Musume

Chapter 14

Yumi had spoken to her father about her suspicions about All For One, but although he gave them some consideration, he seemed to be a firm believer that the villain was dead.

It did not calm her.

She only managed to worry even more, about what could happen if it was true and he was caught by surprise.

The last time, he’d barely made it out alive, with a wound on his side that cost him his stomach and a lung. If the battle repeated itself… in his state…

Yumi shook her head and tried to focus on her lesson. After this class, she would have her first one-on-one class with Midnight and she was pretty excited about it. She wondered what sort of things she’d teach him…

She knew Shinso had already had his first class with Aizawa-sensei and her dad had something planned for Izuku.

And then the class ended and Bakugo had to begin conflict with the rest of the UA courses. Class 1-A was doomed.

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For two weeks before the UA festival began, class 1-A put all their effort into training and becoming better.

They’d already had a taste of what life as true heroes was like but that had only made them strive for it harder.

Yumi trained hard with Midnight, who focused on her flexibility and acrobatics when she assessed her and decided the stamina she had because of her hiking routine was more than enough for now.

In that time, though, Izuku finally gathered enough courage to ask about her Quirk during class.

“My Quirk? It’s called Pyrolysing.” She revealed.

“Oh, I guess it’s a word game with the words Pyro from the latin fire and paralyzing for the paralyzing effect of your stare. It seems like a very similar Quirk to Aizawa-sensei’s. I wonder, though, if there is a limit to the paralyzing part of the quirk, like there is to what injuries you can heal…”

Yumi shook her head fondly at the boy’s muttering and decided to get him out of his misery. She knew it wasn’t very smart to reveal this just before the UA festival but she didn’t want to have an unfair advantage either.

“Well, there is. In fact, the time they remain paralyzed depends entirely on the number of people under my quirk. As you know, unlike Aizawa-sensei’s quirk, mine doesn’t require constant eye contact to act, just the initial eye contact is enough for the target to be frozen for around twenty minutes. However, if I paralyze more people, the time they remain under the effects of my quirk will decrease. Also, my eyes get itchy and red as if I’ve been crying the longer that I use my quirk. In that way, it’s not much unlike Aizawa-sensei’s.”

“What about the healing part of your quirk?” asked Izuku, looking fascinated as he wrote down in a notebook.

“I rely on my life-force for that, so I can only heal injuries that aren’t really fatal. I don’t consciously control, it’s just that whenever I touch a fire, it turns blue and starts to heal instead of burn. Also, I can’t heal myself. It would be silly for my own life force to try to heal my wounds, as it would turn into a never ending cycle, so it doesn’t work on me.”

“So you cannot get burnt?” asked Todoroki, speaking for the first time in a while.

“No, I’ve never gotten burnt.”

The teen hummed low in his throat, seemingly lost in his own thoughts, and she didn’t bother him.

“Your quirk is so cool, Yumi-hime!”

“Thanks, Izuku, although…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s just strange, you know? For the longest time, my dad and I thought I was quirkless. It was a source of a lot of problems as a child.” She revealed, knowing that if someone understood it would be him.

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In those two weeks, she invited her friends over to her house another two times, this time inviting Todoroki too. Once, Kirishima brought over Bakugo, bowing and apologizing since apparently they had met on the way and Bakugo had been a little disgruntled not to be invited to what he thought was a class reunion.

Yumi wasn’t fazed. She thought the blonde deserved a good kick for how he treated Izuku especially, but otherwise didn’t have any problem with him.

After getting to know him, she had a few theories as to why he was that way though.

The leading one was that, somehow unnoticed by everyone, his quirk also had a psychological effect over him and so he had an explosive temper that matched his explosive quirk.

It was very possible, as different quirks had been studied and discovered to do exactly the same.

She just didn’t understand why no one noticed it before, but resolved to tell her theory to her teacher so he could maybe arrange something for the blonde. After all, if nothing else, the mere idea that something was controlling his thoughts and actions could be enough for the teen to decide to pull himself together and rein in his impulsivity.

As for what they did in her house, well, she once tried to teach them to bake. Shoji was surprisingly ―or not, with his multiple arms― good at it, whilst Fumikage’s results were as black as his soul. Kirishima was passable but Todoroki couldn’t be trusted around anything at all.

The next time, when Bakugo came, they played board games and trained together, doing some sparring in her garden.

It was decided they would be repeating it in the future.

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A few days before festival, Todoroki issued a challenge to Izuku. Yumi was surprised as she watched the confrontation, but she didn’t intervene.

She’d find out what all that was about, as something was obviously bothering Todoroki, but she wouldn’t interfere in the challenge itself.

She took another sip of her tea and directed her attention to Director Nezu’s plans.

Along the school, people shivered as she smirked.

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The day before the festival, her father dedicated solely to her, much to her happiness. They went shopping, she got a new haircut ―mirroring her father’s as always― and they ate out before spending the day in the garden talking about this and that.

Slowly, her nerves disappeared. It didn’t really matter if she did well or not in the festival, not as long as she still had these moments with her daddy.

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The festival was, much like its name implied, a festival.

She knew it, of course, but she’d expected it to be a much more serious affair than it really was.

Instead, there were stands with food, toys and games and the stairs were full to the brimming with people ready to enjoy the spectacle.

The first year students of UA marched into the arena and after Bakugo’s… ‘inspiring speech’ ―‘I promise I’ll be the number one’ shit― they moved onto the competition itself.

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The first trial was running a lap around an obstacle course. Sounded normal enough, except for the fact you were allowed to do anything at all whilst inside.

At Midnight’s announcement, she felt herself growing a bit nervous again. She didn’t have to do well, but she wanted to.

She was going to be one of the best Pro Heroes and save people and do her daddy proud. That was her goal, after all, and doing well in the tournament would help her with that.

She got into position and waited for Midnight’s signal to start, ready to spring into action.

“Start!”

She launched herself into the air, stepping on people’s shoulders and heads to make way for herself.

She wasn’t the only one who had a similar idea, as she was joined in the air with several of her classmates.

They were all doing pretty well, even Mineta who seemed strangely motivated lately, with Class 1-A passing over the first obstacle ―the entryway and Todoroki’s ice― easily enough.

And then a robot threw Mineta off the air.

It was the first real obstacle of the course: the false villains from the entrance exam.

She saw Todoroki pause, probably because unlike them he’d not made the entrance exam and he didn’t really know what they were capable of. He was not fazed, though, freezing one of the giant robots completely and making it fall.

Pushing Present Mic’s and Aizawa-sensei’s voice out of her mind, Yumi didn’t let the opportunity go: she sprang into action and used her newly gained equilibrium from Midnight’s hellish training to her advantage, sliding over the ice and passing Todoroki whilst everyone was still pulling themselves together.

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Shinso sighed as the two guys carrying him slowly trudged through the ice. He felt a bit bad about using his quirk in this way, but he didn’t have many options and one of the guys had conveniently enough had a quirk that allowed himself to stick to the ground, which stopped him from sliding in the ice.

Once he reached the robots, though, he dropped them. He didn’t order them to leave the course, although he could’ve. That would be playing dirty.

Then he heard the commentary of Present Mic and Aizawa-sensei.

So Yumi was already on the lead, uh?

‘Well’, he though with a smirk, ‘I won’t be left behind.’