God of Heroics: Comicman!

The arena floor was clean concrete. Flat, featureless, a perfect square bordered by grass on all sides. Forty thousand people sat in the stands above it. Cameras floated on drones at the corners. The sun was high and the sky was the kind of blue that belonged on a postcard.

Present Mic's voice crashed through the speakers like a wrecking ball through a window.

"Hey, guys! ARE YOU READY?! YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH HELL TO GET HERE! BUT NOW IT'S TIME FOR THE ONE-ON-ONE TOURNAMENT! YOU'VE ONLY GOT YOURSELF TO RELY ON! EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT A HERO, THIS SAYING HOLDS TRUE! YOU KNOW IT! Spirit, technique, strength, wisdom and knowledge! Use 'em all and show us your best!"

The roar that answered him was enormous. It came up from every direction and it shook the railing beneath the hands of the students watching from their section.

"Holy crap." Awase picked at his aching ear.

Kendo gripped the railing tightly with anxiousness and excitement.

In the tunnel on the east side, Manga rolled his neck. Cracked his knuckles one hand at a time. Took a sip of water from the bottle he'd brought before placing it back on the table.

In the tunnel on the west side, Tokage bounced on the balls of her feet. Her fingers opened and closed at her sides, sharp teeth bared in a grin she couldn't have suppressed if she'd wanted to. Her dusky green eyes were locked on the square of sunlight at the end of her tunnel.

Two weeks.

Two weeks since she'd dragged him to that gym. Two weeks since she'd looked him in the eye and told him whoever placed higher at the festival won a favor from the other. Two weeks of training harder than she'd ever trained in her life, training with her Quirk until her body ached from regenerating too many pieces too fast, remembering his fights from the obstacle race and the cavalry battle on repeat, looking for patterns, looking for weaknesses, looking for anything.

She hadn't found many.

But she had a plan.

"The first match!"

Both tunnels lit up.

"We got the #1 contender so far of the entire sports festival for the first years, It's Fukidashi Manga, from the hero course!"

Manga walked out into the light. The crowd noise hit him like a wall and he waved to the stands with both hands. A star emoji sparkled inside his bubble. The cameras tracked him and his face, or the closest thing he had to one, appeared on every screen in the stadium.

"Versus!"

Present Mic paused. Milked it.

"Tokage Setsuna! A recommendation student who got into the hero course! Both are members of Class B! Let's see how hot things will get during this battle, folks!"

Setsuna walked out from the opposite tunnel. Her hair, dark green and wavy at the ends, bounced with every step. She crossed the grass and stepped onto the concrete stage and the crowd saw her grin and fed off it, a ripple of noise that blended cheers with laughter.

They faced each other across ten meters of flat ground.

Manga waved at her.

Tokage balled her fist and smashed it into her open palm with a crack that echoed in the brief lull between crowd noise. The grin didn't leave.

Up in the stands, Monoma leaned forward.

"This is going to be interesting," he said to no one in particular.

"She's been training like crazy. I've seen her in the gym every day for two weeks." Kendo added.

"So has he. The difference is, he was already doing that before she started." Kamakiri pointed out.

"She's got a plan," Monoma said. "I just don't know what it is."

"She wouldn't tell you?" Tetsutetsu asked.

"She wouldn't tell anyone." Pony shared.

Down on the stage, Midnight stood at the edge in her R-rated hero costume, one arm raised, ready to officiate.

"The rules are simple!" Present Mic explained. "Win by knocking your opponent out of the ring, immobilizing them, or getting them to say, 'I give up!' BRING THE PAIN! We've got our good old Recovery Girl on standby! And fight dirty if you must! 'Ethics' have no meaning here!"

He paused.

"Well, of course going for the kill is a no-no! You'll be disqualified! Because a true hero's fist flies only when in pursuit of villains!"

The crowd roared its approval.

Tokage's grin widened. She rolled her shoulders and dropped into a low stance, weight on her back foot, body angled. Ready to explode forward.

"Fukidashi." Her voice carried clearly across the stage. The mic on the edge of the arena picked it up and piped it through the speakers. "Are you ready to meet your Momma?"

A question mark popped up in his bubble. "Isn't it meet your maker?"

"I know what I said."

Aizawa, sitting in the commentary booth beside Present Mic with his arms crossed and his eyes half-lidded, spoke into his microphone. "Two Class 1-B students opening the tournament. First time in the last five years that both participants in the opening match are from the same class. Usually the brackets are seeded to avoid this."

"Blame the randomizer!" Present Mic said. "These two got unlucky! Or lucky, depending on how you look at it! They've been training together for weeks, which means they know each other's quirks inside and out! This could go either way, folks!"

Aizawa didn't bother correcting him. He already knew which way it was going to go. He'd watched Fukidashi during the obstacle race and the cavalry battle. This fight had a clear favorite.

But Tokage's expression suggested she knew that too, and it hadn't changed her plans one bit.

"START!!!" Present Mic shouted.

Tokage ran.

She sprinted straight at him, no feint, no splitting. Just her, the full weight of her body, closing the gap between them at a dead run. Her boots hammered the concrete and her green hair streamed behind her and her teeth were bared and she was screaming.

Manga's bubble shifted. A small exclamation point appeared, then a second one. He opened his mouth to speak a word, any word, something to slow her, stop her, redirect her.

"Gassh-"

"I HAVE A CRUSH ON YOU, IDIOT!"

Her fist hit him in the face.

His speech bubble snapped to the left. The half-formed onomatopoeia dissolved in his mouth, swallowed by shock. The impact wasn't devastating. Tokage was a Quirk fighter, not a brawler, and her fists didn't hit like Tetsutetsu's or Kendo's. But the words hit harder than the punch. Much, much harder.

The stadium went quiet for half a second.

Then it exploded.

Present Mic leaned so far forward his chair nearly tipped. "DID SHE JUST SAY WHAT I THINK SHE SAID?! DID I HEAR THAT RIGHT?!"

"She did. Psychological warfare is a valid strategy even for heroes." Aizawa confirmed, his voice completely flat.

"SHE CONFESSED! TOKAGE SETSUNA JUST CONFESSED TO FUKIDASHI MANGA ON LIVE NATIONAL TELEVISION!"

Manga's bubble was filled with question marks. Not one or two. A dozen of them, overlapping, multiplying, filling every inch of white space inside the speech bubble like a swarm of confused butterflies.

"?????????????????????????"

Tokage didn't stop.

"I was going to ask you to become my boyfriend!"

Her other fist crashed into the opposite side of his head and sent the bubble snapping in the other direction. He stumbled. His feet scraped concrete.

"?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?"

The question marks were turning red. The bubble itself was changing color, starting at the edges and creeping inward, a flush of pink bleeding into the white like ink dropped in water.

"I like that you're strong!" She swung again. Open palm this time, a slap across the front of his bubble that cracked like a gunshot. He took a step back.

"I like that you're kind!" A hook to the side. He took another step.

"I like that you're funny!" A straight punch into his chest. He skidded a full meter, his boots leaving dark streaks on the stage.

Each confession was another blow. Each blow pushed him closer to the edge.

In the stands, Class 1-B was losing its collective mind.

Tetsutetsu was standing. His hands were on top of his head. His mouth was open. He was screaming.

Kendo had both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were enormous.

Kamakiri's jaw had detached from the rest of his face, or at least that's what it looked like.

Monoma was whistling in support.

"Did you know?" Kaibara asked, turning to Kendo.

"I, no. Maybe? She's been, I mean, she talked about him a lot, but I didn't think she'd..."

"On TV!" Awase said. "She's doing this on TV!"

“She’s so brave!!!” Pony screamed.

"That's the most insane thing I've ever seen!" Tsuburaba said.

Honenuki smiled. "She planned this. This is her strategy."

Everyone looked at him.

"Think about it. She can't beat Manga in a straight fight. She knows that. Everyone knows that. So she's not trying to beat his Quirk. She's trying to beat his head. Throw him off balance with something he'd never expect, push him to the edge before he recovers, and win by ring-out while he's still processing."

"That's…" Kendo started.

"Brilliant!" Monoma finished. "And reckless. If it doesn't work, she just confessed on national television for nothing."

"Not nothing. She told him how she feels. Even if she loses, that's not nothing." Komori believed.

Nobody had a response for that.

On the stage, Tokage wound up.

She was three meters from the edge. Manga was one. His feet were planted but his posture was wrong, weight too far back, arms half-raised but not in guard position. The question marks in his bubble were vibrating. The pink flush had spread to the center. He looked, for the first time since the entrance exam, like someone who didn't know what to do next.

"AND I JUST COULDN'T HOLD IT ANY LONGER!"

She cocked her right fist all the way back. Everything she had. The crowd noise had reached a fever pitch that pressed against the eardrums like physical force.

"WHAT DO YOU SAY YOU LOSER?!"

She threw the punch.

It would've sent him over the edge. It was aimed at the center of his bubble with every ounce of force she could generate. If it landed, if his foot slipped, if his weight stayed where it was, the fight was over. Ring-out. Victory.

"Doki-doki."

His hand came up and caught her fist.

His fingers closed around her knuckles and held them there, and the word he'd spoken didn't come from his Quirk alone. It came from something quieter. Something he hadn't been expecting either.

The onomatopoeia materialized between them.

It was different from the others. The kanji appeared in the air between their chests, shimmering, warm, and the moment it formed, Tokage felt it.

Her heart slammed against her ribs.

It wasn’t because of the fight. Or the running or the punching or the adrenaline of confessing. This was something else. This was her heartbeat accelerating beyond anything voluntary, a spike that hit her chest like a fist from inside, and in that same instant she felt something impossible.

She felt his.

The doki-doki had connected them. His heartbeat and hers, tethered by the onomatopoeia, pounding in sync. She could feel the rhythm of his pulse in her own veins, fast and warm and absolutely thundering, and the realization that his heart was beating just as hard as hers sent a wave of heat through her body that turned her ears red and her knees weak and her thoughts into static.

Manga felt it too.

Her heartbeat. Rapid-fire. Hammering. A pulse that belonged to someone who'd been carrying a secret too heavy and too hot and had just thrown it into the open and was watching it burn. He could feel her nervousness layered under the aggression, the genuine fear that he might laugh or look away or say nothing, and beneath all of that, a warmth that had nothing to do with Quirks.

Oh.

"I've never been confessed to before." he said.

His voice was quiet. The arena microphones picked it up anyway. Forty thousand people heard it. Present Mic, for once in his life, said nothing.

Manga dashed.

He closed the gap so fast that the cameras barely tracked it, one step to close his stance, a second to push off, and suddenly he was right in front of her, close enough that her breath caught, his hand reaching for her face.

Tokage's heart was a drum. The doki-doki was still alive between them, feeding back, amplifying, and she couldn't tell anymore if the rush in her blood was the Quirk or just her, just the fact that he was looking at her from behind that blank white bubble with something in his posture that she'd never seen before, something soft, something real.

Her face split into pieces.

The top half separated from the jaw. Her left eye detached, then her right, floating away in opposite directions as her cheek split into three segments and her chin separated from her neck. Manga's reaching hand passed through empty air where her face had been a fraction of a second ago.

Her body followed. Arms split at the elbows, then the forearms split into smaller segments. Her torso opened like a blooming flower, ribs and stomach and shoulders breaking apart into dozens of independent pieces that launched in every direction. Legs separated at the knees, the ankles, the toes.

Fifty pieces of Setsuna Tokage hung in the air around Manga Fukidashi.

"SHE SPLITS!" Present Mic roared, finding his voice again. "LIZARD TAIL SPLITTER IN FULL EFFECT! TOKAGE SETSUNA HAS GONE TO PIECES, LITERALLY, AND THE FIELD IS NOW A THREE-DIMENSIONAL BATTLEFIELD!"

The pieces flew faster than a person could move on foot. Individual segments of hand and finger rocketed toward Manga from six different angles, each one a small blunt projectile with the mass of a chunk of flesh and the speed of a thrown ball. Normally they weren't strong. Any one of them would sting at best. But six of them at once, coming from six different directions?

Manga ducked the first. Sidestepped the second. A segment of forearm clipped his shoulder and spun him a quarter turn. A knee, flying upward from below, caught him under the armpit and lifted him off-balance. A fragment of hip slammed into his lower back.

He stumbled forward.

More pieces circled. They orbited him like satellites, fast and unpredictable, darting in to strike and retreating before he could grab them. Two eye segments hovered at the top of the arena, watching everything, giving Tokage a bird's eye view of her own attack.

"Beto-" Manga started, trying to lay an adhesion field.

A hand segment smacked him in the mouth. Not hard, but enough to disrupt the word.

He tried again. "GO-"

A finger flicked the side of his bubble. The onomatopoeia broke apart before it could form.

"She's targeting his mouth," Aizawa noted. "Every time he tries to speak, she's sending a piece to interrupt him. Smart. His Quirk is entirely voice-activated. If she can keep him from finishing a word, he can't fight back."

"BUT HOW LONG CAN SHE KEEP IT UP?!" Present Mic asked. "FIFTY PIECES IS HER MAXIMUM, AND MAINTAINING ALL OF THEM AT ONCE HAS TO BE EXHAUSTING!"

"It is. Watch her movements. The pieces at the edges of the formation are already slowing. She's burning through her stamina fast. She needs to end this quickly." Aizawa said

Tokage knew that. She could feel the strain in every piece, the thinning tether between her consciousness and the outermost fragments. Her jaw, floating fifteen meters above the stage, spoke for her.

"Just say yes, you idiot!"

Her voice, coming from a disembodied mouth hovering in midair, was both eerie and absurdly charming. The crowd didn't know whether to cheer or laugh, so it did both.

Manga was getting hit. Shoulders, back, ribs, legs. Little strikes from every direction, a constant pelting of body parts that kept him off-balance and kept his rhythm broken. He hadn't landed a single Quirk word since the doki-doki.

He was also smiling.

Or the closest thing to it. Inside his bubble, the question marks were gone. The pink flush remained, but it had settled into something warmer, less shocked and more present. A small heart emoji sat in the corner of his bubble, half-formed, flickering in and out of existence like it couldn't decide whether to commit.

A hand segment dove for his mouth again. He caught it.

Tokage felt his fingers close around her severed hand and her breath caught in her jaw piece above. His grip was firm but not rough. He held it like he didn’t want to break her.

"Goku-goku."

The word came out clearly, spoken through a gap in the barrage that he'd created by catching the hand, and the onomatopoeia erupted from his lips and slammed into the concrete at his feet.

The effect was immediate.

Suction. Powerful, concentrated, and inescapable. The goku-goku manifested as a visible vortex of force centered on the kanji, and every one of Tokage's fifty pieces was yanked toward it like iron filings to a magnet. They screamed through the air, losing their independent trajectories, spiraling inward from all directions.

"WHAT'S THIS?!" Present Mic shouted. "FUKIDASHI FIRES BACK! SOME KIND OF SUCTION FORCE! AND TOKAGE'S PIECES ARE, THEY'RE BEING PULLED IN!"

One by one, the pieces slammed back together. Forearms reconnected to elbows. Fingers slotted into hands. Her torso snapped together like a puzzle being solved at ten times speed, each piece finding its place in the order her body demanded. Knees to legs. Toes to feet. Shoulders to arms.

The last piece, her jaw, came screaming down from fifteen meters up and clicked into place on her face just as the final fragment of her torso sealed shut.

Setsuna Tokage stood on top of the goku-goku, fully reformed, breathing hard. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were dilated and her heart was still hammering from the doki-doki, which had faded but hadn't fully left. She could still feel the echo of his pulse somewhere behind her ribs.

Manga stood in front of her.

Close. Closer than fighting distance. His hand was still holding hers.

"You and your Quirk are so damn infuriating..." Tokage said.

Her legs were shaking from the regeneration stamina drain and the adrenaline and the fact that she was standing in front of a boy she'd just confessed to on live television and he was reaching out to her and she didn't know what he was going to say.

He lifted her. Gently. The goku-goku faded beneath them and her feet found concrete again, but he didn't let go of her hand. Not yet.

"I'm willing to give us a try."

The words appeared in his bubble before he spoke them. Written in soft round letters, not the jagged impact font of his Quirk attacks. The pink flush in his bubble deepened to red. A blushing emoji materialized beside the text, round-faced and warm, and for the first time, the cameras caught something in Manga's body language that the crowd hadn't seen before.

He was flustered.

The stadium lost its mind. A wall of sound that was half celebration and half disbelief and half pure emotional release from forty thousand people who had tuned in to watch teenagers fight and had accidentally walked into the most public love confession in the history of U.A.'s Sports Festival.

In the Class 1-B section, Tetsutetsu was crying. Full, open, unashamed tears streaming down his face while he pumped both fists in the air.

"THAT'S BEAUTIFUL!"

"Come on man, are you really crying?" Kamakiri asked.

"OF COURSE I'M CRYING! REAL MEN CRY WHEN LOVE WINS!"

Kendo had her face in both hands. She was smiling so wide it hurt.

Monoma was leaning back in his seat smiling.

Komori was bouncing in her seat.

Honenuki just nodded. "Called it."

"You didn't call anything!" Awase said.

"I called it being her strategy. The romance part was a bonus."

On the stage, Tokage looked at Manga. Her sharp teeth showed in a grin that was trying very hard to look tough and was failing because her eyes were wet and her ears were burning.

"Good." Her voice cracked. "Because if you rejected me live on tv, I would've done everything in my power to kill you, Manga."

She used his first name. Not Fukidashi. Not Fukidashi-kun. Manga.

He noticed.

A nervous sweatdrop emoji appeared in his bubble. "Heh... That doesn't sound like a joke..."

"Because it wasn't."

She let him carry her. His arm under her knees, her back against his chest, her head resting against the curve of his bubble. She was exhausted. The full split and forced reformation had drained her stamina to the floor, and her legs wouldn't have made it across the stage without embarrassing her.

He stepped over the edge of the ring.

Carried her down the steps.

Set her on the grass.

Midnight watched the whole thing with a look on her face that suggested she was going to be talking about this for years.

"Tokage Setsuna is out of the ring!" she announced. "Fukidashi moves onto the second round!"

The crowd cheered for love and they were thoroughly entertained.

Present Mic found his composure somewhere in the wreckage of the last two minutes. “FUKIDASHI MANGA MOVES ON TO THE SECOND ROUND! BUT LET'S BE HONEST FOLKS, I THINK THEY BOTH WON SOMETHING HERE TODAY!"

"Don't editorialize." Aizawa said.

"I'M A COMMENTATOR! EDITORIALIZING IS LITERALLY MY JOB!"

"Your job is to describe what's happening. What happened was a match that lasted approximately ninety seconds, in which Tokage employed an emotional disruption strategy, Fukidashi recovered and used a suction-based onomatopoeia to neutralize her Quirk's primary advantage, and the match ended by ring-out."

"Yeah but that doesn’t sound as entertaining."

"Whatever."

Tokage sat on the grass. Her legs were stretched out in front of her. Her hands were in her lap. She was looking up at the sky like someone who had just jumped off a cliff and discovered, halfway down, that she could fly.

Manga stood next to her. The blushing emoji in his bubble hadn't faded.

She may have lost the battle. She may have lost the bet.

But she certainly won the war.

"Hey, Manga."

"Yeah?"

"You better win the whole thing now that you're my boyfriend."

A confident grin appeared in his bubble.

"Obviously. How could I look bad in front of my new girlfriend?"

He left for the waiting room.

Tokage watched him go.

Then she let herself fall backward onto the grass, arms spread, green hair fanning out around her, and stared at the sky with the widest, sharpest, most self-satisfied grin of her entire life.

I did it.

Pony eventually made her way over to her, still lying in the grass, still grinning.

"Lover girl, you know you can’t sit out here, right? Other competitors got their matches too."

"I just confessed to a boy on live television and lost a fight in under two minutes."

"So... are you okay?"

"Pony." Tokage looked up at her. Her green eyes were bright and wide and completely, unreservedly happy. "I have never been better in my entire life."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!