Giving Up Hurts More [Emi]

What the fuck?

Didn’t Emi live off campus? How the hell did she get here so quickly? Oh well, these questions didn’t matter. For all he knew she just needed to poop really badly and stayed after class to do that for an hour or… three, God what time was it holy shit? Or maybe she just was sitting out here the whole time, the circumstances didn’t matter at this point. They were irrelevant and unimportant, the thing that mattered is Alex pretending like he wasn’t fully expecting to be the first person to arrive like he usually was for these things. Mildly irritating, but nothing he couldn’t work through. He usually hated having people actually see him rip shadow, because that brief lag was a weakness that nobody had taken advantage of quite yet. Frankly? The less people who knew about that particular weakness, the better because even people who couldn’t abuse it could blab their mouths to people who potentially could.

”Nice?” the disdain in the delinquent’s voice was palpable. ”I’m doing this because you helped out Chimera. End of. This isn’t nice, this is transactional. You doing that and calling out the military was dumb as hell, but you did it anyway. You realized it, and probably feel like you’re not strong enough to do anything if they come and fuck with you.” he continued, his tone shifting to neutral as he stated out loud what was completely and utterly obvious for anyone reading U.A. chats recently. There was a brief pause as red eyes judgmentally looked the girl up and down.

”I want you to step out to your max range and go apeshit whenever you’re ready.” the American started, digging his heels into the snow where he was and ripping the shadow behind him for use. ”You’re not going to win, but I’ll at least be able to see where you’re at in terms of quirk and skill set. If you manage to knock me down at any point, you get to pick your teammates and the location of your next Hero Operations session. I’ll also give you your list of opponents in advance.” the tone of his voice made it clear exactly how likely he thought that particular turn of events would be, but it didn’t help to put forward a carrot too.

Emi’s shadow was ripped as well while Alex was talking, and as long as she did not move outside of a roughly thirty meter range it would continue to be ready for attacks. The instant that she made any offensive move, a tendril would come up from behind the girl and attempt to toss her five to ten meters backward. The tendril would not let go until Emi Tachibana had been tossed several times until she was out of the aforementioned thirty meter range and Alex’s quirk fizzled out. The tendril would have the hardness of iron, and easily strong enough to toss the girl farther than that – but the goal wasn’t to hurt her. She hadn’t even really irritated the delinquent, it was just standard practice.

It first established why Alex was the one teaching by showing the gap of skill, because he had seen her capabilities in the last Hero Operations scenario and he wasn’t exactly super impressed. It established the fact that he was competent enough to fuck around, and if he played this seriously it would be over in a flash. It clearly showed by the teachers trusted him with the club, and training in general.

Secondly, being tossed around like a ragdoll was a surefire way to piss anyone with any sense of pride off. The girl was wearing zero snow gear, so ice and snow would get all up in her hair and clothes and be hella uncomfortable. It would burn and be cold and be fucking miserable, and she would either give up immediately or come at him with everything she had. If she did the former, then Alex could go back inside secure in the fact that he did everything he could about the situation. If she did the latter, then the boy would swap to full defensive mode and just let Emi attack him as she wished for a bit to get a feel for how she thought about things.

He would toss out the occasionally offensive move, typically the yanking or sharp push of a leg to knock the girl down to fuck up her tempo but by and large once he had done the initial display of power he was more than content to just defend and see what he was working with. His style was much less walls of matter and much more intercepting attacks with other attacks, and he had absolutely no problem freezing his quirk to break apart the salt if he thought it would help and just seeing if he could fuck up the material itself she was manipulating to make it useless. He didn’t expect it to work overly well, because it effected organic material like flesh much more than nonliving objects like wood or … salt, but it was worth a shot at least!

This was as much practice for Alex as it was for Emi, and his goal was to escape this spar completely untouched. It was unlikely, especially given that her quirk was probably as versatile as his was… but he at least hoped to force her to think outside the box and abandon head-on attacks as a means to break his defenses. If she was forced to do weird shit, it meant that she had a fucking brain and could actually adapt to the situation. If she kept trying to go straight forward and hammer down his defenses, she was going to have an absolutely and utterly fucking awful time with it. The delinquent would keep a small reserve of shadow ready at his feet in order to break any bindings that were put on any of his limbs, because that was a counter that he was absolutely expecting to come from the ground. Salt would be hard to see against the snow, and he doubted Emi was dumb enough to lift it above the ground forever.

Emi was comfortable enough to trash talk at the beginning, but the unceremonious ring out and snow cover did wonders for fixing that particular problem. She yelled frustration at the boy and managed to stomp on over as well as melt the snow that was covering a good chunk of her body at that point on the way over. She wasn’t running, so thirty meters took a few seconds to cover. While for an opponent that the delinquent disliked he might use this time to trash talk or be obviously disrespectful by yawning or stretching… there wasn’t exactly too much of a point here.

He instead lowered his body weight a bit and assumed a fighting stance, completely unnecessary… but it showed at least that Alex was taking this seriously. The physical positioning was for her sake, not his. He didn’t bother filtering his words, and just spouted out things as he saw them to both state clearly that he had noticed certain things and to piss her off a bit more. ”Very short range. Plan or low power.” was his first one, on account of the girl coming in much closer than he expected before even attempting to use her quirk against him.

”Low power. Low accuracy, even at point blank range.” were the next words out of his mouth, said without any emotion attached to it. It wasn’t trash talk, it was just a statement. Spikes, triangles… ”Uncreative attacks. Very basic.” were the next words out of his mouth, this time with mild disappointment. There was really nothing positive to come out of this so far, and that was kind of sad.

It was at this point that Alex ramped up his efforts to be annoying and took a more offensive route. He failed to do any actual attacks but started to be as annoying as he possibly could. He used his quirk to shake the girl roughly on the shoulders, to yank at legs and arms seemingly at random, and to shove her shoulders back repeatedly in an effort to fuck with her. This annoyance was constant, and with her attack patterns as predictable as they were a mixture of dodging, deflecting, and redirecting was more than enough to prevent any serious damage from coming the way of the American. If she wasn’t going to pressure him, he was going to pressure her until she was actually forced to do something about it.

His heels were still firmly dug in where he had originally planted them and hadn’t moved even a millimeter since the salmon haired girl started her assault. ”I find it hard to believe you’re this bad. Please show me the only reason that U.A. accepted you wasn’t because of your uTube following, because I’m struggling to find any positives here.” he said, his voice carefully neutral. This was meant to be enraging, but he took it a step further still. ”If this is all you have, maybe a career as a weather girl or something would be more up your alley. Look good on camera, and leave the heroics to heroes yeah?”

If this didn’t light a fire under the girl, nothing would. He found it exceptionally hard to believe that anyone’s aim could be that fucked up after over a decade living with their quirk. Nobody was that fucking terrible, which meant that for some fucking reason she was refusing to hit him with intent to harm. A drunk idiot could hit a standstill target at five meters, and Emi was better than that. If he pissed her off enough, she would actually fucking do something other than waste both of their time out here in the freezing cold of winter.

So, he would keep pushing, with words and with his quirk until something snapped and Emi started taking this seriously. The barrage with his quirk at this point would be like if four to six athletes were in a circle around the girl just continuously shoving her in every which direction with the occasional sweep of the feet. This would continue until she actually attacked him with intent to harm, and once she finally did that the intensity of the annoyance would go down back to the level it was at before.

This annoyance was done with two tendrils of shadow that had the hardness of iron and moved with Emi where-ever she moved to continue to harass her over and over. Sometimes they would split into four for a multi-directional shove, but they would harass her endlessly nevertheless. He still kept the small reserve at his feet for the expected trip attempt, but otherwise was content to just redirect, deflect, intercept and dodge the attacks that came his way.

He hadn’t expected to last this long without actually being touched, and it was annoying. He shouldn’t have gone this long without even a glancing blow hitting him, and if this entire bout ended with him actually being untouched… Alex was going to be absolutely livid. 1-B didn’t have the same pedigree that 1-A did or the relentless drive that characterized 1-C… but surely they taught their students something right? Surely they had some combat training where shit like this would be cleaned up? Some form of quirk lessons where someone with range capabilities this poor could practice? This type of extremely basic level shit wasn’t another student’s job to teach, it was the faculty’s job because they were being paid to do it.

The goal of Hero Operations was to turn average hero candidates into good hero candidates, and good ones into great ones through scenario-based practice. He could not make a useless hero candidate not useless… that was beyond his ability. He had to have something to work with as a base, or this was pointless. Emi would either show that she wasn’t useless at this point after being goaded on far past the point where most would be willing to go… or she would prove that she wasn’t worth anyone’s time to train anymore. It really was as simple as that.

Huh.

This was odd. Normally this type of person the easiest to provoke, those who wore their pride on their sleeve like that. Even the physical shaking was gone, and that could have been from the cold more than anything due to the cold water seeping through the girl’s clothes after she melted the snow. Trash tier bait, huh? Maybe she was a little different than the norm he was used to, but she still hadn’t shown him anything to justify her existence here at the school. She still hadn’t proven she had anything other than more self-control than the deranged lunatics that populated Class 1-A who would go off on genocidal rants at the slightest provocation and try to murder people. It wasn’t a high bar, and clearing it meant nothing except that Emi wasn’t psychotic.

The pattern of her attacks changed. They packed more power now and were much more creative. Since he had committed to not really attacking, he was forced to pull more shadow towards him defensively. Where there used to be two full strength tendrils next to Emi, one of them seemed to liquify and move back to the feet of the delinquent to give him more matter to work with to dodge these multi-directional attacks. As a result, the harassment on his opponent lessened significantly and became much less severe. It also became much more predictable, because it could at least only split into two while remaining tough enough to avoid being destroyed.

With the new matter at his feet, he had more than enough to completely stall the offense of the uTube star. The two larger shots from both directions were intercepted by quick blasts of umbrakinetic energy that shattered the crystalline constructs with ease. The shadows he was pulling from, as in his own and Emi’s both remained completely steady throughout this exercise, so his supply was never even close to running out. He was spreading his attention to different places, but that was fine. Emi would have to do a hugely telegraphed attack in order to have enough power to do anything, and that attack would be deflected or blocked when it came.

The constructs that bore down on him were weaker and slower than his own, so he had the luxury of just destroying them outright. An arrow of shadow could be planted inside a construct and expanded so the salt just rained down across the area into what he thought was a harmless heap. The barrage of attacks from every direction was enough to take up the class representative’s full attention, and he simply didn’t have time to consider anything else other than the attacks rushing at him at any given moment. Aerial attacks were flashy, sure, and it made a little bit of sense considering that every single one of his constructs had to start from the ground… but it was futile in the end. She was doing well enough to stop him talking entirely, though, which meant that he was at least forced to take her seriously enough to not distract himself at this point.

A crystalline staff materialized to his left, a clever little trick to try and catch him while he was looking up. A circle of umbrakinetic energy in the shape of a flat parasol rose up from the ground to block the attack entirely, but that particular construct took his attention away from the real attack that was coming. The boy’s reaction time was good enough to get a small shield of shadow out of the paltry amount of matter the delinquent had left at his feet the entire time to defend himself from the inevitable binding attempt…

But this wasn’t a bind. This was a goddamned pillar of enormous size, and while it didn’t shatter his construction… it didn’t need to. Emi had managed to figure out where the point of weakness was, and she was able to just slam the construct against the delinquent’s stomach in a clean hit with full force and clear intent for follow through. His feet were lifted off the ground from the upward momentum, and suddenly even the single tendril that was left to harass his opponent dissolved as every shadow that he had available moved to protect its master.

The one positive about this entire thing was that a pillar of salt moving upward left its own massive shadow on the ground, and this shadow was quickly ripped and burrowed into the pillar until it reached the center. Once the mass of shadow reached the center of the pillar, it expanded until the entire crystalline construct was destroyed. This was not instant, however, and Alex was several feet in the air from the impact when this completed. If he was not fucked with during the fall, he would land with a heavy thud… but on his feet.

If he was fucked with during his fall, he would expend more power in instant sort of attacks than before while on the way down to block, deflect, and redirect attacks to ensure he still landed on his feet. He hadn’t forgotten about the objective, and he wasn’t about to hand a win condition away that easily. Alex had stated very clearly that for Emi to win she would have to knock him down. She had knocked him up in the air, but not down just yet.

The girl couldn’t see it underneath the balaclava, but Alex had the widest smile on his face at that moment. That was a clever little trick, and if they had been equal in skill level it would’ve been enough to win her the fight right then and there. She had gotten a completely clean hit on him while he was actively trying to defend himself, and though his armor did its job and ate most of the impact he had definitely felt the force behind it. He would let this go on for a little longer to see if she had any follow up to that move, especially with the crystals scattered literally everywhere around him. This wasn’t finished yet, unless that pillar had exhausted her beyond her ability to continue which was definitely possible. God knows pillars had taken a lot out of Alex himself when he first started here at U.A.

No follow up attack, odd.

Alex had gotten significantly tougher since he first came to U.A., to the point where he showed absolutely zero physical pain response to the combined pillar and fall. It was enough to perk him up and force him to pay attention, but not much else. Fists raised once more as he waited for the follow up that never came. There was a wobble from his opponent, showing that she likely didn’t have too much left in the tank in order to continue.

The delinquent was never in the habit of calling off these things from his end. If someone wanted to be as dangerously stubborn as he tended to be, who was he to stop them? Every person at the school was a hero candidate, and they should be able to decide when to stop and when to continue. He wasn’t anyone’s fucking parent, and he wouldn’t pretend to be one to anyone here. Acting like he was better than anyone else except in pure terms of current power level wasn’t his thing. Patronizing and condescending were traits better left for his archrival in 1-A, anyway.

The second Emi called off the bout, though, Alex cancelled his quirk everywhere in an instant. The effect was visible for both his own shadow and Emi’s, a kind of visual glitch where both of their shadows bugged out for a split second before regaining their form. The girl ran off to a nearby building, so the delinquent just shrugged his shoulders and followed. He pulled out the handwarmers he had stuffed in his pockets earlier and rubbed them to get them going with some heat. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough to work with until the fire got started.

The American walked past the girl guzzling an absurdly unhealthy amount of salt and water nonchalantly as he went around and opened the back door as he called out behind him: ”Gonna start a fire. You can choose to freeze in here instead if you want, though.” he commented flatly as he walked past, making a mental note that Emi seemed to use the salt in her body in order to use her quirk. He had no idea that the human body had enough salt for a pillar that big, and honestly the very thought of that was absolutely revolting to him. She probably had some weird physical mutations to go along with it, to give her body that high of a salt count. Yeah… that must be it.

He had done some upgrades to the Ground Alpha buildings since he was over there so much building shit, and one of those upgrades was creating sheds with a good chunk of firewood stocked. The buildings didn’t have fireplaces, but the school didn’t exactly object to the use of firepits either. One of these firepits was placed within spitting distance of each shed, and it was a simple matter with Alex’s ranged quirk to just open the door, get some wood, and dump it into place. Another thing he normally carried around with him on these training sessions was a set of matches, and he pulled a set out of his pocket manually. He then lit the thing and tossed it within the mass of firewood, and then lit two more and tossed them in for good measure. A decent flame was sparked at this point, and a couple of fanning motions with a shadow construct was all it took to start growing very quickly.

It wasn’t a big fire, and it was only enough wood to last twenty or thirty minutes max… but it was enough for now. The bright side was that Emi had exceeded Alexander’s admittedly very low expectations for her. She wasn’t the testosterone filled, pride injected meathead that was honestly most of his opponents these days and was able to keep her cool when faced with verbal as well as physical humiliation where so many others had failed. She had used her environment around her in a way to get a clean hit against an opponent who was actively defending of greater skill than her, showing that she at least had a few tricks up her sleeve. Her power, range, and accuracy left a lot to be desired… as did the fact that for her plan to work she needed to use almost all of her stamina and salt reserves for one make or break attack…

But it was a starting point that was above zero! She had tried and wasn’t afraid of trying out strategies with high risk and had managed to make someone who was extremely averse to leaving the ground go airborne for a few solid seconds. She had, uh, what was that word? Spunk. Yeah, Emi had spunk… and that was enough to be worth the time to train further because not every hero candidate had that.

Some scum here, like Akio, would back down and run when confronted with something or someone much more powerful than themselves. At the initial display of strength, Akio would have made up some excuse to not be there and run. Because that was all that cowards like that were good for – taking out threats that weren’t hard for them and talking up a big game that evaporated like dew in the sunlight when any real danger came along. When push came to shove, people like that valued their own pride more than their own lives or even the lives of others. They advanced and did this only to fuel their ego, thinking that one day they would unlock their potential and all the danger would be gone so they could stop running.

Others, like Robin, were just too delusional to think they could lose. They would charge in a straight line over and over until someone either saved them, they won, or they died. They had absolutely no self-control and no sense of self-preservation and would need saving at least as much as they saved others. It was the same root problem of placing personal pride above their own life, but with the opposite outward effect of suicidal tendencies and the absolute refusal to do anything other than lunge forward with everything until they died trying.

Emi was neither of these. She understood that this was a training exercise and that Alex wouldn’t kill or seriously injure her and was willing to put that basic trust in him to go out here and try. She also understood that killing herself to get an insignificant hit in within a spar with no stakes was an unnecessary and stupid risk. Her quirk also had more potential than either of those dopes, too, so it worked out on all fronts.

The delinquent was more than happy to just sit there and enjoy silence for a little while, but it seemed like the salmon haired girl disagreed. Red eyes flicked over to the girl who had decided to stand around the fire and come out, and red eyes rolled the instant before he obliged her request. His tone was similar to before, matter-of-fact and emotionless like he was reading the nutrition label on the back of a bowl of ramen or something.

”Your opening strategy was dumb and took advantage of the fact I couldn’t really attack back. You used most of your energy on useless attacks that didn’t even try to hit me in order to hit one surprise attack. I really doubt you needed that much salt on the ground, and even if you did you could have forced me to use my quirk defending myself if you actually aimed at me the whole time.”

There was a momentary pause before he decided to get in front of what Alex deemed the most likely excuse. ”Yeah, yeah. Win conditions, this wasn’t a real fight. The fact of the matter is when you’re in an actual fight, you come back to muscle memory. The same shit you’re used to doing and have done a lot, you will do when shit hits the fan. Assuming you don’t freeze up in terror like some people do. If you get used to practicing near missing a bunch – you’ll just get really good at near misses. That’s a useless skill unless you’re looking to pretend to be a hero on T.V. Since that’s not what you’re going for, it doesn’t do you any good to pick up that skill.”

Another pause, but this time Alex turned his body towards the girl, so he wasn’t just giving her the side eye. ”Though, you can pick up skills that are useful to you here without a lot of help if you’re willing to put in the time and effort. It won’t be easy, and it won’t really be a lot of fun, but if you wanted to improve you would definitely improve faster than people who aren’t doing it. It’s how I did it – lots of people just do the bare minimum in class and just kind of dick around afterwards doing whatever the fuck after not paying attention in the classes that are actually, y’know, relevant to becoming a pro. Turns out, whining about how life isn’t fair isn’t a strategy for success here.”

Before he started the next bit, the delinquent pointed to his left towards the sports fields. ”Accuracy training is easy. They have baseball shooting machine because of my classmate, Kirk, convincing the school that he needed them for his club. You can adjust the speed it fires, and you just practice hitting the damn things in midair. Those are small, fast moving targets and if you can hit those consistently you can hit just about anything.”

For the next part he pointed forwards, towards more of the trees in the distance. Off campus there were a decent chunk of them in a forest-y area that Aki liked to be in a lot of the time. ”Strength training is also easy. Find a tree and chop it down with your quirk. Then chop up the bit that fell over into firewood. At first it’ll probably be pretty difficult, but it gets you used to not holding back. It lets you let loose with everything you have, over and over. Quirks are like muscles, and the most efficient way to get a muscle stronger is to train close to the maximum you can actually do so your body gets used to the strain and adapts. It might take you a while to take down the first tree, but if you keep doing it for a couple of months it becomes much, much easier. Eventually you can do it with one hit, and the chopping up into firewood in one too. One you get the strength, then you work the control. Once trees become easy, then move on to something bigger and stronger like a brick wall. There are quite a few of them scattered around here, and you won’t get in trouble for knocking them down.”

There was a longer pause, then, as he looked the girl in front of him up and down and saw that she was still a bit woozy. A long lasting drawback, for sure. Something to note for future reference, because that could definitely lead to some accidental injuries down the road if she had the wrong opponent who didn’t know how to do anything except for charge forward and go full offense until someone died or passed out. ”If you don’t have to use the salt inside your body, that’s also really inefficient. Find some way to store it in your hero costume so you’re not fucked up afterwards. I don’t care if you literally bring a backpack filled with fucking salt shakers with you, that’s fine and an exception to the whole ‘train like you fight’ thing until you figure something out. Not everyone has the same, uh, control at this school so your little wobbly spell could end with an injury if you’re up against the wrong dumbass… even in training.”

The handwarmers were still being massaged to bring just a bit more warmth over to the American, because low temperatures and his quirk didn’t really mix the best. Overuse of his quirk always lowered his body temperature, and when the area around him was already freezing… well, it didn’t turn out so fun for anyone involved. It normally didn’t pose an actual danger to him, but during the winter it definitely started to. He hadn’t reached the point yet where he was anything other than just mildly colder than usual, though, which was good. If that match had gone on a minute or two longer it may have well been him to call for the end of the match to avoid frostbite.

The American almost made it the whole way without interrupting. He was this close to letting her finish, but the second that the girl tried to say that her plan worked it pissed him off enough to cut in right then and there. His volume level didn’t raise, and while his annoyance didn’t bleed into his tone and instead manifested itself into a clenched jaw that was thankfully hidden beneath the balaclava. He had been trying to improve on the whole ‘letting people finish speaking’ thing but slipped up now and then… usually when the other person was saying something dumb as hell. Stupid or dangerous sentences didn’t need to finish, especially when they were objectively wrong at every level.

”Surprising me with an attack I didn’t see coming… after delaying for long enough for you to tire yourself out and relying solely on the fact that you realized partway through that I wouldn’t attack you. Not what I would consider… uh… sound strategy.” there was a momentary pause when the delinquent’s heels dug into the snow just a little bit more before he continued. ”There was absolutely no reason all of those hits couldn’t have been actual attack attempts. Putting on the kid gloves against someone you know to be stronger than you is not only stupid as hell but also disrespectful. It wastes both of our time, because I sure as hell didn’t come out here to watch you pound snow with your quirk.”

Neck rolled back to hide the narrowed eyes and hands flexed and unflexed as the irritation only grew. It didn’t take long for the boy to interrupt again, when the girl shit all over the basic exercises he had tossed her way and said that he could’ve just texted the information over to her ‘if that was all’. What a snide bitch, honestly. Why the fuck did he even come out here to try and help her? She wasn’t worth it. She wasn’t worth it at all.

”I came out here because you helped Chimera.” he cut in to stop her from talking. Short, direct, and to the point. ”That was a mistake, and won’t happen again. I’m wasting my time here. Go insult someone who’s paid to deal with your bullshit – ‘cause I sure as hell don’t.” the tone was no longer neutral. It was no longer flat, it was filled with contempt. This wasn’t his problem and dealing with a brat wasn’t his job. It was a teacher’s, and he wasn’t about to sit there and volunteer to take the shittiest part of the job that teachers are paid to do and then do it for free. The fact that she would even say things that were this tone deaf and stupid said a lot about the quality of 1-B’s homeroom teacher that was supposed to actually make sure every dope who stepped through these halls at least had the fundamentals down.

Narrowed red eyes matched the girl’s for the briefest of moments before he just turned heel and walked back towards the dorms. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket as he went, rolling his neck around as he did to get some of the frustration out of his body. Moods changed so quickly there may as well have been whiplash, but that just came with the territory. Those that knew him better were already used to how fast Alex’s mood and entire demeanor could turn, and those that didn’t… well, they would learn eventually.

One of the traits that Alex had, for better and for worse was decisiveness. He didn’t spend time thinking if something was the right thing to do or if it was the appropriate thing to do… he just did it. He didn’t particularly give a damn if it made him popular or liked or even if anyone else agreed with him – because that didn’t matter. Not to him, at least. He did what he thought was right in the moment with no hesitation, no anxiety, and no fear.

Once he made a decision, he just followed through. Emi had a clever trick, fine, but wasted all of her energy setting up that trick and was completely and utterly helpless when it didn’t pan out. The fact that she seemed proud of that mockery was fucking insulting, and to sit there and argue with him for giving feedback even more so. There was a level of shit he was willing to put up with for free, but this was past that limit.

There were a couple of routes that Emi could take from here, and most of them ended up with Alex being a hell of a lot warmer in a few minutes. If she did nothing, then Alex would simply trudge back to the school and forget this entire incident ever happened. He had done his part by being a good citizen and immediately leaping to action when a fellow student needed him or whatever the fuck, and he had certainly done enough to soothe his conscience for walking away. He had given her all the tools she needed in order to get better, and what she chose to do with those tools was her business. If she chose to toss them away because they were boring, that was her choice.

If she thought that Pro Heroes became good enough to become Pros in days because they just decided to jump out of bed one day and become strong… well, she was going to have one hell of a rude awakening one of these days. Nobody just woke up one day and got really good unless they were a goddamned prodigy… and Emi sure as hell wasn’t one of those. She had a mediocre quirk with some pretty severe drawbacks and very little natural talent using it. The girl didn’t have the luxury of being carried with a superior quirk and certainly didn’t have the luxury of coasting through with skill already acquired before admittance into U.A.