The crowd outside U.A. High was alive with nerves, students pacing, stretching, muttering to themselves. Most looked like they were about to face a life-or-death trial - and for some, maybe it was. Souta stood apart from the clusters of anxious teens, hands in his pockets, eyes calm and distant. Compared to the others, he didn't look particularly intense or excited. Just... focused. Like someone who already understood what was waiting for him inside.
As he took a step toward the gate, a quiet chime rang in his mind. The system's interface appeared subtly in the corner of his vision:
[Quest: U.A. Entrance Exam]
Objective: Pass the practical exam
Reward: +1 Quirk Slot
That was all it said. No hints. No advice. Just the opportunity - and a high enough ceiling to be worth the pain. He dismissed it with a blink, rolling his shoulders as he joined the flow of examinees walking through the security checkpoint. Whatever came next, he'd deal with it one step at a time.
He noticed a commotion nearby - a student with messy green hair stumbled, nearly falling, only to be caught by a cheerful girl with chestnut hair. They exchanged nervous words, and others around them chuckled. Midoriya and Uraraka. Seeing them made Souta's brain pause for a moment, recognition surfacing like muscle memory. He didn't linger on it. Just faces now. Fictional or not, they were real people here. If they all passed, then they would meet eventually anyway.
The written exam came and went. Standard stuff - history, ethics, basic logic problems, situational analysis, and a few tougher sections on tactical thinking and quirk safety laws. It was designed less to trick the students and more to filter out the ones who weren't prepared to be heroes in any real capacity. Souta moved through the questions methodically, pencil gliding across the page with quiet confidence. None of it was especially difficult for him. History and logic? Easy. Ethics was a bit more abstract, but he'd thought long and hard about right and wrong lately, about power and its cost.
What really gave him the edge, though, was the preparation. Fuyumi had helped him cram everything U.A. was known to test for, running drills and mock exams until his mind was wired to the structure of it all. She hadn't gone easy on him either - her lessons were strict, her critiques sharper than anything on the page in front of him. But they had worked. Even the quirk safety laws - long-winded clauses about collateral damage responsibility, hero licensing, civilian boundaries - felt familiar now, like information he had always known.
Not that they were even asked for on this exam.
And yet, despite his focus, he never shook the feeling that this part didn't matter. Not really. It was important, yes - but not vital. The written test was just a gatekeeper. A warm-up. The kind of thing you had to do to prove you had a working brain before they threw you into something that actually meant life or death. No villain ever asked for your ethics score before trying to kill you. No collapsing building ever waited for you to finish a logic puzzle.
This was just ink and paper. The real test - the part that counted - was coming. And he was ready for it.
In the preparation zone for the practical exam, Souta waited at the gates of Area B, the zone he was assigned to. Around him, other examinees were hyping themselves up, cracking jokes, or pacing in tight circles. He just stood still. Present Mic's voice exploded from overhead, explaining the breakdown of the exam - robotic enemies scattered throughout the cityscape, point values depending on their type, with a massive zero-pointer that was best avoided altogether.
The gates began to open, but no one moved.
Souta smiled very faintly before starting into a full sprint, right through the now open gates.
Behind him, he heard Mic. Sensei through the announcers begin laughing before continuing, "What are you all waiting for? That one candidate has understood it; there will be no countdown in real life. Or do you think a villain will wait till you're ready?
He moved in early, his stride smooth and practiced. His quirk – Cremation – was powerful, but it came with a cost. He couldn't afford to use it recklessly, not unless he wanted to burn himself worse than anything the exam could throw at him. His first opponent was a one-point robot skittering across a broken intersection. He closed the gap quickly, leapt up, and slammed his heel down into its head, denting the metal with a solid crunch.
'1 Point'
More robots followed. He dealt with a pair of two-pointers using a mix of movement and calculated bursts of blue fire, short enough to avoid serious burns. The scent of scorched steel filled the air. With each attack, he could feel the heat licking up his arm, the discomfort building like pressure behind his skin.
'5 Points'
He winced, shook it off, and kept moving. No time to stop. He slid through an alleyway, ducked behind a half-toppled food cart, and spotted a three-pointer moving between buildings. He waited until it turned, then launched himself from cover, firing a controlled blast of his blue flames, melting one of the robot's legs, then finishing it with another fire enhanced punch to the back of its head.
'8 Points'
The heat was getting harder to manage, his body warning him at every step. Still, he kept going. He didn't have a second quirk yet - no resistance, no support ability - but if he made it through this, that would change.
He knew that he could have also copied an ice quirk from his siblings, or could have directly copied Shoto's Half'n Half, but thought it to be a waste.
At that time, he hadn't known wether he could gain more slots, and what the limit may be to the number of quirks he could wield.
A boy in a yellow tracksuit screamed nearby as a two-pointer cornered him. Without thinking, Souta dove into the fray, dragging the other examinee out of the robot's path, then let loose a short wave of fire to melt its legs out from under it.
"Dude - thanks!" the boy gasped, wide-eyed.
Souta nodded once. "Watch your back," he said, already turning to look for the next threat.
Time blurred. He moved like a machine - burn, strike, duck, recover. The count of points in his mind started to disappear altogether. His arms were raw. His breaths were labored. But he hadn't stopped once. Not until the ground itself began to tremble.
The noise was like a tidal wave of metal.
The zero-pointer arrived.
It tore around the corner of a collapsed highway like a force of destruction, its massive treaded feet crushing entire buildings as it moved. Most of the students scattered at the first sight of it, screaming, running in every direction.
But one boy didn't move.
He was pinned beneath part of a fallen billboard frame, struggling to breathe as the Zero Pointer's shadow fell across the street. His cries for help were drowned out by the chaos.
Souta didn't hesitate. His legs burned as he sprinted toward the wreckage, ignoring the voice in his head screaming at him to run. He reached the trapped boy just as the Zero Pointer's arm began to rise.
"Hold still," he growled.
He planted his feet, flames igniting in his palms - not to attack, but to melt through the beam. The air around him distorted with heat, and the metal glowed red, then white. He could feel the burns crawling up his arms, skin blistering beneath the sleeves of his uniform. Still, he didn't stop until the boy slipped free.
Together, they stumbled away, seconds before the Zero Pointer's arm came crashing down behind them with a thunderous impact.
The boy looked at him, shaking. "You… you didn't have to-"
"I did," Souta cut in, not unkindly. "We're here to become heroes, aren't we?"
The final horn blared, signaling the end of the exam. Medical drones descended from the sky, tending to injuries and evacuating the more seriously hurt. Souta collapsed against the side of a fake convenience store, letting the med-bots stabilize his burns with cooling foam for the moment.
After a couple of minutes, a pair of robots approached and carried the collapsed Souta away, towards the infirmary.
While being carried, his system sounded once again.
[Quest: U.A. Entrance Exam]
Objective: Pass the practical exam
Objective: Cleared
Reward: 1 Quirk Slot
Bonus Objective: Make it into the top three
Reward: 1 Quirk Slot
Souta let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. His body ached, his uniform was half-destroyed, and his arms throbbed with dull, radiating heat - but he had made it. He tilted his head back, staring at the sky. The weight of what came next began to settle in.
One quirk wasn't enough. But now, the door to more had been opened, and his mind began to race, thinking about what kind of quirks he might choose.
And U.A. was only the beginning.