The starting pistol was Present Mic's voice, which was the same as the starting pistol for everything at UA — a volume capable of addressing a stadium of eighty thousand people without requiring speakers.
"LET THE GAMES BEGIN!"
The gates opened and forty-two Hero Course students and sixty-three students from General Studies, Support, and Business courses launched themselves into the tunnel at the same time, and the tunnel was exactly as wide as Yami had known it would be, which was not wide enough.
He went to the right edge of the pack immediately. Not aggressive, not visible — the edge, where the shoulder of the tunnel curved away from the crush of people who were all accelerating at the same moment and making the specific choices that a hundred bodies in a narrow space made simultaneously, which was mostly to go forward and accept whatever friction that produced. He let the initial surge carry him along the right margin and didn't burn OFA in the first fifteen seconds, because the first fifteen seconds were always the ones that cameras prioritized, and fifteen seconds of unremarkable edge-running was the correct fifteen seconds to have on national broadcast.
The tunnel opened.
The robots were exactly where they were supposed to be.
Three of them — the zero-pointer class, the scale of which had not become more comfortable to exist in proximity to regardless of context. The entrance exam version had ended his life. These ones were prop obstacles in a school competition, which his body understood intellectually and reacted to on the instinct level that the entrance exam had installed in him, a cold jolt that ran from his sternum to his fingertips in the half-second before the analytical brain caught up and said prop obstacle, not threat, continue.
He continued.
Three percent OFA in the legs for the vault — a running approach to the fallen section of barrier at the robots' left side, the structural gap that the obstacle course designers had clearly included as the intended bypass route and which the first fifteen people through had already discovered and used, because Todoroki Shoto's ice path was visible ahead of him as a navigational trail of frost on the concrete, first place by a distance that communicated he had not been trying to stay in contact with the pack.
Bakugo was somewhere above — the sound of him was above, the explosions at irregular intervals that tracked his vertical trajectory over the obstacle rather than around it. Yami didn't look up. Looking up cost time and the cameras were probably tracking Bakugo, which meant looking up put his face in the frame of a Bakugo shot.
He cleared the barrier in the top nine. Settled into a pace that would hold fifth across the minefield without requiring OFA above three percent to maintain.
The minefield was the one he'd run in his head forty times across the two preparation weeks — the placement pattern that the UA support department had designed on the principle of enough density to require attention, not enough to require extraordinary ability. The mines didn't produce shrapnel. They produced smoke, force, and the specific disadvantage of being knocked sideways by your own momentum when your foot found the wrong patch of ground.
He knew the safe paths.
He took them.
The route looked, to any camera following him, like competent navigation. It was not competent navigation. It was the exact route that existed between the placements, run by a person who had memorized a layout that no student was supposed to have access to and which he had accessed through a medium that did not exist.
Fifth. He crossed the finish line in fifth, which was four seconds behind Kirishima and eight seconds behind the 1-B student whose name he'd had to look up because the original timeline hadn't given him much screen time and this timeline had apparently given him excellent robots.
Todoroki first. Bakugo second. 1-B student third. Kirishima fourth. Yami fifth.
The cameras spent four seconds on him at the finish line. He had the expression he'd practiced for this — not satisfaction, not performed modesty, the specific face of someone who had worked hard and arrived at a result and was processing it — and then the cameras moved to the sixth-place student because fifth place was not a story.
The results board was up before the next wave finished.
He found his position on it — Ichigo Yami: 5th, Hero Course Class 1-A — and then moved his eyes down through the General Studies section because the outline he'd built for this morning had included Deku will be somewhere in the top 30 as a note and he wanted the number.
Midoriya Izuku: 28th, General Studies 1-C.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-three positions down from fifth, on a board that had forty-two names on it as the qualification line. He'd made it by the width of fourteen positions.
Yami looked at the two lines. His name and Deku's name, on the same screen, in the same competition, at the same school, competing for the same credential that one of them had built their entire future around and the other had stumbled into by dying at the right moment.
The support boots were visible in the replay footage that Present Mic was talking over — the homemade modification quality of them, the Hatsume Mei fingerprints in the engineering, the adaptation of available technology by a person who had been told they had nothing to work with and had gone and found the nearest available thing to work with instead.
Of course he found her, Yami thought, without knowing exactly who the he in that sentence was describing at the moment he thought it.
The cavalry battle formation sign-up opened on everyone's wristband simultaneously.
He sent three messages.
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