Chapter 34: The Beast’s Forest.

The ground was gone and twenty teenagers were now falling down the side of a mountain.

Tetsutetsu was laughing.

He went steel between one breath and the next, his whole body flashing to iron mid-plummet, and as Monoma tumbled past him close enough to grab he didn't grab, he stuck his hand out flat instead, and Monoma, because he understood the exact stupid thing being offered, slapped it. The high five rang like a struck anvil. Monoma's skin ran silver a half second later, Copy taking the steel straight off the contact, and the two of them dropped the rest of the way as a pair of grinning metal cannonballs who hit the slope, crumpled two saplings flat, and rolled.

"WOOOO!!!" Tetsutetsu reported from inside a cloud of his own dust.

Above him the rest of the class was solving the same problem in several other ways.

Kamakiri had already driven a blade arm to the hilt through the mountainside and was carving a long shrieking furrow down it, slowing himself in a spray of dirt and sparks, and Awase hit him from behind in midair, slapped both palms to Kamakiri's shoulders, and welded himself on. "DON'T STOP, KEEP CARVING!" Awase yelled into his ear, and Kamakiri, who had not been planning to stop and now had a passenger, swore and stabbed a second blade deeper, the two of them sledding the slope on a single screaming edge of steel.

Yanagi fell with her eyes half-closed and her hands loose, and her own body slowed, and Kuroiro's beside her, the two of them sinking through the air like leaves while the world rushed past. She tried for a third but couldn’t. "Two is my limit." she said, somewhat strained, to Kuroiro, who nodded once, ready to hop into the nearest shadow if Yanagi’s focus dropped.

Kodai got a hand on her bag.

It was a small shoulder bag a second ago. It was the size of a mattress a second after that, swelling under her palm into a slab of canvas and leather, and she dropped onto it and so did Kendo, hauling Komori by the back of her hoodie, and Shoda, who arrived in an undignified heap, and the four of them rode the enormous bag down the slope like a sled, Komori shrieking, Kendo's arm thrown across all of them, the cushion of it eating the worst of the speed.

Pony just flew. Two horns down and out, two more catching air, surfing her own rack down the mountain with whoops in two languages.

Tsuburaba sucked in a breath as big as his lungs would take and breathed out a platform, a flat pane of solid air that caught him hard enough to knock the wind back out of him, and Shishida, polite even in freefall, landed beside him with a courteous “pardon me” and the two of them slid the slope on the invisible sheet like it was a tray going down a banister.

And Tokage came apart.

She burst into a scatter of pieces high up and the pieces spread and caught the air and then gathered themselves into a shape that was mostly hands, and in one of those hands was Manga, held careful as an egg, and in the other was Honenuki, looking deeply embarrassed about it, and a foot below had hooked Bondo's belt before the big quiet boy could become a crater, and her other foot had Rin by the collar, and she descended the whole mountain as a girl in twelve flying pieces carrying four boys who had not been consulted.

"You good up there, Manga?" she called, the hand around Manga's middle giving him a squeeze.

“My hero.” He sang as a drawing of her in her hero outfit was carrying him in a princess outfit appeared in his bubble.

"Shut up." she laughed.

Shiozaki came down last and serene, a fan of vines snapping out of her hair to bite the slope, swinging her in a long controlled arc, and on the way past she lashed one tendril around Kaibara, who'd been spinning end over end with nothing to grab, and reeled him in to ride the vine down beside her with his Gyrate still chewing uselessly at empty air.

Twenty kids hit the valley floor in twenty different ways and came up filthy, scraped, and, every single one of them, alive.

Nobody was hurt. That was the thing. They picked themselves up out of the leaf litter and the dust, and they checked each other without being asked, a hand up here, a head count there, Kendo's eyes going down the line and ticking off names, and not one of them was missing and not one of them was bleeding worse than a scrape.

"Is everyone okay?" Kendo started.

"Everyone's good." Shoda said, brushing himself off, already counting heads.

Then something from the forest came running out toward them, not even giving them a chance to breathe.

The soil itself rose, packed earth and root and stone climbing into shapes with hollow sockets and grinding jaws, one and then six and then more than anyone bothered counting, a whole slope's worth of beasts dragging themselves up out of the dirt.

Three hours to the lodge. A forest full of these between here and there.

Manga looked at the wall of earth-beasts, and then he looked at his friends, the brave ones already cracking their knuckles, Tetsutetsu still steel and bouncing, Kamakiri's blades propping up, Kendo’s hands expanding, and his bubble lit up with a slow, spreading grin.

"Bari-bari."

The word left his mouth and formed in the air in front of his chest, a crackling clutch of kanji that he caught in both hands like a lantern, and where its light fell the nearest five classmates felt it, every part of them dropping into full output at once, muscles and quirks and nerve all clicking up to the top of the dial. He tucked it against his side and started walking, and the buff walked with him.

"Go plus ultra, guys!" he said. "I've got your backs. All of them."

Class 1-B hit the Beast's Forest like they'd been waiting all summer for permission.

…

Tetsutetsu went through the first beast.

He took it head-on at a dead sprint with the Bari-bari effects still on him and his fist already iron, and he hit the thing in what passed for its chest and kept going, bursting out the back of it in a fountain of dirt and shattered rock, the beast collapsing into a heap of what it used to be while he skidded to a stop on the far side grinning through a mask of grime.

"THAT'S ONE!" he bellowed.

"It's not a competition," Kendo said, enlarging a fist and caving in a beast's skull with a single downward hammer-blow that dropped it where it stood.

"Don’t be boring, Pres! Let’s have fun on our awesome summer adventure!"

Kamakiri was a blender. He'd shed Awase somewhere in the first ten seconds and now moved through the press of beasts taking them apart joint by joint, blades flashing from both arms and his shoulders and his shins, an arm here, a leg out from under there, each beast coming apart into clean dirt sections before it finished forming, and he was laughing like a villain, finally able to use his quirk to its highest potential.

Awase, freshly unwelded, took a different approach. He avoided the beast’s grab, pushed its huge dirt fist toward its face, and welded its arm to its face. It stood there trying to work out how it was going to attack now just as Kaibara drilled through its midsection.

"You're welcome!" Awase yelled at Kaibara.

“Nice support!” Kaibara laughed.

Shishida let the beast out, and the polite intellectual with the glasses was gone, and what replaced him was huge and shaggy and snarling with too many teeth, and it tore into the earth-beasts with both clawed hands and a roar that shook needles off the pines. He grabbed one by a limb, swung it into two others, and brought all three down in a single crashing sweep.

"INDEED!" Shishida bellowed.

Manga moved through the middle of it all and never threw a punch.

He didn't need to. He had Bari-bari in one hand and he'd added a Niko-niko that floated over the group like a small warm sun, and where its light touched, shoulders squared and fear thinned out and twenty kids who were technically fighting for their dinner started fighting like they were having the time of their lives, because they were. When Komori went down under a beast's weight, scared, her mushrooms doing nothing against packed soil, he was there in three steps, and he spoke a Pin-pin into his palm and pressed the radiating word toward her, and the exhaustion and the panic sloughed off her like water; she came up clear-eyed and gasping and then furious, and sprouted a bloom of fungus straight into the beast's eye sockets that rotted the packed dirt soft enough for Honenuki to collapse the whole thing with a touch.

"Thanks, Fukidashi." Komori breathed.

"Haha! It was nothing, Komori-chan!” Manga thought playing support wasn’t so bad.

A different playstyle where he spent his words where they'd save someone or lift someone. A Kiri to Pony as a focus enhancement when a beast was closing on her blind side, and her horns answered before she'd consciously seen it. A Sappari over Tsuburaba when a beast's collapse buried him in choking dust, stripping the grime and the dizziness off him completely so he came up completely refreshed. He carried the buffs and the buffs carried the class.

Tokage fought beside him in a similar way. Using her split body to augment and supplement their friends. Distracting earth-beasts and allowing their friends to deal the finishing blows.

"You know… Most boyfriends would be trying to look cool right now in front of their girlfriends." She pointed out, reforming next to him, both of them walking forward through a field of settling dirt.

"I look incredibly cool." Manga retorted

"You're being a glorified cheerleader."

"#1 Cheerleader at U.A." Manga declared, and his bubble drew him in a cheerleading outfit, and she laughed so hard she accidentally spit on his face.

“Gross.”

“Never show me something like that again!” She held her gut.

…

Two hours in, Kuroiro discovered that a forest floor in afternoon shade was full of pools of dark, and he used them, dropping into the shadow of one beast and erupting out of the shadow of another behind it, never where the things expected him, dragging them out of position for others to crush. Yanagi walked through the middle of it almost bored, flinging fallen branches and fist-sized stones with her mind, pelting beasts off-balance so others could finish them, occasionally lifting a downed classmate back to their feet without breaking stride.

Bondo turned out to be a wall that fought back. He planted himself where the beasts were thickest and let them come, and every one that reached him got a faceful of Cemedine that set in seconds, blinding them, locking their joints, turning a charging earth-beast into a statue mid-stride that others could shatter at leisure.

Pony and Rin took the air and the range respectively, scales and horns peppering the things from distance, breaking up clusters before they could mass, and Shoda was in the front boxing earthen creatures, a punch and then a larger detonation, dropping beasts that thought they'd tanked the first touch.

Monoma, still wearing Tetsutetsu's steel, was having the time of his life and would not shut up about it.

"HAHA! CLASS B SUPERIORITY!" he cackled to the heavens, plowing through a beast with an iron shoulder. "THIS IS WHAT A HERO CLASS ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE!"

"Might be coming off a little too strong there, Monoma." Kaibara said.

"I have my pick of the litter of my friends’ quirks for the first time ever. Give me a break here." Monoma sprouted blades from his body as he went spinning into a group of earth-beasts.

“I guess it's true. Rarely do we ever really get to let loose like this with our quirks.” Awase pointed out.

“We need a class where we fight villain bots like in the entrance exam.” Kamakiri shared his opinion.

“It’d be so relaxing…” Pony dreamed of it.

Manga was having the time of his life just carrying his supportive words. A Niko-niko once spoken would hang and radiate without him spending another breath on it, Niko-niko and Bari-bari and a Kiri he'd handed off to ride on Pony's shoulder, keeping all of them lit and moving and adjusting them as the fight shifted, was nothing at all. Unless a beast was trying to break it, they were at full effect the whole time! By the time the trees started thinning toward the far side of the valley Manga and most of his team was still at full power or near full strength.

His friends shined even brighter because of him, and he'd continue supporting them until they were through.

…

Eventually, they ran into something that wasn’t so easy.

The earth-beasts they'd been carving through all afternoon had been the size of bears, the size of cars, big and dumb and many. This was the size of a building. It hauled itself up out of the ground at the last stretch before the tree line broke, packed earth and boulder and whole swallowed tree trunks bound together into a thing with shoulders like cliffsides and a head that blotted the low sun, and when it set one foot down the whole clearing jumped.

The class stopped at the edge of it. Even Tetsutetsu stopped.

"...Okay, that one's bigger for sure."

"That one's a lot bigger…" Tsuburaba agreed without doubt.

Tetsutetsu roared with fighting spirit. He went full iron and threw himself at its leg at a sprint and connected with everything he had, and the leg shattered.

The beast silently bellowed before smacking Tetsutetsu away, flying past his teammates.

“I actually felt that one! Guys, don’t let it hit you!” Tetsutetsu shouted.

"So don't get hit, got it." Kendo was already moving to the front. "Nobody takes it on alone. We bring it down together or we run. Everybody on me."

And Class 1-B, who had spent a whole year learning to be a team, did as they learned.

Honenuki hit the ground first, both hands flat to the earth, and the soil under the giant's feet went soft as soup. It lurched, sinking, its huge legs unable to find balance, and that bought the seconds everyone else needed.

"Bind it! Now, while it can't brace!"

Shiozaki's vines erupted from her hair in a green flood, wrapping the giant's body tightly, and Monoma, swapping quirks, slapped a hand to her shoulder and took Vines for himself and doubled the output, a second flood of thorned green lashing upward, the two of them anchoring the thing's entire body. Awase darted in under the giant's reach and welded the vines to the bedrock where they crossed, fusing the bindings to the mountain itself so the thing couldn't tear free without losing vital parts. Bondo planted both feet and unloaded Cemedine across the giant's sunk-in legs in a gray flood that set like stone, gluing it into the softened earth that was already hardening back around it.

It was pinned. For a moment, for a few seconds, the giant was pinned.

"Tokage, the weak point!" Kendo snapped. "Where do we hit it?!"

Tokage's eye was already gone, flicked off her face and flying, circling the giant's bulk, and she pointed with a detached hand at a spot on its chest where three swallowed trunks bound together and the packed earth was thinnest over a hollow core. "There. Under the chest. That's the ticket. Crack that and the whole thing comes apart! Probably." She wasn’t an expert in earth-beast anatomy.

"Kodai." Rin gave her one of his scales.

Kodai touched the head of Rin's scale and it grew, the piece enlarging greatly.

"Tsuburaba, Pony, eyes off it." Kendo said, and Tsuburaba breathed a wall of solid air across the giant's line of sight while Pony's horns went into its sockets, blinding it, and the giant thrashed against the vines and the cement and stayed, for now, stuck.

"Manga." Kendo looked back at him, once. "Whatever you've got. Put it on our big hitters."

Manga's throat was ready to go and he grinned with a thumbs up.

He crushed the words he was carrying, his focus narrowing down to the five who were about to swing.

"Bari-bari," he shouted, and the peak-output light flared over the strikers. "Gori-gori," and a second word formed, heavier, and its effects hardened them and lit something forward and relentless in them, every hesitation burning off, every body tougher and meaner than a body had a right to be. He pushed both words out toward the five of them.

Tetsutetsu. Kamakiri. Kendo. Kaibara. Shishida.

They hit the keystone at the same instant.

Steel fist and giant blade wielded by enlarged hand and screaming drill and the full weight of the unleashed Beast, all five buffed past their ceilings, all five landing on the same hollow spot under the giant's chest in a single combined impact that cracked across the valley like the mountain breaking. The keystone caved. The bound trunks splintered. A spiderweb of fracture blew outward through the giant's whole torso, dirt and stone spalling off it in sheets.

It wasn't quite enough. The thing was too big. The crack ran deep and the giant groaned and began, impossibly, to pull itself back together, the soil flowing to fill the wound.

Shoda had been waiting for exactly that.

"Twin Impact!" He shouted.

The second hit went off where the strikers had hit and the giant came apart.

It detonated outward, the whole building-sized bulk of it blowing into a cloud of dirt and shattered stone and splintered trunk that rained down across the clearing. And when the dust cleared there was nothing standing where the thing had been but a settling heap of ordinary earth, and twenty teenagers, filthy and gasping and lit up with it.

Silence. Then the clearing erupted louder than the beast had.

"WHAT DO WE CALL THAT?!" Tetsutetsu screamed, throwing both fists up. "THAT NEEDS A NAME. THAT WAS A SUPER MOVE. SUPER MOVES GET NAMES."

"Class B Annihilation Cannon." Monoma announced instantly.

"That was so cool…" Kaibara said.

"Class B’s Annihilation Cannon." Kamakiri loved it.

"We gotta come up with more team moves!!!" Tetsutetsu declared.

"It just hit the thing," Honenuki said. "We could call it 'we hit the thing.'"

"We are NOT calling our ultimate move 'we hit the thing,' Honenuki, are you f-ing nuts?"

"Focus on the names and moves later. Let’s freaking get to camp…" Kendo said, but she was grinning too, breathing hard.

The class limped and laughed its way out of the tree line into the open, where the ground sloped down at last toward a cluster of low wooden buildings, smoke rising from one of them, the lodge, the facility, the end of the forest.

They'd made it.

…

Tiger and Ragdoll were waiting on the lodge steps, and the look on Ragdoll's face when the class came stumbling out of the trees was worth the whole four hours.

She'd been mid-bounce. She stopped bouncing. She grabbed Tiger's enormous arm and shook it.

"Tiger. Tiger, look at the time. TIGER."

Tiger looked at the time. His eyebrows, which had not moved through the entire reveal at the rest stop, climbed toward his hairline.

"Four hours," Ragdoll said, to the class, to herself, to the mountain in general, her voice climbing. "You did the Beast's Forest in FOUR HOURS. We blocked off the whole afternoon. We told the kitchen sundown. We genuinely thought we'd be carrying half of you out by lantern light-"

"Most classes take eight hours or longer." Tiger said. He looked down the filthy, scraped, grinning line of them, and at the heap of settled earth visible back at the tree line that had recently been the biggest beast he and Pixie-Bob had ever seeded into that clearing. "Most don't try to take it down either. We expected you to try and run away from it. You killed it."

"Class B," Monoma started, drawing breath, "is the greatest hero class in history…"

Vlad King was grinning at them with pride and joy.

"Took you all long enough." He chuckled. "Get inside and wash that outside stink off. Dinner's in an hour, and you've all earned it, so eat like it. Real training starts tomorrow." He pushed off the doorframe, and as the class filed past him into the lodge, exhausted and loud and every single one of them accounted for, he put a hand on the head of the smallest one going by, just for a second.

"Good work, Fukidashi." he said, low, just for him.

“Heh, I can’t be the only great hero from your class, sensei. Even I know when to take a step back.” Manga responded.