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“Where to now, Iida?”
Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds left on the clock. The arena had been entirely transformed between the qualifying event and the team match. What had been flat ground was home to hills and shallow trenches, dotted with low-sitting hollow facades of businesses with distracting neon signs and cars and city walls. It was a labyrinth of prop-obstacles and mostly flimsy visual cover, less like Ground Beta and more like moving around between four or five different movie sets. They were in the downtown Musutafu sector of it now, near the east corner.
Third-year sports festivals were either everything or they were nothing. Tensei had a good placement with a good agency; he had lucked out with that in his second year. To him, this was one last chance to show the world what kind of hero he was gonna be before his fully-licensed debut next year.
That’s how it was for most of his class. But if you didn’t get a good internship placement in the year prior, or if you didn’t get one at all, then this was your last year to get scouted.
Unlike last year’s optional internships, third-year work studies were required. But they weren’t guaranteed: if you failed to pick one up, then you failed. It had happened before. He couldn’t think of anyone who’d dropped all the way out, but there were always people who put off finding an agency until their third year. Just last year, he’d heard talk about a couple upperclassmen left in a serious lurch.
“Iida?”
Tomoda caught his eye with a big old grimace, turned out of Miue’s view. With a quick flick of the eyes, they pointed back her way. Tensei didn’t need to be told.
He’d asked Miue to partner up because they made a good team—Tensei offered mobility, Tomoda’s Momentum Leech was a relatively good defense from any solid projectile, and then he’d sacrificed their chance to have a solid long-range quirk in favor of Sadano’s knack for counting cards and Miue’s quirk as a good lookout. But now, he had to pull off the followthrough to make it worth her while. One final personality clash at the tail end of a series of similar clashes had cost Miue her internship last term. Heroes talk, and agency HR heads talk—career-wise, the position Miue was in was worse than starting back at zero.
“Sadano,” Tensei asked over his shoulder without turning, eyes on a nothing-point in the middle distance to think. “What’s the point spread, are we still holding third?”
“205, 140, 110,” (that one was them), “65. Two teams still in the game with just 30.”
Everyone else—fourteen teams total—was out. It was, so to speak, a bloodbath. Tsuchikawa’s Earth Flow quirk had gone eerily quiet in the early game, but it was only later, about halfway through, that Team Iida had finally found her and the rest of Team Sosaki collapsed on top of one another, hands fruitlessly plugging their noses, bodies splattered with purple paint.
“Then we just have to hold. As long as we’ve got three flags, we should be good to just watch the clock.”
Flags were thirty points each. This year, maybe just to throw them for a loop if they were guessing based on years prior, it didn’t matter where they placed in the qualifier: if you got this far, you got a team of two to four players, one flag, and twenty-four color-coded paintballs to divvy up between you.
There was a very small, but real, chance that Tensei could be making the wrong call. Two teams might, in the final seconds, manage to steal two flags each. That could shake things up enough that points earned through player outs might start to matter: teams get five points for each player they paintball out, and their team only had twenty for that. If that major shake-up happened, there was a chance they could be edged out of the top four and, consequently, out of the third round.
But there was, unfortunately, a shark lurking in these waters, and Tensei kept his head turned to her.
The rest of Team Kayama had quirks that were well suited to long-range sniping, even with the weird ammunition they’d been issued. If Tensei had to guess, that was their strategy. Spread out, get her in close enough to bring players down and pick the team off from back where the air was still breathable.
It looked like Kayama tended to catch just one or two individual players off guard. Here and there you would round a corner to find the paint-splattered form of a classmate slumped against the ground, arms craned up at uncomfortable-looking angles against whatever scenery they’d been attempting to use to remain awake and upright. So far, Team Sosaki was the only entire group Tensei’s team had come across who’d been caught too quickly to scatter, but if you asked Tensei, they’d had the right idea.
From the looks of things, Chatora had been trying to pull the other three out of there—all three of them; Pliabody was a quirk that allowed for stunts like that.
It was definitely how they’d wound up collapsed in one tangled heap, but as far as Tensei could figure, it was still probably the right call: Once one player on a team is out, that whole team is out. Unless they could have countered with an offensive—Tsuchikawa must have gone down early—leaving even one of them behind was a losing move.
He fingered the yellow paintballs sitting in his own pocket. Friendly fire, too, was allowed. That meant even your own ammunition could bring you down, and that would bring your teammates down—a little nervewracking for close-range fighters like him.
Miue’s voice chimed in then, with its persistent tinge of annoyance. “Deep breath,” she warned. He took one.
By the tail end of it, Tensei could taste lavender and a subtle bite of sweet ether just before his fingers clamped his mouth and nose shut. They’d all been classmates for more than two years by now—Somnambulist had taken him out before.
Their team had exactly one advantage. Team Kayama didn’t have anyone with a good scouting quirk, but Miue knew exactly where Kayama was, and they might have shut up before she heard their exact location.
They also had a pretty big disadvantage: Tensei was their best escape route, and his quirk needed to get oxygen into those combustion chambers if it was going to have anything to burn. Even if he could carry three people like this, he couldn’t carry them far enough to be out of a good sharpshooter’s range, and he’d be down the second it was over. It would mean moving them at most a couple hundred meters, drawing the Team Kayama snipers their way even more loudly, and leaving Tensei on his team’s hands as dead weight.
He was their escape route, sure, but if things hit that point, they were dead in the water. The strategy for a vs Team Kayama situation was run in the opposite direction at the starting whistle, get points in the early game, play it safe in the late game. Don’t waste a chance to pick off any of her other teammates if we find them; pray to find one of them before we find her.
They darted from cover to cover, as far as they could, three times more. At each, they paused to pull in a breath, and, at each, the air had a slightly denser quirk tinge to it— they weren’t getting enough distance for Tensei to pull off a miracle escape without damning them. By the third, purple was pooling visibly in the air around them, and an exchange of glances confirmed that no one was going to chance a breath.
Tensei nudged Miue in the shoulder until she looked at him. He nodded over his shoulder toward the spot she’d kept glancing to, held up fingers to indicate 3, 2, 1, and raised an eyebrow to add a ?.
Staring at him a second longer, unsharpening her shoulders, Miue finally gave him a 4.
Pulling his last handful of ammunition from his pocket—little balls of yellow paint that could bring him and his whole team down during this next move if he wasn’t careful and they broke on him—Tensei motioned to dump them in Tomoda’s hands. “Alright, the rest is on you.”
“Huh?”
3, 2.
Kayama’s hands found purchase atop the painted faux-rooftop across from them, and she was a damn quick vaulter. 1. “Torque over.”
Eyes widening, Tomoda cleared a couple of steps to the side, crowding the others in as compactly as they could fit while still behind cover as Tensei stepped out from it toward the open street. Tensei had murmured the announcement in the same undertone they’d been using, but there was no way to disguise the noise of Engine once it had started. That was alright. She could know what was coming.
It’d be over before it started, anyway.
Tensei could not have pictured Kayama’s reaction time better if he’d written it. For just a quarter of a second, their eyes locked. Kayama’s eyes twitched wide enough to lose her composure entirely for that quarter’s first half; for its second, a glint in her eye said so we go down together?
There was a flick of movement down by her waist. Tensei planted his feet.
He took a breath.
“RECIPRO BURST!”
The arena fuzzed into long lines without distinct edges. He managed four or five good, long leaps from one obstacle to the next before turning his ankle on the last one, and then the world slimmed down to a beige smudge of arena floor wayyyy too close to his eyes, purple swirling around the edges.
Leveraging his hold, Kayama wedged an arm up around his shoulders and then down into a headlock. Even woozy like this, the force of Engine might have been enough to pull them apart and break her grip, but she knew damn well Engine wouldn’t be kicking back on for a minute yet.
Kayama wheezed. “You’re lucky I expect you to be such a gentleman, Iida.”
Expecting Tensei to pin her by the wrists, too awkward to veer below the rolled and tied-up-high hem of her uniform top, she’d made sure to retrieve her paintballs before he could. She had raised her arms in a block feinted too high, with the intention of yanking them downward at the last second, of catching his arms in her hands and letting her ammunition paint both their skin purple. It was a part of her brand—she was willing to get close and messy. The strategy would lose her the match, but it may well have been her last chance to make an impression.
Instead, the snap of acceleration at her waist had thrown her arms out behind them and her fingers open, and the last of Kayama’s ammo had fallen, inert, to the floor, hundreds of meters ago.
If she was really torn up about it, he couldn’t tell, because her face was already going soft and fuzzy above him, and the sounds of the stadium cushioned and distant. It was part of the plan, more or less, when he flashed her a smile and—cue desperate relief from the part of his oxygen-starved brain that thought it was gonna save him—went ahead and gasped in another.
Tensei was back in the stands in time for the second round of the one-on-ones. In time for Miue's first match, as it happened, and as he would learn as soon as he was allowed to take a seat and look out over the railing. Just in time for classmates to drag him in by the shoulders and ask him what the hell- “You forfeited the qualifiers, Iida! The runner-ups drew straws.”
“It was dumb of you.” Tomoda told him after chasing the crowd aside.
“Not if I like how I won.”
“...Yeah, then alright, Iida,” they decided on, with an appraising nod. “Thanks.”
“You got them through the rest of it, right?”
“God, yeah, we almost went down in the last half a minute—”
Kayama placed second that year. By the final match, she had most of the crowd on their feet shouting for her. She didn’t even win, and she was all anyone could talk about as people trickled out of the stands.
“Tensei!!!”
His mom’s voice carried over the crowd, level and loud. She had both arms raised over her head to wave him down, UA ballcap making her perhaps a centimeter taller but no easier to see over the throng of sports festival attendees flooding the space. He waved back, with one last turn to throw a two-fingered salute to a classmate over his shoulder, before jogging to meet her.
She wrapped him up in a hug, wrestling him down low enough to tousle his hair and then, when he stood straight again, spending a good twenty seconds fixing it again. “You did great. Are you proud of the job you did out there?”
“Yeah, I am,” he decided for the second time that day. “I was lucky that there weren’t many people around where I landed us, but I was basically giving us the best possible chance to follow the mission brief. And I pushed myself, trying Recipro out with a fuzzy head and limited oxygen. I don’t think I could get out a full Rocket Charge like that, but I didn’t even know I could do what I did—I think I went as far as I could.”
“I couldn’t think of a more you exit to UA.”
“Well, there’s a whole year left before that,” he couldn’t help but remind her, but it was a fair thing to say, honestly. It was a year for lasts—the world was about to start moving really quickly. “Will you and Dad mind replays after dinner at home? I know Ya-chan won’t mind, but if that’s enough sports festival for one day, we can just watch on my laptop upstairs.”
She pursed her lips for a minute. “Your dad and I won’t mind. We’re sorry, he had to leave a little early— your little brother was getting fussy, but the two of them were here long enough to see all of your events.”
“Aw, that’s alright. Do you want to go ahead too? We’ll be doing clean-up for another couple hours; I planned to catch the bus.”
His mom adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “But I would stay if I could. Say hello to your sensei for me, could you? We’ll be ordering in to celebrate tonight; it’ll be the hayashi rice for you, right?”
“Glad to be predictable, I guess.”
3-A and 3-B tidied up the stands, helped pack up the athletic equipment while the management course students and outside vendors attended to their biggest sales rush of the day, and sat in homeroom through the last post-games debrief of their UA careers, before Tensei filed with them out into the quad and then off to the bus stop.
He couldn’t be more thrilled for Kayama. But he had to admit it was going to be kind of excellent to check back in with Ingenium Fan Number One.
“WHY, you DO NOT, get OUT the way.”
…Which, first things first, was among the most complete sentences Tensei had heard Tenya utter ever.
Secondly, however: foolish of him to forget, wasn’t it, that in the grand schemes of nearly-three-year-olds, big brothers are just chopped liver.
Tenya stood just inside the front door with his arms crossed, close enough to knee-height that Tensei could’ve tripped if he wasn’t in the habit of watching out for toddlers. At some point before deciding that big brothers were obstacles to be protested, it seemed Tenya had cajoled their dad into letting him wear one of Tensei’s old shirts, with a neckline that hung loose around him and miles of extra sleeve fabric all rumpled up in his folded arms. It wasn’t clear yet whether Tenya, too, would be inheriting Dad’s eyebrows, but man would it be a wonder to behold if he did, because he certainly knew how to use them.
Tenya had a small repertoire of complete statements. He didn’t have more words than your average little guy—at least, not by Tensei’s best guess; he didn’t really know what was to be expected—but he had a few echoey sentences stowed away. “Get revved up,” because of a commercial for a local event in which their dad had a speaking line a few months ago, and “but WHO will the people turn to in times of crisis,” because it was a line in an All Might animated short. That kind of thing. “Times of crisis” was a whole lot to hear a toddler get his mouth around, but Tenya certainly did it.
So he would expect a similar kind of source material at work here, for “why [do you] not get out [of] the way,” but that would be news to Tensei.
Tensei halted, then started to step aside so that the imperative business of the toddler world could proceed—then did not step aside. Hang on a sec. “Oh, ok, were you going outside?”
He craned his head inside the door as subtly as he could manage with his legs still blocking Tenya’s path. He was met by a look from his mother– raised eyebrows, half a smile– before she returned to carrying an armload of thickly-stuffed manila folders from another room to her home office. “...By yourself?”
“NO.”
Dad always pointed out that kids think as much as we do, they just don’t have all the words for it yet. That meant that a lot of the time, whatever strings of synapses were firing just built up inside, perfectly obvious in their inner world and completely incomprehensible to anyone outside it, unable to get any other human out there to understand. It’s got to be more frustrating to them than it is to us.
Glancing inside again only revealed that Tensei’s mother had already proceeded down the hall, and their dad was nowhere to be found, so alright, this one was all him.
“With me?”
“ No.”
“But I’m in the way.”
“No, listen.”
Don’t laugh. “You’ve got my full attention, Ya-chan. Mind if I come inside and sit down, though?”
He was still turning the vibrant shade of red that only a toddler is capable of, but the question was enough to slow him down, at least—switch tracks from the early stages of a brewing little meltdown to gazing up at Tensei, with wide eyes.
“Meet me on the couch?”
With an eventual, sharp nod, Tenya turned about ninety degrees and aimed one straight-as-a-board arm down the hall toward the couch before taking off at a run at it, bent arms swinging. Tensei closed the door behind himself, toed off his shoes and dropped his gym bag, and caught up just in time to watch Tenya bounce after impact.
Tenya hauled himself up into one corner, pressed his back against the back of the couch, and crossed his arms over his stomach.
“So,” Tensei said, taking the spot just beside him and hauling a knee up onto the cushions to face him. “You had some big plan you wanted to do, right?”
He received a stare as if he’d come home and started speaking Portuguese. Okay, no dice.
“Hm,” he exaggerated, scratching an imaginary beard on his chin. “Is it an idea you got from the games at UA today? Hey, did you see me on the big screen, Ya-chan?”
“And you DO NOT get OUT the way—”
Oooooh. That… made sense, almost. “...Out of the way of Kayama’s quirk, right?” Tensei hazarded, gears rapidly turning. “It’s called Somnambu—”
“They SAID,” Tenya huffed back, going redder in the face still. ...Over the loudspeakers, surely they had said, but Tenya had to be the only kid in the world who would recognize the word “somnambulist” after hearing it just once.
“So WHY you do— DO you,” Tenya corrected, and ah, there was the source of the sentence. Dad Was Here.
(“Close; it’s ‘why do you.’” Tensei envisioned his dad and Tenya putting their problem-solving caps on when they got home post-tantrum, or maybe on one of the benches on campus before they left. People sometimes looked at Tensei funny when he talked in a normal voice to a very tiny child, but that’s just what they do around here.)
Now, Dad wouldn’t use Tenya as a mouthpiece. Not only because their parents weren’t like that, but also because he was fairly sure this wasn’t even a thing he and Tensei disagreed on. Sometimes the answer’s not obvious until someone has run into the trouble, Mom had said once, and someone has to get there first. Or, from Dad, And sometimes it is pretty obvious. With a quirk like yours and mine, the only way to put a stop to trouble is to get inside it.
Tensei had definitely run into the thick of it. He couldn’t say he had put a stop to it, but he could say he put a slow to it, and that counted for something. He felt pretty confident his parents knew that counted for something.
…It was probably harder to know when you’re two years and nine months, and still learning what abstract concepts are.
Hm, I don’t know, Tensei could all but hear in his dad’s voice. Why don’t you ask your brother?
What a good idea, when dealing with a distraught Tenya, if big brother wasn’t woefully unequipped.
Acting woefully unequipped never helped anyone, though. Tensei had spent a lot of second year tripping over himself, over the fact that a one-trick pony of a speedster couldn’t stand very well on his own and over the fact that neither he nor his quirk were more than the one, small, specific tool he’s got. What had helped none whatsoever with that was apologizing, or overcompensating, or making a big, blustering point about how much better he knew he should be doing. What had helped was taking what he’s got, and deciding he was going to figure out how to make it enough.
What he and Tenya had got were some enormous feelings, all the time in the world to kill before dinner, a clear expectation that it was Tensei’s responsibility to make this right, and only about 1.2 people total with a developed command of the Japanese language.
Tensei took a breath and talked like he meant it. “That was my Recipro Burst,” he started. “You’ve seen Dad do it on TV before, too. I throw my engines into overdrive, but because of the extra heat, I stop being able to use them after a dozen seconds or so, which is why I got stuck there. It’s a pretty big tradeoff—”
“And— and the villain GOT you.”
“Kayama isn’t a villain!!?” Tensei sputtered. “We were playing pretend!!”
Tenya knit his eyebrows at this, unconvinced.
“I was… yeah. I was asleep for real. It… it was a game?? She’s allowed to do that.” Come on, come on, words. “Games have to have losers, Ya-chan. At least at the sports festival. Hey, don’t you bet her family’s really proud of her right now?”
“The hero wins.”
“And I did, right? I mean, I can’t take any credit for Miue’s hard work getting noticed, or any— uh— any opportunities she gets because of it?— but since I made an opening, I got to help someone else save their hero dream today.” He stared at Tenya for a minute. Trying to describe the abstract concept of work-study offers and workplace politics was a decision too stupid even for him to make today. “Imagine…”
And even that might be asking a lot. Did he know the differences between imaginary and real yet? Tensei suddenly couldn’t remember a shred of evidence one way or the other.
“...imagine if I might not get to be a hero if I didn’t win a game. I think it would be heroic of someone to help me out.” Tensei snapped his fingers, an action that startled Tenya so hard that for a second he was worried they’d lost all focus, before those little eyes landed back on his mouth while he spoke. “Actually, if it wasn’t for a lot of other people, I might not have. Right? Mom and Dad and all of my teachers are helping me become a hero, and you are by cheering me on, and that’s pretty heroic. Heroes help.”
It… still probably didn’t make much sense to him. Tenya did not look convinced, not even as he leaned forward, apparently tired of maintaining his angry distance when one of his favorite pillows was sitting right there in front of him, and pulled his head up onto Tensei’s calf.
Tenya turned his head, considered something very hard for a moment, and then struck Tensei hard with the side of a little hand directly to the kneecap.
“Ow- Ya-chan, ow. What’s with you? You’re not a hitter.” That had better not be the beginning of a habit, because in about half a year this little guy was going to start growing metal somewhere under his skin. “The hero— yeah, the hero wins.” He fluffed the back of Tenya’s hair and Tenya wriggled one pudgy cheek into the side of his knee, face all squished up because of it. Tensei looked at him— really looked at him, with new eyes, maybe. “That was confusing of me, huh. You were really worrying up there.”
Tenya was born a month after Tensei turned fifteen. He was coming up on three now, right as Tensei was coming up on being a man, legally and all. He was still so— so small? Stubby little body attached to a great big brain. He was at that age, bobblehead-shaped. It was weird, sometimes, how much time had passed and how Tenya was three times as heavy as he used to be, and they talked about him being tall instead of “long” these days, but he was still, you know. Little.
His mom liked to say that, for a few years, every single thing that happens for someone as little as Tenya is happening for the first time. Babies throw cups in your face and drop toys out of strollers because they’re studying— how things work, what people should do to each other, what happens next.
Tenya watched Tensei all the time. All he had to do was walk into a room, and there were little eyes on him.
The conversation waned, there. Tenya didn’t get it so much as he tuckered out. The fault for that was probably equal parts brain development and big brother development—it still can’t have made much sense to him, after an explanation like that. He scooted forward by centimeters (with difficulty, the way he’d entangled himself), pulling at Tensei’s arm until big brother leaned forward and let him plod his clumsy little fingers around the rim of an exhaust. “But win.”
“Yeah, I’ll try to next time.”
