The one-pointer's sensor cluster was at approximately neck height on a human, which meant shoulder height on the robot's actual structure, which meant the kick he'd drilled for six weeks — heel strike, OFA-channeled, three percent through the right leg on contact — landed at the correct angle and the correct force and the robot's head component caved inward on the first application.
His shin registered the impact the way metal registered metal. Not pain exactly. The specific jarring pressure of force meeting resistance without enough give, running back up through the bone, arriving in the knee as a complaint that the knee was not structurally optimized for repeated applications of this.
One-pointer down. Time elapsed: four seconds.
He was already moving toward the next signal on his spatial map — elevated PER at eleven doing the work it had been allocated to do, picking out the acoustic signature of servos under a second robot's movement from inside the alley mouth to his right before the robot was fully visible. He took the corner at an angle, got a running start on the approach, and hit the two-pointer's midsection with the shoulder tackle he'd confirmed against three-pointers at Dagobah in the last two weeks of training.
The robot absorbed the hit and stepped back. Did not fall.
He stepped back with it and adjusted. Single strike was not going to work on a two-pointer. He hit the lower knee joint with a snap kick, felt the connection, hit the same joint a second time from a different angle when it staggered, and on the third strike the joint buckled and the robot went down one-legged and he put his foot through its sensor cluster while it was fighting to rebalance.
Time elapsed for a two-pointer: approximately eighteen seconds.
Too slow. He filed this under known limitation, manage around and kept moving.
The arena was chaos within the first three minutes in the specific productive way that chaos could be when two hundred quirk users were released into an enclosed space containing an unknown number of targets. He caught glimpses in passing — a boy with engines in his legs running at speeds that made the air behind him visible, a girl with creation quirk generating shields and battering surfaces, someone levitating chunks of road surface and redirecting them. The noise was constant: metal on concrete, power discharges, shouting, the mechanical shriek of robots with damaged mobility systems.
He fought his way east across the central block, tracking two things simultaneously: villain point accumulation and Uraraka's general position. She was visible on the overhead walkway for a moment around the eight-minute mark — a robot floating weightlessly and drifting, the touch-to-zero effect clean and efficient — and then out of sight again as the crowds shifted.
By the twelve-minute mark he'd accumulated what he estimated at twenty-two points. He recounted at each engagement: one-pointer, two-pointer, two-pointer, one-pointer, three-pointer, one-pointer... The three-pointer had taken a combination that left both his hands bruised under the tape wrapping, the impact running up through the metacarpals in a way that promised to be more unpleasant tomorrow when the adrenaline finished burning off. He noted this and continued.
The OFA output was wobbling.
Not dramatically. Not threshold-breach-level wobbling. The fatigue built in the muscle rather than the power itself — the channel that three-percent required was held by concentration, and concentration degraded under sustained physical effort, which meant maintaining the exact percentage while also running and striking and taking hits from metal components he hadn't quite dodged was starting to cost more than it had at the beginning.
"Four minutes," Present Mic's voice announced overhead.
He was twenty-three points deep and nowhere near the north gate.
He pushed east with purpose now, abandoning the methodical search pattern for direct transit — through an alley, over a low barrier, past a pair of examinees who'd immobilized a three-pointer together and were finishing it off with what looked like a crystallization quirk. He gave them a wide berth, not from courtesy but from efficiency: they didn't need help, and his time budget was shrinking.
He found Uraraka on the north boulevard.
She was working two one-pointers simultaneously, floating them both, but the nausea from her quirk's overuse was visible on her face — the specific green-grey color of someone managing a physiological response at the edge of its tolerance. She dispatched the first by floating it into the second and dropping both from height, the impact finishing the sensor clusters, but she was bent forward with her hands on her knees when they hit the ground.
He cleared a flanking one-pointer she hadn't seen yet with a kick that jarred his shin for the third time today.
She looked up. "You — thanks."
"Breathe through it," he said, because he knew what was causing it and she probably didn't have context for it yet. "You're overextending the quirk limit. Short rest, then go again."
"I can't, there's only—"
"Thirty seconds," he said. "Then the timer shifts."
She looked at him. He was already moving north.
His knuckles were bleeding where the metal of the last two-pointer's chassis had opened a cut through the tape on his right hand — a thin line across the third knuckle, not serious, the kind of wound that would seal in an hour and be forgotten in a day. The blood was making the tape grip different against the palm. He noticed this and filed it under irrelevant and kept running.
[SYSTEM — COMBAT LOG: ESTIMATED VILLAIN POINTS: 24. OFA OUTPUT: ~3%. STAMINA: 58%.]
Twenty-four. He needed the zero-pointer. Without the death gambit, twenty-four villain points was a middling score that wouldn't clear the bar on its own. The rescue points he'd accumulated helping Uraraka and the minor assists during the robot clusters might push him across — but might was not the engineering standard he'd spent three months training to.
He hit the north boulevard at a run and felt the pavement move under his feet.
Not vibration. Movement. The kind that started two blocks away and arrived in the soles before the sound did, the low sub-bass of something with mass orders of magnitude beyond a single robot operating its locomotion at full output.
He stopped.
The shadow fell first.
It came over the mock storefronts from the north — not gradually, not in pieces, but as a single advancing line of darkness that moved like a weather event, sweeping the afternoon light off the boulevard in a plane that stretched block to block without any gaps. The ground tremor arrived a half-second later, the kind of shaking that got into the structure of things and made loose debris chatter against surfaces.
He looked up.
The zero-pointer was larger than it had looked on a screen. He had known, intellectually, that screen representations scaled poorly for things in this size category. The academic knowledge of this did not prepare the body for the actual visual input of a machine whose nearest appendage was the height of the mock storefronts, whose central body block the camera in his memory had never quite captured at the correct angle.
Bigger than it looked on screen, he thought, with the specific flatness of a person arriving at information they had technically possessed and are now confirming experientially.
Behind him, down the boulevard, he could hear the shift in the arena's noise — the combat sound of two hundred people dropping in volume as attention redirected north, replaced by the different quality of two hundred people doing a rapid reassessment of their immediate priorities.
Twenty-four villain points. One minute, give or take, on the timer.
He found his footing on the trembling pavement and started walking toward it.
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