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it's more than 3,500 word.
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' Kendo Itsuka '
...
"Are we having an earthquake?!" Recovery Girl squawked, eyes wide. That would be the same direction the strawberry-haired girl's mind went, except for the fact that the world went still just as quickly as it had started shaking.
"Um, okay, what was that?" Ashido asked with wide, black-and-gold eyes.
...
"Holy shit," was the only verbal response Sero, or anyone else, gave as he pointed wordlessly to the TV screen, which had just caught up with the events outside.
The entire arena had been transformed into a veritable glacier, extending from Todoroki's right leg and rapidly expanding outwards, trapping a shocked Iida in the middle of it. Shortly thereafter, Todoroki was declared the winner and the boy stepped forward to melt his opponent out of the icy prison.
"Shit," Sero hissed again, looking as though he was seriously rethinking the odds for his 'Todoroki versus Bakugou' bet. "I knew that Todoroki was strong, but I thought Iida would be fast enough to outrun him. I didn't expect… that."
"I suppose it might have been a calculated gesture," Itsuka managed weakly. "You know, taking Iida's speed into account and preemptively stopping him in his tracks."
"Good thought, but this feels a little overkill even for him," Ashido squeaked back.
"Well. Um. I… guess it's already our turn to head to the stadium, then?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess," her opponent nodded, her bright pink cheeks unusually pale, eyes still fixated on the screen. Then, in a softer voice, "Jesus, Todoroki, what is your deal?"
"Let's hope we don't have to find out, considering he's up against Bakugou next."
"Ah geez," the other girl winced, following her out the door. "I'm not sure which of them would be worse to fight, actually. The pissy guy that can turn you into an ice cube or the pissy guy that can blast you into oblivion."
The two of them split up a short while later, and before she knew it Itsuka was waiting to head to the pitch, tuning out Present Mic's excited commentary while she focused on calming her breathing and heartbeat. By the time she was given her cue, the hero-in-training was as ready as she'd ever be.
"Up next, we have the mistress of martial arts, it's Kendo Itsuka from Class 1-B! Versus-is there some sort of purpose for those things sticking out of her head?-from Class 1-A, Ashido Mina!"
The crowd roared around them, but it didn't matter. Itsuka was preparing for battle. Everything extraneous to that plain fact simply melted away. On the other end of the arena, Ashido was bouncing lightly from one foot to the other, her golden eyes bright and energetic, but not unfocused. The pinkette might be a little ADHD, but she was not incompetent.
The moment Midnight-sensei called for them to start, Itsuka rushed forward, eyes fixated on her opponent. Ashido set off almost immediately as well, but something was a little off. Her pink-skinned opponent wasn't running. She was skating, acid pouring from the soles of her shoes and melting portions of the concrete to increase her speed and mobility.
That might be a problem. She needed to gauge the other girl's capabilities before she could risk showing her hand. Literally.
The moment Ashido was in range, Itsuka's fist shot forward. She didn't expand it, not yet, but she needed to see how her opponent would react. Ashido instantly dropped below the girl's attack, spinning on her stream of acid to whirl behind her.
On instinct, Itsuka threw herself into a forward somersault, darting out of the acid-user's attack radius and rolling neatly to her feet. She knew that she had made the right call when she pivoted back towards her opponent, sliding into a stance just in time to see Ashido's legs sweeping back under her, as smoothly as though she were dancing.
If Itsuka hadn't moved when she did, her legs most definitely would have been knocked right out from under her.
"Hey, you're pretty good!" Ashido called cheerfully, bouncing on the balls of her feet once again.
"You're not so bad yourself," the strawberry-haired girl called back, smiling to herself. "Ready for round two?"
"Are you?" Ashido grinned even as she darted forward again, zipping in on her acid and mimicking Itsuka's own earlier jab, aiming for her throat. The martial artist quickly deflected the strike, biting back a hiss as a sharp pain flashed across the back of her wrist. She darted back, glancing downward to assess the damage, and saw that her skin had grown red and inflamed where it had made contact with the other girl's.
So she didn't just secrete acid from her feet, and she could change its composition depending on where it was being produced from. If she had used the same kind of acid on Itsuka's skin as she had on the concrete, it probably would've eaten all the way through to the bone.
Either way, the pinkette was coming at her again, golden eyes gleaming and grin turning fierce and determined as she aimed a sucker punch towards Itsuka's ribs. A quick strike with her palm deflected that hit, too, but it also turned her palm the same shade of inflamed red as her wrist.
Itsuka grit her teeth against the pain.
She needed a way to end this quickly.
The strawberry-haired girl skipped backwards, trying to force some distance between herself and her opponent, but Ashido wasn't keen on letting her give herself room, using her skating technique to weaken the concrete and zip forward once more.
Weaken the concrete.
Hm…
Time to capitalize on the element of surprise.
The next punch she threw, Itsuka expanded her fist. Ashido yelped in shock, trying to spin away but still catching the hit on her shoulder, sending her stumbling, her stance momentarily broken. Itsuka's eyes widened slightly at that. Her opponent obviously didn't have as much formal martial arts training, so she wasn't able to recover as quickly as Itsuka could from unexpected attacks.
That meant this plan of hers might just work.
Clasping her hands together, the young martial artist expanded both hands and brought them down with a snarl and a grunt on the weakened patches of ground that Ashido had created, shattering the concrete into jagged pieces of stone.
She seized the closest one, wrenching it from her ground and gritting her teeth against the pain as it scraped across the irritated skin of her hand and flinging it towards Ashido, not unlike Uraraka had done in her fight against Shiozaki.
Again, Ashido yelped, waving a hand towards the basketball-sized chunk of concrete and flinging a film of acid towards it in the process even as she darted back. The acid wasn't quite enough to fully melt the chunk of rock, but it did reduce it in size, as well as slow its momentum so that the pinkette had an easier time dodging it.
Of course, by that time, Itsuka had managed to gather up several more chunks of rock-one hand to hold them and the other to throw-to fling at her while sprinting forward.
Quite suddenly their roles were reversed, Itsuka attacking in a relentless barrage while her opponent was being forced back, but her speed made it difficult to corner the other girl. As much as she tried to force Ashido towards the out-of-bounds line, the acid-user always managed to pirouette her way out of a corner, moving back towards the center of the pitch where she had plenty of room to maneuver.
It was frustrating, but Itsuka did her best to push that frustration away; this was no time to get emotional.
Eventually, the young martial artist ran out of rocks. She quickly moved to smash the concrete once again-most of the surface had been affected by Ashido's acid at this point-but it seemed this had been the exact moment that the pinkette was waiting for, because suddenly a puddle of acid hit the ground right next to Itsuka's shoes.
forcing her to stumble back, the edge of the material hissing as it burned away. Ashido didn't let up on her attack, skating forward and sending wave after wave of acid splashing towards Itsuka's feet, but keeping enough distance that she couldn't be reached even if she did enlarge her hands.
Before she knew it, Itsuka had been forced to the edge of the arena, surrounded on all sides by mushy, acidy concrete with the soles of her shoes starting to fall off from the constant splatters of acid eating away at them.
The strawberry-haired girl gasped when Ashido was suddenly in front of her, sliding instinctively into a fighting stance and in the process stepping into a puddle of some of the more potent acid at the same time.
Her cry of pain was cut off by Ashido's uppercut, which sent her flying out of the ring, landing hard on her back and knocking the wind out of her. Still, she felt herself gasping, desperately fighting to draw attention to her alarm as she kicked weakly at her damaged shoe and the cold-burning sensation beginning to reach her foot.
"Ah, shit! Shit!" a voice hissed hurriedly, and Itsuka suddenly became aware of a pair of hands seizing her pant leg and the heel of her shoe and ripping it off along with her sock, flinging the both of them away.
"Midnight-sensei, does anybody have a water bottle, or a water quirk or something?! Also, we're gonna need a stretcher; she shouldn't walk on this!"
Itsuka couldn't hear a response; she was too busy focusing on calming herself down so that she would be able to breathe. Still, she sighed in relief when she felt something cool trickling over her foot, leaning her head back as she managed to take her first breath. Then another, and another.
"…probably get her hands, too."
"That was some quick-thinking, kid," someone was saying when she was a little bit more aware of her surroundings, "but you do need to be a little more cautious with a quirk like yours. You could cause a lot of damage if you're not careful."
"Yeah I know, I just got caught up in the moment, and… Shit, I am so sorry, Kendo," that voice from earlier groaned.
"I didn't even think about what might happen if your shoes got destroyed; that was so stupid of me!"
Itsuka opened her eyes to see Ashido kneeling beside her, wringing her hands under a spray of water produced from the hand of a hero that had obviously been attending the Festival, her gold-and-black eyes wide and worried.
The man's other hand was pointed towards her own left foot, and was probably the source of the refreshing coolness taking the edge off of the painful bite in that general region of her body. She vaguely recognized him as a sidekick from an agency in Shinjuku. What was his name again?
"It… It's okay," she managed, remembering that Ashido had just given her an apology. "How… How bad is it?"
"Not bad," the water quirk hero assured her, his sea green eyes gentle and reassuring as he helped her sit up, taking her inflamed wrist and hand and gently pouring water over those, too. "Your friend here managed to get your shoe off before the acid could bite through more than the first couple layers of your skin, then got a few people to throw her their water bottles to dump over your foot even before I got down here.
The wound is nothing that Recovery Girl can't heal, although it will leave a pretty wide scar."
Itsuka chuckled weakly, relieved to hear that there shouldn't be any permanent nerve damage. "That's fine. What kind of battle hero would I be without a cool-looking scar or two?"
Ashido managed to giggle at that, looking relieved herself as she glanced towards the pair of medical robots droning towards them with a stretcher. "Well, I guess I should go shower then," she said finally, rising to her feet and stepping away.
"I don't want anyone giving me a victory hug while I still have acid on my skin, y'know?"
There was something sad in her voice as she said it, something dark and uncomfortable in her eyes, and suddenly Itsuka found herself wondering how many times Ashido must have accidentally hurt people to know right away that the best treatment for an acid burn was running water, and how many times she must have been judged or rejected for it.
"Hey, Ashido!" she called after the other girl as the water hero helped her to her feet-Pressure Wash, maybe? That seemed right.
"Yeah?" her fellow hero-in-training replied glancing back uncertainly, her arms slightly held out from her sides, probably to avoid accidentally burning through her clothes.
"That was an awesome fight. You earned that win."
The pinkette's eyes seemed to widen for a moment before she smiled, the fear hovering in them draining away in an instant. "You did great too, Kendo. And call me Mina. I don't like being formal with my friends."
There was an invitation there-one that the strawberry-haired girl was happy to accept. "Then call me Itsuka, 'kay?"
"Sure thing! I'll see you later, Itsuka!" Mina grinned, waving with all of her old cheer before she practically skipped away.
"Way to be sportsmanlike," Pressure Wash smiled as she settled down on the stretcher, carefully keeping her injured foot off the ground.
"Well, I didn't come to UA to make enemies, you know?"
"That's a mature way to look at it," the man laughed back. "If you really are interested in being a battle hero, you might consider my boss Goliath's agency for your internship. We'd be happy to have you."
"I'll bear it in mind!"
Cementoss was still repairing the ring after the damage she and Ashido did to it when Itsuka arrived at the infirmary. Both Tetsutetsu and Tsukino were waiting for her there, looking anxious and eager by turns.
"What did that pink-skinned b-"
"Tetsu!"
"-do to you?!" Tetsutetsu half-yelled, half-screeched the moment she came into view.
"Keep your voice down; this is a hospital!" Recovery Girl's voice snapped from inside the office.
"Her name is Mina and she actually saved my foot," Itsuka sighed back, accepting a hug from her other friend before the bots carried her inside.
"I wondered when I saw her grab your shoe," the dark-haired boy admitted, following, "but you know Tetsu. The guy was beside himself."
"Hey, you try keeping calm after you've just heard one of your best friends almost start screaming!"
"I did keep calm after one of my best friends started screaming."
"That's not the point-!"
"I said quiet!"
Tetsutetsu cringed as Recovery Girl's cane beaned him over the head, the woman herself visibly fuming. "Out, both of you! You have your tiebreaker in a moment, and you're the first match of the second round, so out! Out!"
"We'll see you later, Kendo!"
"Bye, guys!"
Recovery Girl released a deep sigh, leaning against the door she had just slammed shut for a moment before she hobbled back to her newest patient's side. "Acid burns, correct?" she mused, gently taking her injured foot and turning it back and forth to assess the damage.
Itsuka winced slightly at the spike of pain that broke through the dull throbbing the limb had settled into.
"Yeah. Mina and Pressure Wash poured water over it and my hands the moment they got my shoe off. As far as I know, that was the only treatment they used on it."
"Wise of them," Recovery Girl nodded, gently lowering the limb and taking her damaged hands.
"Ashido was right to act quickly. If your shoe had been left on any longer, there might have been nerve damage. As it is, the scarring will extend from the end of your foot up to your ankle."
"Like I said before, what's a battle hero without a few scars?"
"Don't you start getting flippant on me about injuries, young lady! I don't need any more recklessness than I already have to deal with on a daily basis, understand?"
"Yes ma'am," Itsuka murmured meekly.
"Good," the aged doctor huffed. "Well, Ashido and Pressure Wash already performed what basic first aid I would be able to do here, so I'll use my quirk on you and let you heal on your own.
You'll probably doze off for a few minutes, during which time I'll wrap your injuries since they'll still be a bit tender. After you wake up, you'll be free to go back to the stands."
"Thank you, sensei," Itsuka murmured as Recovery Girl pressed a kiss to the back of her hand. A wave of drowsiness swept through the girl as her hands and foot seemed to tingle, not unpleasantly. Deciding not to fight it, she settled back against the pillow and closed her eyes
...
' Outtake '
...
"Hey Iida, you finally made it back!"
Tenya managed a weak smile as his friends all spun towards him, Uraraka sporting a sympathetic smile, Asui tilting her head towards him, Kouda signing frantically, and even Shinsou watching him in his own, quietly concerned way.
"What kept you?" Asui asked softly, bringing her finger to her chin. "Todoroki didn't injure you that badly, did he?"
"No, he didn't," Tenya sighed wearily, reclaiming his seat on Uraraka's other side, "but Recovery Girl-sensei sent me to Power Loader-sensei to ensure that Todoroki didn't accidentally cause any sort of damage to my engines. We've been spending that last twenty minutes or so running diagnostics."
He decided not to mention that he'd also attempted to call his brother, feeling frustrated by the outcome of the match and wanting to talk it over with him. But, the call had gone straight to voicemail, as it only ever did when he was on a mission and couldn't talk.
"Makes sense," Shinsou nodded. "If you're walking, I guess you're good."
"Yes, we couldn't find any problems. I'm cleared to continue training once we reconvene on Monday. Either way, I apologize for being unable to support our classmate for her match."
"Ah, no worries," Uraraka grinned briefly. "Mina-kun did great! The girl from 1-B was really cool, too; I've gotta ask her to teach me her moves some time!"
Shinsou chuckled softly at that, turning back towards the stadium as the next match-up was being called out. "We know; you wouldn't shut up about it the entire match."
"Hey, I apologized for that already!"
Tenya was distracted from any further conversation when his phone suddenly began to vibrate, subsequently causing his own body to vibrate as well. Blinking in surprise, he reached into his pocket and removed the device, eyes widening as he saw his mother's name on the Caller ID.
"Excuse me, I have to take this," he murmured, standing and moving towards the hall as he answered the call.
"Hello, kasan? I'm sorry to tell you this, but-"
"Tenya! Thank goodness! Where are you; are you alright?"
"What? I'm absolutely fine, kasan, I'm still at the stadium. What's wrong?"
"It… it's your brother."
"Oniisan?!"
"A villain… a villain got Tensei. They think it was the Hero Killer."
"What!? How is he doing?! Where are you; I'll come right away!"
"His life's not in danger, but they're still assessing the potential long-term repercussions of his injury. We're at Hosu General Hospital, but Tenya, please don't try to come on your own.
I'm sending a car for you, but after everything… I don't want you to make yourself vulnerable. So please, be patient."
"I… I understand, Mother. I'll be waiting by the main gate."
"Thank you, Tenya. The car will be there soon. Just… Just hold on."
"You… You too. I'll see you soon."
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I am Iida because I have my parents listed under their actual names in my phone. Also, does anybody else, like, close their eyes and then suddenly they're awake again and they can't remember if/when they fell asleep? 'Cause that happens to me ALL the time.
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