Chapter Text
Abigail took a shaky breath, trying to calm her racing heart. She knew what would happen if it kept beating like that, hammering against her ribs like it wanted out, and she really wasn't keen on her bag glitching out of her grasp again. Not here. Not in front of half the city's hopeful examinees.
She was wearing a red oversized tee, which hadn't actually looked oversized on the mannequin, but with her four-foot-nine frame, everything ended up looking like a tent. At least her denim shorts fit, since they were technically sized for an eleven year old, but no one needed to know that particular detail of her life. She'd take small mercies where she found them.
She pushed her bangs out of her face. Her hair, cut into a rough bob, was a mess no matter what she did to it, curling at the tips and stubbornly straight everywhere else. It probably didn't help that she'd cut it herself over the kitchen sink last month, since salons were a luxury that didn't exist in her budget, not with the way things were these days.
UA. Her parents had practically begged her to try out. Abby loved them, she really did, but the little money that made it into their cramped, state-issued apartment usually left again just as fast, in the form of cigarette smoke curling out the window and empty cans piling up by the door. She didn't blame them. She'd seen far worse in her building, behind far thinner walls. Or, at least, she'd heard worse.
The idea of her actually earning a scholarship, living in a dorm, being fed three times a day without having to think about it, was something she'd only ever let herself daydream about in the dark, right before falling asleep, when wanting something didn't cost her anything yet.
Her breakfast that morning had been a heel of bread, a little stale, drizzled with oil and sugar. Her usual. The bread sold in her part of the city was tough enough to risk a tooth on, so she'd learned to run it under the tap first, then heat it back up so it was at least chewable. It wasn't much, but it filled the hollow space behind her ribs enough to get her through a morning. Even if it was a morning as important as this one.
She hoped she'd studied enough for the written portion. She hadn't missed a single day of school this term, which was practically a world record for her, considering there'd been stretches where she showed up maybe once or twice a week, when the undergrounds were running and she had the energy to fight through a panic attack just to sit at a desk. Her teachers had noticed. Of course they had. No one from her school had ever managed that kind of streak before, not in a public, underfunded building wedged into the worst neighborhood the city had to offer.
She'd shown up for every test, every assignment that meant walking nearly two miles to the nearest library just to get five minutes on a shared computer before her hands started shaking too badly to type. She'd been kicked out of that library twice. Both times because she'd accidentally fried the computer she was using, and the staff had to reset the whole system while she stood there mortified, apologizing to a librarian who clearly wanted to murder her.
Not her fault, really. Overdue reports stressed her down to the bone, and her quirk didn't exactly care about context.
She took another breath, this one shakier than the last, and felt the moment her pencil case slipped off the strap of her tote bag, one of those ratty canvas things supermarkets used to hand out around the holidays, and hit the pavement. Her bag was glitching in her hand, flickering at the edges like a screen losing signal, threatening to vanish from her grip entirely.
She groaned and grabbed it hard, forcing herself to breathe slow, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way the school counselor had taught her back when the school still had a counselor. Had she been seven? Eight?
"Seriously? Come on—"
"Oh, wow. Cleanup on aisle poor. What is that bag?"
A guy was looking down at her, grinning like he hadn't just insulted her in the first ten seconds of meeting her. He was taller than her by a solid head and a half, with messy brown hair streaked through with faded purple, like an old dye job that had mostly grown out. He also had two rabbit ears poking up through his hair, the same chocolate-and-purple mix, twitching slightly as he watched her scramble.
"At least I brought one," she shot back, snatching her pencil case off the ground. "Planning to take the written exam with your finger?"
"Hey, I brought a pen!" He patted the back pocket of his faded cargo pants like he was proving a point, then pulled out a chewed-up ballpoint and waved it triumphantly. "Seriously, though. What's up with the bag?"
"My quirk. Glitching stuff." Abby rolled her eyes at herself before he could do it for her. "Pretty stupid, if you ask me. Only works when I'm anxious, which, surprise! Is about ninety percent of the time."
"Heh. That is pretty stupid." He chuckled, tilting his head to study her face a little too closely for her liking. "That why you've got one red eye and one blue eye?"
"No, that's just genetics being weird. Unrelated quirk fact." She squinted at him. "I'm Abby."
"Leeroy." He grinned wider, and she caught sight of the ears again, twitching. "Let me guess. Bunny quirk?"
"Nah. I think that one was my dad's, actually." He shrugged like it didn't matter, even though something in his voice suggested it did, just a little. "Mine's more... opening locked stuff. Anything, really."
"You must never go hungry, huh." It came out before she could stop it, a little too dry, a little too close to an accusation.
He didn't even blink. "Do you seriously think I'd be standing here parading my ass in front of the Hero Commission if I was well-fed, Abby?"
"...Yeah. Fair." She let out a breath that was almost a laugh, surprising herself, and motioned toward the looming gates ahead of them, where a crowd of nervous teenagers was already funneling inside. "Come on. Before we're late and they bar us from saving the world."
"Wouldn't be the worst thing that happened to me this week," Leeroy retorted, but he fell into step beside her anyway.
The auditorium was enormous, tiered seating curving up and around a stage that felt more suited to a rock concert than a school assembly, screens mounted on every wall flashing the UA crest in gold and blue. Abby had seen pictures of it in pamphlets, grainy and a little out of date, but nothing had prepared her for how it felt to actually sit inside it, dwarfed on every side by a few hundred other kids who all seemed to be vibrating with the same nervous energy she was trying very hard to swallow down.
She found a seat near the middle, and Leeroy, completely uninvited, dropped into the one beside her like they'd planned it.
"Don't you have friends to sit with?" she asked, almost accusingly.
"Nope. You're my friend now. Congratulations." He kicked his feet up onto the back of the empty chair in front of him until a hero-course upperclassman monitoring the aisle shot him a look, and he reluctantly put them back down.
The lights dimmed, and a man with wild blond hair and a leather jacket strode out onto the stage, microphone already raised like he'd been born holding one.
"ALRIGHT, LISTEN UP, LISTEN UP!" His voice cracked through the speakers loud enough that several rows of students flinched in unison. "WELCOME, future heroes, future legends, future somebodies who might just save this city from itself someday, to UA's entrance examination!"
"Is he always like this?" Abby muttered.
"I've seen clips. Yeah," Leeroy whispered back. "That's Present Mic. Radio hero. I think his power is literally just being loud."
"Sounds exhausting."
"For him or for us?"
"Yes."
Present Mic ran through the basics in his usual booming cadence, the structure of the exam, the written portion they'd sweat through the following day, the practical portion still ahead of them, while a second figure waited at the edge of the stage, considerably more subdued. Green, curly hair. A faint, permanent furrow between his brows that made him look like he was always halfway through solving a problem in his head, even when he was just standing there.
"And now, I'll hand it over to one of our finest faculty members, who definitely has a few things to add, Deku!"
A smattering of applause went up, louder than Abby expected, a few excited whispers rippling through the crowd. Of course. Deku. Even ten years out from the worst of it, his name still did something to a room.
He stepped up to the mic with a small, slightly awkward wave, the kind of gesture that looked more at home in a classroom than on a stage.
"Right, um, thank you, Mic." He cleared his throat. "I know a lot of you grew up hearing about heroes the way I did. Big speeches, bigger symbols. I'm not going to give you one of those today, because honestly, that's not really what the job is anymore."
The room went a little quieter, attentive in a different way now.
"Ten years ago, the world looked a lot different. Some of you weren't even born yet when the worst of the fighting happened, and some of you remember it better than anyone your age should." His eyes flicked briefly toward the crowd, like he was aware of exactly how many of them might fall into that second category. "We're still rebuilding. Streets that used to have full patrol coverage still don't. There are still people operating outside the law who think they're doing good, and sometimes they are, which makes our job a lot messier than it used to be. I won't pretend otherwise."
He paused, glancing down at his notes, then seemingly decided he didn't need them.
"What I will say is this: every single year, the quirks coming through this exam get stronger. More unpredictable. That's not an accident, it's part of why we expanded the hero course into more classes than UA's ever run before, and why this year's practical exam is going to ask more of you than it used to ask of, say, me, when I took it."
A ripple of nervous laughter at that, and even Abby found herself almost smiling.
"So my actual advice, the only advice that matters today: don't try to look like a hero out there. Try to think like one. The exam's not testing how strong your quirk is. It's testing what you do with it when things go sideways. And things will go sideways. That's sort of the whole point."
He gave another small, awkward nod, like he wasn't quite sure how to end a speech gracefully even after years of practice, and stepped back to mild, genuine applause.
"AND NOW," Present Mic boomed back in, clearly delighted to reclaim the mic, "let's give it up for the man, the myth, the absolute mystery, our resident tactics instructor: KINGER!"
A pause. Then, from a chair tucked off to the side of the stage that Abby hadn't even noticed was occupied, a tall, thin man unfolded himself upward with the jittery energy of someone who'd been silently panicking the entire time and was only now remembering he had lines.
"Yes! Hello! Wonderful! Pawn to E4!" he announced to the room, apropos of absolutely nothing, before seeming to catch himself. "That is... That was a metaphor. About strategy. You'll understand later. Maybe. If you survive the test, that is, which, statistically—"
"Kinger," Deku said gently, from the side of the stage, without even looking over.
"Right! Right, yes. Good luck, everyone! Watch your flanks!" Kinger gave a stiff little bow and sat back down so fast it looked like the chair had reached up and yanked him into it.
"What was that?" Abby whispered.
"I love him," Leeroy whispered back, delighted. "I love him so much already."
The locker rooms smelled like rubber and nervous sweat, and Abby changed into her gear with fingers that wouldn't quite stop trembling. Her wristband buzzed with her assigned testing site, Site C, and she shoved her civilian clothes into a locker before following the flow of students toward the transport gates, scanning faces for Leeroy and not finding him in the crowd anymore.
"Different sites, huh," came a voice from beside her, calm in a way that immediately stood out from the anxious hum filling the hallway.
She turned. A kid roughly her height, somewhere between lanky and stocky depending on which way they were standing, with short-cropped hair and an expression that suggested they'd already mentally clocked out of caring about anyone's opinion of them, including their own.
"Guess so," Abby said. "I'm Abby."
"Riley." They glanced down at her hands, which she realized were still faintly glitching at the fingertips. "You doing okay?"
"Great. Fantastic. Never better." She forced her hands still through sheer will. "You?"
Riley shrugged, completely unbothered. "I'll be fine. Mostly just want to get this over with."
They didn't say anything else, but it wasn't an unfriendly silence, more like the kind two strangers fall into when neither one particularly needs to fill it. Abby found she didn't mind it. It was almost steadying, actually, standing next to someone who looked about as far from panicking as a person could get.
The gate ahead flashed SITE C in red lettering, and the crowd around them thinned out until it was just the two of them and maybe thirty others, all funneling into a massive transport vehicle that would take them out to the testing grounds.
"Guess we're stuck together, then," Abby said, only half meaning it as a joke.
"Could be worse," Riley shrugged, and climbed aboard without further comment.
The testing ground was a sprawling, artificial cityscape, built specifically to be destroyed and rebuilt over and over, every season, every exam. Crumbling facades, fake storefronts, alleys that led nowhere, all of it designed to look exactly like the kind of half-rebuilt districts that still dotted the real city, the ones the news liked to call "in recovery."
Abby stood at the starting line with the rest of her group, heart already thudding too hard, watching the massive holographic display overhead light up with the rules.
TEN MINUTES. POINTS AWARDED FOR ROBOTS NEUTRALIZED, BASED ON DESIGNATION. NEGATIVE POINTS FOR RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT OF CIVILIAN DUMMIES. ZERO-POINT TARGETS ARE NOT TO BE ENGAGED.
"Zero-point target," Riley repeated under their breath, beside her. "That's new."
"What does that even mean," Abby said, more to herself than to Riley.
"Means something we're not supposed to fight," Riley said simply. "Means we run."
"Not very heroic, huh?"
The horn blared, and the gates dropped.
The first few minutes were almost manageable. One-pointers skittered out from collapsed buildings on six spindly legs, easy enough to spot and easy enough to take down if you knew your quirk and weren't too proud to use it creatively. Abby watched a girl across the plaza melt one clean in half with what looked like acidic saliva, and a boy nearby simply punched straight through another's central processor with what she assumed was some kind of strength-enhancement quirk.
Her own first kill, if you could call disabling a robot a kill, happened almost by accident. A one-pointer rounded a corner directly into her path, claws already extending, and her hand shot out on pure reflex before her brain caught up to what was happening. The moment her palm made contact with its chassis, the whole thing seemed to ripple, edges blurring like static eating through an old television screen, until the metal simply stopped being solid. Her hand sank straight through its core, and the robot crumpled to the ground in a heap of dead, flickering parts.
She stared at her hand like it belonged to someone else.
"Whoa," she said, to absolutely no one.
She didn't get long to marvel at it. A two-pointer came barreling down the street next, faster and heavier, and this time when she reached for it, her own anxiety did half the work for her, her pulse spiking on instinct, the metal beneath her palm shuddering and dissolving into a haze of broken light before it could even raise its weapon. She didn't fully understand what she was doing yet, not consciously, but her body seemed to know, like the fear itself was a tool she just hadn't realized she'd been carrying around the whole time.
Three robots in, and Abby had stopped feeling like she might throw up. She still felt like she might cry, but that was a problem for later.
She caught sight of Riley a block over, and "killer" was the only word for it.
A three-pointer had cornered them against a half-collapsed wall, all four mechanical limbs raised to strike, and Riley didn't so much as flinch. Their right arm shifted at the elbow with a faint mechanical click, fingers retracting into the socket as a long, curved grappling hook extended in their place. They fired it in one smooth motion, hooked it around the three-pointer's leg joint, and yanked, hard enough that the entire machine toppled sideways into a stack of fake storefront rubble.
Before it could recover, Riley's other arm was already changing, palm flattening and hardening into a blunt, reinforced wedge. They didn't run at it. They didn't even seem to hurry. They simply walked over, almost bored, and drove the wedge straight into a seam in its armor until something inside sparked and died.
A four-pointer dropped down from a rooftop next, and Riley, without missing a beat, detached one leg entirely below the knee, replacing it with what looked like a thick coiled spring, and used the sudden burst of force to launch themselves sideways out of its strike radius, landing in a crouch a full ten feet away like it was nothing.
"You good?" Riley called over to her, not even out of breath, swapping their leg back like they were changing a shoe.
"You're terrifying," Abby called back, and meant it as a genuine compliment.
"I get that a lot," Riley said, and turned to deal with the next robot before Abby could ask what that meant.
The minutes blurred together after that. Five-pointers, then a particularly nasty cluster of robots that worked in tandem, clearly designed to test coordination between strangers who'd never trained together. Abby found herself instinctively falling into step near Riley more than once, not because they'd planned it, but because something about Riley's calm was contagious in a way she desperately needed right then.
At the seven-minute mark, the ground shook.
It wasn't subtle. The whole plaza trembled, chunks of fake asphalt cracking and lifting, and from behind a row of collapsed buildings, something enormous unfolded itself into view — towering high enough to blot out the midday sun, all jagged plating and too many limbs, its single visible optic flaring red as it scanned the battlefield.
The zero-pointer.
Around her, the testing ground exploded into motion as students scattered in every direction, the unspoken rule suddenly very, very spoken: this was not something you fought. This was something you survived.
Abby's first instinct was to run. Her legs were already moving before her brain caught up, breath coming in short, useless gasps, every nerve in her body screaming at her to put distance between herself and the thing currently leveling a building two blocks away with one swing of its arm.
Then she saw the girl.
A smaller kid, maybe a head shorter than Abby even, had tripped near the base of a half-collapsed bus stop, ankle twisted at an ugly angle, scrambling uselessly against the pavement as the zero-pointer's shadow crept directly toward her.
Abby's whole body went cold.
She didn't decide to stop running. Her feet just did it on their own, some older, stubborner part of her overriding the part that wanted to survive this. She turned back.
"Hey! HEY!" she screamed, waving her arms like an idiot, anything to buy the girl another few seconds. "Over here, you overgrown toaster!"
The zero-pointer's optic swiveled toward her instead, and every cell in her body immediately regretted the decision.
It was massive up close, in a way that made her brain struggle to process scale at all, its weapon arm, some kind of cannon, easily the size of a city bus (not like she'd ever been allowed in one), already beginning to whir and charge with a horrible, building light.
She couldn't glitch something that big. She knew that immediately, on some animal level, the way she knew her own name. There was simply too much of it, too much mass, too much density for her panic to unravel all at once.
But the cannon.
The cannon was smaller. Self-contained. A part, not the whole.
She didn't think. She just moved, sprinting directly toward the thing everyone else was sprinting away from, every cell in her body screaming that this was the single stupidest decision she'd ever made, and there was no time to disagree with herself.
The cannon's glow intensified, a beam beginning to coalesce at its tip, aimed squarely at the fallen girl behind her.
Abby leapt, both hands outstretched, and slammed her palms flat against the cannon's barrel just as it reached full charge.
For one terrifying second, nothing happened. She felt the heat of it baking against her palms, felt her own heartbeat slamming so hard it physically hurt, felt every ounce of fear she'd carried her entire life, every skipped meal, every flickering library computer, every night spent listening to her parents fight quietly through paper-thin walls, channel itself directly into her hands.
The cannon's surface rippled.
Then it dissolved.
Not the whole machine, she still couldn't manage that, not even now, but the weapon itself crumbled apart in a shower of broken light and dead metal, the charge dispersing harmlessly into the air with a sound like a popped balloon the size of a building. The zero-pointer lurched, suddenly weaponless, its single optic flickering in what almost looked like confusion.
Abby didn't wait around to see what it did next. She grabbed the fallen girl by the arm, hauled her up despite the twisted ankle, and half-dragged, half-carried her clear across the plaza while the now-harmless giant lumbered uselessly behind them, swinging empty limbs at nothing.
They didn't stop until they hit the safety barrier at the edge of the testing zone, both of them collapsing onto the pavement the second the horn sounded, signaling the end of the exam.
Abby lay flat on her back on the cracked pavement, chest heaving, every muscle in her body shaking like she'd run a marathon instead of standing still and touching one (admittedly enormous) cannon. The sky above her was an ordinary, boring blue, completely unbothered by the fact that she'd apparently just disarmed a zero-pointer with her bare hands.
She lifted her own hands up in front of her face, turning them over slowly, watching her fingers twitch with the last fading traces of static.
Pretty stupid quirk, she'd told Leeroy that morning. Only works when I'm anxious.
She let out a breath that was half laugh, half something closer to a sob, and let her hands drop back to the pavement.
A shadow fell over her. Riley, looking down with an expression that, for the first time since Abby had met them a few hours ago, wasn't entirely unbothered.
"You're either the bravest person here," Riley said, "or the dumbest. Heavily leaning towards the latter."
"Why not both?" Abby managed, voice cracking.
"Fair," Riley said, and offered a hand to help her sit up.
Somewhere behind them, examiners were already gathering near a tablet, murmuring to each other in low, urgent voices, occasionally glancing back toward the spot where a very ordinary-looking girl with mismatched eyes had just rendered a zero-pointer's main weapon completely inert.
Abby didn't notice. She was too busy staring at her own trembling hands, wondering, for the first time in her life, if maybe, just maybe, the thing that had always made her feel broken was actually the thing that was going to get her exactly where she wanted to go.