God of Heroics: Comicman!

Vlad King walked into the classroom on the last Monday of June, set his stack of papers on the lectern, and did not say good morning.

"Summer's almost here," he said. "A whole month off would be a waste of twenty kids who chose this school instead of an easier one."

The class had a very bad feeling...

"So you're not getting a month off."

"Sensei, don't say it…" Tsuburaba said.

"You're going to a training camp. In the woods. The whole department."

The room detonated.

"I KNEW IT!" Tetsutetsu was already on his feet, both fists in the air. "A WHOLE MONTH! All of us, under one roof, in the mountains. Do you know what that is? That's the dream. That's the actual dream."

"Hot springs…" Tokage said, eyes lighting up. "There are always hot springs."

"Fireworks!" said Pony dreamily.

"We have to do truth or dare!" Tsuburaba said.

"Curry… I’d like to eat curry with everyone." Bondo rumbled.

"The forest at night holds many dark truths." Kuroiro said to no one.

"It holds bugs. And so many mushrooms! Sensei, can I forage?" Komori asked happily.

"That depends on you." Vlad King said.

“Is there any internet?” Manga wondered.

A month in the mountains with his friends sounded awesome but still, no technology? He didn’t know if he had it in him.

Kendo was already organizing. Her eyes moved across the room and started sorting people into groups, who'd share a cabin, who needed watching, who'd get homesick. The president of class showing her excitement in her own way.

"However…"

Vlad King felt the room shift at that one word.

"The camp is for students who pass their final exams." He looked around the room, and he chuckled. "Anyone who fails spends that month in remedial classes. Here. In this building. With me."

The silence that followed had a different flavor than the first one.

"So while your classmates are eating curry and setting off fireworks in the mountains," Vlad King said, "you'll be in an empty classroom doing worksheets, and I will be the one grading them, and I do not grade gently in July." He picked his papers back up. "Finals are next week. Written and practical. Study hard."

"DO YOUR BEST, EVERYONE!" Tetsutetsu bellowed.

"Sit down, Tetsu…" Kendo said gently.

"I'M MOTIVATING!"

"Sit down."

He sat knowing he would probably need the most help studying.

…

"I didn't study," Tetsutetsu said, staring into his rice like it had betrayed him. "At all. The sports festival, then the internship, it all just. It left. The studying part of my brain left the building and it did not come back."

"That definitely sounds like a problem." said Kaibara, who had studied, and was enjoying the sight of others who had not.

"Midterms were easy." Tetsutetsu went on, gaining speed and panic together. "We'd barely covered anything. But that was a hundred years ago and now there's a whole semester. I don’t mind the practical, but the written! Why must we be forced to labor our brains away like this?! It’s inhuman!"

“It’s inhuman for a student to use their brain on a paper test?” Kamakiri questioned.

"YES!" Tetsutetsu responded with more emotion than logic.

"We thought you were one of us." Tsuburaba said, mock-wounded, draping an arm across Tetsutetsu's shoulders. "One of the cool morons who doesn't care about grades. And now you're over here panicking.“

"Guys like you are only fun when you're confident idiots." Kamakiri agreed. "There's no market for a nervous one."

"My life is hell." Tetsutetsu exaggerated.

Across the table, Monoma had been very quiet and the moment Tetsutetsu looked up at him with hope, he set his chopsticks down.

"Don't look at me," Monoma said. "I have my own problems."

"He isn’t book smart." Awase chuckled.

"It's difficult, okay."

"He got like a 20% on his last test."

"That was shared with you in secret, you traitor."

Kendo set her tray down at the end of the table, looked at the two of them and made a decision.

"Okay," she said. "Study group. After class, every day this week, my house. I'll take you both."

"You don't have to,"

"I want all of us at that camp," Kendo said. "All twenty. So I'm not asking." She turned. "Honenuki. Help me?"

Honenuki was two seats down, eating calmly as a student who had never once been worried about a test in his life. He didn't even look up. "Sure. I'll head over after the gym."

"That's what true virtue looks like." Tokage laughed, pointing a chopstick at him.

"I've got virtue too." Kendo said. "I'll tutor these two until they cry if that's what it takes."

"Please don't make us cry." Monoma requested.

“Can it be a sweet and kind tutoring instead?” Tetsutetsu asked nicely.

"You better learn well."

…

Manga did not go to the study group.

The material was the first semester. He'd been there for the first semester. There was no version of the man who would surpass God who couldn't pass a comprehensive review of things he'd already learned, so he studied like he always did, an hour at night with the textbook open and his phone on a video call with Setsuna, and then he gave the rest of the week to the thing that actually mattered.

The body.

Because there was a practical coming, and the practical was the part you couldn't cram for.

The first day, Tetsutetsu nearly cried about it.

"I want to go to the gym. I belong at the gym. The gym is my home."

"You belong here," Kendo said, not unkindly, steering him back to his seat by the shoulder. "Sit."

"Manga and the other guys are training and I'm doing LONG DIVISION!"

"Tetsu."

"This is the worst week of my life."

In the gym, Manga set his feet, and dropped a familiar weight onto his own shoulders, and went to work in the heavy air.

Kamakiri joined him on the second day, having apparently sweet-talked his way out of the study group by getting a perfect score on a practice quiz out of pure spite.

"I cannot sit in that room." Kamakiri said, rolling his neck, blades sliding a centimeter out of his forearms and back. "A week at the agency working on my hair and being lectured, and now a week of worksheets. I need to hit something." He looked at Manga, at the heavy field, at the bar. "Make it heavy. As heavy as you've got."

"You don't want as heavy as I've got," Manga said, and his bubble drew a small, dry smile.

"Try me."

"No."

"COWARD!!!"

"It's not cowardice to know your friend would get hurt." The smile in the bubble warmed. "I'll give you what you can handle and a little past it. That's the deal."

Kamakiri grumbled, and trained, and by the end of the hour he was lying flat on the mat groaning in pain.

Setsuna was usually with him in the gym. If there was a chance to be next to Manga, she was there.

"Study group’s a war zone," she said. "Monoma cried after being chopped too many times on the hand by Kendo. Kendo had to apologize and give him a break."

"It sounds painful for sure. Did he get it in the end?"

"After enough smacks up the head, yeah." She laughed.

Manga laughed along  with her, consecutive hahaha’s appeared in the bubble.

After laughing, they went silent for a moment.

"You’ve been quiet this week…" Tokage pointed out.

"I keep waiting for it to feel normal again." he said. "Sitting in class. Hearing everyone yell about hot springs. It's good. I want all of it." He grabbed a hefty dumbbell and started curling. "It just feels like it's happening on the other side of glass right now. Like I'm watching everything instead of participating in it."

Tokage didn't tell him it would pass. She didn't tell him he'd done everything he could, or that there hadn't been a way, or any of the true and useless things people kept handing him. She knew he'd heard them all and that none of them would help.

"You'll be on this side of the glass again," she said instead. "You always come back. It just takes you a while because you care a lot more than other people. Most people don't. That's the whole reason you're you."

The bubble flickered. A small heart formed.

"You and your bubble are so damn infuriating." She said fondly.

"You like the bubble."

"I tolerate the bubble."

"You confessed to the bubble."

"I confessed to the idiot under the bubble, there's a difference."

“Is there?” Manga chuckled.

…

Huge news came from Kendo on Thursday.

She'd been talking to a third-year, somebody who'd done the first-term finals last year, and she brought what she'd learned to the class.

"The practical's a combat exam," she said. "Robots. Villain-bots, like the entrance exam. Point values, the whole setup."

The relief in the room could be felt.

"Robots," Tetsutetsu said, the way a drowning man says land. "ROBOTS! I can hit robots. I don't have to do anything clever to robots, I just have to be steel and hit them. Oh, thank God. The practical's free."

"It's not free."

"It's free, Kendo, it's tin cans, I've never been so happy."

Kamakiri cracked his knuckles, looking pleased for the first time all week. "This’ll be a breeze."

Monoma, who had perked up the instant the word advantage occurred to him, leaned forward with a gleam in his eye. "We tell no one. Class A doesn't know. We walk in knowing exactly what's coming and they don't, and we post the best practical scores in the department, and we upstage them again like in the Sports Festival!"

"We're not doing that." Kendo said.

"Itsuka. This is our chance… What don’t you understand?"

"I'd tell Class A myself if I ran into them," she said, and meant it, "because the point of the exam is to make good heroes, not to dunk on other kids. Sit down. Class A is already going through a rough time as it is losing one of their classmates."

Monoma quieted down, that was true. As much competitiveness he felt toward Class A, a guy did die. Now probably wasn’t the time for class rivalries.

Manga thought if the practical was robots, the practical was the easy part.

He almost felt bad about it. Tetsutetsu was over there nearly weeping with relief.

"Going to the gym?" Kendo asked.

"Going to the gym."

"You know it's robots. You don't even need to."

"I’m the man who plans to surpass God." He reminded her, and the bubble him standing over the characters for God. "I can’t really skip training."

"Don’t you have rest days?" Kendo wondered.

“Sunday.” Manga waved as he left toward the gym.

…

On exam day, Manga took his seat. He took his time. He worked through it with relative ease, and when he got to the end he went back to the start and checked it all again, not because he doubted it but because it was recommended by his teachers growing up to do so.

He drank from his water bottle. He set his pencil down with twenty minutes to spare and looked out the window at the summer building itself up over the campus.

Three rows over, Tetsutetsu was sweating through his shirt and mouthing something to himself with his eyes squeezed shut, and Kendo, finished and serene, was watching him with the quiet anxiety of someone who had poured a week into a result she couldn't control anymore.

The pencils stopped. The papers came in.

They got the results back two days later, and the whole of Class 1-B passed, every last one, including a steel boy who shot out of his seat and lifted Honenuki clean off the ground in a hug that nearly cracked a rib, and a blond disaster who pretended he'd never been worried at all.

One exam down. The fun one left.

The class spent the evening loud and having fun, already half-packed for a camp they were sure of now, trading guesses about how many points each of them would rack up against a city full of tin cans. Tetsutetsu wanted to bet on it. Kamakiri took the bet. Monoma organized a betting pool with Shoda’s help.

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