Chapter 42: Ultimate Moves!

"As I mentioned yesterday," Vlad King said from the front of the classroom, "our primary goal now is to get you your Provisional Hero Licenses."

"Yes, Sensei!" The class responded.

"Hero licenses are directly tied to the saving of lives. One must be properly qualified for that responsibility. The exam is extremely difficult. Even for provisional licenses, the pass rate averages around fifty percent."

"Fifty percent?!" Tetsutetsu leaned forward. "That's half!"

Vlad King's expression didn't change. "That's why, starting today, each of you needs to develop your own ultimate moves."

The door opened.

Midnight walked in first, followed by Cementoss and Ectoplasm. Three additional teachers filling the front of the classroom with the energy of a panel announcement at a hero convention.

"Ultimate moves!" Midnight struck a pose. "These are your finishers! Your signature techniques! Your personal statements as heroes!"

"Internalize these moves, make them your own until they become unparalleled," Cementoss added, raising a finger. "Combat is all about finding and making use of your particular strengths."

"Your moves symbolize who you are," Midnight continued. "Nowadays, pro heroes without ultimate moves are a dying breed."

"But ultimate moves don't need to be attacks," Ectoplasm clarified. "Any technique that gives you a surefire advantage in combat qualifies."

Vlad King nodded. "The training camp was supposed to advance you toward this. The villain attack cut that short. So for the remaining ten days of summer break before the second semester begins, you'll be doing double duty: developing your quirks and creating your ultimate moves simultaneously. Class A has the morning slot. We have the afternoon. After lunch, change into your hero costumes and meet us at Gym Gamma."

The class scrambled for the locker rooms.

…

Gym Gamma was big. With a capital B.

The enclosed space was entirely concrete, floor to ceiling, with reinforced walls and no windows. Cementoss stood at the center and the ground responded to him like clay on a potter's wheel. Pillars rose. Walls formed. Platforms materialized at varying heights. Training areas shaped themselves to individual specifications, each one tailored to a specific student's quirk and needs.

Ectoplasm split into twenty clones. One for each student. Each clone took position in a student's designated area, ready to spar, advise, or take a beating.

"The terrain is custom-built for each of you," Cementoss explained. "Tell me what you need and I'll shape it."

"In addition to developing your moves," Vlad King added, "consider whether your hero costumes need modifications. If they do, submit requests to the Development Studio. Small adjustments can be done in a day. Larger overhauls take three."

"Also," Midnight added with a smile, "you should all be thinking about naming your moves. A good name makes a technique memorable, and in the field, a memorable technique intimidates."

"Now get to work."

Twenty students spread across the gym.

…

Manga stood in his designated area, a flat concrete platform with room to move, and looked at the Ectoplasm clone standing across from him.

"So," the clone said. "What's your approach?"

"I've been thinking about this since the internship." Manga cracked his knuckles. A confident emoji popped up. "My quirk gives me more options than anyone in this gym. Hundreds of words, each one a different effect. The problem isn't that I don't have moves. It's that I have too many. So I’m gonna go with something new.” Manga performed an animesque pose. "Combination play." He said it out loud because saying it made it real. "Multiple words. Sequenced. Creating an effect neither word produces alone."

He squared up to the clone.

"Fura-fura."

Dizziness hit the clone. Its balance wavered, its stance loosened, its eyes unfocused for a critical second.

"Zudon."

The bullet-impact word hit the disoriented clone square in the chest. The clone flew backward and hit the gym wall hard enough to crack the concrete. The impact was devastating, far beyond what Zudon normally delivered, because a body that can't brace for impact takes the full force without any resistance.

"Dizziness plus impact." Manga explained. "The first word makes the second word hit harder because the target can't prepare for it. Sequenced effects that multiply each other."

“Impressive as usual, Fukidashi-kun.” The clone coughed.

Kendo's area was a forest of concrete pillars, spaced close enough to simulate a crowd or an alley.

She stood between them with both fists enlarged to the size of beach balls. Then she started.

Right fist, full size, swing. The moment it connected with the pillar, she shrank it. Left fist, already enlarging, swung from the other side. Connected. Shrank. Right again. Left again. Right. Left.

The rhythm built. Each fist enlarging and shrinking in alternation, the shrink giving her speed, the enlargement giving her mass. She wasn't throwing haymakers. She was throwing a barrage, each punch arriving faster than a full-sized fist should allow because the size change happened mid-swing.

"You can go faster than that." the Ectoplasm clone encouraged.

She went faster. The pillars cracked. Chunks flew. Her fists were blurs of expanding and contracting flesh, the sound of impacts blending together into a continuous roll of thunder.

By the time she stopped, four pillars were rubble and she was breathing hard with a fierce grin on her face.

"I'm calling it Gatling Impact." she said.

Tetsutetsu stood in the center of an open area, his body half-steel, half-flesh.

This was new. He'd spent every training session at the camp working on heat resistance. But now, his right arm was gleaming metal from shoulder to fingertip. His left arm was normal. His right leg was steel from the knee down. His left was flesh.

"The problem with going full steel," he explained to the Ectoplasm clone between rounds, "is that I'm slower. Every part of me gets heavier. But if I only harden what I need..."

He threw the steel right. The clone slipped it easily. The arm was still too heavy, the swing a half-beat late.

Tetsutetsu scowled at his own fist. Then the steel sank back into his skin, arm and leg both, until he was all flesh.

“Okay. Not what I need. When I need it.”

He threw the right hook again, fast and light, bare skin all the way. At the moment of impact, steel flashed across his knuckles and up his forearm. The clone’s guard caught it and the clone slid backward, heels scraping the concrete.

“Steel when it hits. Flesh before it moves.” He snapped a kick next, flesh on the way in, steel spreading over his shin a split second before it slammed into the clone’s guard. “Faster, lighter, and the hits are just as hard.”

"What are you calling it?" the clone asked.

"Selective Steel!" Tetsutetsu struck a pose. "Wait, no. Steel Spots? Iron Mix? Uh..."

"We can work on the name later."

Kamakiri's area had been shaped into a tight corridor. Close quarters. His specialty.

He stood in the center with blades extended from both forearms, his feet, and his shoulders. Every surface of his body bristled with edges. The concrete around him was scored with cuts from the past hour of practice.

"Blade Domain." he said.

He slashed. A single rotation, arms out, blades catching every surface within reach. The corridor walls gained four new gashes. The Ectoplasm clone had to duck to avoid losing its head.

The area around Kamakiri became a dead zone. Anything that entered the radius of his extended blades got cut. The floor. The walls. The air itself seemed to part around him.

"Anyone who steps into my range is torn apart!" Kamakiri said. "That's my domain."

"And if they stay out of range?" the clone asked.

"Then I bring the range to them." Kamakiri crouched. Blades extended from every surface of his body, forearms, shins, shoulders, back, until he looked less like a boy and more like a sea urchin made of knives.

He leapt.

The rotation started mid-air. His body became a spinning ball of blades, spiraling forward like a saw blade launched from a cannon. He hit the far wall of the corridor and carved a crater into it before landing in a crouch, blades retracting to normal length.

"Blade Spiral," he said. "For when you need to rip someone apart on the move."

Shiozaki knelt in a garden of concrete. Her vines had already begun spreading, green tendrils flowing from her hair across the floor and up the walls of her training area.

"Vine Crucifixion." she said, and her vines exploded outward.

They shot toward the Ectoplasm clone from six directions simultaneously, wrapping around wrists, ankles, torso, and neck. The clone was lifted off the ground and suspended in the air, arms spread, legs together. The vines pulled tight. The clone couldn't move.

"This is an effective capture technique," the clone noted from its suspended position.

"A sinner must face judgment with their arms open and their soul exposed." Shiozaki's eyes were closed. Her hands were pressed together. "The Lord's mercy is given, not taken."

She released the clone and reset.

"Vine Tsunami." Her vines surged forward in a wave, a rolling green wall that traveled across the concrete floor like water crashing toward a shoreline. The wave hit the clone and buried it under layers of tangled green.

She reset again.

"Vine Cross." Her vines wove together in front of her, intertwining into a thick, cross-shaped barrier that stood between her and the clone. The clone threw a punch. The vine cross held before lunging and capturing Ectoplasm.

"Defense, capture, and offense. A trinity." Shiozaki whispered.

Setsuna sparred with her Ectoplasm clone in close quarters, and the first time the clone threw a punch at her face, she let it come.

The fist reached her cheekbone and her face split.

The skin and bone divided, the fist passing through the gap where solid flesh had been a millisecond earlier. The rest of her body was already moving, her torso twisting, her right fist driving into the clone's exposed ribs while her split face reassembled behind the extended arm.

"Haha! It worked! Hell yeah!" She cheered.

The clone kicked. She split at the waist. The kick passed through air. Her upper body floated for a fraction of a second while her legs swept the clone's remaining foot. It went down. She reformed standing over it.

"The key is the counter." She pulled the clone back to its feet. "Splitting isn't enough. Every split has to lead to an attack. If I just dodge, I'm wasting the opening."

She named it Lizard Reflex. The instinctive body-split dodge from the camp, refined into a combat technique.

Shishida's area was reinforced. Double-thick walls. Extra padding on the floor. Cementoss had built it expecting damage.

He stood in human form. Glasses on. Posture straight. The Ectoplasm clone charged.

At the last possible moment, Shishida activated Beast.

The transformation was instant. His body exploded outward, fur and muscle and claws replacing the gentleman in the space of a heartbeat. The clone's punch, aimed at a human-sized target, hit the chest of something much larger, much harder, and much angrier.

Shishida caught the arm. Threw the clone into the wall.

Then he deactivated. Human again. Glasses. Straight posture.

The second clone attacked from behind, its attack missing the now smaller Shishida before he transformed once more after the dodge. His clawed hand catching the clone's face and slamming it into the floor.

Human.

"Re-Beast," he said, adjusting his glasses. "The momentary reversion creates a smaller target. The immediate re-transformation creates a larger, stronger one. The gap between the two is where the counterattack lives."

"It's quite effective, if I do say so myself." He pushed his glasses up.

Across the gym, Monoma wasn't fighting.

He was watching.

He sat on a concrete pillar that Cementoss had shaped into a bench and he watched his classmates develop their ultimate moves with utmost dedication. A notebook sat open in his lap. He wrote constantly. Each page was a different classmate's name, and under each name was a growing list of observations.

Kendo: Gatling Impact. Requires rhythm. If I copy Big Fist, the rhythm is the hard part. Practice alternating size changes.

Tetsutetsu: Selective hardening. Partial Steel transformation. If I copy Steel, I need to practice PARTIAL activation. Five-minute window.

Kamakiri: Blade Spiral. Requires full-body blade extension. High skill ceiling. If I copy Razor Sharp...

He stopped writing. Looked up. Watched Kamakiri's spinning blade ball carve into a wall.

"Defense, attack, and speed…" he muttered. "That’s going to be difficult to practice."

The Ectoplasm clone assigned to him stood nearby, unused.

"You're not sparring?" it asked.

"My quirk doesn't really give me the option to create special moves on its own." Monoma didn't look away from the gym floor. "Maybe I could create something by using one quirk and trying to combine it with another. Like maybe Bondo and then Yanagi. Glue and then control the glue. But yeah, most of my special move training is seeing what everyone else can do."

He flipped to a new page. Manga's name at the top.

"Manga’s is still objectively the most adaptable for any situation." Monoma said it quietly. "I’ve been studying onomatopoeias since I realized the nature of his quirk in the entrance exam. Out of anyone in the class, I have the greatest experience with Manga’s quirk."

The rest of the class trained in their own ways across the gym.

Rin launched scale volleys at his clone, each burst denser and faster than the last, working on rapid-fire and accuracy. Kaibara drilled his clone with Gyrate punches, focusing on rotation speed. Bondo practiced long-range Cemedine launches, trying to hit targets at distances his quirk usually couldn't reach. Pony worked on remote horn control, guiding four horns simultaneously through a maze of concrete pillars. Shoda practiced Twin Impact timing, trying to shorten the delay between the first hit and the activated second impact. Kuroiro merged with shadows and emerged from new ones, working on speed and transition fluidity. Kodai threw objects and expanded them mid-flight, working on the timing of her size changes for maximum impact. Yanagi lifted three, four, five objects at once, pushing her Poltergeist's simultaneous control limit. Tsuburaba built air walls faster and thicker, practicing layered barriers. Komori experimented with spore dispersal patterns, trying to control where and how fast her mushrooms grew. Awase practiced welding while fighting, bonding objects to enemies while fighting them. Honenuki softened the floor under his clone in patches, then hardened it around its ankles, working on how fast he could switch.

The gym was loud. Twenty students and twenty clones and the sounds of twenty quirks being pushed beyond their previous limits.

Vlad King stood at the edge of it all with his arms crossed and watched his class grow.

…

“TIME!” Vlad King’s voice cut through the noise. “That’s it for today. Same slot tomorrow.” 

The class started winding down. Sweat wiped. Water bottles emptied.

As Class B filed toward the exit, Class A was coming down the corridor from the Development Studio, half of them carrying pieces of their costumes. The two classes passed each other outside Gym Gamma.

Monoma stopped walking.

"Hey!" His voice carried the theatrical projection of a boy who had been waiting for this moment all day. He turned to face the Class A students, arms spread wide, grin enormous. "Did you all hear? They say half the people who take the licensing test fail! So why don't you do us all a favor and fail for us, Class A?"

"There he goes..." Kendo sighed.

"BWAHAHAHA! While you've been struggling in the morning session, Class B has been DOMINATING the afternoon! Our ultimate moves are ALREADY superior! Our coordination is UNMATCHED! Our class swept the Sports Festival podium and we'll sweep the provisional exam too!"

"He's right in one manner," Tokoyami said from Class A, arms crossed. "In the exam, we are beasts thrown into the ring. It is our fate to test ourselves against each other."

"Not quite." Aizawa's voice was flat. "Classes A and B are registered at different exam sites."

Monoma's laugh froze mid-gesture.

"The Provisional Hero Licensing Exam takes place annually at three locations across the country, in both June and September," Vlad King explained. "To prevent students from the same school from competing against each other, it's standard practice to register different classes at different sites and times."

"WHAT?!" Monoma's face crumbled. Then rebuilt itself. Then crumbled again. The emotional whiplash of a man whose entire speech had just been invalidated.

Then he rallied.

"WHAT A SHAME THAT I WON'T GET TO BEAT YOU ALL WITH MY OWN TWO HANDS! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!" He threw his head back and laughed with the conviction of someone who had decided that if the universe wouldn't let him dunk on Class A in person, he would simply dunk on them from a distance.

"Does he have a condition?" Kaminari whispered to Kirishima.

"He's just like that," Kendo said, dragging Monoma away by his collar. "GOOD LUCK ON YOUR TRAINING, CLASS A!"

"THEY DON'T NEED LUCK, THEY NEED A MIRACLE! BWAHAHA..." The rest of Monoma's taunt was cut off by the corridor door closing.

…

That evening, the common area of the 1-B dorm was full of exhausted bodies and casual conversation.

Tetsutetsu was face-down on the couch. Kamakiri sat on the floor with his back against the kitchen counter, drinking something cold. Awase had claimed the armchair and wasn't moving. Komori and Pony were on the carpet sharing a bag of apple slices.

"They're working us to the bone..." Awase groaned.

"That's the point. We only have nine more days." Kaibara said from behind his phone.

"How're your ultimate moves coming along?" Shoda asked, sitting on the couch arm.

"Gatling Impact is getting there," Kendo flexed her fingers. "My hands cramp up after the eighth cycle, though. Need to build endurance."

"Blade Domain's done," Kamakiri said. "The Blade Spiral still makes me dizzy if I spin more than twice. Working on it."

"I developed three ultimate moves today." Shiozaki said from the corner. She was sitting cross-legged with her eyes closed.

"Three?!" Tetsutetsu lifted his face from the couch cushion.

"The Lord works quickly through willing hands."

"My Re-Beast is functional," Shishida said with a book in his hand. "The timing of the reversion and re-transformation is the key. Too slow and I'm caught in human form. Too fast and the reversion doesn't create enough of a size difference to matter."

"What about you, Manga?" Kendo looked at him.

Manga was leaning against the wall near the kitchen with a mug of tea. Setsuna was beside him with her head on his shoulder, half-asleep.

"I’m trying to combine different words."

"Combine?" Awase raised an eyebrow.

"I'm the man who will surpass God. My moves should reflect that." A flexing emoji appeared in his bubble.

"He's been muttering onomatopoeias and their meanings nonstop." Setsuna muttered. "Dokan this. Mochi-mochi that. I'm dating a man with a god complex."

"I don’t want to become a God. I want to become better than God." Manga corrected her.

"Is that a new level of narcissism that I can’t even understand?" Setsuna poked his side.

“I don’t think I’m a narcissist.” Manga retorted.

"Wait combinations..." Monoma sat up from where he'd been lounging. His notebook appeared in his hand. "That's incredibly versatile."

"I'm still figuring out which combinations work and which ones don't. Some words complement each other. Some cancel each other out. Some do nothing new when paired. It's going to take time to map it all."

“But theoretically,” Monoma’s pen was moving, “the combinations explode the more words you know. And if there’s no limit on how many you chain together...”

“There’s no ceiling.” Manga took a sip of tea. “Except my throat.” 

The room was quiet for a moment. Their classmate had just casually explained that his quirk's potential was mathematically infinite.

"Anyway," Manga said. "Who wants to watch something on TV?"

The tension broke. Conversations resumed. Someone grabbed the remote. The evening settled into the comfortable noise of twenty teenagers living together.