Chapter 94: Battle Trials (End)

Gray dashed towards the front door first. Seeing that the kids had somehow reinforced it with extra wooden pallets and scrap iron, Gray put some strength into his leg and kicked the barrier wide open. The metal hinges tore right out of the concrete wall with a loud crash. Stepping through the dust, he came face-to-face with a few students waiting for him on the first floor.

He also noticed right away that Mineta had actually taken his threat seriously. Gray could see hundreds of his sticky purple balls scattered everywhere across the floor tiles. But he was going to teach the kid another lesson: his own teammates could get stuck on them too, completely ruining their mobility. Gray simply floated about half a foot off the ground, avoiding the sticky traps altogether as he glided forward.

A few of the students shook their heads at the physics-defying sight. Todoroki stepped forward, his eyes narrowing as he tried to freeze the whole corridor before Gray could push any further inside the building. Gray watched as Todoroki stamped his right foot, making a massive wave of jagged ice walls appear directly in his way. Gray didn’t even slow down; he simply formed a small, humming blue Ki ball and threw it at the frozen barricade, instantly shattering the thick ice into tiny fragments.

Once the wall shattered, he noticed a new wave of frost coming his way. The sudden drop in temperature encased his body in solid ice instantly. Todoroki let out a breath, a satisfied expression appearing on his face as he thought he had successfully secured the hero.

Gray simply flexed his muscles and broke the ice right off his body, the frozen prison exploding outward in a shower of harmless dust.

Before anyone else in the room could even register the movement or use their quirks, Gray vanished. He appeared right behind Todoroki, his voice dropping into a whisper next to his ear. "Seriously? You’re holding back against me?"

Gray landed a precise, heavy gut punch on the half-and-half kid. The kinetic force sent Todoroki dropping straight to his knees, gasping violently for air as the wind was completely knocked out of him. Gray leaned down slightly, looking at the shivering teenager. "It seems you do take after your dad after all."

The rest of the students stationed on Todoroki’s defensive team sucked in cold air in pure horror. Gray had just moved faster than their eyes could see and effortlessly put down one of the strongest student in their entire class without even breaking a sweat.

Before Gray could pull out his capture tape and wrap it around Todoroki, he noticed another student dashing forward through the dust. It was Kirishima, his skin hardened into jagged stone plates as he threw a wild, aggressive hook. Gray effortlessly swayed his head back, dodging a few more frantic punches. He noticed almost instantly that the kid relied too much on his Quirk for defense. Every time he threw a punch, he left his vitals wide open to counters.

"You trust your Quirk a bit too much, Kirishima," Gray said calmly as he started blocking each heavy punch from Kirishima with a single open palm.

Seeing that the kid wasn’t changing his strategy or adjusting his guard at all, Gray stepped inside his reach and punched him in the gut as well. The impact reverberated loudly through the building. Kirishima’s hardened armor instantly cracked and shattered under the pressure, and he fell down in the very next second, his eyes rolling back in his head as he lost consciousness.

Two students were now down, and Gray hadn’t even been inside the building for thirty seconds. He pulled white capture tape from his inventory and wrapped it tightly around both Kirishima and Todoroki, securing them to the floorboards.

Satisfied, he started making his way deeper through the building’s corridors.

While Gray was busy dismantling the frontline on the first floor, All Might had also dashed forward across the street. But instead of starting from the bottom entrance, All Might leaped high into the air, soaring straight up to the second floor. He punched right through a side concrete wall, shattering the structure, and entered the building almost at the exact same time as Gray.

Once inside the hallway, he also came face-to-face with a bunch of purple grape balls scattered all over the place. The first student to arrive at the sound of the wall collapsing was Iida, who instantly panicked, tapping his earpiece to tell his classmates that All Might was now also inside the building and that he had made first contact on floor two.

Not even ten seconds later, more students appeared from the upper stairwell, forming a desperate blockade: Bakugo, Midoriya, Hagakure, and Tokoyami. Hagakure tried to sneak silently past her classmates while the boys squared up. Holding a roll of the white capture tape in her invisible hands, she planned on sneaking behind All Might to capture him while his focus was forward. But All Might instantly spotted the floating piece of tape hovering in mid-air, and he moved like a flash.

All Might grabbed the floating adhesive tape and instantly spun it around, capturing Hagakure before she could even gasp.

The remaining students finally came to a harsh realization: the Symbol of Peace wasn’t holding back either. Midoriya dashed first, attempting to use all the surrounding walls to his advantage. He activated his 10% Full Cowl, green sparks lighting up the dark hallway as he dashed up, down, left, and right in rapid succession, bouncing off the surfaces like a pinball.

All Might’s eyes, naturally, never left his side. He tracked the green trail effortlessly, his arm shooting out with absolute precision. Midoriya’s ankle got grabbed mid-air by All Might’s massive hand. "Wha-"

Izuku never got another word out. All Might swung him downward, using the momentum to dash forward instantly, knocking out the other remaining teenagers who were standing in his direct path. The Symbol of Peace had originally planned on holding back as much as possible for a standard high school exercise. But Gray had spoken to him seriously right before they started. He told him not to hold back at all; he planned to show the kids exactly what a real, unyielding pro hero looked like. So here he was, taking it as seriously as possible against his own students, completely shattering their defense in seconds.

Yaoyorozu, hearing the commotion echoing from the lower levels, instantly began creating defensive items from her skin. She manufactured flashbangs alongside heavy-duty taser batons, desperately trying to create anything that could slow down Gray and All Might’s synchronized assault. But the moment her ear communicator crackled with the news that almost a third of the class was already down, she slumped in disbelief.

"This is not fair..." she murmured under her breath, her voice shaking slightly. But pushing the despair aside, she continued rapidly creating tactical items to distribute to her remaining classmates.

Gray continued floating effortlessly up the facility. The students guarding the first floor, seeing Todoroki and Kirishima instantly put down, panicked and fell back to the upper levels to regroup with the rest of the class.

Gray floated right after them, his movements silent and fluid. The moment he turned a corner toward the main stairwell, he saw Koda yelling a frantic command for help. A massive flock of birds instantly rushed straight towards Gray, their wings flapping wildly as they tried to swarm his vision. Gray simply smirked, bringing both of his hands up to the sides of his face as he channeled a minor spark of his energy. "Solar Flare!"

Instantly, a blinding, solar-intensity white light erupted from his form, completely illuminating the dark stairwell. The flash stunned the incoming animals, sending them scattering in a panic. Gray dashed forward through the opening, pulled out his roll of capture tape, and securely wrapped it around Koda’s mouth to prevent him from calling out more commands. Next, he picked up the kid and tossed him right onto a nearby patch of Mineta’s purple spheres, leaving him completely stuck to the wall.

’Three down,’ Gray thought to himself with a nod.

Gray and All Might continued moving forward through the concrete facility, systematically clearing floor after floor. Most of the stronger, frontline kids had already fallen to their overwhelming speed.

Finally, Gray and All Might met face-to-face on the staircase of the fourth floor, their clothes pristine.

"How many did you take down?" Gray asked, leaning against the railing.

"Seven," All Might replied. "You told me not to hold back for this exercise, so..."

Gray nodded in approval. "Not bad. I took down five since I wanted to give them some extra time to actually show what they had prepared."

Twelve students were now officially down and secured in capture tape, leaving behind a mere eight survivors from the initial twenty. Once the remaining teenagers saw through their communicators that they were being systematically picked off one by one in the dark, they decided to abandon their scattered floor placements. They regrouped into one massive vanguard on the top level, planning to combine their Quirks to at least take one of the instructors down with them. Uraraka, Jiro, Shoji, Mineta, Yaoyorozu, Sero, Mina, and Kaminari were the last ones standing, mostly because they had been tasked with protecting the final bomb room from the start.

Seeing that the digital countdown timer on the wall still had exactly 6 minutes left to it, Gray hummed quietly to himself. "Shall we get it over with?"

"They’re probably already exhausted from the stress, so yes. They’ve earned some good rest," All Might replied, his iconic grin widening as they both breached the heavy double doors of the fifth floor at the exact same time.

The moment the doors swung open, they were instantly met with a massive, blinding electrical discharge.

"Indiscriminate Shock: 1.3 Million Volts!" Denki Kaminari screamed from the center of the room, sending a torrent of wild, yellow lightning crackling across the entire floor space.

Gray’s reflexes kicked in instantly, and he moved out of the way in a blur. All Might, choosing a more direct defensive vector, stomped his heavy boot violently on the concrete floor, shattering the floorboards and dropping down to the lower floor to avoid the current.

Once the electrical storm finally passed, Kaminari was immediately done for the day. "Wheeeey..." he mumbled mindlessly, his thumbs pointing up as his eyes rolled back, having completely fried his own brain’s neural pathways while trying to catch the teachers off guard. Yaoyorozu had quickly manufactured a specialized insulated fabric blanket to shield the rest of her classmates from the proximity current, but alas, their grand ambush failed to score a hit.

They were now down to seven.

"That was not bad," Gray said. "If it was another teacher or hero, they might’ve actually been caught by that."

The remaining students didn’t freeze. Realizing their opening attack had failed, they instantly threw several flashbangs Yaoyorozu had manufactured, filling the enclosed concrete room with a blinding white strobe of pure light and deafening pops.

While they attempted to use the blinding light as a sensory distraction, All Might had already made his way back up through the shattered floorboards in a rapid blur. The remaining students launched their secondary counter-strategy. Uraraka instantly lunged sideways, slapping her palms against Mineta’s shoulders to completely activate her Zero Gravity on his body, making him weightless. Next, Shoji carefully grabbed Mineta’s lightened body with his multiple tentacles and threw him like a projectile straight towards Gray and All Might.

Mineta, already bleeding from his scalp from pulling off so many spheres, had a hysterical look on his face. He was covered in a thick layer of his own purple pop-balls and full of Sero’s tape. He planned to stick himself to one of the teachers to take them out of the fight, thinking the sudden flashbangs would at least disorient one of their targets enough to score a direct hit.

Mineta flew straight through the dust cloud towards Gray like a boulder. Gray saw the ball-covered student flying directly towards his chest in slow motion. He simply leaned his torso back a single inch. He watched silently as the screaming kid flew straight past his shoulder, smashing hard into the concrete wall behind him, where he remained stuck upside down. ’What the fuck was that...’

Shoji, seeing their surprise attack fail, didn’t back down. He clenched his jaw, grabbed six taser batons with his multiple webbed arms, and dashed forward into the smoke to protect his remaining classmates.

Gray kept Shoji busy, effortlessly dodging the flurry of six taser batons while All Might quickly put the remaining students in capture tape. The Number One Hero moved like a golden flash through the room, systematically wrapping up Yaoyorozu, Mina, Sero, and Jiro before they could even launch a counter-strategy. Once Gray saw that All Might was done with his side, he pulled out his own roll of capture tape. Moving with fluid speed, he instantly filled Shoji full of it, binding his multiple limbs tightly to his torso.

The digital clock on the concrete wall still had exactly 5 minutes remaining. All Might, seeing all twenty students down and secured, walked calmly up to the dummy nuclear weapon and touched it with his palm.

The final buzzer blared through the building’s speakers, signaling the end of the exercise.

By the end of the exercise, some of the students looked like they’d just died: completely exhausted, ragged, and staring blankly at the ceiling. Mineta had to be taken to the school infirmary to stop the bleeding on his scalp. Kirishima also had to be taken there to get checked out by Recovery Girl to ensure his ribs and torso hadn’t suffered any internal damage from Gray’s heavy gut punch.

The remaining students were physically fine, though their pride was completely shattered. Once they slowly changed back into their normal UA school uniforms, they were allowed to leave, since the battle trials were officially the last class of the day.