Combat Lesson: Can You Feel the Sunshine?

“All right
Hold tight
I’m a highway star!”

Darren had never been one to listen to music while he was doing things, especially things relating to hero work or showing that he was better than everyone else in general: he prided himself on unbreakable concentration and music only served as a distraction. One needed absolute, bleeding-sharp focus while in the middle of a fight.

Or a race.

Before the race, however, it was as good a way to hype oneself up, and so Darren partook, blasting Deep Purple in his headphones on the way to the class. Others -- Reddarc’s face briefly flashed in his mind as he had the thought -- would have picked up some mid-90’s eurobeat, but he was OD’s Hazard’s star bassist and damn if he wasn’t representing his fellow rock kids.

He smiled and greeted Geist-sensei as he arrived, dressed as instructed in his hero outfit save for the usual harness; shedding weight was important in a race. It therefore only consisted of the green jumpsuit, black leather rangers and steel-knuckled mittens, and save for those last two items and the white letters of “KINETIC” and “ACTIVITY” sewn on his sleeves, he would have looked very much like a janitor.

That’s when the flexing combat teacher dropped the surprise: they were not gonna race alone, but cooperatively instead. “Why do we get the ugly yellow, Geist-sensei?” he asked on a joking tone before he turned around to see his partner. It was the bear guy, the aptly named Tsuji Kuma. Two words came to his mouth: not a remark, not a suggestion, but a declaration. “Bear. Cavalry.”

The rules were simple: you finished when both you and your teammate crossed the line, or, in other words, once the slower of the two finished. They were allowed to fight, but not to supercede the course, and given that Geist-sensei wasn’t showing them the course and asking them to figure it out by themselves, Darren guessed that would mean their orientation skills would be put to the test. His tactical brain immediately started cruching the implications; it was a race in which finishing first of your group didn’t matter in the slightest, it was all about getting both participants across. With the combat element involved, it cemented the idea that it was better to stick together to avoid getting picked off in a defeat in detail sort of deal -- though branching off might be a good idea if the course proved as labyrinthic as Geist-sensei was hinting at.

True to his words, he lined up not next to his bearlike teammate but on top of him, riding on his back as the expression “Bear Cavalry” implied. It might be seen as a weird choice, one that would rob Darren of his top speed, but this was more akin to an endurance race than Formula One; the focus wasn’t on crossing the finish line first so much as it was on making it to the end with both participants fresh and alive while fending off attacks from the two other teams.

“You ever see sidecar racing? Isle of Man shit?” he whispered to his furry mount with a disconcerting hint of excitement in his voice. “Just barrel down the corners at full speed. Don’t even worry about slowing down. Trust me, I’ll make us turn.” Now would be a good time for Tsuji to worry about what the fuck did he just got himself into, but Geist-sensei didn’t leave him that luxury as he kicked off the start of the race.

“BEAR CALVARY, CHAAAAAAAAAARGE!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. Yumi was already fizzing ahead of them with Miyu on her shoulders; Feng soon sprang after her with Red in tow, and hopefully the bear cavalry would take off at the same time. Bears were much, much faster than their blubbery appearance made them seem to be, and from what he had seen, that applied just as much for Tsuji, hence Darren wasn’t too worried about top speed. Maneuverability he would assure in the corners; this arrangement would leave him free to roam during straighter portions of the race, however, and since that’s what the course started with, he got to work immediately and jumped off Tsuji’s back to run a little ahead of him, chasing after Yumi and Miyu but keeping his partner’s at arm’s length.

He didn’t leave Tsuji’s back unguarded for long. In fact, he immediately went to crash in the rock wall to their side, a puzzling move to be sure but one that Yumi was likely to recognize, as the intent and the result was to break off enough sizable pieces of rock for Darren to kick and throw their way. Some were aimed at Yumi, but more at Miyu; the delinquent’s logic was that Yumi likely wouldn’t be able to zigzag around so much while hauling the less mobile turn-into-a-giant girl on her back lest she knocks her out with G-forces alone when untransformed, and if she did transform, well, she wouldn’t be as easy to lug around.

The aim was to knock Miyu off her back that way, or at least to prevent Yumi from just straight-up blasting ahead in a straight line, forcing her to waste time zig-zagging around the rocky projectiles. Separating your opponents and pinning one of them down was the key here, as it would do Yumi no good to cross the finish line of her own, no matter how fast she was.

And damn was she fast, he remarked to himself. It pissed him off a little, but it added fuel to the fire of his fighting spirit. There could be only one speedy bastard at Yuuei, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be a redhead if Darren had anything to say about it.

As a two-man unit, Darren and Tsuji entered the corner last, but that was okay. They were not going for entry speed, they were going for exit speed and to launch themselves out of the corner. “Hug the right side, and then keep going straight. Trust me through the corner, but remember, you’re in charge for the exit! We’re going for a late apex, so don’t bother slowing down! Let’s go!”

Gripping Tsuji’s hero suit tightly, Darren secured a hold with his legs as to distribute the force of his pull evenly over the bearman’s body as he shifted to the left like a motorcycle rider would. His objective was to get through the corner as fast as possible, after all, not hurt his teammate. He nonetheless warned him before the first activation as the sparks crackled over his back: “Hang tight, the first time is rough as shit!”

The next instant, Tsuji would get to experience something close to the feeling Darren had gotten used to from years of using his quirk. All of a sudden, it would feel as if he was being pulled by the nape of his neck -- roughly where Darren was gripping his hero outfit -- for the good and simple reason that he was being pulled by the nape of his neck by Darren’s activation. This would repeat six or seven times more through the corner as the delinquent bear pilot adjusted their course.

The one doing the pulling was in little to no better shape himself, hunched over Tsuji’s back at a sharp left angle, almost parallel to the ground as he hung on for dear life -- or rather, for dear victory: should Darren let go after all, he would be able to catch himself quickly, but Tsuji would likely run off-course if he kept going straight as fast as possible like Darren requested and they would lose a lot of time.

That wouldn’t do, so the delinquent held on, putting his grip strength and quirk output to the test. They both held. With every activation of Autokinesis Darren forced the speeding bear to corner without either of them having to slow down as was the case for a regular corner. Maintaining that kind of speed through a corner was no small feat, and with the other two teams busy trying to slow each other down, this was the perfect opportunity to overtake the both of them and gain a lead in this race.

Of course, though, this was no regular racetrack corner. This was more comparable to one of these corners from hell where one car crashed, forcing two others to go off-course and a fourth to crash into the first one, creating a mess of debris and confusion to navigate through. Except instead of a shower of debris, it was Yumi peppering them with electric blasts and Feng and Red trying to counter them.

It was certainly chaos, but as stated previously, the perfect kind of chaos in which to overtake the whole group and leave them in the dust. “Power through, bear boy!” Darren shouted in-between two cornering pulls of Autokinesis. “Take a couple blasts if you have to, we can take the lead!!”

Indeed, with both Feng, Yumi and Red throwing out attacks at each other, none of them would be cornering at optimal speed. Their sheer velocity and the fact that none of the attacks were aimed specifically at them meant they had their chances to power through with a minimal amount of harm. It was one hell of a ballsy gamble, jumping head-first into this live-fire bullet hell, but boldness often predated success.

Sometimes it also predated disaster, but let’s not focus on that, shall we?

The corner exit, with its lots of dangers between Miyu’s threat of transformation and Red’s fire fang attack, which their speed would make them a target of, would be left to Tsuji, however. After pulling like that all through the corner, Darren had to pause for a few seconds. He was already seeing grey -- a sign that the repeated activations in a single direction, reinforced by the centrifugal force, were forcing his blood down and away from his brain, menacing him with grey-out, which was just an euphemism for “keep doing that and you're gonna knock yourself out from lack of blood to the brain, and you'll sure as hell lose the race if you do.”

Dealing with the corner exit and any decisions that would come with it would then be entirely in Tsuji’s charge, and he had no shortage of things to contend with. Darren shouted the best encouragement he knew, which was quoting old action movies: “Go ahead bear boy, make my day!!”