Chapter 23: Heroics Tournament Day 3 (Round 3)
Summary: The Heroics Tournament fights come to a close, and a tiny bit of 2B's perspective for the first (but not last) time.
Chapter 23: Heroics Tournament Day 3 (Round 3)
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All of the First-Year hero students not currently in the infirmary hovered around the board. A break for lunch had been declared, with refreshments provided by Lunch Rush so that no one had to change out of their costumes. Even so, eyes continued to dart to the new brackets. Not that they held any surprises, exactly.
Bracket 1
Yaoyorozu Momo vs Jiro Kyoka
Kinoko Komori vs Bondo Kojiro
Bracket 2
Midoriya Izumi vs Tsunotori Pony
Shoji Mezo vs Yanagi Reiko
After the new brackets had appeared, several people had given Jirou and Pony pitying looks. Strangely, however, neither girl looked all that worried. Jirou was clearly pensive, but seemed more curious than alarmed. Pony, meanwhile, looked determined. She had the air of someone who knew she was out of her league but was intent on finding out exactly how much that was the case. Several of those present, even from her own Group, were giving her assessing looks, as if seeing a new side of her. Kirishima and Mina had even drifted over to her during the break and were engaged in a clearly enthusiastic conversation with her and Tetsutetsu.
Another, larger group had gathered around Izumi and 2B. 2B's previous Pod had been dismissed and a new one summoned, with the new Pod being a utility model that was capable of holographic projection. On it were being shown replays of the better fights from the upper year's own tournaments. A pair of third years in particular stood out, with a cartoonish man essentially just ignoring his opponent's attacks as they appeared to slide right through him. The other stand out was a girl with periwinkle hair, who was showing off nearly the same level of casual power that Izumi and Momo always seemed to radiate. The fact that she was cheerfully chattering at her opponents the whole time merely added insult to the injury of how easily she woman-handled each of them. There had been another stand out…but he'd seemed to show serious stage fright symptoms after his first win and hadn't returned, despite his first victory. Izumi was humming as she watched the blonde man's fight replay, focusing on the little details.
"What do you think, 2B? Illusion or some sort of phase-shifting?"
The response was immediate.
"Phase shift. His files list his Quirk as Permeation, though there are few details about it. His match in his first year was very telling, however. He apparently phased right through his clothes, his initial costume apparently not having gotten the DNA encoding quite right at that point."
Izumi winced.
"Oh, right. I remember that. It was one of the only things that made the news from the First-Year tournament that year. UA caught some bad press from it, even though the censor delay was enough for the broadcast to blur everything."
"I could get you the unaltered footage, if you want to expand your interests. He appears to be relatively modest in size, however."
Izumi spluttered, even as Momo giggled and one or two of the guys watching the footage winced at 2B's brutally casual assessment.
"2B! Why are you like this?!"
"It is only logical to gain exposure so that you're not surprised in the field. Even if your own clothes are nearly indestructible, your opponents are not."
Izumi pouted as her girlfriend pat her head consolingly. 2B was right. Even if the pure amusement in her Quirk's voice said the 'logical' reason wasn't why she'd brought it up…
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Jirou knew, objectively speaking, that withdrawing probably would have been the logical thing to do. Yet, she'd seen this particular fight coming, assuming she'd gotten this far at all. She'd thought it through and knew she probably couldn't win. She had also realized, however, that seeing how one of the two women who designed her new gear went about attacking her with full knowledge of that gear's strengths and weaknesses was of nearly incalculable value. With that in mind, Jirou had decided to go through with the fight. She'd opened up by instantly activating her nausea-inducing Sound Bubble, which she was tentatively thinking of calling Discordant Ripple. Momo's own description of the bubble's effects had indicated that merely covering one's ears wouldn't be enough to cancel it out. It was at the right frequency and amplitude that bone conduction alone would carry it through someone's entire body, making it nearly impossible to close with Jirou while it was active.
Of course, she suspected that Momo could simply brute force her way through it. If she moved with sufficient speed, her motion would carry through to a hit, even if she's disoriented to the extreme. Thankfully, and honestly as expected, her opponent had instead immediately darted out of range. For just a moment, the memory of a terrifying rail gun had haunted Jirou…but instead of creating something, Momo seemed to be focusing on her gauntlets? What was sh-
…Holy shit!...
Jirou gulped and sent out a burst from the sonic canon, disrupting the second air pressure bullet that Momo had flicked at her. She'd only barely dodged the first one and she sighed in relief as the sonic blast caused the second to implode before it could reach her. Going to rapid fire on the sonic canon, she tried to force Momo to stop flicking…only to gape as a full helmet formed on her armor and she simply tanked the hit! Then the light of Momo's Quirk appeared around her hands…and a shotgun began returning fire with bean-bag rounds. Jirou yelped, barely avoiding the first, only to fail to avoid the second. Losing her air in a woosh as the round took her in the belly, she failed to notice the follow-up taser until it was too late…
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This time, instead of being a mix of impressed and disappointed, Izumi was just flat-out impressed. She had no idea who had trained Tsunotori-san, but the fact that someone had given her extremely good training before she ever came to UA was blatantly obvious. Izumi was more than fast enough to parry and deflect the girl's rapid-fire assault from her horns, of course. But the dulled copy of Virtuous Contract was kept extremely busy doing so, particularly as her opponent had phenomenal control and was capable of telekinetically controlling any eight of her horns at a time. This had nearly led to her landing several hits on Izumi, before she'd upped the power of her parries to shatter the assaulting horns rather than just deflecting them. Once destroyed, it seemed the other girl couldn't control them any longer, leaving them at an apparent stalemate.
Of course, that stalemate was only apparent, and Izumi stepped up her movements another notch. Abruptly, Pony was far too busy using her horns to pull her out of the way of air slashes. She couldn't have pulled that off if Izumi wasn't forced to step down the power of her shockwave move in order to keep it non-lethal. But, since that was the case here, her foe managed to evade them by the skin of her teeth. It didn't help her for long, since Izumi had used the opening in the horn barrage to close with her opponent, Pony was unable to react fast enough as a carefully-calculated pommel strike rendered her unconscious.
Despite the seemingly easy victory, Izumi was smiling in delight. Tsunotori-san had actually forced her to fully activate her transformation! If only for those final few seconds. It was the best friendly fight anyone but Momo or All Might had given her in years! Maybe she could make another friend? There had to be a few things they could do to help Pony close the gap. Hmmm, she'd need to know more about the girl's Quirk first though. Could she really not control partial horns? Or just hadn't tried in this match? What determined if it was partial or full? Intactness or total mass? Several ideas whirred through Izumi's mind as the medical bots showed up to take her opponent away…
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In a rare moment of complete focus, 2B pulled back from her near-constant connection to her various cyber endeavors. While most of her attention was always on where she was and who she was physically with, 2B didn't have the ability (or desire for that matter) to shut off her own version of Izumi's 'hyper-cognition' mode. In truth, that mode was really Izumi fully embracing 2B's own native speed-of-thought. Which meant that, day-to-day, 2B would have been bored to tears if she didn't have other things going on in the background. A passive tap on news outlets, scanning for cyber threats, cracking databases that looked like they might have interesting secrets. 2B did all of that, while also exchanging messages with several R&D teams, playing an online game or two, and chatting with a few of the more interesting denizens of the internet that she'd run into over the years.
For the moment, however, she had more important things to focus on. So she logged out of the CyberDeath 8040 lobby, put her text conversations with BravaLava3 and DizzyGecko on pause, and left her 321st attempt to crack Deterant's weirdly secure backup servers as another failure. Instead, she pulled all her focus into the complex recording suite her current Pod body was equipped with and hovered over to a corner of the ceiling with that had the best view of the match that was about to take place.
In a fit of surprising sanity, Komori and Yanagi had both bowed out, each in different ways. It was the right move, of course. Komori was exhausted and would have been up against yet another person in armor, one far faster and with more tricks than Iida. She'd simply tapped out verbally and been praised by Midnight for good judgment in doing so.
Yanagi, on the other hand, would have been in an even worse position by going directly head to head with a far more powerful telekinetic in Izumi. Despite that, she'd technically done her match with Izumi, by simply quietly asking for a telekinetic 'push' match. A common means for telekinetics to measure each other's strength, a push match was the equivalent of a telekinetic arm-wrestling competition. One individual, Yanagi in this case, would slowly ramp up the force she could apply until she hit her maximum, with her opponent matching her until one or the other of them couldn't keep up to pressure. The result had been pretty blatant. Yanagi had amazing control and decent strength with her Quirk. But Izumi had brute power. A lot of brute power. The push match had ended quickly, with Izumi as the winner, even if no one without access to scans of their QE numbers would be able to tell just how much Izumi had still been holding in reserve.
The result of the non-matches between the quarter finalists meant that the Tournament had moved straight into the final round. Momo vs Izumi, the one match everyone had suspected was coming from the start. A match which no one but 2B had any real idea what to expect of. She'd been amused to overhear several of their classmates wondering if the two would even fight each other seriously, given they were dating. Clearly, they still had a lot to learn about how competitive her two favorite humans could be. Full contact spars between them were common enough that Momo's parents had ended up needing to build a Quirk-reinforced room to house them…and that had been before Momo got One for All. Just because Momo had been physically outclassed didn't mean they hadn't sparred, the two had simply needed to set more limits on how much power Izumi used. Worse, it had resulted in Momo getting creative with things like jet propelled skates and explosives.
Now, with Momo at least starting to approach Izumi's physical level, those spars had taken on a new dimension. One that they were still growing into as Momo struggled to rewrite a lifetime worth of combat instincts. Which was, of course, why 2B was paying such close attention. The pair didn't get the chance to really cut loose very often, and the more data she could gather for them, the better they'd be able to keep refining Momo's combat style. Izumi's too, technically, though to a far lesser extent. In 2B's partner's case, any adjustments were mostly the result of how rarely she got to fight something or someone truly on her physical level.
Moments after 2B fully focused, Midnight wisely moved several meters back before addressing the two fighters. Good survival instincts, that woman.
"Alright! I don't normally stress this…but please don't completely destroy the building, or otherwise get so out of hand that someone other than the two of you might get hurt. If you go too far, I will stop the match, and you will comply or be removed from the Heroics Course. Am I clear?"
Izumi blushed and nodded…Momo grinned and verbally responded with a confirmation.
"Alright. You may begin at the whip crack."
There were several moments of intense silence as Midnight looked like she was regretting her life choices just slightly…then she cracked her whip and leapt even farther back. Momo moved first, putting all of the power she could muster into a straight right aimed at Izumi's face. It, of course, never had a hope of landing. The dull-edged type-40 great sword Izumi had summed for the match batted the attack aside…only for Momo to move immediately into a spinning backkick with the extra momentum. That too was blocked, but landing a hit hadn't been the point. In one of her most well-practiced combo-moves, designed specifically to create space when fighting Izumi, Momo's leg had been trailing a series of smoke and flash bombs through its entire arc. They went off almost precisely at the same time as Izumi caught her kick, with Momo using the unavoidable instant of blindness on Izumi's part to push off the blocking hand and open the range.
Given Izumi had fully transformed before the fight, her own body was only barely affected by the strobing lights. But the sheer white-out effect created an unavoidable gap in her sight that Momo had used. It was a tactic older than her girlfriend's possession of One for All, though previous versions of the move had all involved weapons on Momo's part and had been useless against a fully transformed Izumi. Now, she had enough power to escape Izumi's hold on her foot, and the push off had given her several meters of distance. She lit up with the pink sparkles of her original Quirk, creating an assault rifle in one hand even as she flicked the fingers of her other, intercepting the shockwave slash that Izumi had sent chasing her. The attacks eliminated each other even as Momo opened fire at full-auto in Izumi's direction, using her new brute strength to hold the rifle on target.
A good effort, but too slow, as Izumi had already pushed off and hidden herself behind the width of the great sword as she closed. Closed right into a set of landmines that managed to blow Izumi upward…even as a brutal telekinetic fist slammed Momo straight through a pillar and nearly out of the ring. Then they stopped feeling each other out and blurred out of view to everyone but the high-speed cameras and a watching All Might…
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A/N: So, that's the Heroics Tournament wrapped up! Hopefully, everyone liked the fights! I feel like I found a fairly decent balance between letting it drag on too long and actually allowing more people screen time to be awesome in. But let me know what you think! Action isn't exactly my specialty, so I promise you won't hurt my feelings...unless you're super mean about it!
A/N 2: Just another 'Hey, I have a Page,' reminder! Check out my Page for early access to new chapters of all of my works (including this one). Currently, as of first posting to Scribblehub, 42 chapters of My Hero Automata are public, with 7 more (about 16k worth) currently in Early Access. ALL of my fanfiction content is ultimately free, with nothing stuck permanently behind a paywall. So, while I deeply appreciate anyone willing to help support my writing time...if you don't want to support me, don't :-p. You'll get the content eventually, one way or another, Patrons simply get it sooner.