Chapter 51: Coastal Rescue Training!
Summary: Water Terrain Training begins!
Warning! Chapters 50-54 were all posted back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any of them!
Chapter 51: Coastal Rescue Training!
The first day of the Terrain Training Camp, which was scheduled to last a full two weeks in total, had been dedicated to getting everyone trained and checked out on various safety procedures. Even that had been turned to a useful purpose, however, as it had been more of Selkie's sidekicks that had taken them through the processes. In doing so, they'd added additional information on how many of the same emergency procedures could be applied not just to themselves, but to others. Merely being aware of the common dangers, as well as the equipment every properly registered vessel was required to have on board to deal with them, was extremely good information to build off of.
Which, as it happens, was what Day 2 turned out to be all about. The training vessel and the Oki Mariner had both set out to sea toward evening of Day 1, with the students and heroes starting Day 2 in a pre-prepared location a few dozen kilometers down the coast. The vessels were at anchor off a rocky beach, in relatively shallow waters. Said beach was no tourist spot, and had been setup in instead as a launch location for a series of 'Terrain Related' disaster scenarios. The older students were currently aboard the Oki Mariner, practicing 'man overboard' scenarios, and trying to determine how their Quirks could be used to help with them. If they could at all. Meanwhile, the First Years had been taken via a ship's boat to the shore, where Selkie had met them. Standing alongside the man was Manual, drawing some curious looks.
"Alright, UA First Years! I've been informed that all of you have already passed basic life-saving courses for shallow waters using UA facilities. Frankly, that's good enough for me. Which means we're now moving into specific, highly dangerous water scenarios that you might need to rescue civilians from. The first one is a mankiller at beaches the world over…and one of the primary reasons that good beaches employee lifeguards. Does anyone have a guess?"
Momo instantly raised her hand, getting a nod from Selkie.
"Given the formations of rock around here…are you perhaps talking about Rip Tides and Rip Currents?"
Selkie beamed, the expression…surprisingly cute.
"Indeed I am, young lady! Dozens of people die every year to Rip Currents in Japan alone. While our ability to detect and warn about them had improved prior to Quirks…the simple truth is that so many Quirks and ambient Quirk Energy fields interact with the water that, on an island nation like ours, it has become nearly impossible to truly monitor them."
Selkie gestured to Manual, who waved at them all.
"That is, in fact, why Manual is helping our group out today. His own Quirk is one such example. The rock formations that Miss Yaoyorozu pointed out, create anomalies and narrow channels both above and below water. This gives this specific beach a natural tendency to create Rip Currents. But with Manual's Quirk, we can outright cause such currents to be triggered. We will be doing so repeatedly, while using various dummies as 'civilian swimmers' you need to rescue."
From there, Selkie began to explain how to spot such tides and currents, how to survive them if they got caught themselves, and how to help others escape them. The gist of it boiled down to 'don't panic, and don't try to directly fight the current.' Instead, the best way to escape them was to either swim parallel to them to get out of their flow, or else to float/tread water until the current weakened, then swim diagonally back to shore. There was more to it, of course, particularly when other people and Quirks got involved, and he promised to go over the best options for each of them individually…once they experienced such a current for the first time themselves.
... ...
Two hours later, Izumi found herself in her own one-on one with the seal-hero. The Rip Current experience had been…disconcerting. Even if she'd managed to escape it in her untransformed state, the speed and power of it had caught her off guard. A reminder that, strong as she was, nature and natural phenomena were nothing to mess around with. Still, now it was time to try various methods of using her Quirk to work through this situation. Momo had already had her turn, easily using both her original Quirk on one pass, then the bracer-deployed version of her costume and the thus-disguised One for All on a second pass, to rescue her dummies.
"Go!"
Izumi didn't twitch…instead she summoned a Pod. The Pod zoomed out to the first of three dummies, even as Izumi launched herself toward another, landing near it with a splash even as the Pod grabbed a dummy and flew back to shore with it. Izumi herself summoned a small underwater scooter she'd designed for this trip and grabbed the second dummy, quickly powering the scooter to help her drag said dummy to shore. Even as she started to move, 2B was already zooming back out with the pod to get the third. They both reached shore at roughly the same time, to find Selkie twitching a bit.
"Effective, admittedly. But likely a bit overkill. Perhaps try something a bit less drastic on your second pass?"
Izumi blushed slightly and nodded, even as Selkie grabbed up the dummies and returned to the water. Let's see…less drastic reduced her options a lot. Maybe she needed a new undersea mode? Well, that would take longer than she had right now, if she wanted to do it right. She set a bit of mental processing speed aside to work on the details of that while picking out something else she could try. Adding her brute-force telekinesis directly, to something already experiencing significant force, probably wasn't a good idea. But what if she simply used it to handle, say, a net…
... ...
Momo had rapidly realizing that she might have accidently picked the environment she was best suited for, instead of one she'd assumed she was weak in. It was only after everyone had gotten through their initial one-on-ones with Selkie that they'd all come together for bigger exercises. Team operations that dealt with a more serious case of a boat full of idiot tourists capsizing in a Rip Tide, instead of the more localized Rip Currents. The beach was known for such a Tide and Selkie and gotten them planning for it while waiting for the right time of day for it to occur. During that planning, they'd all been asked to analyze each other's efforts with their Quirks.
Setsuna had promptly made Momo, Izumi, and 2B all feel like idiots.
Specifically, she'd asked Momo why she hadn't used Float. Even having thought it was a feature of her armor, Setsuna had wondered why whatever type of thrust effect it used couldn't be used underwater. Of course…it wasn't a feature of Momo's armor. Which made her and her girlfriend feel triply stupid for not considering that it might work underwater. Some quick experiments had proven that, in fact, Float worked just fine in water…and made moving in it hilariously easy. Add in the features of Momo's near-replica of Izumi's full YoRHa visor to locate her targets, and Momo turned into an incredibly effective water rescue heroine.
Oh well, as she pulled another dummy out of the water, she decided to be philosophical about it. She was shoring up a weak point in her knowledge, even if it wasn't the weak point in her Quirk that she'd expected it to be. And who knows how long it might have taken her to realize that Float worked underwater on her own…
... ...
Jirou had to admit, the night-time version of the 'man-overboard' training they'd already done on Day 3 was considerably more terrifying than the daylight version. Particularly because Selkie had complicated the entire thing by making it a 'heavy dummy.' Essentially, a dummy meant to represent someone like Momo or Izumi, people with mutation aspects to their Quirks that might make them sink rapidly if unconscious. In this, she had rapidly become the star of the show with her ever-improving sonar ability. It meant the inky blackness of the water in night wasn't a major impairment to her…but that didn't mean it wasn't still kind of fucking terrifying that she couldn't see anything down here. Not to mention the water was much colder at night. Maybe she could convince Momo and Izumi to cuddle for body warm-
Jirou cut that thought off with a vicious shake of her head. Yes, discovering on accident that both of them were cuddly when they'd crashed in the same set of bunks half-asleep last night had been amazing. But that was no reason to let her mind wander to the feel of the swell of Momo's…nope! Back on track! There was just one dummy left and she had a lock on it. Engaging the latest iteration of her Bass Boosters, which helped propel her underwater, she zeroed in on the 'victim.' She could fantasize about certain bits of anatomy later. As in, much later, after she wasn't near them and didn't risk giving anything away. For now, she had a job to do…
... ...
Izumi pouted as she lost yet another round of underwater tag. Now on their fifth day of camp, the game was the first step toward underwater combat…and Izumi was sadly having just as much difficulty as she'd anticipated. She could function fairly well under water, but it crippled her movement options to an irritating degree. Weighing in at over 200kg even in her base body, and closer to 350kg in her transformed state, even her considerable strength simply didn't allow quick movement through water. Worse, she was nearly certain some of her damage resistance design features were going to suffer as well, once they started true underwater combat the next day. Water didn't compress, which meant that certain types of force were much more dangerous underwater, even to her.
Well, at least Momo was utterly dominating everyone but Tokage. Tamaki should have been a challenge too, but Setsuna had wrecked their poor senpai's nerves by shrieking and calling him hentai when he'd used his octopus tentacles to catch her. When she'd doubled down and comment how she might be 'into it' but he 'should have asked first,' the poor third year had practically melted down…
... ...
Jirou turned a little green as she saw what her underwater sonic canon blast had done to the fish Selkie had caught as a demo. He'd wanted to make it clear to her just how dangerous her type of attack could be underwater…and he'd certainly succeeded. Her blasts were far more omni-directional in water and considerably more lethal. Still, despite feeling like she was going to puke from seeing what had happened to those poor fish, she was glad she'd found out on them instead of on a person. She was going to have to bring it up to Momo and Izumi, see if they knew a way to deal with the problem. They had already helped tweak her Base Boosters to work better underwater, after all…
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A/N: As you can see, the idea of a Training Camp got a major overhaul for this work, just like the Heroics Tournament did. In this case it's less because there was anything wrong with the original Trianing Camp arc, and more because it's nature didn't really fit with a University. Outside of things like Sports, Training Camps aren't normally a thing at the University level (so far as I could tell, its surprisingly hard to find details about Japan's university programs). Likewise, the training camp in canon was a little...primitive, if we're being honest. Good enough for what's supposed to be a highschool summer event, but lacking much in the way of professionalism. Hence, here I've converted it into a more focused set of events, intended to teach Heroics students how to handle specialized terrain.