Saavedra
Junior Member
Nanami Kyriu
Yesterday
Nanami left the written exam classroom thinking she was going to faint. Her heart thundered away and her brain throbbed. It might have been the precursor to an anxiety attack... it would not have been the first... but this time, she felt it was a little different.
It was the pressure. The sheer panic at the idea of failing. But... it was also hope.
The girl clutched one hand to her chest and shut her eyes, retreating into a dark corner where she hoped no one would see her, and ran through the exam again in her mind. At least, she tried to. Nanami could not remember all the questions or all the answers she had given, but she was sure they were correct when she wrote them. They had to be. Nanami had always been a great student, and she would usually walk out of an exam knowing she had passed with flying colours. But this was no ordinary exam. This one was tough. A true test in the most merciless sense, meant to fail people, to eliminate those that did not make the cut. Nanami knew she could not fail this one, or the practical exam. If she failed either, if she could not get to U.A., there was a real chance that she could not enroll in that school. And if she could not do that...
Nanami felt the weight of the photograph on her breast pocket. It was a copy of a copy, but it had the same weight on her heart as the original. A weight that suffocated her. The burden of a responsibility that she had accepted before she even knew what the word `responsibility´ meant, and which now squeezed her heart until it felt as if it would burst. The fear of failing now was more than she could bear, and it made her want to scream because there was not another person in the world that could bear that responsibility for her. Nanami steadied herself on the wall, then walked slowly toward the window, her legs shaky and weak, her lungs feeling still and unresponsive. Her forehead touched the window glass, and the wonderful coolness amplified by the sweat on her skin calmed her down just enough that she could open her eyes and look outside. However, she saw nothing but the image in her photograph. The image of a little girl, a younger version of herself, with a wide and happy smile and her arms partially off-frame, extended toward her.
She could almost hear her sister Hikaru laughing.
Warm tears rolled down Nanami´s cheeks as she struggled to hold herself together. That image, conjured from deep within her heart, calmed her down just enough to remember that there was hope. There was just one more test. One more exam.
And if she could pass it... she just knew.
Nanami knew that her sister Hikaru could be saved.
She would spare no effort.
Start of the exam
It had been a tough road. It seemed even tougher when the examiners clarified that the students could take no gear with them. But today, Nanami was focused. All the tension that poured into her hardened her muscles and her will, and set her blood boiling. With a gesture, she dropped three crumped balls of paper on the ground. One of the examiners looked at her disapprovingly, and she blushed, part excited about the exam, part embarrassed. "Give them ten minutes, ma´am. Don´t touch them until then."
Having said that, Nanami breathed deeply. The girl had never had delusions about being a hero. She didn´t even truly want to be one. All she wanted was to save her sister Hikaru. Therefore, there was no costume or tailored clothing on her. Nanami just wore a denim set of tight jeans and a jacket, paired up with sneakers. Her quirk-caused black-and-white look drew stares, particularly given she was a well-proportioned girl, but Nanami was unable to even notice those. It was strange how her senses were razor-sharp, yet her mind was dulled. She guessed she was having another anxiety episode, but... she knew it would end in a moment.
The examiners gathered the would-be students, gave the last indications and improvised encouragements. Nanami looked at her watch and saw there was barely a minute left to start.
She quickly fished her sister´s photo from her jacket and took another look at her smile. A memory of better times and heartbreak, a reminder of her responsibility and all her efforts to get here, and a piece of her very heart. Her hand shook as she gently folded the picture and slid it into her breast pocket, pressing it as hard against her chest as she could with the tip of her thumb. I´ll do it, Hikaru. It´s do or die for me today. I swear I´ll give it all. For you.
With barely thirty seconds left, Nanami stepped to the front of the line and dropped to the ground in front of everyone, adopting a runner´s pose.
Nanami´s fingertips touched the ground. Her legs bent and her back and bum raised up in the air. Her black hair brushed the ground and her dark eyes, bright and intense behind her glasses, saw only the gate ahead. Her heart pumped, her lungs filled as if they wanted to explode, and her muscles were maddeningly eager to begin. She sensed nothing else. She heard no comments, noticed no stares.
When the gates opened, there was only Nanami´s fierce, desperate need for success, and a heart ready to burst with hope.
The girl had no quirk to help her move fast. She could not fly, float, teleport or slide quicker than anyone else. But she could run, and that was exactly what she did. Her athletic form was peerless as she sped through the gates among the first like a black and white blur. Other candidates overtook her with some ease, but Nanami had a carefully practiced rhythm and a clear objective. A body well trained ran on its own, and that left her mind to work. The fire and the sirens in the testing grounds were no distraction to her, but the mundane objects in the streeth drew her attention.
Firstly, there were cars in the street, and lampposts. The lampposts might have been useful, but these were too long. The cars were not. She ran along the cars, and her fingertips touched the first one, a classic family car that disappeared instantaneously with no fanfare. There was now a small sheet of paper in Nanami´s hand that she quickly transferred into her jacket pockets. She used her quirk a second time with another car and put the resulting paper into a pocket on the other side of her jacket. Nanami was a short girl, and not that fit, therefore she needed to manage her stamina and how many times she used her quirk. Each paper weighed one kilogram, and that was no joke for a girl of her physique. The pockets helped distribute the weight, but she still couldn´t just make papers out of everything around her.
Soon, the sights and sounds of fights exploded all across her front. Those who had outran her were already finding their targets and demolishing them. A robot arm flew through the air and crashed through the windshield of the car next to Nanami, startling her and making her stumble aside before she recovered her running form.
I have to wreck a few of these things, but I don´t know if there will be any left if I don´t hurry!
As she rounded a corner, Nanami found a welcome sight that made her smile. There was a red bicycle chained to a parking space in front of a sport store. It had to be atrezzo for the test, but a functional bike that she could use was a functional bike that she could use. Huffing and puffing, already breaking a sweat, Nanami ran to the post and touched the chain. A page showing the chain drawn in perfect detail fell to the concrete like a rock, slamming into it with a sound and speed one did not generally associate with something so... theoretically light.
There was another sound.
Nanami raised her head and looked through the window of the store. Behind a bunch of gym training machines, something moved. Something large, green, that lunged out at her, crashing through the exercise equipment and then the store window. Shards of glass and large, green armour plates sailed through the air at a girl that only stood 4´6 tall, and wasn´t even standing at that moment. The red visor on the robot stared brightly at her, unfeeling but no less determined as it directed the machine´s lethal appendages toward her.
What came next would not have happened if Nanami had not considered exactly this kind of scenario and trained to deal with it.
The robot was one ton, maybe one ton and a half of steel, plastic and circuits.
So was a family car.
One of the cars Nanami had pocketed slammed the robot back into the store, a broken and non-functional mess, with the car itself not fitting through the window and therefore stopping there, the front down on the ground and the trunk crushed against the top edge of the shop window, the frame somehow vertical and wedged into the window just far enough to stay there.
Nanami found herself on her ass, panting, looking at the devastation in wonder.
The beating of her own heart suddenly reminded her of the photo on her breast pocket, the only thing of value next to it, and she stood up on shaky legs.
"Okay... Okay..." Nanami walked to the car, and transformed it again into paper, wincing as the glass from the store window and that which had shattered off the car fell to the floor. The robot was inside, hunched over against the wall, the visor dull and dark. Nanami smiled even as she wiped the sweat off her forehead with the cuff of her denim jacket. She felt more cheerful now. "Okay!"
Now
A few minutes later, Nanami was pretty proud of herself. She was grinning, her denim jacket now open to reveal a black t-shirt underneath, enjoying the breeze as she rode on. Her little trick had smashed three more robots, and she had really perfected her ability to throw cars, though now she was wondering how people would react if she started doing that on the regular as a hero. Insurance companies would hate her, probably... but there was something more important to worry about.
Everybody else seemed to be doing much better than her. Nanami rode right by a blonde girl resting on a pile of robots she had smashed apart, and realized that she had no idea whether the point of the exam was to reach a total of points, or be above the top-scoring. And... wait, that was a stupid question, wasn´t it? It had to be the latter. It just had to. You couldn´t have the cutting score to the most prestigious hero school in the country be a fixed one. A cold sweat ran down Nanami´s face as she realized she needed to really step it up, and the only way she could think of at the moment was to just ride into the biggest pile of robots she could find.
And that seemed to be in the building in front of her. More than a dozen visors stared out at her from the darkened offices in the first floor. There were a car and a truck parked beside each other, close enough to a lamppost of just the right height, which in turn was just barely within reach of the windows. Nanami leaned forward on the bike, gritted her teeth, and worked her legs like she had never done before in her entire life. She aimed for the car trunk, praying this would work and knowing that even if it did, it was not going to be very enjoyable.
The robots had their own plans. They smashed through the windows, seeing a target approach, and their mechanical voices all buzzed out in a chorus. "Target acquired. Prepare to be destroyed."
By this point, Nanami was too tired to realize that she should really change her plan. Instead, she went right ahead with it. The robots slammed down on the truck, crushing the top, while the lamppost zigzagged as one of them hit it with its arm as it came down. Nanami pulled on the bike´s handles, and the front wheel left the ground entirely. The bike went almost vertical, and then it hit the car. The robots were just a meter away when the back wheel hit the car and the bike spun forwards, the front wheel coming down fast and hitting the top of the car. Nanami was not glued to it, though, she was small and light, and the spinning of the bicycle added to her momentum.
She screamed as she went flying much higher and faster than she had thought possible. The robots reached for her. Bullets and mini-missiles streaked past, and that really made her redouble her screaming, too out of her mind to consider the possibility that those munitions could not be real. One of the robots´s arms almost hit her face, but the girl managed to interpose her hand in its way, and more out of panic than because it was a trained reaction, transformed the robot. Nanami held onto the piece of paper because it was the only thing she could hold onto as she sailed through the air, went through the windows, and slammed her back against a desk that was dragged by her momentum into the next three desks.
She was winded, half-dead, and a total mess. But the pain in her back, arms and legs told Nanami that she was still somewhat alive.
And then everything began to shake.
The building on the other side of the street began to move. Pieces of masonry rained everywhere, and the offices she found herself in threatened to come apart.
"Give me a breeeeeeak!" Nanami cried out, hurting and tired, as she dragged herself onto her hands and knees, and crawled comically quickly towards the windows facing the moving building. Her other option was the robots, and the robots seemed more fearsome to her than whatever this threat was. Of course she was wrong about that, but the instincts of a person not at her most rational moment can be terribly mistaken. Nanami took a glance outside, and proved that horribly, horribly right.
A laser dot appeared right on her forehead, coming from the glass face of a massive robot decked out in heavy munitions of all kinds. When it fired, a dense cloud of white and grey smoke enveloped it. For a moment, a ring of fire shone through the smoke, and Nanami had no idea what it was. She just stared dumbly at the pretty, mysterious light until a missile almost as big as the girl herself flew through the smoke, headed directly for the bright spot on her forehead. Nanami shrieked, jumping up and backwards, falling on her ass again, then skittering back and away from the huge projectile. She hit her back against the desk that stopped her flight into the office space, and then the missile was inside as well. Her shriek went several notes up as she stretched both hands towards the missile in a childish attempt to protect herself. A dense cloud of smoke followed the steel projectile into the office, pulled in by the missile itself, and swept over everything inside, including Nanami.
There was no explosion.
Instead, after the smoke dissipated some seconds later, Nanami walked out to the edge of the office, a crumpled ball of paper falling from her hand. It depicted a smoking missile in flight. As for Nanami herself, she was covered in dust and smoke particles from head to toes, which made her look grainy and just plain strange, more like a cross between a ladybug and a dalmatian than a human being. She fell to her knees, her butt touching the ground between her feet, and registered absolutely nothing as she looked up at the robot with dead eyes, watching it continue its attack on the other students. She didn´t even hear the announcement about the end of the test.
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