God of Heroics: Comicman!

Vlad King didn't sit down when he came in, which was how they knew.

"Two things before heroics," he said. "First. You all told your families about the camp. Where it is, when you leave, the whole itinerary." He held up the printed guide they'd all been handed at the mall trip. "Forget all of it. The location's been changed. You won't be told the new one until the morning we board the buses."

Everyone groaned.

"Sensei, I already told my parents the old place,"

"That's the point." Vlad King's voice flattened. "After what happened at the mall, after the USJ, the school can't be sure who knows what or how they came to know it. So nobody knows the destination, including, for now, you. That's not us being paranoid. That's us being careful with twenty kids I'd like to bring home in the same condition I take them out in. We already lost one of you, and that's one too many." He set the guide down. "The camp is still happening. Pack the same gear. Be at the buses at six. That's all you get."

"So we don’t need to do anything?" Shoda asked.

"No." He checked the clock. "Heroics is in the second gym complex today. All Might's running it. Get changed and get out there, and I don’t want to hear any complaints from All Might about any of you."

…

The second gym complex was the urban training ground, the same maze of mock buildings where they'd run the Battle Trial back at the start of the year, streets and stairwells and dead-windowed concrete under the dome lights. A monitoring tent sat at the edge of it with a wall of screens, and All Might stood in front of it with his fists on his hips and his grin at full power.

"I AM HERE! And so are all of you, which is the more important part!"

"He's in a good mood," Awase muttered.

"He's always in a good mood," Kaibara said. "That’s the #1 hero."

"Today," All Might boomed, "we do something different! You have fought each other. You have raced. You have rescued from different natural disasters. Today you learn the part of this job nobody puts on the posters." He let it land. "Getting in quietly."

A graphic bloomed on the big screen behind him: a building schematic, a marked room on the third floor, a dotted path winding up to it.

"The scenario! Villains are holding a hostage on the top floor of that building. The building is patrolled by villains. Your objective is simple to say and hard to do. Get in. Reach the hostage. Get them out alive. One at a time, so I can watch each of you properly, and so can your classmates." He swept an arm at the tent. "The rest of you observe from here. Watch what works. Watch what doesn't. Both will teach you."

"How are we graded?" Kendo asked.

"Three things!" All Might held up three fingers. "Time, because saving a hostage can’t be done under unlimited time. Detection, because every alarm you trip is a villain who now knows you're coming. And the outcome, did the hostage walk out, and did you both make it before the clock ran out." He folded one finger down. "On detection. The villain bots log you when they see or hear you. Three logs before you reach the hostage and you've failed; you're too compromised to trust. After you reach them, getting spotted just costs you points and makes the exit ugly." Another finger. "And if the hostage is harmed because you brought the whole building down on them, or you can't get them out in time, that's a failure no matter how stylish you looked getting there."

He clapped his hands together once, and the sound went off like a starter pistol.

"You may take the villains out, sneak past them, or anything in between! That's your judgment to make, and your judgment is half of what I'm grading! A word of advice before we start." The grin softened by a degree. "The loud way in feels strong. It feels like being a hero. But the quiet way in is the one that brings the hostage home. Remember who you're doing this for. It is never you." He turned to the board. "First up! By drawing order! Young Kendo!"

Kendo went in knowing her hands were the wrong tool for the job.

"Big Fist isn't exactly a sneaking quirk…" she said to no one, jogging the approach in a low crouch. She read the patrol from cover, timing the gaps, moving only when a bot's back was turned. When she had to deal with one she did it the only safe way, isolated units only, a single bot with no others in line of sight, taken with one enlarged hand clapped over its body and a squeeze that crushed it quietly before it could get a syllable of alarm out.

"That’s terrifying." Honenuki observed. "She can crush steel like that so easily."

It was slow. It ate clock. But Kendo reached the third floor with a zero on her detection count, got the hostage dummy over her shoulder, and walked it out the way she'd come, patient and unspotted, with maybe ninety seconds to spare.

"Phew… That was stressful." She breathed at the finish line, arms shaking.

"Excellent work!" All Might corrected. "Slow and steady wins the race. Good work, Young Kendo."

Monoma had no quirk of his own to lean on, so he leaned on Kendo.

"I watched her route." he announced to the tent, with the confidence of a man who believed he'd found the cheat code. "Same path, same timing. If it worked for her…"

It did not work for him.

He got two floors up retracing Kendo's exact steps and turned a corner into a bot that, by his memory, should not have been there. He froze. The bot lit up. INTRUDER. One log. He bolted, improvised, ate a second log scrambling for cover, and from the tent you could see the exact moment the plan died in his face.

All Might was laughing. "Don't bother memorizing the patrol routes, young man! They're randomized for every run! What worked for one of you means nothing for the next!"

"YOU COULD HAVE LED WITH THAT!" Monoma's voice cracked into his headset.

"I could have! A hero needs adaptability, no matter what!"

And, to his credit, he did. Stripped of the borrowed plan, Monoma relied on himself, read the floor in front of him instead of the floor in his memory, and clawed his way to the hostage on nothing but nerve and improvisation. He came out with two detections and the dummy intact, panting, upset, and passing.

"Copying a person's quirk is easy," he said, glaring at nothing. "Copying their luck is harder."

"Copying their preparation?" Shoda offered gently.

"Nobody asked you, Shoda."

Tetsutetsu had a plan, and the plan was speed.

"In big, in fast," he said, bouncing on his toes at the start line. "I smash through before they can call it in. No time to detect what's already wrecked."

"That is the worst plan I have ever heard." Kamakiri said from the tent.

"It's the best plan, just watch man."

For about ninety seconds, it almost looked like a plan. Tetsutetsu went steel and charged through the front door, and the first two bots on the ground floor were scrap before they finished the word INTRUDER. He took the stairs three at a time, a human-shaped wrecking ball with a destination, smashing everything that beeped.

"He's making so much noise." Rin said quietly.

"The bots upstairs can hear him." Shiozaki said. "They've heard him since he got in."

They had. When Tetsutetsu shoulder-charged through the third-floor wall into the hostage room, grinning, fist cocked, the room was already full. Six bots, arranged, waiting, weapons up, having had a full minute of his racket to prepare. They didn't bother with him at all. The screen showed three of them turn toward the dummy in the chair and fire, and the dummy's chest lit up with the red splatter of a simulated hit, and a flat tone sounded.

HOSTAGE TERMINATED.

The tent went quiet.

Tetsutetsu stood in the middle of the room, steel running off him as he dropped the transformation, staring at the slumped dummy he'd come to save. He didn't say anything. For once in his life, Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu didn't have anything loud to say at all.

“Awh man…”

All Might's voice came over the field in a stern serious tone.

"Young Tetsutetsu. Come here."

Tetsutetsu trudged back to the tent. All Might crouched to his level without a smile.

"You were fast," All Might said. "You were brave. And the person you came to save is dead, because every villain in that building knew your name before you reached the room. Speed is a weapon. But noise is a weapon too, and in there, you handed it to the enemy." He put a hand on the steel shoulder. "When you go loud, you're betting the hostage's life that you're faster than the bad guys can react. Sometimes you win that bet. The day you lose it, someone doesn't go home. Do you understand?"

Tetsutetsu forced himself to make eye contact with All Might. He nodded, once, hard. "Yeah. Yeah, I get it." And he meant it. "I'd have gotten them killed for real."

"You learned that here, where it's a dummy and a lesson," All Might said, standing, the grin coming back. "That's what here is for. Next time you'll be smarter. I know it."

Tetsutetsu rejoined the class quieter than he'd left it. Manga patted his shoulder without a word, and his bubble said Next time. Tetsutetsu thanked him, knowing Manga actually went through something like that. This was just a dummy, but it was still tearing him up when he thought about the way that dummy just slumped over…

Tokage made it look unfair.

She came apart at the start line into a scatter of pieces and flowed into the building like spilled water finding cracks, a hand here, a foot there, her core small and low and hugged to the walls. She couldn't see through the detached pieces once they left her eyeline, so she didn't use them as scouts; she used them as her whole body, breaking herself small enough to pour through gaps a bot's sensors swept right over, reassembling in blind corners, never presenting a single human silhouette for anything to log.

"What a show-off." Kamakiri grumbled.

She reached the hostage, gathered herself whole just long enough to get the dummy up, and poured back out the same way she'd come. Zero detections. Fast. Easy.

Manga clapped at his girlfriend’s success.

“You didn’t clap for me, Fukidashi.” Kendo teasingly pointed out.

“Me either, what’s up with that, huh?” Monoma played along.

“So because she’s your girlfriend, she’s the only one who’s performance is worth clapping for?” Pony smiled.

“N-No! I just… uhh… forgot! I’ll make sure to clap for everyone going forward!”

The class laughed.

“You better, dude.” Awase told him.

“We deserve to be clapped for as well, you know?” Kaibara pointed out.

Honenuki softened the ground at the entrance and sank into it, swimming through the floor like it was water, surfacing only to check his bearings, a shape moving under the concrete where no sensor was pointed. Then he softened a patch of ceiling to slip past an awkward junction and misjudged it; a bot standing on the floor above dropped straight through the suddenly-mushy ceiling and landed on top of him.

INTRUDER. One log.

But the bot landed soft, in softened ground, and before it could repeat itself Honenuki had both hands on its head and wrenched it clean off, the body sinking into the floor he'd liquefied. Silence restored.

"One detection," he reported at the finish, hostage over his shoulder. "Earned it. The ceiling was my mistake."

"Good recovery." All Might told him. "You turned a blunder into a takedown instead of panicking completely and ruining the entire rescue."

Awase had nothing built for sneaking and knew it.

So he did it the way Kendo had, on senses and timing and nerve, threading the patrol with his heart in his throat. But Awase had read the rules carefully, and he'd noticed the part everyone else had glossed: the hostage counts as detection too. A dummy bobbing along on your shoulder is a second silhouette for the bots to catch.

So when he reached the hostage, he welded it to his own back, flush, one outline instead of two, and crept out as a single awkward lump of a shape.

"Haha, you are smarter than you look!" Kaibara admitted in the tent.

“Of course I am. How could you doubt my brilliance?!” Awase grinned with his hands on his hips, hero style.

"He turned the hostage into a backpack." Pony said.

"Backpack hostage. Hostage backpack. Which sounds better, Kodai?"

“Mm. Mm.” Kodai decided.

Two detections on the way down, and Awase walked the dummy out welded to his spine with the clock still green. Pass.

Kaibara treated the bots like a to-do list.

Gyrate wasn't loud, that was the thing people forgot; a drill spinning through a bot's core was a low whirr and a crunch, not an explosion. He went up the building methodically, finding bots alone and unmaking them one at a time, a quiet whirr, a crumple, move on. No alarms. No witnesses. By the time he reached the hostage the path behind him was a trail of cored, silent machines.

"Boring." Tokage pronounced.

"Don’t be jealous my way was cooler than yours," Kaibara said, walking the hostage out with zero detections.

"Shut up, you were slower than me!"

"But who was cooler?"

Kamakiri had walked in fully intending to do exactly what Tetsutetsu did.

He'd said as much before his run, blades half-out, grin sharp. Then he'd watched Tetsutetsu stand over a dead dummy and get the quiet serious talk from All Might, and that plan changed immediately.

"Change of plans then…" he muttered at the start line.

He went in like a different person. The blades came out, but not wild and crazy like he wanted. Kamikiari used them similarly to Kaibara, finding bots one at a time and taking their heads off in a single clean stroke before they could so much as chirp. Razor Sharp turned out to be a beautiful assassination tool when its owner wasn't in a hurry to scream about it. He carved a silent path up the building and, the tent slowly realized, made his own extraction trivial; every bot he killed on the way up was one that wasn't there on the way down.

"Kamakiri used his brain again…" Manga said. "Is this like the second or third time?"

“We have to add that to the record.” Kuroiro mentioned.

“I’m jotting it down now!” Komori was writing something super fast in a small notebook.

"I CAN HEAR YOU!" Kamakiri's voice came over the speaker.

Zero detections. Hostage out healthy. All Might looked genuinely pleased. "You watched your classmate's mistake and you learned. That's the entire point of watching. Excellent, Young Kamakiri."

Kamakiri returned to the tent proudly, glaring at everyone who doubted him and his ability to use his brain!

“You’re welcome, Kamakiri.” Tetsutetsu mentioned.

Kuroiro cheated. In everyone else’s opinion.

The moment he stepped into the building it was already over. He pressed a hand to the first dark surface he found, a shadowed doorway, and was simply gone, poured into the black and racing through it, and the screens that were supposed to track him kept losing him because there was nothing to track. He moved through the building's shadows at a speed nothing in it could match, surfacing in the hostage room before half the class had finished settling in to watch, gathering the dummy, and pouring back out through the dark with it held against him.

His time was less than a third of anyone else's. Zero detections. The hostage barely had time to be rescued before it was already outside.

The tent was silent for a second.

“That’s so unfair!" Kaibara shouted. "This exercise was made for Kuroiro!"

"The darkness," Kuroiro said, materializing back at the tent with the unbothered calm of a man who had finally been handed a test designed for him, "reveals what the light cannot. And conceals what it wishes to keep." He almost smiled. "Today, the shadows were kind."

"He's insufferable when he wins…" Tsuburaba groaned.

"Let him have it," Kendo said. "He's right for once."

All Might was beaming. "When the scenario suits your quirk, you make it look like nothing. The challenge for you, Young Kuroiro, will be the day there are no shadows to use. But today? Flawless. The fastest run we'll see, I believe."

Komori had to do it raw, and her quirk made raw harder, not easier.

She knew it going in; the tent could see the nerves in the set of her shoulders. Mushroom was no good against machines, and worse, it wasn't subtle. She tried, on the second floor, to bloom a quick screen of fungus across a junction to slip behind, the way she'd screen a human opponent.

The bots didn't react like humans. One logged the sudden fungal bloom as an environmental anomaly and chirped it, and the chirp cascaded; within seconds the building's alarm state climbed, bots converging, the whole structure waking up. By the time she fought through to the third floor on willpower alone, the hostage room was a kill-box exactly like Tetsutetsu's, and the result was the same outcome.

HOSTAGE TERMINATED.

Komori came back to the tent with her head down and her shoulders drooping, and Pony put an arm around her before she'd even crossed the line.

"My quirk's just bad for this." Komori said, very quietly.

"Your quirk is incredible for other things," Kendo said, firm, crouching to her level. "Today… Maybe we should’ve tried to go at it without our quirk..."

All Might's verdict was gentle but honest. "A quirk that announces itself is a hard quirk to be quiet with, Young Komori. That's not a flaw in you, it's a problem to solve, and solving it is your homework. When force and flash are the wrong tools, what do you have left? Find that answer before the field asks you for it." Komori nodded.

Shiozaki had a principle about it, and she said it out loud.

"Sneaking feels close to deceit," she said at the start line, hands folded. "And I have no love for deceit." A pause. "But a hostage saved is the Lord's work, and there is no virtue in a loud failure. So." She bowed her head. "Quietly, then."

Vines aren't stealthy, but darkness is, and Shiozaki made her own. She sent thin tendrils ahead to find the lights, the dome's mock streetlamps and the bots' little sensor lamps, and snuffed them one by one, dropping the building into pockets of dark she could work in. And in the dark her vines were silent hands; they wrapped each bot from behind, pinned the villains, and crushed it quietly before it could call out. She walked the hostage out through halls she'd personally darkened, with not a single detection on the board.

"She turned the lights off and strangled them in the dark. That's what I call metal!" Tetsutetsu pumped his arm up.

"Please do not word it like that." Shiozaki requested, carrying the dummy like a sleeping child. “I did not strangle them, I simply put them to rest…”

“That sounds even scarier…” Komori felt.

“Mm.” Kodai nodded in agreement.

Shishida’s run turned out a bit differently than what everyone expected.

Everyone expected the Beast. But the Beast was the opposite of stealth, big and loud and boisterous, and Shishida knew it better than anyone. So he left the Beast in its cage and went in as himself, the polite young man with the thick glasses, and used the one piece of the Beast that worked quietly: the nose.

"He's tracking by scent," Honenuki said, watching Shishida pause at a junction, breathe slow, and turn unerringly away from a patrol he couldn't possibly have seen. "He can smell the machine oil. And probably the hostage."

It was a strange thing to watch, a boy built like a brawler creeping on all fours like an animal. Shishida admired Hound Dog, who could throw everything away and run on instinct, and he couldn't do that, his whole upbringing wouldn't let him; but here, for once, the thing he couldn't do was the thing the exercise rewarded.

He reached the hostage by scent, carried it out by scent, and posted one detection from a corner he'd misjudged.

"You used the most unassuming part of your quirk and left the loudest part home," All Might said. "That's discipline, Young Shishida. Well done."

"Thank you, sir," Shishida said, settling his glasses, with a small smile on his face. A compliment from the #1 hero would make even the most introverted children smile.

Pony drew the short straw and the limits showed.

Her horns were guided, but only while she could see them; the second one rounded a corner out of her sightline it was just a projectile she'd lost track of. So she couldn't scout with them, couldn't send them ahead, couldn't do the thing that would've made her great at this. All she had was firing at bots she could already see, and that meant exposing herself to see them.

She was brave about it and far too eager, which was the problem. She popped a horn at a bot down a corridor, hit it, and the horn ricocheted into a second bot she hadn't clocked. One detection. She pushed on, jumpy now, fired again too quick at movement that turned out to be two bots, clipped one, the other logged her. Two. And on the third floor approach, rushing because the clock was eating her, she rounded a corner right into a patrol she'd have seen if she'd waited a second.

Three.

INTRUDER CONFIRMED. The run cut out before she ever reached the room.

Pony came back to the tent with her horns floppy, and several people reached out at once.

"I couldn't see them," she said, frustrated, in English first and then catching herself. "My horns. If they go where I can't see, they're useless. I kept having to look, and looking got me caught."

"You found your quirk's edge," All Might told her. "That's worth a failed run. You learned today exactly where your sightline ends and your power ends with it. A hero who knows her own limits builds around them. Now you know what to build." Pony nodded, scrubbing at her eyes, and Kendo squeezed her shoulder.

Bondo was the biggest student in the class, Shishida's Beast aside, and couldn't hide behind anything in that building, so he didn't try.

He just turned the bots off. Cemedine isn't loud; it's a wet splatter and then silence. Bondo lumbered up the building methodically, and every bot he met got a faceful of fast-setting adhesive, sensors glued blind, joints locked solid mid-stride, the machine frozen into a statue before it could log a thing. He didn't sneak past them. He simply walked up to each one and erased its ability to perceive him.

"He doesn’t even have to be stealthy." Rin said. "He can just goo and go!"

“Haha, goo and go…” Manga giggled which caused Kuroiro, Kaibara, and Tsuburaba to laugh as they caught on to it as well.

“Perverts…” Tokage glared at Manga.

“Why are you ear hustling?!” Tokage literally had an ear detached floating next to him.

“None of your business! What I do with my ear is my business!”

“It is my business when it's all in my business!”

The class ooh and ahh’d at the couple spat. Tokage glared at them before their attention was retaken by Bondo.

By the time Bondo reached the hostage, most of the building behind him was a gallery of glued statues. He carried the dummy out cradled in both huge hands, gentle as anything, with zero detections logged, because nothing he'd met had lived long enough to log him.

"Good job, Bondo-kun!" Kendo patted him on his shoulder.

“Thank you…” Bondo said softly.

“You were awesome in there, dude!” Tetsutetsu slapped him on the back.

“Ow.” It didn’t really hurt but Bondo felt he should say that.

Kodai passed, and everyone including Kodai knew there was an asterisk on it.

Size doesn't help you hide. So she did it raw, on timing and patience, same as Kendo and Awase, right up until a bot got close. Then she touched it, shrank it to the size of a die, and stepped on it. She cleared her way to the hostage shrinking and crushing anything that got within arm's reach, walked the dummy out, and posted a clean board.

"...Mm…" She said at the finish, which was a lot of words for Kodai.

All Might's expression was the careful one. "Excellent run, Young Kodai. A pass." He let the but sit for a second. "But Size works on what you've touched, and it works on objects. It would not have shrunk a living villain. Today your enemies were machines you could put your hand on. The day they aren't, that whole plan is gone. You passed. Now your homework is to ask yourself how you'd have done it without your quirk, because the field won't always hand the perfect tools to you." Kodai nodded slowly. She'd already been thinking it.

Yanagi helped the class realize an option they didn’t know was available to them until she showed them.

Poltergeist couldn't lift a bot, but it didn't need to. It needed to lift a pebble, a bolt, a scrap of debris, and fling it down a corridor away from her, and let the clatter pull the patrol toward the noise while she slipped the other way. She walked the building on misdirection, a thrown sound here, a knocked-over object there, the bots forever investigating an empty hallway while a pale girl snuck past behind them.

"That’s so smart and I’m mad at myself that I didn’t think about it!" Pony realized she could’ve used her horns as distractions and sneaked by!

“Hmm…” Shoda and Rin begin thinking of new ways of passing this exercise.

Zero detections. The hostage came out while three bots were still studying a clattering bolt around a corner. Yanagi's expression never changed the whole time, which somehow made it more unsettling. But the class could tell she was happy from the bounce in her step.

Rin had scales, and scales are not stealthy.

But a scale flung down a hall is a distraction, and a scale fired into a bot's sensor is a stealth takedown, and Rin used both, picking his way up the building on misdirection and precise little shots. He wasn't flashy and he wasn't fast, but he was careful, and careful got the hostage out with one detection and the clock still green.

"Nice one dude." Awase gave him a thumbs up.

“It’s all thanks to Yanagi-chan!” Rin thanked her.

“I guess you could say, I possessed you.” Yanagi responded.

“You possessed me too! I have an awesome plan thanks to you now.” Shoda added.

She smiled. A rare occurrence. Not as rare as a smile from Kodai but still pretty up there.

Manga in next and the tent got quieter when his name came up, because they wanted to see what the kid who won everything did with a test that punished noise.

He didn't look like he was doing anything.

That was the eerie part. He walked to the start line, and then he was simply moving through the building, and the screens had trouble making it interesting because there was nothing to flinch at. No scramble. No near-misses. A short, muscular figure flowing up through the structure on feet that didn't seem to touch the ground hard enough to make a sound, sinking into the shadows behind cover the instant before a bot's sweep reached him, crouched and motionless in a half-shadow for ten seconds, fifteen, without the smallest wobble, then moving again the moment the walkway cleared.

“Huh, I wasn’t expecting something so boring from a guy like Manga.” Tetsutetsu pointed out.

“Thanks to you showing everyone what not to do probably helped.” Kamikari chuckled.

“Listen! I know better now! Stop bringing it up!” Tetsutetsu raised his voice.

“Haha, never.” Tokage giggled. 

“Gotta use that brain, man.” Monoma laughed.

“Does your insides turn to metal too when you use your quirk? So does your brain go all metal too or is just the outside?” Kendo wondered.

“I…” Tetsutetsu froze. “I don’t know…”

“It’s okay. I’m sure there’s things about my own quirk I still don’t know about.” Rin patted him on the shoulder.

Back on the screen, they refocused their attention on Manga as he finally used his quirk. At a junction with two bots facing each other, no gap to cross; a soft Chuu-chuu, and a little scurrying squeak-shape skittered across the floor behind them, and both sensor-heads turned to investigate the mouse made of characters while he crossed the lane they'd just stopped watching. A bot planted square in a doorway he had to use; a whispered Ji-ji-ji aimed at its housing, a stutter of electromagnetic noise, and the machine froze mid-scan with its lights guttering, blind for the three seconds he needed to slip behind it. A long open corridor with a camera-bot panning it end to end; a low Bonyari, and a thin haze bloomed along his stretch of floor, just enough to soften one boy into a vague nothing the lens couldn't resolve, and he walked through his own fog untouched.

He reached the hostage room. Two bots inside, alert. He didn't fight them. A breathed Boo drifted over both, and their sensor-heads went slack and aimless, dazed, scanning nothing in particular, and Manga simply walked between them, lifted the dummy out of the chair, carried it under his arm and walked it back out through a building that had, as far as its security was concerned, never had anyone in it at all.

Zero detections.

"Is anyone really surprised?" Monoma asked.

Manga came back to the tent with two fingers held up in a victory sign and a trophy in his bubble. “I wasn’t as fast as Kuroiro-kun but I wasn’t too bad.” He laughed.

“You’re not used to not being first, huh?” Setsuna grinned.

“I can’t be first at everything.” Manga shrugged.

But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t stop working toward being first at everything. As a man whose goal is to surpass God, if he’s not aiming for the top, what the hell would he even be doing?

"Outstanding run, Young Fukidashi!" All Might said. “Next!"

Shoda closed it out and made it look easy in his own way.

Twin Impact was a quiet quirk if you used it quietly. He used it for misdirection, tapping a far wall and detonating it to send a bang down an empty hall, bringing a bunch of villain bots to investigate the sound, while he went the other way. He was calm-headed despite the sweat running down his face. Shoda walked the hostage out with zero detection and a healthy margin on the clock.

"Fantastic work!" All Might said. "You make good decisions under pressure, Young Shoda. That's rarer than any flashy quirk. Pass."

Tsuburaba had the worst draw in the class and he knew it before he started.

"Solid Air isn’t a sneaky quirk," he said glumly at the line. "Well, not in a situation like this..."

So he did it the way Komori had been forced to, raw, on nerves and timing, no quirk crutch to lean on, and the tent leaned forward a little because they'd just watched that exact situation lose a hostage. But Tsuburaba had watched it too, and he'd watched Tetsutetsu, and he went slowly and carefully. He ate one detection early and nearly panicked, then caught himself; when a patrol turned back toward him in a corridor with no cover, he did the one useful thing his quirk could do here, exhaled a wall of solid air across the corridor behind him, sealing the bots off on the wrong side of an invisible barrier while he slipped up the stairs.

It wasn't pretty. Two detections, a lot of held breath, and he reached the hostage with the clock bleeding toward red. He hauled the dummy out at something close to a sprint and crossed the line with seconds to spare, detected and ragged and alive.

PASS.

Tsuburaba dropped to the ground at the finish, lungs heaving, and started laughing in disbelief.

"I PASSED!" he wheezed.

Komori, from the tent, called out, "TRAITOR!"

"Most heroes don’t have a quirk suitable for an exercise like this," All Might told them both, gathering the class as the last run wrapped. "Just you, your nerve, and your judgment. Young Tsuburaba found a way. Young Komori didn't, today. The difference wasn't talent. It was that he learned from you all and found the best way that fit for him." He looked across all twenty of them, the passers and the three who hadn't, sweat-soaked and dusty under the dome lights. "That's the whole lesson. Not every job gives you a quirk that fits the problem. The hero is the one who finds the most resourceful way, because the person in that chair is counting on you to be more than your quirks. To be the hero you came here to be."

He clapped once, and it rang.

"You did well today. All of you, including the three who failed, maybe especially them, because failure here is a lesson and failure out there is worst. Learn it now. Hit the showers. And get ready for that camp, wherever it turns out to be!"

They filed back toward the locker rooms chatting loudly, the run-by-run already turning into legend in the retelling, Kuroiro's speedrun and Bondo's gallery of statues and the exact noise Tetsutetsu's dummy made when it died, which Kamakiri was doing an impression of until Kendo made him stop.

Manga walked back with Tokage, holding hands.

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