Chapter 36: Past the Limit!

Five in the morning arrived and no one was happy about it.

The boys' room woke to Vlad King sliding the door open and turning on every light at once, and the sound thirteen teenage bodies made was an organized groan. Awase, who had welded himself and his blanket to the roof of the room for some reason, made the worst noise of anyone.

"Up. Outside in ten. Eat something on the way, you'll need it." Vlad said.

"Sensei, it's still yesterday." Tsuburaba croaked from inside his futon,

"It's tomorrow. I warned you about tomorrow. Ten minutes."

They made it in twelve, which Vlad allowed because he wasn't a monster, and the twenty of them stood blinking in the cold blue before-dawn light of the mountain with rice balls in their hands and eye crust still in their eyes, and Vlad King stood in front of them and did not look tired at all, which everyone was upset about.

"Listen up," he said. "Today the real camp begins. The goal of this week is simple: every one of you comes out of it strong enough to take the provisional license exam. And beyond the exam," his voice dropped a register, "there's a hostile force out there, and it's growing. What we do this week is part of getting you ready to face it. So stay sharp."

Nobody joked. They ate their rice and listened.

"Now." Vlad crossed his arms, and the colder thing went away, and the furnace came up in its place. "First semester. Who took the Sports Festival?"

Confusion rang amongst the group.

"...We did." Tetsutetsu said.

"Who put three teams in the final four?"

"We did."

"Who's the most famous first-year class in Japan right now?"

"WE ARE!" more of them this time, waking up into it.

"That's right." Vlad's lower canines showed. "You took the spotlight. You earned every watt of it. And I want you to understand something about spotlights." He let it hang. "A spotlight you don't defend gets taken. That class across the camp got humiliated on national television by you, and they have spent every day since then getting hungrier. They have real combat experience. And starting today, they are training like their lives depend on catching you, because they've decided they do." He looked down the line of them, one face at a time. "Second semester, everyone in this country is watching to see if Class B was a miracle or the real thing. So we don't chase the spotlight this semester. We hold it. Not Class A. Us. Got that?"

"GOT IT!"

"Then come see what hungry looks like." He walked and they followed.

Hungry looked like hell on earth.

Vlad walked them over and the far training ground opened up below, and Class 1-A was already at it, and it was carnage. Bakugo stood with both arms plunged to the elbow in a steel drum of boiling water, steam rolling off the surface, and then ripped them free and fired an explosion at the sky so big it left an afterimage, and plunged them back in to do it again. The half-and-half one sat neck-deep in a hot tub with frost climbing the water and his own right side, ice thickening across the surface while he endured it, pushing his cold as deep as his body would let him and then deeper, training the only half of himself he was willing to use. A boy on a cliff edge sat cross-legged producing an endless river of tape off both elbows into the valley below. The earphone girl was stabbing her jacks into solid rock over and over with a sound like a pickaxe. Somebody's tongue was hauling its owner up a rock face like a climbing rope. A giant plastic ball with a screaming girl floating inside it bounced across the far field. From a cave mouth at the tree line came muffled unearthly shrieking and the sounds of a boy sternly telling something to calm down.

And in the middle of it all, a wall of muscle in a cat costume backhanded a green-haired kid into the dirt, told him to come at him one more time, and to say it louder.

Class 1-B stood on the rise and took it in.

"Huh…" Kaibara said.

"So it's like our training but outside." Awase said.

"It's a little like our training." Honenuki agreed.

"They don't even have extra gravity," Tetsutetsu said, faintly disappointed. "It's just regular gravity out here."

"The boiling water part looks hard. And someone in the cave is screaming. It’s probably terrifying in there!" Pony offered, generously.

"The cave does have screaming." Tokage nodded.

Down the slope, Aizawa turned. He'd heard none of it, they weren't that dumb, but he looked up at twenty kids surveying his class's suffering not really impressed, and his eyes narrowed.

"Class B, you're late." he said, when they came down.

"We're two minutes early." Kendo was genuinely confused for a moment.

"For Class A's schedule. Yours started five minutes ago." He turned away before anyone could work out if that was a joke. "Vlad. They're yours. There's no time to waste, so don't."

"Wasn't planning to." Vlad planted himself in front of his class again. "Here's the lesson, and it's short. Overusing a muscle tears the fibers. The fibers heal back thicker and stronger. Quirks are the same. They strengthen through use, they dull through neglect. Simple." He looked them over. "And here's the part that's specific to you twenty. Your bodies are ahead of schedule. Way ahead. You've spent months building yourselves under harsh conditions." His eyes may or may not have flicked toward Manga, whose bubble was a picture of perfect innocence, "and the result is that your foundations are stronger than any first-year class I've ever taught. But your quirks?" He shook his head slowly. "Your quirks have been riding along on those bodies. They've grown the normal amount. Which means every one of you is a strong engine bolted to a stock transmission, and this week we fix the transmission."

"You say that like it's one thing. There's twenty of us. Twenty different quirks. How's that supposed to work?" Kamakiri said.

"And there's thirty-nine students total up here," Kendo added. "With six adults. How do six of you oversee thirty-nine of us, individually, on quirks this different?"

"That's why we have these ladies." Aizawa said.

And from four directions at once, like they'd been waiting all morning for the cue, because they had been:

"We're four parts of a whole!"

"Rock on with these sparkling gazes!"

"We've come to lend a paw and help!"

"Stingingly cute and catlike!"

Four figures landed in formation in front of the class, two familiar, two new, and struck the pose as a unit, tails and paws and total commitment.

"WILD, WILD, PUSSYCATS!"

A silence.

"There's four of them now." Awase said.

"The other half!" Ragdoll bounced on her toes, delighted, gesturing at the two newcomers like a game-show host. "Told you! Four parts of a whole! That's Mandalay, that's Pixie-Bob, they had the other bus. Now we're all yours, lucky you!"

Mandalay gave the class a small professional wave. Pixie-Bob looked them over with her tongue at the corner of her mouth, and her whole face lit up.

"You're the ones who killed my big baby!" she said. "Even some villains hadn’t managed to take that bad boy down."

"It was nothing special for our class!” Tetsutetsu bragged.

"We could’ve dealt with it faster if Manga tried." Setsuna mentioned.

"I was trying." Manga felt called out. “I was supporting my friends!” He clarified.

Pixie-Bob looked at Vlad. Vlad proudly grinned.

"Introductions, then work," Mandalay said, stepping forward. "You know Tiger and Ragdoll. I'm Mandalay. My quirk is Telepath; I can send words directly to any number of people at once. When you're scattered across a mountainside this week, I'm how instructions find you." She stopped speaking for a moment, and her voice arrived again, this time without her mouth moving at all, inside twenty skulls at once: Like this. Don't panic.

Half the class panicked.

"My quirk's Earthflow!" Pixie-Bob wiggled her clawed fingers, and the dirt in front of her rose into a perfect miniature of the training ground, hills and all. "The ground does what I say. Which means I can build the exact training environment each of you needs. Mountains, targets, walls, pits. You break it, I make more. You broke my big one, I can make a bigger one." She grinned with all her teeth.

"And you know my Search!" Ragdoll pointed two finger-guns at the class and swept them slowly down the line, and there was something underneath the bubbly now, a focus, her wide eyes flicking from face to face like pages turning. "Up to a hundred people at a time. Locations, conditions, and, most useful for this week, weak points. I've been reading all twenty of you since you walked over that rise." She spun to face them fully, and the game-show host and the professional were the same person, and it was a little terrifying. "So here's your morning, kittens! Everybody gets a station. Everybody gets a regimen. I know exactly where each of your quirks stops short, because I can see it, and Pixie-Bob's going to build the thing that makes you push past it, and you're going to hate this week so much." She said the last part with enormous cheer.

"Operative types with output ceilings," Vlad took over, "you're raising the ceiling. Transformation and heteromorph types, you're conditioning the parts your quirk gives you. And all of you are doing it past the point where it's comfortable, because past that point is the only place a quirk grows. Normally you'd get years to do this at your body's own pace."

"But there's no time for that," Aizawa added. "Get to it, Class B."

They got to it.

…

The mountain turned into twenty small purgatories, each one custom-built. Everyone in Class B had their own miniature personalized Zusshiri made by Manga. Instead of times two, Class B has elevated to times two point five gravity since the Sports Festival. Some three. Manga himself four.

Kaibara's was a row of slabs Pixie-Bob raised out of the earth in ascending order of misery: packed dirt, then sandstone, then granite, then something dark and dense she refused to identify and only smiled about. He set his arm spinning and went at the first slab, and Gyrate chewed through it in seconds, and the second took a little bit more, and the third stopped him dead a hand-span deep, his rotation stalling out with a sound like a stripped gear.

"Keep going." Tiger said, passing behind him.

"My arm's numb to the shoulder."

"Sounds like it's working."

Kamakiri had the station next to him, a matching row of slabs, and he'd opened by declaring he didn't need quirk training because his body did the work, and then the granite had turned his best blade with a chip in the edge and a shock that rattled his teeth, and now he was rapidly ripping and tearing, growing the blades thicker, longer, denser, angrier, spitting through his teeth every time the dark slab shrugged him off. He'd stopped saying he didn't need this, though he'd have died before saying it out loud.

Kendo worked the same row from the other end, and Big Fist made it look different but not easier. The hands came out three times the size of her body and the granite still argued. Her training wasn't crushing harder; it was crushing longer, keeping the enlargement up for minutes at a stretch instead of seconds, because Ragdoll had read her and announced, cheerfully, that Kendo's ceiling wasn't power, it was duration.

Awase's station looked like nothing and was maybe the worst one out there. A pile of scrap: wood blocks, metal plates, stones. His regimen, delivered by Ragdoll with two finger-guns and no mercy: weld and unweld. Weld the plate to the stone, reverse it, weld it to the wood, reverse it, again, again, faster, because his quirk was instant but his rate wasn't, and there was a number somewhere in him, welds per minute, welds per hour, welds before the quirk started dragging like a dead battery, and this week that number was going up. By the two-hour mark he could feel the drag arriving later than it had at dawn, and he hated how well it was working.

"My training is so boring in comparison…" he announced to the mountain.

"Mine's a wall of dirt. I think I got you beat." Komori called from somewhere.

"Yours is a spa compared to this."

Komori's was not a spa, but it was the closest thing on the mountain. The forest air was thick and humid, her spores' favorite weather, and Pixie-Bob had raised her a garden of bare earth walls, and her job was speed. Spore to sprout, how fast. She seeded a wall and clocked it, seeded it and clocked it, pushing the bloom time down from a slow crawl toward something that could matter in a fight, because Ragdoll had read her weak point out loud and it was the same one the stealth exam had found: her quirk wasn’t fast. A mushroom that took thirty seconds was useless in a hero situation. A mushroom that took three was a weapon. By afternoon she had a wall blooming slightly faster and was talking to the mushrooms encouragingly.

Shiozaki knelt at the edge of the trees with her vines spread across the ground around her like a green tide, and her station was the one Ragdoll had read with raised eyebrows. Months under doubled gravity had done something to the vines; they'd grown against resistance every morning of it, and they'd come out of it thick and fast and stubborn, hardier than they had any business being. So her ceiling wasn't strength. It was recovery. Tiger's regimen for her was blunt: he cut them. Over and over, big handfuls shorn away, and her work was regrowing them faster each time, pushing the regeneration from minutes toward moments, because vines that came back before the enemy's next swing would help her greatly.

She prayed while she regrew them. It seemed to help.

Shishida's station was a clearing, a boulder, and a chalkboard, and it was the strangest regimen on the mountain. Transform. Then, in Beast form, with the blood roaring and the boisterous thing in the driver's seat, do long division.

"I fail to see," the Beast rumbled, hunched enormous over the tiny chalkboard, claw gripping a stub of chalk, "the RELEVANCE!"

"The relevance is that you need to control your mental facilities. A hero who cannot think clearly while saving lives is no hero at all. Now continue without breaking any of the tools. Seven hundred and twenty-eight divided by fourteen." Mandalay's voice arrived in his head, calm, from wherever she was,

The Beast snarled but the Beast did long division. Each transformation, the polite boy stayed present a little longer, and that was the entire point.

Shoda stood in front of a rank of dirt pillars, tapping them. Tap, walk away, trigger. Tap, wait longer, trigger. His quirk's second impact came many times harder than the first; that was fixed, that was the quirk. What wasn't fixed was everything around it: how long he could hold a stored impact before it faded, how many taps he could keep up at once, how far away he could be at the trigger. By evening he was holding three at once across three pillars, sweating heavily.

Pony's station was an obstacle grove and a bucket of keratin supplements that she regarded with open despair. Fire, regrow, fire, regrow, forcing the regeneration rate up, and between volleys, control work: four horns aloft, weaving the trees, and then Ragdoll's cheerful voice calling "FIVE!" and Pony straining at the sky trying to make a fifth answer her, which it would not, yet, but the fourth was flying tighter than it ever had.

Tsuburaba's was a hillside and a set of Pixie-Bob's dirt molds: a cube, a hook, a chain of rings, a hand. He'd only ever made walls and platforms, and Ragdoll had read him in two seconds flat: his quirk's shape was limited by his imagination and his size by his lungs, and both of those could grow. So he ran the hill until his lungs screamed, and then, gasping, blew air into the molds, teaching his breath to hold a shape that wasn't a wall. His first air cube sagged like a failed cake. His fifth didn’t. When he finally floated a crude, wobbly hand of solid air and made it stick up the middle finger, he screamed in triumph, lost the shape, and had to start over, and did, immediately, happily.

Tetsutetsu's station was a fire.

His body might melt at the right temperature, and Tetsutetsu had heard that and taken it personally. So he went steel and held his arm in the flame, teeth grit, the metal of him slowly taking a red tint, and pulled it out, and cooled, and did it again, longer.

"How's it taste?!" Awase called.

"LIKE VICTORY!"

"It's iron, dude."

"IRON VICTORY!!!"

Rin was two stations down with his own supplement tin, collagen and calcium, and he and Tetsutetsu had already clinked tins that morning in the solemn toast of boys whose quirks ran on groceries. Pony trudged over at the lunch break with her keratin bucket and the three of them ate their weird powders together in a row, the mountain's saddest and most dedicated dining club. Rin's actual station was a target grove: scales fired at rings Pixie-Bob raised at random and regrowth sets that left his arms patchy and stinging, pushing the scales to come back faster and fly truer.

Kuroiro's station was the one Ragdoll had been most excited about, because Search had found something in him that he hadn't found himself yet.

"Your quirk seems a little unfinished," she'd told him, eyes wide and delighted. " You merge with black things, right? You move through them. But what if you try to move the blackness itself?"

"...I would be the darkness itself…" He murmured.

"Sure, kitten, but let’s start with the tarp."

His station was a field of black objects, cloth, a wheeled cart painted black, a dark training dummy, and his day was spent pouring himself into them and straining at their edges, trying to make the cloth so much as twitch from the inside. By sundown he'd made the tarp shiver, once, possibly from wind, and had declared it the greatest day of his life.

Kodai's station was a table of objects in ascending sizes and descending patience. Touch, grow, shrink, again, pushing both ends of her range, how big, how small, how many at once, how long they held their changed size after she let go. She worked in total silence for six hours and posted, by Ragdoll's read, the single largest ceiling gain of the day, and when told this she said Mm. She was proud.

Yanagi's station was a pile of progressively heavier objects and a simple, brutal number: her limit hovered around one human's body weight, and past it her quirk simply refused. So she lifted at the refusal, over and over, the telekinetic equivalent of failing a rep at the top, stones just past her ceiling trembling a centimeter off the ground and dropping, again, again, her dangling hands perfectly still while somewhere invisible she strained like a powerlifter. By dusk the trembling centimeter had become a shaking hand-span, and Yanagi, expressionless, drifted a rock the size of a torso past Monoma's head at eye level on her way to dinner, which was to gloat about her growth.

Honenuki's was a lake of his own making, a stretch of ground he softened and swam and re-hardened and softened again, working the two numbers Ragdoll had read as his: activation speed and travel speed. How fast the ground went soft under his touch, how fast he could move through it once it did. He took laps like a swimmer off the blocks, touch-and-sink in one motion.

Bondo's station was a target range and a stopwatch. His glue already came out however he wanted it, fast-set or slow, that was the quirk; what Ragdoll's read wanted from him was control at distance, exact set-times on command, glue that hardened the instant it landed at thirty meters or stayed wickedly liquid for a full minute in a doorway. He sprayed and clocked and adjusted, quiet and diligent, and when he landed a thirty-meter shot that set on impact in a shape he'd chosen, he looked around to see if anyone had seen it, and Kendo had, and gave him a thumbs up, and Bondo glowed for an hour.

Monoma's station was everyone else's.

His regimen was a circuit: borrow, hold, work, release, borrow the next. Copy's ceilings were time and slots, how long a quirk stayed and how many he could bank, and the only way to push either was volume. So he made the rounds like a doctor, a touch on Kaibara's shoulder and twenty minutes drilling Gyrate against the slabs, a touch on Tsuburaba and gasping attempts at air cubes, a touch on Yanagi and failing her rock-lifts at a lower weight than she failed them, which she watched with what might have been satisfaction. He narrated his own progress aloud in the third person until Kamakiri threatened to carve him up if he didn’t shut up.

Tokage worked over a marked field, and her numbers were on stakes Pixie-Bob had driven at intervals: distance flags. Fifty pieces was her limit, and the pieces died past a certain range, and both of those were walls made for breaking. She scattered herself wider and wider, pushing pieces out toward the far flags until the tethers thinned and screamed, holding them at the edge until they failed and regrowing what she lost, which was its own second regimen, regeneration under stress.

And Manga's station was a stump, a crate of water bottles, a bucket of throat lozenges, and the simplest, ugliest regimen on the mountain.

Words. Until his voice broke. Then water, and rest, and honey-lemon, and the moment the throat could hold a word again, more words.

There was no trick to it and no shortcut through it. His quirk lived in a throat, and a throat was a muscle like any other, and the road to a more Dokkaan and a more Fuwa-fuwa and a fourth heavy word in a fight instead of three was paved with exactly this: standing on a stump on a mountainside screaming onomatopoeias at a rock face until the word came out, resting to just short of recovery, and doing it again from a slightly higher floor.

Tokage's eye drifted over the ridge once in the late afternoon, just once, just to check on him. He was sitting on the stump between sets with a water bottle, bubble drawn into a simple flat line of fatigue, steam practically rising off him, and as she watched, he capped the bottle, stood back up on the stump, planted his feet, and his bubble flipped from the flat line to a big stupid grin aimed at nobody, at the rock face, at the work itself.

"DOKKAAN," said the far side of the ridge, hoarse and happy, and a distant boom rolled across the camp.

The eye came back. Tokage returned to her flags and pushed one further out.

…

At dinner the spread was as huge as the night before, and they fell on it just as hard, twenty ruined teenagers eating savagely, comparing exhaustion. And when the plates were empty, Mandalay stood up at the front with her arms crossed and the pleasant smile of someone delivering bad news she'd been looking forward to.

"Enjoy that?" she asked.

"YES!" said twenty mouths.

"Good. It's the last one we're making you." The smile widened at the noise that produced. "Starting tomorrow, you cook your own meals. All of them. Ingredients are provided; labor's on you. Heroes feed themselves, and more to the point, heroes feed each other. Consider it training." She let the groan crest and break. "Curry's recommended for beginners. Try not to burn down the mountain."

"We fought a forest for that dinner…" Tetsutetsu said, betrayed.

"And tomorrow you'll fight a stove. Growth in all things."

Vlad stood by the door with his arms crossed as they filed out toward the baths, wrecked and loud and already arguing about who in the class could actually cook (consensus: Kendo definitely, Shishida probably, Tetsutetsu absolutely never to be allowed near open flame despite or because of his growing fire resistance).