My name is Deguchiya Tenya. I could only stare at the innocuous white headband, marked with red numbers, that I held in my hands. “How did it come to this!?”
In this modern world, the keys to success are simple. Signal the appropriate virtues to the society you are born in, climb up the social ladder in the defined manner, live frugally and save for your retirement, where the fruits of your labors are to be enjoyed for the rest of it. If your position allows, find a like-minded member of the opposite sex to start a family with.
When looked at with such a perspective, Quirks mean nothing. That said, the heroics industry is the largest, highest status industry one can be a part of, and Quirks do matter there. But it is also dangerous and fickle. I know all of the statistics. On average, only a single new agency every other year has what it takes to last more than ten years of business. Two get bought outright, completely subsumed by a different agency, and the rest dissolve within that time frame for one reason or another, with a portion of the surviving human resources of the agency getting picked up piecemeal by other agencies and whoever doesn’t goes into other, less prestigious industries or drops out of the workforce entirely.
No, being a hero is not something that can reliably lead to a comfortable retirement. Especially not for someone whose Quirk is poor for combat. My Quirk is called Mathemagician. While it includes a smattering of passive benefits inherited from generations past, the primary function is to use mathematics to affect the physical world. It sounds impressive, until you realize that even the greatest quirk falls short when it lacks in power or endurance. I could enhance my strength to a quite impressive level… for a few seconds. I could fly… for a kilometer or two at most. I could cut through steel… for a few inches. I could shoot a powerful laser… once. After each of those, Mathemagician falls flat, requiring hours of recovery in order to do anything notable. More useful than any of those was an enhanced memory and calculative ability, and while it wasn’t anything special as mental enhancement quirks went, those are still relatively rare, and as a result my academic rankings were always high, although never quite at the top.
With that advantage, I applied to the most prestigious high school in eastern Japan. UA high school. A truly top-tier business course, perfect for attaching yourself to the heroic industry, without that pesky ‘risking your life’ and ‘being in the spotlight’. I got fifth place in the general exam (why were there so many philosophy questions…), and second in the business exam. I had actually held out hopes that without Yaoyorozu participating, I could get first for once with that business exam, but as it always was, the first place podium was denied to me.
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The culture of UA was significantly different from my middle school, or really any other school in Japan. In other schools, even UA’s rival Shiketsu, the expectation was to respect the hierarchy, to succeed silently and humbly, and to not create a disturbance of yourself, at UA the motto was ‘Plus Ultra!’. The worst thing anyone could ever accuse you of is being lazy, and of not trying your hardest to succeed. Someone who proudly declared their expectations of victory was still derided for arrogance and presumption, as that top heroics student demonstrated when he was supposed to recite the Athlete’s Oath, but open competition was the norm, with the hero course students exemplifying that ethos, as they were actually motivated rather than angered by that challenge.
So, coming in to the obstacle course race, in my regular gym clothes, I expected what my fellow management students expected: to valiantly try my best, but to be left in the dust behind the forty demigods who have trained their bodies far longer than I, with Quirks stronger than mine, and then quietly fade back into obscurity, carefully watching the rest of the competition as we fill out Nedzu’s assignment on predicting the marketability of each contestant and their resulting offers from hero agencies.
Hanging well back from the crowd at the beginning, the first obstacle was a bottleneck where all one hundred and forty first year students had to cram into one tunnel, wide enough for maybe five people to go through at once comfortably, but that still left the tunnel with a press of bodies that would be difficult to go through. One of the recommended students, the heir of the number two hero Endeavor, erupted in ice, trapping everyone in the press with only his classmates expecting it and breaking free before the ice could claim them.
Still, there wasn’t a rule specifying you had to go through the tunnel, as it wasn’t an explicit obstacle, just an implicit one. So I used the flight formula; the one that I haven’t used in six years, as flying is illegal and never lasted long enough for me to bother finding legal ways, and simply flew over the whole tunnel. The first actual obstacle were robots, who shot some projectiles up in the air, but a quick deflection formula easily pushed away what was left of their momentum after traveling that far upwards. The other two obstacles were… a chasm and a minefield. In other words, utterly ignorable.
I expected there to be another flier among the hero students. There were none. I expected there to be a speed Quirk that could outpace the thirty or so kilometers per hour speed that I was traveling at so I could withstand the winds and turns without using reinforcement formulas, which would be less efficient. None of those could easily traverse the second obstacle, much less the third. I expected some competitive hero student with a capture type quirk to impede my progress. None could reach.
Most foolishly of all, I expected my Quirk to fail me, like it always did when it counted. Instead, it drew on new reserves of strength, going beyond what I thought possible and instead taunting me with thousands of seconds of flight time when I expected hundreds.
All leading towards this one headband, eight digits of red numbers that might as well be concentric circles with how much of a target they made me. I can only repeat my mantra of despair. “How did it come to this?"