Receive advanced chapters while helping me to make ends meet in:
patreon.com/TheSynonym
────────────────────────
…
After Class 1-B went on with their gaming evening—everyone taking turns to play while trying out the other games Suzaku had brought—the seemingly organized and private session took an unexpected turn.
Thanks to the open door, the exhausted students from Class 1-A, just returning from their journey through the monster-riddled forest, caught sight of everything unfolding inside.
Naturally, they expressed their desire to join. Some more than others—namely the rowdier ones, like Mina, Kirishima, Kaminari, Jiro, Mineta, and Sero.
The class, of course, welcomed them. The more competition, the better. And since they were about to train together for the rest of the week, what better way to start inter-class relations?
Not everyone was readily prepared to join 1-B's activity, though. Iida, for example, remained skeptical, doubting the legality of the whole ordeal. That is, until Suzaku used those quick wits of his to fool the uptight student into believing everything was perfectly authorized, effectively forcing him to join as yet another accomplice.
Others in Class 1-A were simply too exhausted to care. They passed and went straight to bed.
Bakugo was also among those who refused, though in his case, he looked more like he wanted to do anything but socialize with people he had yet to acknowledge—namely, extras.
Of course, all it took was one of Suzaku's usual snarky remarks to injure the blonde's pride and get him to sit down for a 1v1.
Thus, igniting yet another duel.
Minutes later, the cycle repeated itself, with Bakugo following Suzaku with a rabid look, ready to throw hands.
Thankfully, Suzaku didn't play around much and quickly immobilized the explosive teen before he could blow the room apart.
It took a while for the guy to calm down, but eventually, he joined in on the fun—albeit reluctantly.
Sadly, that was also the moment their underground gaming club met its demise. Vlad King and Aizawa came to check what the ruckus was all about, uncovering the whole operation—TV theft included—and the contraband of gaming consoles at what was supposed to be a training camp.
After that, Suzaku was forced to pack his things back into his backpack, and everyone was sent to their respective rooms.
Thus ending a hectic, but fun, day.
…
°
°
°
|The next day…|
…
"Suzaku, wake up."
Suzaku's eyes shot open as he heard Itsuka's voice coming from not too far away.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position and glanced toward the door lazily, spotting Itsuka peeking through.
Rubbing one of his eyes with difficulty—having stuck glasses was a pain in the ass sometimes—he reached with his other hand for his phone beside his pillow and checked the time.
5 AM.
"...What the fuck?" He gave Itsuka a bewildered stare.
She smiled faintly. "Could you wake everyone up? Vlad-sensei's calling us."
"At this hour? You sure it wasn't a nightmare or something?"
"It wasn't. The training's already about to start, so we gotta be out of the building in max 15 minutes."
"You've gotta be kidding me…" Suzaku groaned, scratching at his bed hair with an annoyed gaze, then turned back to Itsuka with a fresh look of betrayal.
"Why me, though? Your vice-representative is right over there."
He pointed at the still-sleeping Nirengeki Shoda on the other side of the room.
Itsuka shrugged. "You were closer to the door."
And with that, she shut the door and disappeared, leaving behind a mildly annoyed Suzaku.
"I bet she's salty about yesterday," Suzaku muttered, ruffling his own hair in annoyance before getting up in one go and heading straight for Nirengeki.
Only to "accidentally" stumble over everyone's stuff along the way, causing all sorts of noise as he walked through the room.
When he finally reached the vice-representative, he nudged him with his foot.
"Oi, vice-representative. Get up, we gotta wake everyone up."
Shoda, who was already sitting up, gave him a wry glance. "I think you've already accomplished that."
Suzaku raised an eyebrow and looked around.
Everyone was in the same position, rubbing their eyes and staring at him with a face that said: "wtf bro?"
Seeing that, Suzaku shook his head with a helpless smile.
"What can I say? I'm simply too efficient."
After that, everyone got on the move. They grabbed their gym uniforms, brushed up nicely in the bathroom, and hurried off to the gathering point.
There, they found the girls already waiting, with Vlad King standing in front of them, arms crossed and looking rather impatient.
Class 1-A was also nearby, with Aizawa present as well—though a few students from their class still hadn't shown up.
It took a few minutes for both groups to fully gather, and once they did, the two teachers stepped to the front together, giving everyone a serious look.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," Vlad King began, smirking faintly as he scanned the still-sleepy faces before him. "Today, we'll be starting camp training to finally begin boosting that strength of yours. Soon, you'll all have the chance to earn your provisional licenses—so you'd better be ready by then. As you are right now, it's not enough!"
Vlad clenched his fist solemnly before Aizawa stepped forward and casually tossed two baseballs—one to Bakugo, and the other to Suzaku. Both caught them with ease.
"You two, I want you to throw that as far as you can."
"... Like at the beginning of the semester?" Suzaku asked, eyeing the baseball with a raised eyebrow. Bakugo remained silent, just staring at it.
Aizawa nodded. "Exactly. Your record was 312.3 meters. Bakugo's was 705.2."
Bakugo's deadpan turned into a smug smile right as he heard that number, shooting Suzaku a mocking smirk.
The redhead, however, didn't even look at him.
"Let's see how much the top of each class has improved in the past half year." Aizawa gave them a small grin, clearly with something in mind.
The two students gave the baseballs in their hands a quick look before stepping out from their respective groups.
Bakugo was the first to go.
His classmates watched eagerly, fired up and ready to see how far he'd come. After everything they'd been through, they were dying to see what all that struggle had amounted to.
The mock battles in Hero Basic Training, the Sports Festival, the internships… They were no longer the same teenagers from half a year ago.
They were half-seasoned heroes!
And Bakugo was going to prove that.
"Do it, Bakugo!"
"A lot's happened these months—I bet he can hit a full kilometer this time!"
"A kilometer? I'd say a kilometer and a half!"
"What if he outright destroys the ball?"
While Class 1-A buzzed with excitement, Bakugo stepped into position.
He inhaled deeply.
Then, just before launching, a savage grin spread across his face.
"GO TO HELL!!!"
His ferocious shout echoed through the forest—and with a powerful swing of his arm—
–BOOM!–
An explosion burst from his palm, and the ball shot through the air like a bullet.
""...?!?""
Everyone in Class 1-A stared in awe. That throw definitely looked faster, stronger, and more intense than the one at the beginning of the semester.
Even some from Class 1-B watched in surprise—awed, and in some cases, a bit envious of such a powerful Quirk.
A single question hung in the air:
How much farther would his record go this time?
Unfortunately, they were all in for a surprise.
"714.6 meters."
Aizawa's cold voice sliced through the excitement, dragging everyone back to reality—including Bakugo himself.
"What?!" he snapped, whipping around.
Aizawa held up his phone, displaying the result without emotion.
The class fell into stunned silence.
"That's… lower than I thought," Sero muttered, visibly let down.
"What happened? I thought he'd gotten way stronger…" Kaminari said, scratching his head.
Murmurs began bubbling in Class 1-B.
"His record barely improved. Did he slack off all semester?" Monoma said, squinting and crossing his arms in disdain.
"Despite his personality, Kirishima holds him in high esteem. I don't think that's it," Tetsutetsu replied beside him.
"Maybe… it has something to do with this training camp?" Itsuka offered from a few steps away.
Then, all eyes turned to Suzaku—including Bakugo's.
Would he also fall short?
Would he, too, help the teachers prove their mysterious point?
Both classes held their breath.
But Suzaku didn't seem fazed by the growing pressure. He was still warming up, rotating his arms and loosening his joints.
When the teachers gave the nod, he stepped forward, focused.
He closed his eyes and drew a long breath.
His body wound up, arm pulled back, muscles tight, tendons straining from fingertips to legs.
If he'd thrown then, the result probably wouldn't have been much better than his original record—maybe even worse, considering how groggy he still felt due to having just woken up.
Back then, all he had was his amazing brute strength and the throwing technique he'd picked up during his training with the old man.
He'd been at the limit—both in knowledge and physique. There wasn't much room for improvement in that regard.
Now, though… he had something else.
"Heh."
Suzaku smiled. A mischievous glint sparkled in his eyes.
Then, from that tense stance, his body flashed—a faint distortion rippling across his frame.
In that instant—less than the blink of an eye—his arm shifted.
Muscles compressed. Tightened. Strengthened. Veins bulged. All of that happened in a millisecond.
Then—
–Whip–
-Bang!-
His arm cracked through the air like a whip. Letting out a loud bang, like a small explosion had just gone down.
The ball vanished, a blur streaking across the sky.
Gasps erupted from both classes—even Bakugo let out a surprised grunt, eyes glued to the vanishing speck.
"Wha—?!" Moments later, Vlad King let out a stunned shout, staring at the screen of his phone with shock, causing most of those around to gather their gazes on him.
When he noticed the eyes on him, he grimaced—then reluctantly turned the phone around. Showing the result.
[1224.5 meters]
"What in the actual heck?!"
"What's that arm made of?!"
"Wait—what was his previous record?"
"312 meters…"
"Holy crap, that's over four times more!"
Comments from both sides erupted like a storm.
The sheer contrast between Bakugo's modest improvement and Suzaku's monster leap in performance left everyone too stunned to stay quiet.
As the students buzzed and shouted, the teachers stared between the device and Suzaku in silence.
Vlad King's expression was… complicated. Like something about the result unsettled him.
Aizawa, meanwhile, kept glancing at Suzaku's arm, eyes narrowed, thinking.
Eventually, the noise settled when Aizawa stepped forward and addressed the students.
"This exercise was meant to show you that while your experience and technique may have improved… your Quirks by themselves haven't improved much. That's why your test results didn't change dramatically from the start of the year."
"But Sensei, Suzaku-kun—" Mina raised her hand, pointing.
"He doesn't count." Aizawa shut her down immediately. He glanced at Vlad King, who finally snapped out of his trance.
"Ahem." Vlad cleared his throat, slipping back into teacher mode. "Quirks are like muscles. They rebuild stronger the more they're pushed to their limits."
He flexed his biceps as he spoke, then created a torrent of blood from the palm of his hand.
The blood coiled around his hand and took the form of claws before hardening. With them, he slashed at a nearby tree and, without much trouble, brought it down to everyone's dazed astonishment.
With the demonstration done, he turned back to his students, a faint smile on his face.
"However, no matter how big or powerful this 'muscle' of yours is, so far you haven't had the chance to push it to its real limit—and because of that, it hasn't grown at all. Which is exactly what we'll be aiming to remedy in this camp."
Aizawa walked next to him, flashing everyone a toothy grin.
"From today onward, you will all work on improving your Quirks. It'll be so hard you'll feel like dying..."
Then, he pointed at them ominously.
"So, try not to."
…
°
°
°
|Hours later…|
…
The once peaceful landscape of the mountains, filled only with the melody of wind grazing the leaves and grass, looked quite different today.
"Aaaaargh!!"
"Kill me!"
"Hu, ha, hu, ha, hu, ha… wheeze… Please, a break… I can't breathe."
"I can't feel my legs!"
"Your legs? I can't feel my body!"
Birds chirping, grass swaying, wind whistling—those sounds had been completely drowned out by the horrid screams of pain and misery from the U.A. students, all being pushed to their limits by the brutal training sessions they'd been assigned.
Explosions rang out left and right—be it from combat, sparring, or just the quirks of certain individuals going off. In other zones, clouds of dust rose constantly as students clashed, went berserk, or simply collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
The once serene and quiet place had transformed into a hellish landscape, with poor souls being dragged to the verge of collapse—or worse.
And amidst all that suffering, a certain redhead sat calmly on a rock, surrounded by the teachers of both classes… and a cyan-haired girl in a cat costume.
"So, Suzuki, anything you want to say for yourself?" Vlad King asked, staring straight into Suzaku's eyes.
"What do you mean? I thought we were about to discuss what the heck I'm supposed to be doing during this week of training. Why does this feel like an interrogation?" Suzaku furrowed his brows, glaring faintly at the three.
Aizawa stepped forward, his eyes narrowing.
"A fourfold increase in performance in less than a year, for something that isn't even a Quirk? Do you honestly expect us to believe that?"
Suzaku crossed his arms. "Your point is?"
Vlad King leaned in, face just a bit too close for comfort.
"All Might noted unusual strength levels from you during the final exam. The recordings made it hard to confirm, and while your burst of speed after your internship was strange, there was still a chance your time with Mirko had something to do with it. But this kind of spike in power—from a student whose Quirk supposedly only controls glasses made from his own body? That's not something we can just ignore anymore."
"Plus…" Aizawa cut in, appearing from the side and pointing at his own eye. "I saw it clearly this time… It was brief, but I'm not a Pro Hero whose specialty revolves around his eyes for nothing. You did something to your arm, didn't you? Whatever it was, it increased your strength and explosive power tremendously."
Upon hearing Aizawa's comment, Vlad King glared at him with squinted eyes before turning to Suzaku with the same look. "So what is it, Suzuki?"
Suzaku didn't say anything at first, just glanced between the three—Aizawa, Vlad, and the cyan-haired girl—or rather, the heroine Ragdoll—who stood awkwardly to the side.
Then, he simply smiled.
"It's a talent of mine," he said, his mouth moving clearly in front of the three. Something that should've been normal—yet it caused a visible shock in them, making their eyes widen and their bodies shudder for a moment.
"That was…" Aizawa muttered. Face growing more serious by the second.
"My voice," Vlad King completed, eyebrows furrowing. "How... what did you do, Suzuki?"
Suzaku sneered, his voice suddenly changing to Aizawa's. "Besides an already strong body, it seems I also possess a pretty weird control over my own body. You remember, right? When I shouted at Tetsutetsu during our first class?"
Vlad King's eyes widened in realization.
"Your voice was unusually loud at that time, so I shouted at you to shut up... So that was also a result of this control of yours?"
"Yeah. Vocal cords stuff." Suzaku pointed at his own throat, then tugged his sleeve to show his arm.
The three adults stared in silence while Suzaku exposed his entire arm. It was well defined, evidently the peak of what his body could attain at his age, and maybe even faintly beyond it.
However, their puzzlement turned to shock when, in an instant, the seemingly normal arm swelled and became incredibly more defined, to the point of looking almost like the muscles had gained muscles of their own—strength practically brimming from the sight alone.
Aizawa squinted at it.
"It's pretty much what I saw right before you threw that ball… It has a faint resemblance to Kirishima's Hardening."
Suzaku didn't say anything, but simply tugged his other arm and did the same with it. The faces of the three adults became more and more perplexed the longer they watched.
While Suzaku waved his arms around to show them, Vlad King kneeled in front of him and grabbed his arm, feeling it with a serious face.
"It feels like stone." A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead as he muttered that. "How is it possible for a muscle to become like this without a Quirk suited for it?"
From behind, Aizawa's eyes suddenly glowed red.
And yet, even after five full seconds passed, Suzaku's arm didn't weaken in the slightest; it remained the same, brimming with power.
Seeing that, Aizawa's red eyes regained their previous black color, and he heaved a helpless sigh.
"So this is—somehow—either a byproduct of your Glasses Quirk, which somehow results in a mutation that can't be affected by Erasure… or it's outright not a Quirk at all," Aizawa spoke solemnly, drawing gasps from both Vlad King and Ragdoll.
With a complex face, Vlad stood back up, rubbing his chin in thought.
For a moment, he and Aizawa walked to a nearby spot, far enough not to be eavesdropped on. During which Suzaku remained seated, making small chat with Ragdoll.
By the time they returned, Vlad King gave Suzaku a serious gaze, arms crossed and eyes going up and down as if inspecting the redhead.
"What else can you do with it, Suzuki?"
Suzaku blinked at the question before shrugging. "Not much. I only know how to change my voice, and do this with both my arms... and legs."
"That's it?" Vlad King raised an eyebrow. From the way Suzaku described it—absolute control over his own body—it definitely sounded like it had a ton of potential for other uses.
Suzaku untransformed his arm and scratched his head. "I used it only for changing my voice whenever I felt like pranking someone. It's only after meeting Mirko and my fight with All Might that I thought of using it for something else."
"Damn." Vlad King clicked his tongue. What a waste of potential.
Aizawa patted him on the shoulder. "At least now we know what to make him focus on during the training."
"Right." Vlad's frown lessened at the thought, then turned to address the one who had been silent so far. "Ragdoll, your turn."
"Okay~!" The girl perked up and looked at Suzaku through her fingers, forming an O with her thumb and index finger.
"Let's see… huh?"
She flinched slightly as she kept staring.
It went on for a whole minute, her eyes moving up and down Suzaku's body like something wasn't clicking.
"So? What does your Quirk say?"
It wasn't until Vlad nudged her that she finally snapped out of her daze.
"Well… it only specifies 'overwhelming power' as his weakness… but it sometimes flickers and disappears, only to reappear not long after, like a malfunctioning lamp… It's strange. That's never happened before."
"What?" Vlad King asked, baffled.
The three glanced at Suzaku with suspicion. Eyes squinted into slits.
The redhead simply raised an eyebrow, sounding almost exasperated. "What? That just means I'm well-rounded in all areas. Nothing but overwhelming power can get me."
Ragdoll suddenly perked up, eyes brightening slightly. "Oh, something else popped up! Weakness: overconfidence."
"..." The three gave the redhead a deadpan.
Suzaku rolled his eyes.
"Fair enough."
Reaching a consensus, the three adults turned to each other and began talking for a bit—mostly, from what Suzaku could hear, about what to do with him during training.
Eventually, they reached a decision, Vlad King turning to him.
"Suzuki, you're gonna be training with Tiger for the moment. He'll make sure you're sharp enough on all ends, while also keeping you from slacking off."
Suzaku glanced to the side. In the distance was Tiger—the... rather obvious odd one in the Wild Wild Pussycats.
Three women in cat costumes, and one swollen macho guy. It was hard to miss.
He nodded and stood up, patting off his clothes.
He gave the three teachers one last glance, almost as if wondering if they had anything else to say, before shrugging and walking away.
As the redhead disappeared into the distance, the three adults heaved a sigh in unison.
"Well, I'll deliver the information to Mandalay so she can give instructions when needed." Ragdoll gave the two teachers a nod before walking away.
That left only Vlad King and Aizawa, simply staring into the distance—probably taking in everything they'd just learned.
"Aizawa."
"What?"
"Are you sure what Suzuki did wasn't a Quirk?"
Aizawa let the silence stretch for a moment before replying in a tired tone. "Like I said, it's either a mutation-type side effect of his Glasses Quirk… which I highly doubt, given the zero connection between both powers… or it's not a Quirk."
Vlad King nodded, his expression solemn.
"That kid gets more bizarre the more you learn about him. A physiological impossibility at birth, nearly experimented on as a child, and now this... I wonder what the principal will make of it?"
"At most, he'll pay more attention to the kid and ask us to help him figure out what's up with his body. He's curious, sure—but he does care for the students."
Vlad King sighed, nodding slightly.
Then, he cracked his neck and turned around, glancing at Aizawa. "Well, we'd better start planning a training regime for that ability of his right away… It's probably the only thing that brat needs to train, so I guess it wasn't so bad we found out now. Otherwise, we would have had him do some ineffective and repetitive training just to not let him slack off."
"... What do you mean by 'we'? He's your student," Aizawa deadpanned.
"What a joker you are, Aizawa."
"..."
Aizawa turned around and began walking away.
"AIZAWAAAAAA!"
…
────────────────────────
-To be Continued…-
────────────────────────
(A/N: And so, Suzaku's true nature begins to unravel to those around him. Of course, they're quite far from the truth for now, but how long will that last?
Not much, probably.
No image this time because I can't find anything.
I'm sleepy.)
->