CHAPTER - 8 - MAGIC

I trembled with anticipation as I looked at the school from outside the gates. "Can you believe it, Kacchan?" I asked. "We're going to Yuuei! And we're in the same class!"

"Fuck yeah we are!" Kacchan pumped his fist in the air. "Fucking Yuuei!"

"This is our first step as heroes!" I exclaimed. "Wait, wouldn't our first step as heroes been-"

"First step as heroes, fuck yeah!" Kacchan agreed.

"It's so manly!" a male voice I'd never heard before said. I looked over to see a boy with spiky red hair and a wide, shark-toothed grin and a girl with pink hair and skin, horns, and very... distinctive eyes, both in school uniforms.

"Are you guys starting the hero course today too?" the pink girl asked. Is it rude to refer to her as 'the pink girl?' I looked up at their titles so I wouldn't have to call them by nicknames.

We Will Rock You

LV 26

Kirishima Eijiro

Alien Blood

LV 24

Ashido Mina

"Yeah," I said with a smile. "We're going to be in class 1-A. What about you guys?"

"Us too!" Kirishima said. "Let's walk to our homeroom together!"

As we walked to our homeroom class at Yuuei oh my gosh oh my gosh, Ashido said, "Hey, what are your guys' names? I'm Ashido Mina by the way!"

"Kirishima Eijiro!" Kirishima added.

"My name is Midoriya Izuku," I answered. "It's nice to meet you."

"You're looking at the future number one hero, Bakugou Katsuki!" Kacchan boasted. "And I guess Deku here will manage to make number one for a few years before I make my triumphant return," he added.

I gasped. "Kacchan, that's one of the nicest things you've ever said to me!"

"Hey, I just told you my name's Ashido Mina, not Bakugou Katsuki!" Ashido interjected with a laugh. When Kacchan looked at her with a confused expression. "Just kidding! So what about your Quirks? If you don't mind me asking, anyway. Mine's Acid! I can make this corrosive stuff from my skin that doesn't burn my skin, plus it makes my skin pink for some reason."

"Maybe the altered pigment is a side effect of whatever makes you resistant to your acid?" I theorized. Ashido gave me a carefree shrug.

"Mine is Hardening!" Kirishima offered, pointing to himself. "I can turn my skin all hard and kinda rocky at will, and yes, I've heard all of the jokes."

"Explosion," Kacchan said with a grin. "I sweat what's basically nitroglycerin from my palms and can ignite it at will. I'm also resistant to impacts and fire, which is how I haven't gone deaf or blown my fucking arms off yet."

"So manly!" Kirishima cheered. "I haven't even seen it in action and I can already tell it's super cool-looking, unlike mine!"

"I'm sure yours is perfectly fine, Kirishima," I assured him.

He chuckled a bit. "Sure, but it's not as flashy as some other Quirks."

"Yeah, well my Quirk doesn't even hold a candle to the potential bulshittery that is Deku's, but that doesn't mean mine sucks," Kacchan roughly interjected.

"What is your Quirk anyway, Midoriya?" Ashido asked.

I chuckled and rubbed the back of my head. "I-it's a little hard to explain..."

"It's called The Gamer and it lets him do RPG stuff, like upgrading his stats and leveling up," Kacchan explained.

"Yeah, that's about it," I said. "I can also get various skills and then level them up and I have an inventory that I can put things in and take them out later."

"Which is pretty bullshit, how it works," Kacchan added. "He can shove fucking anything in there, even if he can't even carry it."

"That's awesome!" Ashido said.

I smiled. "Thanks!" I stopped in front of the massive door for class 1-A

"Why's it so big?" Kirishima asked.

"It's probably just in case there's someone with a Mutant Quirk that makes them really big," I explained. I opened the door to see that only about half the class was there. I was glad that Kacchan insisted we come early, because I felt like I would've been almost late otherwise. Instead, only about half the class was there and Kacchan and I just calmly walked over to some empty desks and took our seats. The first thing that Kacchan did after sitting down was to immediately put his feet up on the desk, which made me sigh. "Our new teacher might not be as okay with you doing that as our last teacher, Kacchan."

He just glared at me. "And you mumble a lot, Deku. Ya sure the teach'll like that?"

"Fair enough," I mumbled and pulled out my Skill Grimoir to wait for the teacher.

"You!" A familiar voice yelled after a while. I looked up from my book to see that one uptight guy from the exams, Iida. "Don't put your feet on the desk! It is disrespectful!" I sighed.

"Well how 'bout you shut the fuck up, teacher's pet," Kacchan growled. There it was...

I shut my book. "Kacchan, please don't get in a fight on the first day. Iida, please don't rile Kacchan up, he doesn't like it when people order him around like that."

"Well he should get used to being ordered around, because this is a school and the teacher will have to order you around." I slumped my head. That did not sound like it'd go over well.

Kacchan glared at Iida. "Deku wasn't talking about teachers, dipshit. I hate it when I feel like people who don't have any reason to boss me around are looking down on me and shit, asshat."

Iida blinked, then bowed at a ninety-degree angle. "I apologize for my insensitivity, though I... would prefer that you do not use words like that in a school environment."

Kacchan sighed and put his feet on the ground in a calm manner that I was not at all expecting. "Don't be an as- a jerk about asking and we won't have an issue, alright? And for what it's worth, I'm sorry 'bout getting that angry so soon." He looked away and started blushing slightly. "I've started to notice that my anger issues are really bad and not at all what a hero should act like, so I'm trying to get better with that."

Iida smiled widely at that. "I accept your apology. It is very admirable that you accept your flaws and are working to better yourself! I am sure that you will make a fine hero when we graduate!"

Kacchan chuckled and gave him a grin. "You're actually pretty alright, man."

As Iida got to his seat, I heard the door open and a familiar voice said, "Oh, hey, Midoriya!" I looked over to see Uraraka waving at me. "We're in the same class! What a coincidence, huh?"

"O-oh, hey, Uraraka!" I waved back. "I hope that we'll get to be friends over the course of our education!"

"If being friends is all you want to do here then you should leave now," a voice said from the doorway. I just barely managed to see a bit of what looked like a yellow sleeping bag from the doorway. The person inside the sleeping bag got up and discarded his bag before saying, "It took you five seconds to quiet down." The man with dark hair and clothes walked into the room and glowered at all of us as Uraraka got to a seat. "My name is Aizawa Shōta," he said, then took a sip from some sort of juice pouch. "I'll be your homeroom teacher for the next three years, assuming you stay in Yuuei."

"That name sounds familiar..." I muttered to myself. It was obvious from the facts that I couldn't see his level and title and his being a teacher at Yuuei that he was a pro hero, but I couldn't remember who he was.

"Your gym uniforms are in my desk," he told us. "Put them on and come outside."

xoxoxo

"You guys are going to run a Quirk assessment exam," he told us when we all went outside.

"But what about orientation?" Uraraka asked.

Aizawa-sensei shook his head. "Teachers in the hero course have a lot more leeway than traditional schools. None of you have ever used your Quirks in physical exams because of stupid laws that were put in place. Here, however, you have no restrictions." He tossed a ball to Kacchan. "Bakugou, you were the top scorer in the entrance exam. What was your best score with the softball throw?"

"I forget exactly, but I think it was like sixty-seven meters. That about right, Deku?"

"Sixty-seven point nine," I corrected.

"Use your Quirk," Aizawa-sensei told him. Kacchan grinned and went to the circle. "You can do anything you want, just stay in the circle." Kacchan threw the ball as hard as possible with what looked like a shaped charge explosion. The ball shot off like a rocket and landed far enough away that I was willing to bet Kacchan had broken a kilometer. Though when Aizawa-sensei turned his phone to us, I saw that Kacchan was just barely short.

"That was awesome!" someone said, with everyone joining in the cheer.

"Do you think this is a game?" our teacher asked harshly. "This is serious. Every single one of you are here to be pro heroes. If any of you are here for fun, you won't be soon. At the end of this physical exam, whoever has the lowest score will be expelled."

I'm proud to say that, for the first time, the whole class united together all to scream "WHAT!?"

"You can't expel someone on the first day!" Uraraka said.

"I can and I will," Aizawa-sensei scowled. "Don't like it? Don't be last. Pro heroes have to be ready for natural disasters and other horrible occurrences, so this should be nothing. First is the fifty meter dash. Asui and Iida go first." Iida naturally got a good score on account of his speed-boosting Quirk which, now that I had a good look at it, appeared to be engines inside his calves, which reminded me of the Turbo Hero, Ingenium. Considering his last name, was he a relative? The other girl, Asui, was able to get a decent score with her Quirk, which if I knew my Mutant Quirk naming conventions right, was probably called either Frog or Toad. If the slight glisten on her skin that I saw with my Hawkeye-boosted sight was any indication, it was probably Frog.

The rest of our classmates' runs were just as interesting. While some of them just couldn't or didn't use their Quirks for the dash, like the one girl whose Quirk seemed to be that she was permanently invisible, most of our classmates used their Quirks in really creative ways. For example, Uraraka made her clothes lighter and that one hot French boy from the entrance exam (Aoyama, I think his title said) used his laser-based Quirk for propulsion. Somehow. Soon enough, it was Kacchan's and my turn to run. Kacchan and I grinned at each other as we activated our Elemental Auras and I used a Speed Up. While I only ran, the buffs I had combined with my nearly sixty DEX meant that that gave me an S-rank score. Of course, Kacchan scored less than a second ahead of me thanks to his combination of Fire Aura and what looked like fire jets coming from the palms of his hands, as opposed to continuous explosions. I'd seen him trying to do that before, but it seemed like that was the first time he actually managed it.

After that, we had the grip strength test. I didn't get the best score, but I didn't get the worst either, so it wasn't a total loss. In the next test, the standing long jump, I managed to combine Air Aura with another air magic skill I'd made called Glide to get one of the higher distances. With the repeated side steps, I managed to another point of DEX mid-test, bringing me up to sixty. It wasn't much help, but I'd like to think it was what let me get the second-highest score, behind the short, grape-haired boy, Mineta.

I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie

LV 16

Mineta Minoru

He used his... sticky, yet bouncy hair ball Quirk... to bounce himself fast enough to get a ridiculously high score. I was impressed by his creativity, though that was immediately brought down by how much of a creep he was being toward the girls in our class... I do agree that almost everyone in our class was unfairly attractive, but he really shouldn't have been making those comments about the girls...

In the ball throw, I was amazed more by the fact that Aizawa-sensei's scoring app had an infinity symbol programmed into it than the fact that Uraraka managed to get it. Without gravity, the force she threw it with was certainly enough to get it into space, or, as the invisible girl, Hagakure, put it, "yeeted that ball into the sun!"

Achtung, Baby!

LV 20

Hagakure Tōru

I still wasn't sure how she could see if the light passed through her eyes... I asked her, but she wasn't any help at all.

Where was I? Oh, right, the ball toss. Eventually, it was my turn to throw the ball. I looked down at it, then looked across the ball toss field. I hadn't used One For All at all so far in the exam, but I decided I should probably use it at least once and I didn't see myself having any other opportunities to use it, at least not usefully. Air Aura and Speed Up alone would be enough for the distance run and the other ones... I doubted I could think of any way to actually use All Might's Quirk, or even my own powers for that matter, in them. The earth-colored glow of Earth Aura engulfed my body, concentrated on my arm more than the rest of my body, and I carefully drew out the power of All For One so that it didn't affect any more of my body than necessary. Apparently I'd managed to bring the amount of One For All I used down to ninety-five percent, which actually really helped. I cocked back my arm as the glow of One For All mixed with my Earth Aura, and infused air mana into the ball in an attempt to make it fly farther. "LIMIT BREAK!" I shouted, then threw the ball as hard as I could. "BALL TOSS!" A blast of displaced air unbalanced me for a moment as the ball shot through the air like a cannon ball. I winced at the pain and saw that my HP took a bit of a hit, but was encouraged by the amazed reactions of my classmates. It was hard to believe that I was practically Quirkless a year ago... I shoved down the pain and turned my Healing Hands on myself as Aizawa showed us my score.

"Are you okay, Midoriya?" Aizawa-sensei asked me. "It's hard to believe that you can use such a powerful... 'attack' without any sort of backlash." He then looked down at my hands. "Also your hand is glowing."

"O-oh, ah, that... that just means I'm totally fine!" I lied.

Kacchan scoffed and I felt some minor impending doom. "Deku's lying, that's his healing spell."

Aizawa-sensei gave me an odd glare, then his eyes started to glow red, which I could only assume was his Quirk. It appeared as if the gravity around his head was somehow disrupted and I got a system message warning me that All For One was disabled. "Oh, you're Eraser Head, the Erasure Hero," I finally realized when I saw his trademark goggles. "I always thought your Quirk was really interesting." I then noticed that my mana was still working fine and only All For One was disabled, which was interesting.

"Just testing," he said, then blinked to deactivate his Quirk. "Report to the nurse's office when we're done here, Midoriya."

I gulped, then shook my head. "N-no, I can still go, my Quirk makes me really durable and Healing Hands takes care of the rest."

"It's because of your healing abilities that I want you to report to the nurse's office," he clarified. "Assuming you can use it on others, at least. Yuuei offers a special program for people with any kind of healing power that could eventually lead to you becoming a licensed Quirk healer, and I want you to talk to Recovery Girl about it, even if you end up not taking it."

"Right," I said.

"Hey, how'd your 'healing spell' thing stay on if Aizawa-sensei's Quirk disables other Quirks?" Kirishima asked.

I gulped. "A-ah, uhh, well, you see..." I didn't know if Aizawa-sensei knew about my magic or not, and if he did, whether or not he was okay with me telling the rest of the class... I looked at Aizawa-sensei for any sort of confirmation and he nodded. "I think it's that his Quirk only stops the Quirk Factor from working properly, so it didn't affect my Healing Hands, which is more of a spell..."

"What?"

"You can tell them more," Aizawa-sensei told me.

"Literal magic," Kacchan offered. "Deku here somehow managed to bumble his way into discovering actual, literal magic using his Quirk without realizing it, then I figured it out from his constant muttering, and now some government officials or something know about it. Don't worry, you guys won't get dragged off by some shady suits just for knowing, but they'd prefer it if how to use it doesn't get into the general public just yet. We are allowed to teach you guys, though." He looked at a classmate of ours with a raven head, Tokoyami, who looked like he was trembling with excitement. "Are you vibrating, Bird Face?"

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

LV 22

Tokoyami Fumikage

"No," he somehow calmly denied, despite still vibrating. "How might one such as I learn to harness such power as that?"

Kacchan shrugged. "I don't know how you in particular would do it, but I figured out how to take the energy that I feel when I use my Quirk and use it for other shit. That stuff's called mana, and you use it to do magic. Don't know how you guys with Mutant Quirks work, so good luck with that. It's possible to make mana a particular element by concentrating on it, but I don't know if you can do that without an 'affinity' for it."

"I was planning on having them tell you that later, but it came up, so now you know. You're welcome to try using it for the last tests, but I doubt you'll figure it out," Aizawa-sensei said.

True to Aizawa-sensei's words, the rest of the exams were mostly uneventful, though Tokoyami and Hagakure managed to do something with dark and light magic in the long-distance run, which I thought was strange because I couldn't make any light or dark elemental affinity with Nature Affinity. Maybe they're just more esoteric or something. At the end of the physical exams, Aizawa-sensei pulled up a holoscreen with what appeared to be our rankings on it. "I ranked you from best to worst, not going to go over the rankings." Mineta screamed when he saw his name at the bottom, causing Aizawa to sigh. "Relax, Mineta. I was lying about expelling the lowest scorer. I'm not even allowed to do that anymore."

"Anymore?" about half the class asked.

"And even if I could and was going to, your performance in the repeated side steps combined with your... below-average height... making it more difficult for you to do some of the exams would have made me reconsider."

"It was to make sure we did our best, right?" a tall, black-haired girl who I definitely saw pulling something out of her body said.

Pure Imagination

LV 25

Yaoyorozu Momo

"Sure, let's go with that," Aizawa-sensei said in a way that made me feel like that was an afterthought. "Pick up a syllabus in the classroom. And I want to see you two, Midoriya and Bakugou. Just wanna get a good idea of what you can do."

xoxoxo

Kacchan and I walked out of the building when we were done. Aizawa-sensei just wanted us to write down what we could generally do that wasn't on our Quirk files, then asked me to teach him Hawkeye to see if it did anything with his Quirk. "We just finished our first day as students of Yuuei," I said. Ping. "Huh?"

"What's up, Deku?" Kacchan asked.

"I just got a title for surviving the first day of Yuuei," I explained, then checked it out. "Yuuei Student. It gives me ten percent extra HP and MP. Looks useful."

"Damn. Guess that means we're officially Yuuei students, eh Deku?"

"Hello, Bakugou and Midoriya," Iida said as he walked up to us. "I must admit I was quite surprised with your revelations, though I suppose I understand the reason why this hasn't been made public knowledge quit yet."

"Actually, it's not technically a secret, it's just that it's being researched more before any information about it becomes officially published," I told him. "So don't worry too much if you tell someone. In fact, I'm pretty sure the press conference is going to be sometime this month."

"It's so cool, though!" Uraraka said as she ran up. "I'm actually hoping that gravity's an element, because that would be awesome. Guess I'm gonna be meditating tonight!"

"Good luck!" I said. "I think there might be more complex elements than the ones I can use, so gravity might be possible. It'd probably be really cool to have gravity magic, plus there are a lot of possible uses for it."

We chatted for a while before parting ways. I even managed to teach Iida and Uraraka a few basic spells before they left.

xoxoxo

I decided to upgrade my mental stats after school. I really wanted to know what happened if I got either WIS or INT to one hundred. Not to mention, Meditation was almost to level one hundred, which felt like it was important. My skill with Meditation was up to a point where I could do it while walking and maintaining Elemental Aura and skills like it, though I still zoned out while doing it so it wasn't practical to use. I still paced around in my room while meditating in the hope that that would slowly level up one of my physical stats. Plus, whenever I banged my toes on something it didn't hurt because of my Physical Endurance and contributed to leveling it. Eventually, I heard a ping and felt myself realize a new thing about my Meditation, an aspect of the energy flow I hadn't considered before.

A skill has been created through special action! The skill 'Enlightenment' has been created through Meditation reaching MAX level!

I grinned. Just like with Summon Basic Elemental and Summon Lesser Elemental, it looked like at least some of my skills could be upgraded if I maxed them out, though it seemed like anything aside from Summon Elemental would work more along the lines of giving me a new skill than upgrading an existing skill.

Enlightenment (Passive) LV1 EXP 0.00%

The goal of many great minds is to gain the power of enlightenment. This skill represents the nascent power of enlightenment, granting abilities beyonf one's wildest dreams.

Allows STR, VIT, DEX, and INT to be trained as with WIS by Meditation.

Grants more uses at higher skill level.

Unlike with Summon Basic Elemental, which leveled up rather fast even at higher levels, this skill felt like more than just a step up. Sure, it was just an upgrade to Meditation at the moment, which was literally what Summon Lesser Elemental was, but it literally stated that it'd grant me more abilities at a higher level. I tested it out to see how it works and noted that I could only train one attribute at a time, which I would have been disappointed with if not for the fact that it was still a ludicrous ability.

All in all, I felt pretty optimistic about my budding career as a hero.

xoxoxo

A/N: Don't know if you've noticed this yet, but I've decided by now to have any titles that don't have some basis in canon (i.e. hero titles) to be references to something. By the way, I have two things I'd appreciate input on:

1) If you've ever even looked in the general direction of my other fanfic, you might have reason to suspect that I don't think too highly of Mineta. If you do indeed think that, you'd be correct. Therefore, I have decided to write him out unless someone can convince me not to.

2) The reason why I have yet to give Midoriya a fire elemental is, simply put, I can't think of a fire-type Pokémon that I'd like to give him. So I'm outsourcing. Could you guys please do that for me?

And none of you can tell me that Aizawa's Quirk doesn't mess with gravity because that's definitely how he uses his capture tool (and by the way the reason why The Gamer was still working despite Aizawa using Erasure is that it's a Mutant Quirk).