Work Text:
As Izuku had expected of UA, his size was easily accommodated.
The written exam had him at a desk that would actually fit him. It was actually ever so slightly too large, but that was better than too small. It had also been heavily reinforced, which Izuku appreciated even if it wasn't personally necessary for him. His weight basically didn't exist, and it was not going to hold up to his actual strength anyway. Frankly, very few things can even get close.
Case in point: The Practical Exam.
Those robots might as well have been tissue paper. Izuku had yet to encounter anything that can handle him actively trying to break it that wasn’t a part of himself, so it was more a task of trying not to hurt anyone in the process while still being as quick as possible. Izuku couldn't contract his muscles any faster than anyone else, but they didn't slow him down at all either. With all his extra mass he hit pretty dang hard, and his crushing force was so high that he can't even measure it.
So yeah, robots were a cakewalk. He passed in first place with eighty seven points to his name, with about thirty of those being rescue points.
Getting in was never going to be the hard part. Izuku never even expected it to be the hard part.
The hard part was actually going to class.
The halls were big enough for him, and so were the doors. As Izuku predicted, what little crowd there was was easy enough to avoid. All he had to do was walk in.
All he had to do… was walk in.
He gulped down his fear, and pressed his hand to the door.
Creak
He stopped, then took a second look at the offending door. It was a pull door, with a handle embedded into the door itself near the bottom. Even if he could reach it, he would have struggled to open it. He’d need to stick his nails in or something.
That seemed like a design flaw.
Izuku was debating bending down to try and open the door when he saw a giant, yellow thing out of the corner of his eye. It fell out of the vent completely soundlessly and scooted towards the door before stopping in next to him and getting up to reveal the face of a very, very tired and vaguely familiar man.
“Midoriya Izuku,” they said, their voice droning, “Why aren't you in class?”
Izuku winced, then looked down at the door.
“It's, uh, it's a pull door, sir. I can't use the handle…”
The man’s eyes narrowed, looking between Izuku and the door, before he muttered something angrily under his breath.
“It'll be fixed by tomorrow, don't worry,” the man told him, stepping out of the sleeping bag and stowing it…somewhere? It almost looked like he had just shoved it through the wall. Maybe that was his quirk? He stood around Izuku’s knee, which was actually pretty tall, all things considered, and was wearing a black jumpsuit and a long, grey scarf that Izuku couldn’t quite place.
The man opened the door and Izuku sheepishly walked inside.
All eyes immediately turned on him, locking him in place as the gazes of his classmates burned into him. Izuku’s heart was pounding, and he seriously considered ducking back out the door, but eventually decided to make his way to his desk.
It was in the back of the classroom, for obvious reasons, and had a short aisle that let him walk to it without kicking anything over. The desk itself wasn’t the same reinforced desk that UA had given him for the exam, but instead an enlarged version of the other desks. It seems somebody took note that he didn’t need the extra support.
More than half the class was still staring at him when he shuffled over, and half of the ones that weren’t were very obviously trying not to stare at him. The only people who weren’t staring at him were a girl with a black hair in a ponytail, a boy with white hair and six arms, a girl with violet hair with her right earlobe plugged into her phone, and someone with a bird-like head who was petting what looked like a living shadow as he read a thick looking book. Also the shadow themselves wasn’t staring at him, but Izuku was fairly certain it was asleep.
“Class,” the man in the scarf suddenly said from the podium, causing several people to jump, “Staring is rude. Now, take your gym uniform from the desk and meet me at Physical Education Grounds for a quirk apprehension test. You have ten minutes, I suggest being there in five.”
Then the man walked right back out the door. The class paused for a second, processing, then scrambled to the desk as a boy with blue hair and a girl with a ponytail tried to keep order.
~~~
Thankfully, after learning to deal with ties and button ups, the zippers of the UA gym uniform weren't an issue. He was actually one of the fastest ones out there, only being beaten by some blonde who kept looking at him weirdly. Izuku thinks he might have seen him before, but he can't place the face.
He and the blonde stood in awkward silence as the rest of the class filtered in. All of the boys made the five minute suggestion, though many looked slightly disheveled as the blue haired boy, who Izuku was just now noticing had what looked to be pipes coming from his legs, herded them out like the concept of lateness personally insulted him.
The girls were slower, with the ponytail girl leading the last of them out at the seven minute mark, but they were better prepared and did look legitimately apologetic.
The moment that all of them were here, the man who they were assuming was their teacher (and who Izuku was still trying to place) began to speak.
“Oh good, I don't have to expel any of you immediately,” he said, as if he was talking about the nice weather, “Today you will be performing a quirk apprehension test. Bakugou Katsuki, step forward.”
“WAIT!” A young lady with a brown bob yelled, “You haven't even told us your name yet! And what about orientation? How are we supposed to know any of the school policies?”
The corner of the man’s lips briefly, and seemingly purposefully, quirked up into a smirk. Just as quickly he returned to a neutral state.
“Good Eye. My name is Aizawa Shouta. I am the homeroom teacher for class 1-A, and I am an active underground hero in the Musutafu area. All of the information in orientation is also in the online classroom accessible through your student account,” the man stated blandly, though Izuku couldn't help but think that he was acting, “Now, Bakugou Katsuki-”
“You're that free runner!” Izuku blurted out, “Down in South Musutafu, I’ve seen you there…” he trailed off as he realized he was interrupting, “Sorry, sensei. It just sort of clicked…”
“In the future, Midoriya-kun,” Aizawa-Sensei said with a scolding tone, “If you have a sudden realization, it would be best to not blurt information like that out. Particularly while someone else is talking. Now, Bakugou-kun. Step forward.”
The blonde haired boy walked over, and Izuku was hit hard by the sense that he had definitely heard that name before. It was one the tip of his tongue…
“Now, most of you will be familiar with these sorts of fitness. The ones that you thought were stupid because they didn't let you use your quirks,” most of the class nodded, some of them with a scowl, with only Izuku and a boy with red and white hair looking slightly curious, “I find it foolish as well. Bakugou-kun, what was your score on the ball throw?”
“Seventy three meters,” Bakugou answers.
Aizawa-Sensei nods, then pulls out a ball from…somewhere, “Take this and stand in the circle over there. When I give the signal, you may use whatever means you deem necessary to launch the ball as far as possible without leaving the circle.
Bakugou nodded, and grabbed the ball from Aizawa-Sensei’s hand. He walked to the circle and stood in the center, waiting for the signal.
“Those of you with enhanced hearing, now is the time to cover your ears,” Aizawa-Sensei warned. The girl with the long earlobes and a boy with a rocky head both nodded, cupping their ears with their hands. Bakugou himself also adjusted something in his ears, “You may begin.”
Bakugou held his right arm forward, steadying it with his left like he was holding a canon, and…
BANG!!
There was a bright flash and a discharge of a small cloud of black smoke. The ball was launched far across the field, landing hundreds of meters away. There was a ding coming from Aizawa-Sensei, who was now holding a phone.
He held it up. It read six hundred and three meters. About half of the class dramatically dropped their jaws.
Then, like a church bell announcing someone's death, a girl with pink skin and horns spoke up.
“We get to use our quirks for this! Sweet! This will be so cool!”
Izuku made note of the glint in Aizawa-Sensei’s eye, even as his face remained carefully blank. He had been expecting this reaction.
“You don't just get to use your quirks, you will have to,” their teacher said, “Knowing your limits, your true limits, will be critical in your education as a hero. I can and have removed students from the hero course for doing poorly on this exam, and I don't expect that to change this year. In fact, I can all but guarantee that we will not be ending today's class with twenty students.”
Even standing outside in an open field, the silence after that line was thick enough to drown a Boston neighborhood. Even the wind was as frozen as the students, turning the quiet quickly unbearable.
A single whisper broke the silence, coming from a boy with yellow hair that was streaked with black.
“Can he actually do that?”
Aizawa-Sensei glanced around, then locked eyes with Izuku.
“Midoriya-kun, tell me, how many students from class 1-A attended the sports festival last year?”
Izuku thought back. He watched the festival obsessively, so it was more about remembering the specific festival than it was about remembering it at all. Then his eyes widened.
“There—there wasn't a class 1-A that year, Aizawa-Sensei,” Izuku answered in dawning horror.
“You expelled the entire class!” The girl with brown bob yelled in terror, “How is that fair?! They passed the same exam we did!”
Their teacher glared, his eyes turning bright red. Izuku nearly fell over as his shoes sank into the ground and a wave of dizziness passed over him. It was over in less than a second, but it took him a bit to recover from whatever the hell that was.
“I did not expel them, Uraraka-kun, I simply removed them from the course,” Aizawa-Sensei coldly explained, “and don't think that just because you got your foot in the door means you are not still being tested. When heroes screw up, people die. Civilians, other heroes, and even villains are trusting you with their lives. If you cannot show that, then not only do you not deserve to be here, it is to the benefit of everyone that you are removed. Do I make myself clear?”
Uraraka gulped, “Yes, Aizawa-Sensei.”
“Good. Well, I guess since we already have the softballs out, we’ll start with that one,” he said, the menace gone from his voice as he gestures to a rack of softballs that was definitely not there before, “Aoyama, step forwards.”
~~~
Shouta would likely never admit this to anyone, but he actually had some pretty high hopes for this class.
Last year was utterly miserable. Even after he regained a homeroom following the sports festival, one that was mostly made from course transfers rather than returning students, they continued underperforming until the Pussy Cats got them. Even after that they were simply adequate, and the summer training camp was usually when students became exceptional. He did not envy Snipe for having to deal with them this year.
His new class, however, already had some exceptional individuals.
Midoriya was the obvious and most literal stand out. He got first place in the entrance exam on both the written and practical, and then proceeded to score so highly in the placement exam that they were putting him in third year advanced classes just to give him something to do. Shouta has no clue how they’ll handle the physical and mental giant of a student next year, but that was largely Snipe's problem.
Bakugou also did impressively, particularly for someone who only scored villain points. He definitely needed help with some creative application, but he somehow suspects that Midoriya will solve that problem for him based on how they were looking at each other.
Koda had been a surprise to Shouta. As much as he liked having new underground candidates, Anivoice was such a poor match for the exam and the sports festival that he had fully expected him to fail when he first heard of him. Then he saw him rip a three pointer in half with his bare hands. He still didn't score highly, he was just too slow as a fighter, but that had shocked him.
The other two he was watching most closely were Todoroki and Mineta. This was not for good reasons. He was not kidding when he said that he didn't think he was going to end the class with twenty students. He had suspected that he would have eighteen students until the sports festival when class first started, but so far Todoroki wasn't completely worthless like he suspected he would be. His use of ice was adequate, and he did use his left side to warm himself up, so Shouta decided to give him a pass for now.
Mineta, though…
Midnight hadn't been able to prove it during the exam, but she had suspected the boy of some untoward behavior. Some of his exam footage was…suspect, but not enough to deny him. Shouta was keeping a very, very close eye on him, though based on his results so far it probably won't matter. For someone whose quirk was entirely built around throwing balls, his softball throw was awful.
~~~
Izuku nervously stepped onto the line for the distance run.
He hadn't been doing very well, all things considered. You would think that super strength would be great for tests like this, but there wasn't exactly a lot of creativity with his quirk, and all of the tests so far had been less than great for him.
He took off running as he thought.
Throwing a ball was more about speed than strength. Momentum is velocity times mass, and the ball simply doesn't have a lot of it, and Izuku can't make his muscles move any faster than anyone else. His long arms did some work, so his final score was still over one hundred meters, but people were getting scores in the hundreds of meters. Uraraka even sent it into orbit!
His repeated side steps were a similar problem. He was good at them, he was physically fit almost definitionally and his quirk made it almost impossible for him to slip, but nearly everyone did great on that one.
His sit ups weren't fantastic either. He could do them without a partner, thankfully, but he wasn't very fast. He did worse than almost every girl in the class, with only the girl with the pony tail doing worse, and not by much. Two point eight three a second compared to his two point eight two.
Even his fifty meter dash wasn't all that impressive. He leapt forwards, clearing it in just over four seconds, but that paled in comparison to some of the others. The blue haired boy with pipes in his legs turned out to just have a straight up speed quirk, possibly being related to Ingenium, and he almost got under three seconds. The white and red haired boy with the ice quirk launched himself across in just over a single second, and pretty much everyone who had any kind of mobility quirk managed it in a comparable time to Izuku.
He tried to keep his head together as he ran at an even pace around the track. He still had the seated toe touch, grip strength, and standing long jump left, and he knew that he would be good at those at least. He might not be standing out, but he wasn't scoring badly, and comparing himself to others wasn't going to make him do any better.
After nearly half an hour, Aizawa-Sensei called them back for seated toe touches. Once again, it seemed like Izuku wasn't going to stand out because it didn't seem like anyone else was even tired after the run.
~~~
Shouta was not impressed with Mineta Minoru.
His only good score so far was the repeated side steps. That wouldn't have been so bad if his other scores were merely average, but not only were they bad but they were worse than he has already shown during the entrance exam. He was the absolute slowest during the fifty meter dash, which would normally make sense with his short legs, but Aizawa had seen him use his quirk to move much faster than that already. He was slow at the sit ups, but he barely looked like he was trying. In fact, he was doing almost perfectly better than Kaminari, like he knew he could do better but didn't think he had to.
Worse, Aizawa had caught him looking up his partner's skirt. He even got video evidence of it with the camera on his goggles before making him switch partners (not that the school security feed wouldn't give Nezu plenty to work with).
The distance run was the last straw though. He stopped after ten minutes, acting tired after Hagakure started to flag, and then spent the rest of the time sitting out talking with Kaminari as if he thought Shouta couldn't hear him. He actually let Midoriya continue for nearly ten minutes after the last person fell out as he listened in to the disquieting conversation. Not the most disgusting thing he's heard out of a student's mouth, but enough that Shouta was strongly considering expelling the boy on the spot.
As it was, Shouta already knew that he was right. There would not be twenty students at the end of this class.
~~~
Izuku was careful to not just crush the grip tester in his hands, but he did let a bit of pride fill him as it gave a neat “ERR” as its reading.
He didn't expect to do poorly on this test. His grip strength was one of his quirk’s high points, and even a hero grade tester felt like he was crushing a ball of paper. Still, even with that expectation, it was nice to actually be exceptional at something.
He relaxed his grip, and saw that the tester was still giving an error, and the handle stayed still. Crud, did Izuku break it?
“Uh, Aizawa-Sensei?” He asked, nervously.
The scarf wearing teacher glanced over at him, and noted the malfunctioning tester.
“Is that one of the heavy duty ones?” His teacher asked. Izuku nodded, “Return it to the closet. I already recorded your score, well, the upper bound, anyway.”
~~~
Pick pocketing was not generally considered a particularly heroic skill, but just like hacking it was a useful one.
Shouta discreetly opened the snatched phone and scrolled through the images, almost throwing the damned thing away in disgust.
It was honestly a shame to see skills like this used in such a manner. Discretely taking pictures was incredibly useful, particularly when developed to a level that even a trained underground hero with over a decade of experience didn't catch it, but it should never, ever be used for something like this. Unfortunately, this possibility is exactly why it's not a skill that UA teaches, far too much room for abuse.
There wasn't much time left in class, and Nezu won't even be in his office until after the orientation that they were skipping, so Shouta returned the misused phone and led the students to their final test.
~~~
Izuku thought he had done well on the standing long jump, but nobody had really stood out on that one. The measure was simply if you did or didn't clear the sandbox, which seemed a little dumb considering that the sand was supposed to be a safety feature. Though, that might be why it was last. If anyone was going to get injured, which thankfully did not happen, it was going to happen here.
Aizawa-Sensei rolled in a large screen, for once not pulling it from seemingly nowhere, and turned it on to show a blue background.
“Here are your test results. They're based on how you did in comparison to your peers, with a weight towards if you were able to find a non-obvious solution, as well as other factors that mostly didn't come up,” Aizawa explained.
Then he pressed a button on his phone.
1.Yaoyorazu Momo
2.Todoroki Shouto
3.Iida Tenya
4.Tokoyami Fumikage
5.Bakugou Katsuki
6.Midoriya Izuku
7.Shouji Mezou
8.Ojiro Mashirao
9.Kirishima Eijirou
10.Ashido Mina
11.Uraraka Ochaco
12.Koda Koji
13.Sato Rikido
14.Tsuyu Asui
15.Aoyama Yuga
16.Sero Hanta
17.Kaminari Denki
18.Kyoka Jiro
19.Hagakure Toru
Everyone blinked, looking at the list in confusion. There were twenty people in the class, weren't there? Why would the list only show nineteen?
Then, one by one, the eyes of the more analytically inclined students widened in horror. The girl with the ponytail, then the girl with the earlobes, the boy with multiple arms, and then Izuku himself made the realization.
“Mineta Minoru,” Aizawa-Sensei said coldly, “I am an underground hero. My job heavily relies on my ability to observe the world around me and pay attention to what people are doing. You are not as subtle of a… photographer as you think you are. You are expelled. Change out of that gym uniform and get your things. You will not be allowed to return once you leave,” Aizawa-Sensei said, with a small, but dismissible amount of venom.
The almost entire class’s faces fell, with several students looking legitimately green as the implications of Aizawa-Sensei’s words set in. Only the boy with red and white hair didn't falter, his face remaining entirely stoic.
Aizawa-Sensei tracked Mineta with a glare as he left, then turned to address the rest of the class.
“Hound Dog-Sensei and Midnight-Sensei have their hours listed on the school website if you need to talk. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves for now while I’m away,” Aizawa ordered, “Yagi-Sensei is in charge until I return or class ends.”
“Who’s Yagi-Sensei?” Uraraka asked.
“Er, that would be me. Hello!” a voice picked up from right next to them. The class turned in shock to see the thin, blond haired man in an ill fitting yellow suit that was now standing next to them.
Was the school entirely staffed by ninja? Even the girl with the long earlobes looked surprised, and Izuku was pretty sure she had a hearing quirk.
When he turned back to where their homeroom teacher was standing, the man was just gone.
Yeah, definitely a ninja. Or maybe a magician? A ninja magician?