God of Heroics: Comicman!

The name of the lady had taken three weeks to find.

The place where he got it from did not want to give it to him. The people did not like handing a list like that to a fifteen-year-old, and they liked it less once they saw whose bubble was asking, and they handed it over anyway, because there are some requests you cannot find the words to refuse.

One name matched the spot across the street.

Yuna. Thirty-four. A son. A husband. An apartment on the third floor of a walk-up two trains and a long road from U.A..

He stood outside the door longer than he had ever stood anywhere.

Then he knocked.

The man who opened it was tired. He was somewhere in his late thirties, in a sweater, and his eyes went to the speech bubble first.

"You're the kid…" The man realized.

"Yes, sir." Manga's bubble was small and pale. "I'm- My name is Manga Fukidashi. I was- I was there. On the east side." His voice was breaking. "I came to talk to you about your wife. If that's okay. If it's not okay I'll go, I just-"

"Come in."

"Sir, I don't- You don't have to…"

"You came a long way." The man stepped back from the door. "Come in."

The apartment was small and clean. There were shoes by the door, a woman's pair among them, smaller, that no one had moved. There was a photograph on a shelf with a band of black ribbon across the corner, and in it a woman was laughing at whoever held the camera, and Manga made himself look at her face for as long as he could stand, because she had a name now.

He stayed standing. He couldn't have sat.

"I had her…" he said. The words came out of him in the wrong order. He practiced on the train ride here but still got it wrong. "I saw her. There was a building coming down on a crowd and I was holding it, and she was across the street, and I saw her, and she saw me, and she thought- she looked at me like I was going to get there. And I tried but I couldn't reach her in time… I tried- there wasn't a way, and I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. She looked at me like I was going to save her and I couldn’t save her..."

The man listened to all of it as he stared at the young boy.

"I've watched it," he said quietly, when Manga was on the verge of tears again. "More than I should." He drew a shaky breath. "I saw you try. You tried your best. You don't have to carry this to my door to find out if I blame you, son. I don't. I watched a boy hold up the sky with his shoulders and I'm not going to stand here and tell him he should have had a third arm."

"But she-"

"She'd have told you the same." His voice held, barely. "Don't let this haunt you. You're a young fella. You saved more people down there than most heroes save in their career, and one was beyond anyone alive, and I need you to hear a grown man tell you that. I hope you save a hundred more. I hope you save a thousand, maybe even a million. I'd like to think one of them remembers her without ever knowing why."

Manga's bubble flickered and could not find a shape.

That was when the boy came out of the back room.

He was seven, maybe, small for it, in pajamas at the wrong time of day, and he stopped dead when he saw the speech bubble standing in his living room, and his whole small face changed. Manga watched recognition arrive. Watched it turn into something else.

"Riku, go back to your-" The man said.

"You…"

The boy's voice cracked on the single word.

"You're the one on the TV…" His hands had started to shake. Small flickers of heat shimmered the air around his fists. "You saved everybody. You saved the old lady and the dog and the kids in the hole and everybody, everybody got saved..." His breath was coming in pieces now. "Why didn't you save my mom?! Why did you save everybody but my mom?! My mom didn't- She didn't do anything! She didn't deserve to die! Why is everybody else's mom okay and mine…"

He didn't finish.

He threw himself across the room at Manga with the heat blooming off his little hands, and Manga did not move.

He saw it coming. He had time. His feet stayed where they were and his arms stayed at his sides and he set himself to take it, all of it, because somewhere underneath everything he thought he had it coming and a part of him wanted it.

The father caught the boy by the collar and lifted him off the floor a half-step short.

"No, Riku." He shook his head as he wrapped his arms around the boy.

“I HATE YOU!!! WHY DIDN’T YOU SAVE MY MOM TOO?! I LOVED HER AND NOW SHE’S GONE BECAUSE OF YOU!!!” He screamed it with everything a seven-year-old body had, thrashing, his face a mess of tears and snot and open red grief, hating Manga because Manga was standing there and his mother wasn't and there was nowhere else for it to go. He hated him. He hated him. He wanted his mom. He hated him and he wanted his mom.

Manga took every word of it standing still.

There was nothing to say…

"I'll do better." It came out of him quiet and almost nothing, into the gap between two of the boy's sobs. "I'm going to get better. So I can save more people…" His bubble trembled. "The next time there's a person across the street, I will be there. I promise you that."

The boy didn't answer. He wasn't going to. He had his face buried in his father's sweater and his fists were no longer burning and he was just crying now, the heat all spent, a kid who wanted his mother.

The father looked at Manga over the top of his son's head, and there was nothing in his face but exhaustion and a sad, polite kindness that asked for nothing back.

"Thank you for coming. Don’t take anything my boy said to heart, he’s just grieving. Get home safe, okay?" he said. 

Manga got on his knees and bowed his head to the two before he let himself out. He did not feel one ounce lighter than when he'd come.

He hadn't expected to. That wasn't what the trip was for.

He understood with a calm that frightened him a little that this was simply one of the parts of being a hero that wasn’t spoken about. Perhaps they got into that subject in their third or fourth year…

…

"I AM HERE!"

The doors of Ground Gamma's staging area banged open and All Might filled them, fists on his hips, grin blazing, and the entire energy of Class 1-B reset on contact.

"And the reason I am here, my fine young heroes, is your Foundational Hero Studies! It has been too long! How is everyone after your week in the field?"

"Kind of a quiet entrance for you." Awase said.

"I expected at least a pose." said Tsuburaba.

"He's losing his touch." Kaibara stage-whispered.

"Lose it? Impossible! My supply of entrances is bottomless!" All Might struck the pose. The class clapped heartily. "Now! As your follow-up to internships, today we do something fun. A rescue-training race!"

"Shouldn't rescue training be at the USJ?" Kendo asked.

"The USJ is for disaster scenarios! This," and he swept one massive arm at the field behind him, "is a race. And Ground Gamma is the only place for it."

The field was a horizon of industry. Factories knotted together into a labyrinth of catwalks and gantries, cranes leaning over alleys of pipe, ladders and rails and gaps and long unlovely drops, the whole thing a vertical puzzle bolted out of steel. Somewhere in the middle of it, the machinery groaned to itself.

"You will split into teams of five and run one team at a time," All Might said. "I will plant myself somewhere inside this maze and send up a distress signal. You start at the border. It is a simple thing, my friends. Find me. Rescue me. First one to reach me wins. Apply everything your work-studies taught you." He raised a finger, and his bright blue eyes found a single student with terrible inevitability. "And keep the destruction of school property to a minimum."

The finger was pointing at Kamakiri.

"Why me?"

"No reason!" All Might lied warmly. "First team! To your marks!"

The teams were randomly chosen. While the first group lined up at the border, the rest of the class started betting on each other with no money and full conviction.

"Tsuburaba's got this whole field for free. Vertical's his entire game. He'll just walk over the top of it." Kaibara said, watching the gantries.

"I don’t see how Tokage could lose this…" Pony pointed out.

"Kendo’s gonna struggle with this one. I don’t think big hands and model stuff are going to help here."

“I’m not useless.” Kendo defended herself.

"Anyone betting on Fukidashi?"

"That's too boring. He doesn’t count. Actually, no one bet on Fukidashi, he’s exempted from the bets."

“Oi. How is that fair? I could lose too, you know?” Manga tried to convince them.

Everyone simply looked at him silently.

“Our get rich quick scheme isn’t going to work, babe.” Setsuna walked behind him with a sigh.

“They saw right through us…” Manga balled his fist in fake rage. “How is it possible?!”

…

Manga was in his costume, preparing for the race deciding on a way to make this more challenging for him.

He wasn't going to use his quirk.

He wanted to further build on what was under the quirk.

Nighteye and Tōgata were incredibly strong despite having quirks that had nothing to do with physically enhancing themselves. Manga’s quirk also didn’t really physically amp himself except with a few certain words, but still. It would only benefit him to continue training his body without relying on his quirk.

"Team one!" All Might boomed from somewhere out in the maze. A flare went up, red, hanging over the steel. "The signal is lit! On my mark!"

The five of them coiled at the line. Tsuburaba. Tokage. Kaibara. Shoda. Manga.

An air horn split the morning.

"START!"

Tsuburaba went straight up. He exhaled a slab of solid air under his foot and stepped onto nothing and blew another and was above the field in three strides, running across a staircase only he could see, and for about four seconds it was his race.

Tokage split apart and sent her pieces threading low through the pipe-alleys where a whole body couldn't follow. Kaibara and Shoda had to rely on their natural mobility and agility since their quirks didn’t really assist them in moving better or faster.

And just like them, Manga ran. Well, not quite the same.

He hit the first gantry leg at a dead sprint and went up it without slowing, hands finding rivets, feet walking the vertical steel for two, three strides of pure friction and trained body before he caught the lip of the catwalk and rolled over it standing. He didn't stop standing. He was already moving when his feet landed, already reading the next gap, a four-meter jump to a pipe bridge with a drop under it that would end anyone's race, and he took it flat out and caught the pipe across his forearms and swung his whole body up and over in one motion and came down running on the curve of it.

Below, somebody in the watching crowd said, "Wait what."

He vaulted a railing, dropped a full story to a stack of crates, absorbed the landing through both knees, and came up off the crates onto a slanted conveyor housing without a half-second's pause. The steel under his right foot gave, a loose panel, the kind of unstable footing this whole course was built to punish, and his weight was already on it.

He felt it go.

He didn't fight it. He let the foot slide with the panel and put the next step somewhere solid before the slide could become a fall, his body sorting it out below the level of thought, hips over feet, weight where the weight needed to be, and he was across and climbing before the loose panel finished clattering down into the dark.

"He's passing Tokage without his quirk." Awase mentioned.

“I told you it was a good idea to exclude Fukidashi from the bets!” Komori stamped her feet excitedly as her winning bet was right behind Fukidashi

“I guess you weren’t wrong. It’s more fair to exclude him than include him. Isn’t that funny?” Kuroiro stood next to her.

Tsuburaba, up on his air, glanced down and saw a boy with a speech bubble for a head go past underneath him quickly. “What?! You do parkour now?!” He exclaimed.

Manga ran the spine of the maze. He went over what he could clear and through what he couldn't and up what stood in the way, and the red flare grew closer over the steel, and the last stretch was a crane arm angled across two buildings with a thirty-meter drop beneath it and nothing to hold but the lattice.

He went up the lattice like it was a staircase someone had merely turned sideways. He ran the arm of the crane with his arms out and his eyes ahead.

He dropped off the end of the crane and landed in a crouch in front of All Might, who was sitting on an oil drum with the flare gun still smoking in his hand, and he had not spoken a single word the entire way.

For a moment the Symbol of Peace just looked at him.

"Young Fukidashi. Did you forget you have a Quirk?" All Might said.

A sunny smile flickered into the bubble.

"No, sir. I wanted to see what I could do without it."

All Might reached out and clapped a hand on Manga's shoulder with a smile of his own.

“That’s a good mindset, but don’t think of your quirk as separate from you. It is apart of you just as your body is.” All Might shared.

Then, booming, to the field and the watching class: "TEAM ONE'S WINNER, FUKIDASHI!"

…

All Might ran the rest of the teams through, and by the end of the morning Ground Gamma had only been mildly destroyed.

"Some of you took first, some of you took last," All Might told them as they gathered back at the border, sweaty and grinning and bruised. "It does not matter today. What matters is that every one of you has found new ways to use what you have since you started at this school. I have watched it happen. Keep it up as you head into your final exams, and remember, the point of all of it is the same as it ever was." His grin softened by a degree. "You are learning to get to people in time. There is no more worthwhile thing to be good at. That is all! You have done well!"

The locker room was the usual after-class wreckage of teenagers peeling out of hero gear and into uniforms.

"I have got to do something about my mobility." Shoda was saying, working a knot out of his shoulder. "I was the slowest out of everyone. If I don’t get faster, that could be someone I failed to save…"

“Whoa you were taking it that seriously? I thought it was just a fun exercise.” Honenuki said.

"Easy to say when your Quirk turns the floor to soup." Kaibara dropped onto the bench. "Some of us just got, like. Person legs. Regular person legs. I gyrate and I'm still basically running at people speed. Tsuburaba's got a staircase to heaven and I've got knees."

"I would kill for a better way to move faster." Tsuburaba said.

"You literally walked on the sky today."

"And got passed. ON THE GROUND. By a guy who didn't even-"

"Yeah, about that." Awase turned around with his shirt half on. "Fukidashi got first and didn't use his Quirk at all. Parkoured the entire course like the rest of us were standing still." He looked genuinely aggrieved. "So I don't want to hear about anybody's legs. It's a skill issue."

A laugh went around. Then Kaibara, fairly, said the obvious thing.

"Come on, though. Fukidashi's not exactly a fair comparison of, like, the average human."

He said it as a matter of fact, and he was right, and Manga, lacing his shoes by his locker, didn't argue it.

He couldn't argue it. He'd stopped being able to argue it since he got his quirk. The man who was going to surpass God did not get to be the average human. Above and beyond wasn't a phase. It was his responsibility.

But he did look up.

"You can still be amazing without one, though. A speed Quirk. A strength Quirk. Any of it." He pulled the lace tight. "Everybody in here keeps talking like the Quirk is the whole story. It isn't. The body we have has incredible potential. Most people use about a tenth of it their whole lives and never find out. The limits of the human body are a lot more than you think. Like what I did back there is something all of you can do honestly. Well, at least in theory." He shrugged, almost embarrassed. "Quirks are just a bonus."

For a second nobody said anything.

"For some reason, I feel like that isn’t a joke when you say it." Tsuburaba said.

"I think it’s true. After the gravity training, I feel way stronger and faster than I did before school. And my quirk only has to do with controlling air." Kaibara admitted.

Across the room, Tetsutetsu had banged his locker shut and pointed at Manga with the full force of his being.

"After classes. We still doing gravity training in the gym right?! I missed it during my internship."

Manga nodded anyway. His bubble drew a small barbell.

"YES!" Tetsutetsu pumped a fist. "Oh, thank God, I needed to hear that. A week. A whole week at an agency doing nothing but patrols and public stuff. You know what I didn't do for a week? Anything grueling." He grabbed at his own arm with naked despair. "I can feel it. I lost gains. I came back soft and squishy."

"My internship was useless too," Kamakiri said from the corner. "Whole week. He had me working on my appearance, listening to lectures, and going out on patrols. I cannot wait to get back into high intensity training."

"I did nothing but training for my internship…" Manga slung his bag over his shoulder as they left the locker room.

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