God of Heroics: Comicman!

The second-floor dining room of the Nighteye Agency smelled like grilled mackerel, brown rice, and a bowl of something green that Manga had been told, three separate times now, was good for his joints.

He'd learned on his first day that Sir Nighteye did not leave recovery to chance.

There were two of them. Nutritionists, a man and a woman in pale coats who appeared after every training session with trays portioned down to the gram. Protein here. Slow carbohydrates there. A little dish of fermented something that Mirio inhaled like candy and Manga ate because he'd decided a long time ago that he would put anything in his body that made it better, even if it tasted like nastiness.

"You didn't chew that," the woman said, not unkindly, sliding a second helping of rice in front of him. "You burned more than usual today. Eat slower. Eat more."

"Yes ma'am…" A sullen Manga popped up in his bubble.

He ate slower. He ate more.

Every part of him ached. From his insides to his outsides. His ribs from the body shots. His forearms from the seals. The long muscles along his spine from forty minutes of being thrown, beaten, and made to figure his way back to his feet.

Across the table, Mirio was on his third tray and showed no signs of slowing.

"Sir's gonna make us do the two-on-one again tomorrow," he said around a mouthful, beaming. "I can feel it. POWER!"

"Training to be a hero truly is no joke." Manga said. His bubble drew an exhausted version of himself stumbling toward the word Hero.

"Yup! You learn the most when you're struggling!"

Manga exhaled. "Man don’t I know it..."

Bubble Girl laughed into her tea.

Sir Nighteye was at the far end of the table with a cup of black coffee and a laptop, eating nothing, reading something. He hadn't said a word in ten minutes. The All Might figurine on the windowsill behind him caught the last of the afternoon light, a limited print, Silver Age, the kind of thing Manga had been warned not to breathe on by Bubble Girl.

It was, all of it, the warmest room Manga had been in that wasn't with his friends or mom.

He was reaching for the green bowl when every phone in the building went off at once.

Sir Nighteye was on his feet before the second chime finished.

The coffee was abandoned and the laptop was closed and his eyes had gone to the screen of his phone.

"Commercial district. Eleven blocks south." His voice carried without rising. "Two giant villains. They're moving toward each other through occupied buildings, and they don't appear to care what's between them."

Mirio was already up. Bubble Girl had her visor down. Centipeder had set the report face-down on the table with two fingers.

"Casualties?" Bubble Girl asked.

"Climbing." Nighteye pulled his suit jacket from the back of his chair. "Every agency in the district is converging. So is the police. Two giants is a containment problem before it's anything else, which means the people underneath them are going to be a distant second priority for the first critical minutes." He said it plainly. "We move now."

Manga was on his feet too. His tray sat forgotten.

Nighteye looked at him.

It was brief. One full second of those yellow eyes behind the triangular glasses, weighing something, and then the verdict came out flat and final.

"You observe. You do not engage. You have no provisional license, no field authorization, and no legal standing to use your Quirk for anything in that district." He let it sit. "If you forget that, the consequences land on more people than you. Do you understand me, Fukidashi?"

"I understand, sir."

"Then keep up."

You could hear it from four blocks out.

What you heard first was the sound of a city being treated like furniture, the low groan of a structure giving way, the long crack of a load-bearing wall surrendering, the boom of something enormous setting its foot down where a foot was never meant to go.

They came around the last corner and the commercial district was gone.

In its place was the aftermath of two living mountains deciding to fight in a place full of people. The first villain stood maybe twenty meters tall, all swollen muscle and stretched skin, its head small and stupid on a body grown past any human proportion. The second was leaner, taller, longer in the arm, and it had a reach that let it tear the corner off a six-story building like bread off a loaf and swing the chunk at the first one's skull.

The chunk missed. It came apart in the air. It rained down across two intersections.

Pro heroes swarmed both giants. Manga recognized some of them from the rankings, recognized none of them by name in the chaos, watched a speed hero blur up one giant's spine and a heavyweight slam into the other's knee and a flight-type strafe the lean one's eyes. It was working, slowly. Every hero in the district was pouring everything into the two things that could level a block with a misstep, because that was the math, you stopped the giants first or there would be nothing left to rescue.

Which meant few of them were looking at the buildings the giants had already broken.

"Bubble Girl, scent the western collapse for survivors," Nighteye said, already moving. "Centipeder, the eastern blocks. Mirio, the lean one's blind side, the heroes need to drive it away from the residential edge. I'll coordinate with command." He pointed, without looking, at a stretch of sidewalk near a leaning pharmacy that the giants had left in their wake. "Fukidashi. There. Stay. Watch."

And then they scattered, each to the thing they were allowed to do, and Manga was standing alone on a slab of cracked sidewalk with the whole ruined street laid out in front of him like a page he wasn't supposed to read.

He watched.

That was the assignment. Watch.

Twenty meters away, a woman was clawing at a fallen shopfront grate with her bare hands, and behind the grate a man's arm was reaching back through the gap, and neither of them was strong enough, and no hero was coming because every hero was busy keeping a giant's heel out of the next street over.

Forty meters away, a delivery truck had been crushed nose-down into a sinkhole the giants' footsteps had opened, and there were voices coming out of it, more than one, and the sinkhole was still widening.

A hundred meters away, a four-story building stood at an angle it had no business standing at, listing further with every tremor, and at its base a knot of people had been herded by the collapse into the exact place it was going to land.

He could see all of it.

He could reach all of it. He knew he could.

A hero's job isn't to defeat villains.

His feet were already moving.

A hero's job is to save people in trouble.

His mind caught up about a step and a half later, somewhere around the realization that he'd left the safe slab of sidewalk Sir Nighteye had put him on, and by then it didn't matter, because the part of him that decided things had already decided, the same way it had decided at the front gate of U.A. that he would surpass God, the same way it had decided at the entrance exam to go up and meet a machine the size of a building. His body moved before his brain.

He took one breath as he ran.

"Pin-pin."

The vitality word formed bright in his throat and the day's training drained out of his muscles like water out of a cracked cup. The ache in his ribs, the dead weight in his thrown-and-pinned spine, the deep fatigue of an hour spent losing to better men, gone. His body currently believed it had slept eight hours and eaten three meals.

"Bari-bari."

The second word settled over the first. Peak. Every fiber at maximum, his Quirk wide open, his frame operating at the absolute ceiling of what months under tripled gravity had built. He'd never used both at once heading into something like this.

It felt like the start of a story.

The woman at the grate first, because she was closest and because that man's arm was getting weaker.

"Supa."

The word left his mouth small and sharp and he aimed it at the grate's anchor bolts. A single severing pass and the grate came free in one piece. He caught it before it could fall on either of them and set it aside.

The man spilled out into the woman's arms. They were both crying. They were both looking at him.

Manga crouched to their level, and his bubble did the thing it had been built to do. It went warm and bright and unhurried, the panel lines inside it softening into the open friendly curves of a face that had all the time in the world, and across the white field, in clean hand-drawn letters, appeared four words.

This is the part.

"You know how, in every comic," he said, and his voice came out steady and bright and certain, the voice that had carried across forty thousand people at the Sports Festival, "right when it looks the worst, there's that one page where the hero finally shows up?"

The man nodded, dazed.

"This is that part." A little burst of confetti went off in his bubble. "You're already saved. Get west, follow the heroes in white. Go."

They went. They looked back twice.

"Niko-niko."

He cast it as he turned, a warm aura blooming out from the word in a soft radius, and the half-dozen other people pinned in shock against the pharmacy wall felt the panic come off them by a degree. Eased. Enough to get their legs under them. Enough to move when he pointed them west and told them the hero had it from here.

Then he ran for the sinkhole.

"Da."

The burst word fired under his feet and he crossed the forty meters in a blink, his trained legs turning the word's acceleration into something the eye lost, and he hit the lip of the sinkhole in a low crouch with both hands already finding the crushed truck's frame.

Voices inside. Three. A kid's, a woman's, an old man's.

The sinkhole was still eating its own edges, dirt and concrete sliding down into the dark, and the truck with it. He had seconds, not minutes.

"Gacchiri."

He pressed the word into the rim of the sinkhole and the crumbling earth firmed, the edges holding, the slow collapse arrested in its tracks. Then he set his hands under the truck's frame and pulled, and this was the part no Quirk did for him, this was the months of barbell and gravity and a body rebuilt under three times its own weight, his boots driving into firmed earth, his back screaming and not failing, the steel groaning up out of the hole one terrible inch at a time until the back doors cleared the lip.

"Gui."

He hooked the pull-word through the gap and yanked, and the three of them came tumbling out into the daylight, scraped and screaming and alive.

The kid couldn't have been six. He was hyperventilating, eyes blown wide, lungs going faster than they could fill.

Manga knelt.

"Ho."

The relief word touched the boy's chest, soft as a hand, and the panic let go all at once. The breathing slowed. The shoulders dropped. The eyes found focus, and the first thing they focused on was the speech bubble where a head should be, a thing the kid had clearly seen on television.

"You're the sports festival winner…" the boy breathed.

A star sparkled in the bubble. "That’s me."

"Are we okay?"

"You're already okay. You just don't know it yet." He stood, scooped all three of them toward the western light with the same line, the heroes in white, go, and they went.

For a stretch of minutes that he would never quite be able to account for afterward, Manga Fukidashi was exactly the hero he had told a confused crowd at U.A.'s front gate he would become.

He moved through the broken district like the page had turned to his chapter. A family trapped above a buckled stairwell, Supa carving them a clean doorway through the wall, Fuka-fuka laid soft as a quilt below so the drop to the street caught them gently instead of breaking them. A man pinned under a collapsed awning, Gui to draw the weight off, his own arms to lift the man clear. A teenager frozen on a third-floor ledge as the floor sagged, Batan, and a wall slammed into being beneath her like a door closing under her feet, a platform out of nothing, and Da to put himself there to carry her down.

And through all of it, the smile.

He gave it to every single one of them. The terrified, the bleeding, the ones too shocked to do anything but stare. His bubble blazed warm and steady, the one calm thing in a street full of falling sky, and he said it to each of them like it was true because to him it was, this is the part where the hero shows up, you're already saved, smile for me, you're going to be telling this story for years. Children who had been screaming a minute ago were watching him with their mouths open. A grandmother he carried out of a tea shop kissed his bubble like it was a grandson's cheek. Somewhere above the street a news helicopter had found him, was holding him in frame, but he didn't know that and wouldn't have slowed even if he had.

This was the whole reason. This was the thing he'd built every muscle and trained every note of his voice for. This. People who'd thought no one was coming, learning they were wrong, while a kid with a speech bubble for a head smiled at them like the worst day of their lives was already a good story they'd survived.

He was riding so high on it that he almost didn't see the building start to go.

The lean giant took a hero's strike to the eye and reeled, and its long arm came down across the four-story building at the end of the block, the one that had been listing all along, and the list became a fall.

And under it, exactly where the collapse had herded them, was the knot of people he'd seen from the very first slab of sidewalk and hadn't reached yet.

Manga didn't think. There was no time in him for thinking.

"Da."

He was across the block before the dust cleared. He hit the base of the listing building shoulder-first as it came down, and he caught it.

"Gacchiri."

He shoved the reinforcement word up through the whole leaning face of the structure and got his shoulders under the lowest beam and held. Four stories of dying concrete found a single point of resistance and that point was a fifteen-year-old boy with his boots cracking the pavement beneath him and his whole rebuilt body turned into a pillar. The building stopped falling. It hung. It hung on him, on the word and the frame and the months and the refusal, and behind him, in the shadow it should have crushed, a dozen people scrambled out into the open air, screaming, alive, free.

He was holding it. He was actually holding it. A spread of pride tried to push up through the strain, look at me, look what I can do, I'm holding up the sky.

That was when he saw her.

Across the street. Thirty meters, maybe less. A woman, pinned under a slab the giants' first pass had dropped, and above her the front of a smaller building was coming apart in slow, terrible pieces, the mortar letting go course by course, a wall becoming rubble.

She was looking right at him.

She'd seen the comic kid hold up a building with his shoulders. She'd seen him save the crowd. She looked at him with hope. Into the certainty that this was the part, that the hero had shown up, that she was already saved and just didn't know it yet.

Manga's hands were full of four stories.

If he let go, the dozen behind him died.

He couldn't reach her but he tried anyway.

"PITA!"

The word ripped out of him and shot across the street, a dead-stop command hurtling through thirty meters of open air toward a wall that was already falling. He watched it go. He watched it cross ten meters. Twenty. He watched it racing the rubble and losing, because the wall had a head start and gravity doesn't wait for anyone, and the word was still five meters from the wall when the wall reached her.

The Pita hit a half-second after impact. The rubble froze in place, suspended, locked in the air by a word that had arrived too late to matter. Everything stopped moving except the dust, which kept rising, and Manga's heart, which kept beating.

The dust rolled out across the street.

His bubble went blank.

For the first time in the entire disaster, the white field above his neck had nothing on it at all, the panel lines gone slack and empty, a page no one was drawing.

"I'm sorry..."

He said it to the dust. He said it to the slab and the wall and the place where her face had been. His voice came out wrecked and small and it would not have carried to the back of any room.

"I'm sorry. I'm so… I'm sorry."

He had maybe one second to give her.

Because behind him the building was still on his shoulders, and the people he'd just freed were still in the open, and the giants were still up, and there were more voices in more rubble down more streets, and every second he spent on his knees in front of a dead woman was a second stealing the next person who could still be saved. Grief was a luxury right now and the people couldn't afford it and neither could he.

So he did the hardest thing he had ever done.

He put it back.

He pulled the smile back onto his bubble while it was the last thing in the world he wanted there, forced the warm certain face back into the white field with her hope still burning a hole through him, because the grandmother twenty meters down was watching him and the kid he'd pulled from the sinkhole was watching him and a hero who lets people see his fear is a hero who lets the fear spread, and All Might had taught a whole country that lesson without ever saying it out loud. The smile was not how he felt. The smile was something he gave. He understood that now, all the way down, in a way no words could have ever taught him.

He stood the building back up enough to wedge it. He let the people behind him run. He memorized everything he could about the spot across the street, the storefront, the sign, the block, so that later, when there was a later, he could find out who she was, and go to her family, and apologize to them himself.

Then Comicman wiped his gloves on his ruined jacket, turned his blazing, lying, beautiful smile back toward the people who could still be saved, and went back to work.

…

It took the heroes another nine minutes to bring the giants down.

It took Manga all nine of them. By the end his throat was sandpaper and his arms had started shaking under loads they'd have laughed at an hour ago, and Pin-pin could clear the fatigue but not the rest of it, and he kept going anyway, because that was the deal he'd made with himself the day he declared he would surpass God.

When the second giant finally went down under a pile of pros and the street went quiet enough to hear individual crying, Manga was sitting on a chunk of someone's wall with a toddler asleep against his chest, waiting for a paramedic to come take her, and he became aware, slowly, of how many people were looking at him.

The survivors. The pros, now that they had attention to spare. The cameras, the helicopter overhead, the lenses on the ground, the red recording lights he hadn't seen and couldn't unsee now.

All of it had gone out live. The whole country had watched the winner of the U.A. Sports Festival, a first-year with no license and no permission, hold up a building with his shoulders and pull strangers out of the dark with a smile on his face.

And watched the one he couldn't.

A shadow fell across him. He looked up.

Sir Nighteye stood over him, suit dust-grey, glasses catching the late light, his expression giving away exactly nothing. He'd come from somewhere with command. He'd seen. He'd surely seen all of it.

For a long moment neither of them said anything.

Manga shifted the sleeping toddler so a paramedic could lift her away, and then he stood, on legs that didn't want to, and faced the man who'd told him plainly, two hours ago, that he was to observe and not engage.

His bubble was steady now. He'd made sure of it.

"I'm not going to apologize for it," Manga said. His voice was raw but it didn't waver. "I know what you told me. I know what I don't have. I heard every word and I broke every one of them and I'd break them again right now if the alarm went off again."

Nighteye said nothing. His eyes moved over the boy, the wrecked costume, the burns on his forearms, the dust, the absolute lack of regret in the set of his shoulders.

"There's one I didn't reach." The words cost him. He made himself say them at full volume anyway, because hiding from it felt like an insult to her. "A woman, on the east side. I had my hands full and I couldn't be in two places and she's gone, and I'm going to find out her name and apologize to her family, and I'm going to get better. Faster. Stronger. Whatever it takes to be in two places next time." His bubble flickered, just once, and steadied. "So that the next time this happens, I save the ones I couldn't save today. That's the only thing I'm sorry about, sir. Not the rule. That I couldn't reach her…" Tears fell from his eyes.

The street noise filled the silence between them, sirens and crying and the groan of the giants being hauled into restraints.

Sir Nighteye looked at him for a long, long moment.

Then, so faint that a less observant person would have missed it entirely, the corner of his mouth moved.

"We," he said, in his flat low voice, "are going to have a great deal of paperwork."

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