Chapter Text
An entire year of studying, and all of the trials and tribulations that went along with it, had led to this moment. It was the end of the school year. For every UA student, this meant final exams. All of them had their written tests, spread across three days, followed by any additional exams for their courses. It was always the end of an era. The current crop of third years would graduate, and a new group of first years would join in April. The atmosphere was bittersweet, or at least it would be once the exams were out of the way.
Izuku had to reign in his Sight. An entire school's worth of anxiety was not a pleasant thing to experience, and he had to resist the urge to cast a calming spell on everyone he saw who looked even slightly nervous. They would all be fine. They just needed to make it through these next few days. He had faith in his classmates.
That being said, the nerves were absolutely obvious in more than one person. Ashido and Kaminari, who had both improved a lot over the course of the year, were still at the bottom of the class ranking. As soon as they’d taken their seats, Ojiro had offered Kaminari the fluff of his tail to pet, an offer which was almost immediately accepted. It helped a bit. Even those at the other end of the academic scale were feeling the pressure. Yaoyorozu spent all her time reading. Iida was stricter when it came to enforcing rules. Bakugo, who could usually be counted on to make his presence known in a room, was almost spookily quiet.
Then Aizawa walked in and made his morning announcements. There weren’t many, what with it being exam period. For a moment, Izuku thought he wasn’t going to mention the tests at all.
“Oh, before I forget, Eri wanted me to give you this,” Aizawa said.
From a folder, without a single crease to mar it, Aizawa pulled out a sheet of A4 paper with a drawing on it. It was all of them, drawn by a child’s hand, with “Do your best” written in careful letters above it. Aizawa looked out at the class and nodded.
“You’ve got this.”
It wasn’t an encouragement, nor was it inspiration. It was simply a statement of fact, as though Aizawa was informing them of something that was obvious. Their teacher was not one for grand displays. His dislike for formality and ceremony was well known to them by this point, but those three words did more to lift their spirits than any impassioned speech could. Aizawa pinned the drawing to the board, and when Present Mic walked in with a stack of test papers, none of them felt disheartened.
They actually felt like they could do this.
Three days passed, and they were full of stress, anxiety and exhaustion. Their last written test was on Hero Ethics. The room was full of the sound of pencils scribbling on test papers. UA more than earned its reputation as the best school in the country, and even the smartest in the class felt a bit frazzled as they were tested on not only their knowledge of Hero Laws, but also on applying that knowledge to several tricky scenarios.
“Alright. Times up. Pencil’s down,” Aizawa announced from the teacher's podium.
The class heaved a great sigh of relief. Izuku moved along his row of desks, collecting test papers to hand in. Aizawa counted them, nodded, then addressed the room.
“As always, you still have a practical exam to complete. This will be fully explained to you tomorrow. For now, head back to the dorms. Be sure to get enough rest for tomorrow's test.”
“Man, I’m beat,” Kirishima said later, once they were all dressed in casual clothes and hanging around the common area.
“No kidding. I thought I was gonna cry when I saw that question about hostage situations,” Kaminari said.
“But we got through it. We just need to get through tomorrow’s practical and then that’ll be it!” Uraraka said, her tone joyous and upbeat.
“I wonder what it’s going to be like,” Jiro wondered aloud, “knowing UA, it could be anything.”
“Maybe it’ll be like our first final exam in June?” Uraraka said, “the one where we fought third years with the teachers supervising?”
“Something tells me they won’t do that, not when the third years have their own important exams to focus on,” Asui said, “not to mention how Mikumo and Yaoyorozu’s exam went against Midoriya.”
“I just hope it’s not like the finals in December. All those rescue exercises were awful!” Mineta complained.
“Rescuing is an important part of hero work,” Shoji pointed out.
“I get that, but you try lugging around those civilian-dummies when you’re three foot six!”
“I suppose all we can do is our best. UA could throw anything at us, but that’s like hero work as well,” Izuku said, “we’ve been through so much this last year. Let’s give it our all!”
There was a chorus of cheers.
“To think, soon we’re gonna be upperclassmen!” Ashido said excitedly, “I can’t wait to be like a super awesome big sister to them all!”
“It’ll be interesting to see what quirks they’ll have. There’s already such a mixture in the hero course, you really can’t predict anything,” Ojiro said, “it’s a shame we weren’t allowed to see the entrance exam when it happened.”
Izuku kept quiet, since Nezu had actually offered to show him the footage after everything had been graded. He had declined, even though inside he was really interested to see it and try and predict who’d get in. It made him look forward to next year's sports festival even more.
The conversation wound down as they ate dinner and one by one drifted off to bed. The next morning dawned bright and early, and soon class 1A found themselves back in their classroom, waiting with no small amount of trepidation for Aizawa to arrive. The bell rang and the man appeared, taking his place at the teachers podium.
“Get changed into your costumes and meet at Ground Zeta. You have twenty minutes.”
They didn’t need telling twice, grabbing their costume cases as soon as they appeared out of the wall.
Ground Zeta was not a commonly used training ground at UA. The first years hadn’t used it at all. It was only helpful signs held by small, single wheeled robots that kept them going in the right direction. As a group, they approached the training area. Ground Zeta was not a large training ground. It wasn’t a cityscape or an industrial centre. It didn’t contain space for every kind of disaster imaginable. What it was was a building. It stood imposingly in the middle of an empty lot. At least four stories tall, it didn’t really stand out all that much.
Izuku frowned at it. This seemed too simple. There had to be some other trick.
Across the empty space at the entrance to Ground Zeta was another, smaller building, which served as the waiting room. Aizawa led all of them upstairs to a room filled with comfy chairs, board games and books. There was also a blank screen across one wall.
“Your practical hero exam will be conducted in pairs, with one group of three. It has been designed to test everything we have taught you this past year: combat, rescue, quirk control, civilian interaction, team work, but also adaptability and judgement skills,” Aizawa explained, “this is the scenario. You have been sent to rescue three civilians from a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, the information regarding where they have been taken is very limited, so you will be going into this almost blind. Your job is to get in, rescue the civilians from any dangers that may be present, and then get out. You also won’t be told how you did until everyone has completed the exam.”
“Have the groups already been decided?” Yaoyorozu asked, “like in June?”
“No, they haven’t. Groups will be decided randomly. You won’t know who you’ll be working with until five minutes before you take the test. Each group will have 30 minutes to complete the test, and you will be doing them one after the other. The rest of you will remain here in the meantime, and groups that have already gone will be taken elsewhere so as not to reveal anything to the rest of you.”
There was a collective shudder that ran through the room. They had wondered what they would be tested on. It turned out the answer was everything, with added difficulty. More than one person glanced around the room. There would be no way to strategize in advance, except by thinking about what they had already seen previously from their classmates.
“The first pair shall be,” Aizawa said, clicking a button.
The blank screen came to life, showing the names Hagakure and Kouda. The pair of them both jumped, nerves spiking. A little robot came and took them away, leaving the rest of them with nothing to do but wait. The entertainment in the room suddenly made more sense, though nobody really wanted to engage with any of it. Izuku wasn’t sure if it was better to get it out of the way sooner, but then have to wait until everyone was done to find out the results, or to stew in anxiety waiting for his turn but not have to wait as long once it was over.
Cut off from the outside world, they tried passing the time by talking, but by the time anyone worked up the nerve to get some decent conversational momentum, the screen came to life again, bearing the names Yaoyorozu and Shoji. They left the room much calmer than Hagakure and Kouda had done.
And so it continued like that. Ashido and Iida. Each time a group was called, the nerves peaked, only to die down again when it wasn’t them, only to build back up again as time passed. Kirishima, Uraraka and Asui. Not every test took the full thirty minutes. Without knowing exactly what it entailed made it impossible to predict whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Tokoyami and Ojiro. Eight remaining, less than half of the class. Bakugo and Sato. Izuku wondered how everyone else had done. He’d been careful not to peek with his Sight, much like Jiro wasn’t trying to spy with her earphone jacks.
“Sero and Mikumo,” Aizawa announced.
Hearing his name made Izuku’s heart jolt, but he rose from a squishy bean bag alongside Sero. It was time to take their test.
“Right off the bat, we’ve got a lot of manoeuvrability,” Sero commented as they were led out to the test site, “not that that helps us all that much in a building.”
“Your tape is also really good for capture, so I think we’ll be fine for combat. You always do great in our rescue exercises as well,” Izuku said.
“Well if we’re talking adaptability, I think you’ve got us all beat.”
They reached the door to the building. The walls were plain, with openings for windows showing a darkened interior. A timer hung above the door, counting down the five minute prep time. Izuku widened his Sight, only to not pick anything up from inside. It wasn’t that it was empty. He could tell there was stuff in there, but there were no people. The people he could See were still outside, so he guessed they were the proctors.
“You got any ideas?” Sero asked.
“We can’t really plan with so little information,” Izuku said, “let’s just take this carefully. We know there are three civilians to rescue, but it’s likely not going to be that easy. Let’s not let ourselves get distracted from our goal.”
“Sounds good to me.”
The timer reached zero and the door opened with a click. Neither of them wasted any time. They entered the building. As soon as both of them crossed the threshold, the door shut behind them.
They were in a corridor, dimly lit. It quickly branched left and right. Izuku caught Sero’s eye. Since the information was so limited, they decided to stick together, taking the left hand path. From elsewhere in the building, mechanical shifting and clunking could be heard. As they passed doors, they checked inside, only finding empty rooms.
This place was like a maze. Occasionally they would find one of the windows leading outside, but that didn’t help them to navigate all that much. They went up to the next floor, and Izuku held up a hand. A whirring reached his ears, and the pair of them backed away around a corner. A robot was coming down the corridor towards them. It was similar in design to the 1-point robots from the entrance exam, though it didn’t have the weapons for arms. It stood upright, rolling on its single wheel. Its two arms were human-like, and they held a brightly coloured semi-automatic rifle.
Izuku exchanged a glance with Sero, who nodded. They waited until the robot was just about to turn the corner, and then Sero leapt out. A strand of tape slapped across the robot's eye, blinding it. Before it could do more than let out a mechanical “huh”, Izuku slapped a hand to its chest. A small burst of magic short-circuited the robot, and they caught it as it slumped, deactivated.
“I guess these must be the villains in this scenario,” Sero said, as they lay the robot down quietly, “do you reckon there are more of them?”
“There must be. Come on, we need to find the civilians.”
They continued down the corridor, almost reaching the next turn, when there was a noise of alarm behind them. Another robot was there. In one fluid movement, it brought its gun up, aimed right at them.
“Intruders!” it cried, before pulling the trigger.
Izuku threw up a shield at the same time. The glittering array of magical lines caught the spray of small pellets, and with another flick of his hands, it blasted down the corridor, slamming into the robot and shorting it out. They could hear movement all around them in the building now.
Their search was now with much more haste. They burst into another room, only to find three robots staring back at them. Izuku shielded them from another hail of pellets. Sero swung above him, lashing out with his tape. He caught two of the robots and bound them together. The third dived out of the way, only for its gun to be ripped from its hands. A jolt of lightning took it down.
The room they were in had two other doors leading into it. Izuku opened one, only to find a corridor beyond, a corridor which suddenly was filled by more robots. He slammed it shut and sealed it with a spell.
“Mikumo, I found a civilian!”
Izuku ran over to join Sero. The other door led into a smaller room with only a small window letting in light. On the floor, propped in a sitting position, was one of the civilian-dummies they had used in training in the past, with the appearance of an even simpler crash-test dummy. Its hands and feet were bound, mimicking a prisoner.
“It’s ok now. We’re heroes. We’re here to rescue you,” Sero said.
The civilian-dummy didn’t respond, which meant it was supposed to be unconscious. There was banging coming from the sealed door. They didn’t have much time before the robots tried to find another way to them. As Sero untied the civilian-dummy, Izuku saw the paper folded up in its lap. He took it and opened it up.
“It’s a map,” he said, “it’s got a floor plan of the building with an exit marked. I think we’re supposed to take the civilians there.”
“So we can either drop off the one we’ve already found and come back for the others, or we can try and keep it safe while we search,” Sero said.
“I don’t know where we haven’t searched,” Izuku said, scanning the map.
There was a crunch. A large crack had opened in the sealed door. Just as Izuku moved to repair it, the door they’d come through opened. The robots that entered immediately fired on them. Izuku shielded them, then glowing orange chains sprang from his hands, binding each robot in turn. One of them managed to throw what looked like a grenade. With a quick flick of his hands, it was tossed out of the window. The sealed door then burst open.
“Mikumo, back up!”
Izuku did as instructed and Sero slammed the door to the small room closed.
“If they’re all up here trying to get to us, then the rest of the building should be mostly clear, right?” Sero said, “seal the door, then break open the wall. I’ve got an idea.”
Two quick spells did both. With a bit of help, Sero secured the civilian-dummy on his back, then with some more tape abseiled out of the window until he was down on the ground floor.
“Break this window too, but quietly.”
Izuku landed on a glowing platform, then cast a spell to make the glass of the window vanish. The room they entered was empty, like all the others. The sounds of the robots were far away.
“The map said the exit is on the ground floor. This way,” Sero said.
“I’ll cover you.”
They moved as quickly and as quietly as they could. Even while unconscious, they couldn’t jostle the civilian-dummy too much, and they didn’t want to attract the robots’ attention. They were almost there when a group emerged from a stairwell. Izuku leapt in front to block their fire, opened a portal beneath Sero’s feet which put him on the robots' other side down the corridor. In the confusion of the movement, between tape and lightning, the group was defeated. The pair of them burst into a room with no windows and no other doors, only a trapdoor on the floor.
“This is it,” Sero said as he lowered himself carefully into it.
The trapdoor led to a tunnel. The walls were blocky and white, more well lit than the building above. As soon as Izuku dropped down after Sero, the trapdoor snapped shut. Then the air was filled with mechanical sounds. Lots of shunting and clicking, the sound of gears turning, and pieces of metal slotting into place. Izuku took the lead down the tunnel. A simple ladder was at the other end, and by the time they reached it, the sounds had stopped.
“Let’s see what else they have in store for us,” Izuku said.
The ladder led up to another trapdoor. Beyond was chaos.
Izuku climbed out into a large open space. It reminded him of a factory, with lots of piping and metalwork, only it was blockier. It was also very much not the building they had entered at the beginning.
“Is this place made of lego or something?” Sero asked.
Parts of the space had collapsed, and others were on fire. There were some barrels nearby marked as flammable. Izuku quickly cast a shield over them to protect them from the flames. Smoke was very gradually starting to fill the air.
“I’ll handle the fires. You see if you can stabilise some of this debris. Keep an eye out for the remaining civilians,” Izuku said.
“What about the one we’ve already found?” Sero said.
Izuku produced a mirror clone. Removing the civilian-dummy from Sero’s back, Izuku cast a shield dome around the clone and the civilian-dummy.
“We’ll keep it safe here. If we find another civilian, it might have a map like this one did.”
“Alright. Let’s do this.”
They quickly got to work. Izuku’s hands moved through the air, producing a glyph. The fire around them was sucked through the air towards it, coalescing into a single stream before disappearing into the mandela. With his other hand, Izuku cast another spell. This one did the same thing for the smoke. As he worked to put out the fires, he heard the thwip-stretch-snip of Sero’s tape as he strengthened the supports which looked weakened, being very careful not to put any unnecessary weight on anything.
Once the immediate area was secure, they moved further into the factory setting. Sero’s assessment earlier made more and more sense. Everything looked like it was made from standard blocks. The piping jutted out from it, but still in a regular, configurable way. Even the railings and walkways looked like they could be snapped on and off, moved around at leisure. Since they were still inside what had previously been a maze of corridors, Izuku guessed this whole building, Ground Zeta, was built to be an endlessly customisable space for all sorts of training exercises; one minute a villain's lair, the next a factory in a disaster zone.
Within the factory were several hallways and rooms. Sero tried opening one, only to pull his hand away from the handle sharply, hissing.
“It’s really hot,” he said.
His hand had been burned. Izuku cast his healing spell, the pale green washing away the redness.
“Stand back.”
He cast his spell to suck up flames and with a wave of his hand, the door opened. Almost immediately, a backdraft blasted outwards, safely absorbed by his spell. The room beyond was a mess, completely ruined. Izuku hoped a civilian hadn’t been in there.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” said a faint voice from somewhere close by.
They quickly moved towards it. In another, smaller open area was a civilian-dummy. Its legs were pinned beneath a metal walkway that had fallen from above. Several other blocks and pipes had also fallen on it.
“Are you heroes? Please, please help me!” it cried when it saw them.
It looked like this civilian was awake, Izuku thought, one more thing for them to deal with.
“It’s alright now. We’re going to get you out of here,” Izuku said as they both carefully rushed over to it.
“Please, it really hurts!”
“Your legs, right? Are you hurt anywhere else?” Izuku asked as Sero inspected the rubble pinning the civilian-dummy.
“Just my legs,” it said, “please, get me out of here.”
“We’re going to do that just now,” Izuku said, then looking up at Sero, “how’s it looking Cellophane?”
“Can’t see anything that’ll cause any issues if we lift it. It’d probably be better if you do it so you can lift it all in one go.”
Izuku nodded.
“I’m going to move this rubble off you now. Cellophane’s going to help you get out, then we can do some first aid, alright?”
He waited until the civilian-dummy nodded. He reached out with his magic, allowing it to flood through the pile of rubble until it covered every inch of it. Only once he was confident he had gotten it all did he start to lift. It moved slowly upwards, Izuku concentrating hard to make sure nothing snagged or caught on anything else. Sero knelt down, looking through the gap that had appeared beneath it, then gave him a thumbs up. Once there was enough space, they pulled out the civilian-dummy.
It felt weird to do first aid on a dummy that was visibly not injured, but the civilian-dummy was their stand-in for an actual civilian, and this is what they would need to do for them.
“Was there anyone else here with you?” Izuku asked.
“No, it was just me. Can we leave now?”
From above, they heard something shift. Elsewhere in the factory, there was a crash. A pipe fell down near them.
“Yes, I think we are leaving now,” Izuku said.
They loaded the civilian-dummy onto a platform of magic. Whether this was supposed to happen or not, the factory was collapsing around them as they raced back to the trapdoor.
“Watch out!” Sero cried.
He shot off strands of tape, catching blocks that would have fallen on them. The trapdoor was ahead of them. It was open and Izuku’s mirror clone beckoned them.
“Come on!”
The glittering dome was still in place, rubble beginning to pile up around it. There was a great heaving noise as the ceiling caved in more rapidly. Izuku, Sero, and the civilian-dummy passed through the dome and went down the trapdoor. The unconscious civilian-dummy was there. Once they were all down, the trapdoor snapped shut. The sounds of collapse immediately stopped, only for the shifting and grinding from before to resume.
“Looks like there’s another phase to go,” Sero said.
“You said you’d get me out of here,” the conscious civilian-dummy said, still propped on the floating platform.
“And we will,” Izuku assured it.
He had no idea how much time had passed. How much of their thirty minutes remained? At the end of the tunnel was another ladder, likely leading to another trapdoor. So far, neither he nor Sero were too worse for wear. All they could do was keep going until they reached the end.
The trapdoor shut immediately as soon as Izuku, Sero, his mirror clone and the two civilian-dummies made it up the ladder. Ground Zeta had once again been reconfigured. Now it looked like they were in a courtyard between larger buildings. Planters were set up, a vibrant splash of colour amidst the otherwise plain grey, and above their heads the roof was open, showing the bright blue sky. Across from them was a door with a big sign saying exit above it.
In the middle of the courtyard was a decorative fountain, and tied to that fountain was the last of the civilian-dummies. Sero took a step towards it, only for Izuku to hold him back when he heard something clattering. There was a small bang and then smoke erupted on the other side of the area. Izuku Saw two of the forms he’d taken to be proctors enter the courtyard, concealed by the smoke.
“I just knew taking a civilian hostage would make the heroes come running. Like flies caught in the web, and now we get to eat them up,” said a sultry voice.
“Soon there'll be two less heroes in the world,” said another, rougher and accented voice.
The smoke faded, revealing Midnight and Snipe. Both wore strange bracelets on their wrists and ankles, but otherwise they were in their usual hero costumes. In the next moment, several things happened all at once. Snipe whipped out his gun and fired off two shots at Sero, who lashed tape to a nearby light fixture. He pulled himself out of the way, the bullets arcing after him only to thud into the wall. Midnight leapt, striking out with her whip, only to be blasted backwards by Izuku. The conscious civilian-dummy screamed, and Izuku cast another shield dome around the two of them.
The courtyard rang with the sound of gunshots. Sero was constantly kept moving, forced to change directions and take cover as Snipe fired bullet after bullet. One caught him in the shoulder, thankfully proving they were rubber, throwing him off course and he crashed into a planter. He fired off more tape, but it snapped when he tried pulling himself away, a bullet tearing through it cleanly. Izuku threw out two discs of magic. One shielded Sero from a renewed assault, and the other was a saw blade that forced Snipe to break off and dodge.
The faintest whiff of something sweet made Izuku whip a hand behind him, wind blasting away the cloud of pink mist that was slowly creeping towards him. Midnight was unphased by her fragrance being blown away. At her feet was Izuku’s mirror clone, asleep from her quirk and with her whip around its neck.
“You naughty boy, sending this one to try and free the hostage while the pair of you distracted us,” she crooned, “since you’re the one using the power, I’m guessing this one is just a clone, which means I can be a bit rougher.”
She dug her heel into the mirror clone's back, her predatory gaze locked on Izuku.
“Mikumo, switch with me!”
Izuku immediately responded to Sero’s cry. As Sero soared through the air over his head, Izuku leapt at Snipe.
The bullets were small and fast. Izuku couldn’t see them, and their rhythm was so faint he couldn’t use it to dodge them. His best bet was to keep Snipe from firing his gun at all. Izuku cast spell after spell, Snipe proving to be a slippery opponent. He dived around Izuku’s fire, used a planter to take a bolt of lightning, and withstood a full blast of wind to shoot straight at Izuku. Fortunately, Snipe could no longer fire off a volley of shots. Unfortunately, he didn’t need to be pointing his gun at Izuku to hit him. Coming out of rolls, poking around the scenery, any opportunity he had to pull the trigger, he did. Some of those shots Izuku was able to shield himself from. Others made dents in the courtyard. Izuku could only hiss and bear with it as the rest hit his calf, the small of his back, his bicep.
Then Snipe aimed at the hostage in the fountain.
“Impero Aqua!”
The water in the fountain came to life, taking the form of many serpents that surged out towards Snipe. It was enough of a distraction for Snipe’s shot to go wild. Izuku raced for the civilian-dummy, vanished the ropes binding it with a spell, then sent it through a portal to the shield dome protecting the other two.
There was a thud. Sero swung through the air, shooting tape at Midnight, who in turn used her whip. The leather smacked Sero’s helmet, cracking it open enough for him to take a breath of the pink mist. Though he was put to sleep, his tape had snagged Midnight’s wrist. As Sero hit the ground, his movement caused Midnight to stumble and trip over the tape strand, tangling herself up in it. Izuku blew away the mist again and raced to Sero’s side.
The only way Izuku could think to wake Sero up from Midnight’s quirk was to give him the magical equivalent of a dose of caffeine. Sero’s body flashed grey for a moment, then he shot up.
“What? What happened?” Sero sputtered.
“Focus. We’re in the middle of a fight,” Izuku said, “also, apologies for later if you have a massive crash.”
Pain bloomed in the middle of his back, accompanied by the sound of a gunshot, and Izuku doubled over. He was really starting to hate guns. Sero immediately shot tape to cover him. Snipe was soaked, moving slowly towards them. Only two snakes remained, wriggling over his body. Izuku cursed to himself. There wasn’t enough water to make the snakes very strong. Snipe threw one of them off and it splattered against the floor. The other managed to bite his wrist, forcing him to drop his gun.
A mirror clone formed and charged at Snipe before he could pick it up. Snipe didn’t bother, drawing a knife from his belt. The two fell into a rough exchange of blows, the knife flashing through the air as the mirror clone moved and slipped around it. A shadow passed overhead. Snipe glanced at it, only to take a punch to the gut from the mirror clone, which itself was stabbed and shattered. A flurry of tape from a swinging Sero finished the job, pinning Snipe to the ground.
“Are you ok?” Sero asked when he landed.
“I’m good,” Izuku said, “we’ve gotta get out of here. We don’t have much time and the civilians need rescuing.”
The conscious civilian-dummy was shaking when they returned to the shield dome. Izuku didn’t bother with trying to carry any of them. He loaded them all up onto a floating platform and he and Sero escorted them across the courtyard.
“Oh yes, leave us all tied up and at your mercy,” Midnight said, her voice silky and smooth from where she was tangled in Sero’s tape.
Izuku ignored her, prodding Sero onwards when the boy was flooded with embarrassment. They passed through the door and found themselves actually outside. The building of Ground Zeta was behind them, and Present Mic was there with a big beaming grin. Next to him was a clock with a countdown. Five and a half minutes remained.
“Excellent job guys!” Present Mic said, “you can leave those stand-ins right there. Just follow this little bot to where you’ll be chilling for the rest of the exam! Yeah!”
“Considering how your first final exam at UA went, I’d say this is a definite improvement,” Recovery Girl said, her lips extending out to press against Izuku’s arm.
The bruises from the various gunshots Snipe had managed to hit him with faded away. The tiredness that followed wasn’t too unbearable either. Izuku completely agreed. This was much better than sleeping for hours after fighting his sister.
Once Recovery Girl finished checking both of them over, she directed them to the neighbouring room. This was almost a mirror image of the waiting room from the start of the exam, only with windows to make the whole room seem brighter. Everyone who had taken their exam already was waiting there, making themselves comfortable and talking amongst themselves. They all went quiet when Izuku and Sero entered.
“Mikumo! Sero!” Kirishima beamed, “great to see you!”
“We wondered who’d be next. How’d it go?” Uraraka asked.
“Wasn’t this exam completely crazy? I didn’t even know UA had something like this!” Ashido said.
There was a screen in the room, but it was blank. There was no way to know what was happening in Ground Zeta, so Izuku really should have expected the minor interrogation. The same thing had probably been happening every time a new group finished. Izuku and Sero patiently explained what they did during the test, and then asked the others how they fared.
“Do you think it’s bad that we didn’t finish?” Hagakure asked nervously, “we managed to get to Midnight and Snipe, but the time ran out when we were fighting them.”
“Did they say anything to you?” Ojiro asked.
“Ms Midnight just said not to worry, but that’s making me worry even more!”
Kouda nodded profusely in agreement.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Izuku tried to reassure them.
It seemed like no time at all before the next group appeared. Todoroki and Kaminari entered the waiting room, getting the same reception as Izuku and Sero.
“Wait,” Sato said once the pair had finished recounting their experiences, “if you two are here, then that means the final pair taking the exam is Jiro and Mineta, right?”
“Poor Jiro,” Uraraka said.
“She’s gonna kill him,” Ashido said, then let out a small snort, “it’ll be hilarious.”
Thirty minutes later, Jiro and Mineta arrived, the latter still alive. Both looked exhausted, their costumes slightly singed. Mineta had a bandage wrapped around his forehead and Jiro was missing one of her support items.
“I’m burning my Midnight poster,” Mineta mumbled to himself, “that woman is a demon.”
They weren’t left waiting long as Aizawa appeared. Outwardly, he gave nothing away as he stood before the blank screen.
“Principal Nezu, Vlad King and I were watching each of your performances during the exam. You will all be given individual grades with feedback attached in the next couple of days, but at this time, I can tell you whether or not you passed.”
He clicked a button and the screen came to life. A table with all their names was shown. Izuku searched for his, easily finding it since his single name stood out. A circle icon was next to it. Around him, he Saw his classmates lighting up as they found themselves, hope beginning to rise as they processed what this must mean.
“Congratulations, you all passed,” Aizawa said, giving them all a soft, genuine smile.
There was a beat of silence, then the room erupted into cheers. Izuku was hugged by somebody, he wasn’t quite sure who. The happiness all around him was blinding. Aizawa allowed it to continue for a moment before calling for their attention again.
“Get changed and head back to your dorms. Don’t worry about food. Lunch Rush will be cooking for everyone tonight.”
That caused another cheer.
The walk back to campus, changing back into his regular uniform, and then getting back to the dorms was all a bit of a blur. Izuku only really registered it when he was sitting on one of the sofas in the common area. Everyone was still abuzz, the adrenaline and the excitement of passing their exam like electricity in the air. Barring anything catastrophic like failing their written tests, they had all done it. They had passed their first year at UA High School.
Bring on second year!
Two days later, Izuku woke up bleary eyed to the sound of his phone buzzing. It wasn’t early by any means, but with no classes to go to, Izuku was sleeping in a bit more. Who would be calling him though?
“Hello?” he said, answering the phone without checking the caller ID.
“Good morning Mikumo,” said the voice of Edgeshot, “I apologise. I seem to have woken you up.”
“No! Not at all!” Izuku said, sitting up properly, the lingering traces of sleep vanishing, “how can I help you sir?”
“I hate to place more burdens upon you, but something has arisen for which we could use your input on,” Edgeshot said gravely, “when can you come in?”
