The wild boy and the wildling

See, the thing about breaking a fall is that you had to do just that: break a fall. What goes up must come down, and what goes up high must come down hard. Most people, when they have to break a fall, only have the option to do it on the cold hard ground, and that usually comes with the downfall of losing all your speed at once, which has the unfortunate side effect of breaking all your bones. This is why, historically, humans have always preferred falling on mattresses than concrete.

However, Darren mocks your laws of gravity. Or at least he tells himself he does. Like any human being or thing with mass, this blonde dumbass is just as subject to gravity as anyone, but he has a neat trick. See, he can create instantaneous momentum in his body, and the fun thing about momentum is that if you have momentum in two opposing directions at once -- which isn’t usually possible, which is why humans have developed their own neat tricks like parachutes to create drag, a remarkably close second to literal superpowers -- they cancel each other out. The bad news is, a contact with the ground at high speed also does that. It creates instantaneous momentum equal to the momentum of your fall, therefore abruptly stopping it in a process commonly known as crashing.

All these long-winded explanations full of forced unfunny jokes by an author who thinks he's the shit to say that Darren’s quirk allowed him to crash on the ground, but in mid-air. It seemed stupid, but it opened a lot of possibilities. Better fall thrice from a story's height than once from three stories. That's how Darren break his falls with Kinetic Jutsu.

To an observer, it looked like he was a driving student on his first lesson slamming the brakes three times in a row. That’s also kind of what it felt like to Darren. It was something between a crash and slamming on the brakes three times.

He did jump from pretty high up, however, and as much speed as this quirk-simulated braking-crashing shaved, he still had to land on his hands and feet to absorb the impact. With such a quirk and such a reckless way to use it, it was no wonder that Darren was one tough bastard.

Breaking from these self-centered considerations on his quirk, and still a little shaken by the landing, another problem was divebombing on him at breakneck speeds. He saw the girl, who was now apparently chasing him -- how he got himself in such a situation while he was sleeping not a minute ago would still escape him for a while -- literally pouncing on him from the tree with a glow in her eyes that Darren had only seen in a few opponents before. His fighting instincts kicked in and he barrel-rolled away from the incoming wildling with a sideways activation of his quirk, pushing himself up with his arm as he rolled and stumbling upright with the help of a calculated blast of kinetic jutsu in the torso. He turned on himself once or twice before he got a proper hold of his balance, and while it was pretty impressive that he was able to regain his footing after rolling on the ground so fast, it really looked more like someone just pulled him up by the collar and threw him on his feet than a graceful recovery.

Whatever, Darren had time to think and see what was happening around him now, and what he saw was that that in order to break her own divebombing fall, she used an awkward but surprisingly effective roll to absorb most of the momentum and was back on her feet in a manner much more gracious than his. It sure was funny how people without Kinetic Jutsu broke their falls, Darren thought.

Anyway, the girl was now on to him again. He recalled hearing her say something about playing too, and right now it looked like she was chasing after him. He also recalled that the whole reason he went through that whole mess of breaking falls and dodging divebombing chicks was to escape the footsteps he heard earlier. While the girl was remarkably silent in her movements, he was significantly less so and whoever those footsteps belonged to was bound to hear him, and that was before even getting into the whole mess of cardboard boxes he was also bound to find.

The situation called for a tactical retreat, also known as hauling ass, so Darren hauled ass. If she really did think they were playing tag or something, that crazy chick would follow anyway. Now that he thought of it, between Shorty, Blondie, the beehive bitch (it’s an ‘affectionate nickname’ he says) and this one, he was meeting a lot of crazy chicks lately.

Even as he was running away, Darren was still Darren, and after a few seconds, he turned to run back-first so he could catch a better glimpse of his pursuer. It reduced his speed, of course, so from time to time he leaped backward with small bursts of his power. It looked like he was being pulled by an invisible string in his back, like a bad sentai show whose wirework was a little too obvious. As he was not running in the direction humans were supposed to run, he couldn’t use big blasts of Kinetic Jutsu. He knew he wouldn’t stick the landing if he went too wild.

The girl was about his age. He’d seen her in class before. She seemed a little weird then, and very weird now. She was laughing -- she clearly enjoyed chasing him, which he couldn’t decide if it was flattering or terrifying. She moved like a wild beast, with a fiery look about her that matched her fiery eyes and fiery hair.

Or at least, used to match. Darren didn’t catch her licking the handful of his own hair she managed to get her hands on -- which would have definitely weirded him out even further -- so all he saw was her reddish hair progressively turning silver.

“Hey! When the fuck did you turn into a grandma?”

Upon closer inspection, it was in the eyes too. And her skin.

“And when did you got contact lenses?… And tattoos?”

For all his jokes, he was born in a world of quirks and it wasn’t dumb. If weird shit was happening, it was probably a quirk. With a renewed sense of danger, he turned to run in the right direction again and leaped again, this time with enough punch to it to qualify as a half-power activation of his quirk. He stuck the landing, tumbling only a little, kind of like he'd just jumped off a moving bike.

The girl did seem like she only wanted to play tag -- which was weird in and of itself for a high-schooler -- but now she was bringing her quirk into it. You did first, a little voice in his head told him, that he promptly silenced with threats of eviction. Whatever, now that there was some distance between the wild boy and the wildling, he couldn’t help but curiously peep over his shoulder to see what the girl’s quirk was.

Darren’s theory that if weird shit was happening, a quirk was involved proved itself true. Unbeknownst to him, however, Aki didn’t need her quirk to cause weird shit to happen, so when her quirk did get involved, the craziness of the shit went up exponentially.

It was a flashy quirk -- lots of UA students had flashy quirks -- and it seemed like she had absolutely no control over it. Apparently, by turning into a grandma, she was able to control winds or something. Aki, now he remembered, that was her name. Hurricane Aki.

By now, the blonde delinquent had stopped running and was admiring the chaos. The girl was sending fierce gusts of sharp wind in every direction. Even on herself, apparently. Was she that bad at controlling her quirk? How did she even get into UA in the first place? So many questions.

After a few seconds of contemplation, he began to realize that the girl really was in trouble. She was cutting herself, making a mess of the lawn and most importantly, screaming. He couldn’t make out what the girl was saying. Shit, if she keeps that up, we’re gonna get caught.

The blonde delinquent made his way back towards the girl. He stopped about twelve meters away, judging that it was a safe enough distance to not expose himself to the slicing winds, but close enough that he could shout something and maybe get heard.

“TURN OFF YOUR GODDAMN QUIRK BEFORE WE GET CAUGHT!”

Not very helpful, but there wasn’t much more he could do right now, and he never expected that someone who got accepted in a heroics school couldn’t control her power. He considered the option of jumping in, grabbing the girl and hauling ass, but the principle that the eye of the storm was the safest place to be didn’t seem to apply to the hurricane girl’s power. He’d like to keep his uniform intact for at least a few weeks, lest his mom would be on his case like she’d never been. He wondered what would get him yelled at more: getting caught skipping class, or tearing his uniform on his second day.

50/50, he wagered, waiting to see if the girl’s quirk would stop on its own. If not, he was gonna have to do something. Well, I am in hero school after all. I'm supposed to save people.

Just like most hurricanes, Aki came and went, making a mess of everything until it went away, as an eerie sense of calm draped itself over the remains of civilization.

Where she went, things were left in a state of desolation. Her gusts of wind kicked up grass and dirt everywhere. The one who suffered the most was the poor tree, on which the girl redirected most her tempest.

In the middle of the aftermath were standing Aki and Darren. The first one was completely winded, quivering like a leaf in the wind -- ironically. She sent the last breeze on Darren, ruffling his blonde hair. He was left half-impressed, half-dumbfounded. He had seen some crazy quirk shit in his day, like a girl who was literally a bloody beehive or a dude with boulder arms, but never before he’d seen such a spectacle of uncontrolled chaos. Aki was, quite literally, a force of nature.

All force of nature that she was, though, Mother Nature was stronger. Or maybe it was karma; in any case, one of the branches seceded from the tree and crashed down on the wildling’s head. She was already in quite the state of disarray, and it was the final straw. She went to sleep with the shock almost peacefully -- compared to what had transpired here a second ago, anyway. With her face lying down in the grass, her hair turned back to normal.

“…What the fuck just happened?”

No answer came from the unconscious human hurricane. Darren sighed. At least he didn’t tear his uniform. He was not the nicest person around -- many would even call him a dick to his face and he’d admit they wouldn’t be so wrong -- but even he wouldn’t flee the scene leaving an unconscious, bleeding girl who might be suffering a head trauma laying there. He went to her, rolled her on her back, and checked her injuries. Nothing but shallow cuts, thankfully. Surprisingly, the delinquent was half-decent at this, though given the number of fights he'd been in, maybe it wasn't so surprising that he knew injuries well.

Sliding a hand below the girl’s neck and another below her knees, he lifted her up and carried her to the school infirmary, princess-style. Except this particular princess was dead weight, one of her arms hanging loosely, and drooling at the corner of her mouth.