THIRD PERSON POV
The air in the fifth-floor bomb room was thick with the scent of ozone and the biting chill of Shoto's quirk. Shoto Todoroki was not accustomed to being on the defensive. Since he was a child, his ice had been an absolute force of nature that ended fights before they could even begin.
But Riko Akabane was treating his glacier like a practice dummy.
Clack-clack-clack!
Riko's hands moved in a blur, pulling more pellets from her belt and flicking them with the precision of a professional pitcher. Each one struck the jagged pillars of ice Shoto raised, detonating with concentrated force that sent frozen shrapnel flying back at him.
Shoto was forced to cross his arms, hunkering down behind a thick frost-shield. He hated this. He hated the feeling of being "handled." He hated that this girl, with her arrogant grin and her flashy, explosive quirk, was using the momentum of his own battle against him. It reminded him too much of his father's "training" sessions back at the Todoroki estate, the feeling of being trapped.
"You're wide open!" Ojiro yelled, trying to circle around Riko's flank, his tail poised to strike.
Riko didn't even turn. She just flicked a pellet toward the floor near Ojiro's feet. BOOM. The shockwave sent the tail-user stumbling back into a frozen wall.
"Sorry, Tail-man! I'm busy with the main attraction!" Riko chirped.
Shoto's patience snapped. His right side flared with a sudden, violent frost, the temperature dropping so sharply that Momo, standing behind the bomb, began to shiver.
"Enough," Shoto growled.
He didn't just stomp this time; he swung his entire arm in a sweeping arc. A massive, jagged mountain of ice, ten times the size of his previous attacks, erupted from the floor. It was a chaotic, beautiful mess of frozen spears aimed directly at Riko and Momo. It was designed to end the match, the room, and the conversation all at once.
Riko looked at the wall of white death rushing toward her. She didn't look scared; she looked almost annoyed.
"Gee, I would love to stay and fight you all day, Icy-Hot," Riko said, her voice strangely calm over the roar of the encroaching ice. "But if Momo-chan gets a cold, who's going to help me with the English notes? So... bye-bye!"
Riko didn't aim at the ice. She slammed both palms flat onto the concrete floor beneath her.
"Structural Failure!" (Author - I ran out of cool names)
This time she directly charged the floor and blasted it.
Just as the tip of Shoto's ice mountain was an inch away from Riko's face, the entire front half of the room, the half Todoroki and Ojiro were standing on, caved downward.
The sudden vacuum created by the collapsing floor sucked the air out of the room. Shoto's eyes widened in genuine shock as the ground disappeared beneath his boots. He and Ojiro tumbled into the dark abyss, falling toward the second floor as the third and fourth levels gave way under the sheer weight of the collapsing concrete and Shoto's own heavy ice.
THE MONITORING ROOM
"WHOA!" Kirishima screamed, leaning so close to the screen his nose touched the glass. "She dropped the floor?!"
"What a reckless move!" Iida adjusted his glasses, his face pale. "But wait... look at the other side!"
"She only destroyed the section Todoroki-kun was on," Kaminari noted, pointing at the screen. "Yaoyorozu-san and the bomb are still on the remaining ledge. That's insane control!"
"Look at the debris!" Ashido pointed. "What are those... strings?"
THE BATTLEFIELD
As Shoto and Ojiro plummeted toward the second floor amidst a rain of concrete and pulverized ice, something strange happened.
The "useless" capture tape, the hundreds of strands Momo had crisscrossed earlier that Shoto had frozen and ignored, were falling with them. Earlier, Shoto had thought the ice had made them brittle and ineffective.
He was wrong.
Momo had used a specialized Shape-Memory Alloy integrated into the fibers of the tape. When Riko's explosion let out that sudden, intense burst of heat, the ice encasing the ropes didn't just melt; it acted as a catalyst. The heat triggered the memory-alloy's "return" state.
Mid-air, the ropes began to whip and coil like living snakes.
"What-?!" Ojiro gasped, but before he could swing his tail, the ropes lashed around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides.
Shoto tried to reach for his right side to freeze the air around him, but the ropes were faster. The heat from the explosion had turned the "brittle" traps into high-tension snares. By the time the two boys hit the dusty floor of the second level, they weren't just down, they were tightly wrapped.
Shoto hit the ground with a grunt, his arms pinned to his chest in a complex web of reinforced capture tape. He struggled, but the more he moved, the tighter the memory-alloy contracted.
Up on the jagged ledge of the fifth floor, Riko stood at the edge of the hole, looking down through the dust. She wiped a smudge of soot from her cheek and exhaled a long cloud of vapor.
"Checkmate," Riko whispered.
Momo walked up beside her, looking down at the two incapacitated "villains." "The thermal expansion worked perfectly, Akabane-san. Your timing was... impeccable."
"All in a day's work" Riko grinned, though she was leaning slightly on her knees.
MONITORING ROOM
The class was silent for a full five seconds.
"That was... incredible," Tsuyu croaked. "They used Todoroki-chan's own strength against him. Ribbit."
"The Villains win!" Mineta shouted. "She actually beat the recommendation student!"
All Might stepped toward the microphone, his hand raised. He looked at the monitors, a look of profound pride on his face. He had seen many students over the years, but Riko Akabane's ability to manipulate the flow of a fight was something he hadn't seen in most pros.
"The match is over!" All Might's voice boomed through the speakers. "The winners are the Villain Team, Akabane and—"
Suddenly, the screen flickered.
A sharp, crystalline sound echoed.
"Oi... you for real?"
Riko stared down into the abyss she had created, her jaw nearly hitting her chest. Down on the second floor, Shoto Todoroki was a mess, horizontal, wrapped in memory-alloy capture tape like a high-tech mummy, but his right hand was pressed firmly against the concrete.
CRACK-SHOOOOOM!
A massive, vertical pillar of ice erupted from beneath his palm. It didn't just grow; it surged upward like a high-speed elevator, carrying Shoto's prone, tied-up body right along with it. The sheer volume of ice was staggering, filling the hole Riko had blasted and rising all the way back up to the fifth floor.
Within seconds, Shoto was back at eye level with the Villains. He was still tied, still unable to move his legs or his left arm, but he was standing, or rather, leaning, atop his own frozen monument. Ojiro, meanwhile, remained stuck on the floor far below, his tail and torso hopelessly pinned by the debris and the tightening snares.
"You're a persistent bastard, I'll give you that!" Riko barked, her hands igniting with orange glow. "But this floor is closed for maintenance!"
Shoto didn't waste breath on a retort. He swung his free right hand, sending a jagged forest of ice spears across the bomb room.
Riko didn't flinch. She met the frost head-on, her palms slamming into the air in front of her. A massive kinetic pulse rippled forward.
"Sublimation!"
The ice spears didn't just shatter; they turned into a blinding, scalding wall of steam instantly. The room was once again swallowed by white mist, thick enough to hide a titan.
Shoto gritted his teeth, his right side beginning to ache with a deep, bone-chilling frost. He was shivering, his movements becoming sluggish as his internal temperature plummeted. He focused entirely on his hearing, trying to track the girl who seemed to move like a ghost in the vapor.
"You know," Riko's voice drifted through the steam, sounding strangely melodic and haunting. "I noticed something while we were dancing around. Your right side is freezing over, Shoto-kun. You're losing speed. You're losing precision."
Shoto spun his head to the right, sending a burst of frost toward the sound.
"I also noticed," the voice whispered, this time coming from his left, right by his ear. "That you have a whole other side that's currently doing absolutely nothing. Why are you hesitating to use your fire? Why let yourself freeze to death in a training exercise?"
"Shut up!" Shoto hissed, his pride stinging more than the cold. He unleashed a wide-area burst of ice behind him, encasing half the room in a jagged tomb. "I don't need it! I'll win with just my right side!"
"Will you?"
THWACK.
A brutal, kick connected with the back of Shoto's head. Even with his training, the impact sent his vision swimming. He lurched forward on his ice pillar, nearly falling back down the hole.
"You're trying so hard to win," Riko's voice continued, coming from the shadows above. "So it's not that you're underestimating me. You're fighting for your life. So why the handicap? Personal issues? Family drama?"
"I said... SHUT UP!" Shoto roared. The rage he'd kept bottled up since he was five years old flared. He sent a massive, jagged wave of ice in a 360-degree arc, the tips sharp enough to skewer a tank. "I WILL NEVER USE HIS POWER! I WILL WIN THIS MY WAY!"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, man," Riko's silhouette appeared through the thinning steam, perched casually on a hanging piece of rebar. She looked entirely unimpressed. "I'm the villain here, alright? I thought we were having a good convo, but you went and made it all 'Shonen Protagonist' on me."
Before Shoto could process her location, she dropped.
Riko slammed her fist into the ice pillar, turning his massive ice attack into a harmless puff of steam before her fist continued its trajectory, sinking deep into Shoto's gut.
The air left his lungs in a pained wheeze. Riko stood over him now, her expression shifting. The snarky teenager was gone. Instead the Riko before him was different, she had a look that he hadn't seen on her before (a look a couple of middle school girls would have recognised ), Her eyes were cold, clinical, and terrifyingly serious.
"Oi," she said, her voice dropping into a dangerously low. "I don't want your personal story. I don't care about your trauma, and I definitely don't care about your daddy issues."
Shoto looked up, his gray and blue eyes wide with a mixture of agony and shock.
"But don't think for a second you can win at U.A. without giving it your all," Riko hissed, leaning in until their foreheads almost touched. "A villain wouldn't care where your fire comes from. A villain wouldn't wait for you to resolve your childhood trauma. All I know is that the ice is yours, and the fire is yours. It's your power, Shoto."
She grabbed the collar of his suit, her hand glowing with a violent orange hum.
"If you think you can half-ass things in this class and still call yourself a hero, don't even think of winning against me. I'm playing for keeps. If you aren't, then get out of my way."
Shoto stared at her, the words hitting him with the force of a freight train. It's your power. For a split second, the cold in his right side felt like a cage he had built for himself.
Then, just as quickly as the darkness had appeared, Riko's face suddenly brightened. She tilted her head and gave him a mock-cute pout, her voice returning to a high-pitched, chirpy tone that gave him instant whiplash.
"Also... no trauma dumping on me in the middle of a fight! It's totally bad for my health! Okie-dokie?"
As Shoto Todoroki felt the impact of Riko's words, he was met with a sharp kick, that flung him backwards, his body sliding across the frost-slicked floor, but his mind was elsewhere.
"It's your power, Shoto"
The sentence echoed through the hollow chambers of his mind, shattering the icy walls he had built around his heart since childhood. For years, he had defined himself by what he wasn't going to be. He had focused so much on rejecting his father that he had become a half-finished version of himself. As he skidded to a halt near the edge of the rubble, he looked at his trembling right hand. He was freezing. He was failing. And most importantly, he was being told the truth by the "strange girl" who saw him more clearly than he saw himself.
I am not him, Shoto thought, a spark of something, hot flickering in his gut. And if I want to win... I can't be half a hero.
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Author's Shrine
yo.