UA's campus was bigger than the manga made it look.
The main building alone took up more ground than Yu's entire neighborhood. Glass and concrete sprawling across a hillside. Training grounds visible behind security fencing, support course workshops trailing smoke from ventilation pipes the size of cars. Riku walked through the front courtyard with three hundred other hopefuls and most of them were staring upward with their mouths open. He'd seen these buildings before, drawn in ink on a screen he'd held in a different pair of hands. The scale hit different when you were standing in it.
He found the orientation hall by following the crowd. A massive auditorium, stadium seating, a stage with a dead podium. Students filed in and sorted themselves into nervous clusters. A few sat alone. Most talked too loud, their noise covering the shaking in their hands.
Riku took a seat near the middle where he could see everything.
The Allure Aura was at rest. Low, ambient, the kind of pull that made people glance at him and then forget why. But his resting level was cranked from last night's Drain and the glances were lasting longer than usual. A girl two rows down kept turning around. A boy sitting to his left had shifted his chair away twice without seeming to notice he was doing it.
Riku ignored them. He was looking at the room.
Bakugo Katsuki was six rows ahead, slouched in his seat with his feet on the chair in front of him. Arms crossed, jaw set, the posture of someone who considered the entrance exam a formality. His palms were crackling. Small pops of nitroglycerin sweat detonating against his kneecaps because even sitting still he was combustible. The kid next to him had moved his bag to the far side of his body.
The green-haired kid from outside, Midoriya, was sitting three rows behind Bakugo, writing in a notebook at a speed that suggested either genius or a disorder. His pen moved faster than his eyes. He was muttering again, the stream of syllables blending into background noise like a busted AC unit.
He kept scanning. A tall girl in the front row had her legs crossed and her hands folded on her lap and she was sitting like the auditorium owed her money. Dark hair pulled up in a ponytail, expensive watch on her left wrist, school uniform ironed so crisp it could cut paper. She had a leather notebook open and she was sketching the auditorium's structural layout — speaker mounts and exit locations and where the ventilation grid fed in.
Momo Yaoyorozu. He knew her from the manga. Recommendation student with a Creation quirk that could fabricate anything she understood at the molecular level, which, given the way she was sketching ventilation systems for fun, was probably most things.
Riku watched her pencil move across the page. Precise, fast, her dark eyes cataloging details nobody else had thought to look at. She had the kind of beauty that came with a trust fund and didn't know it, and she had no idea he was watching her.
His Allure Aura pulsed. Faint. She was twenty meters away and shouldn't have felt it.
The pencil paused. She turned her head, just slightly, eyes scanning the rows behind her. Looking for something she couldn't name. Her gaze swept past him and went back to the notebook.
He'd registered. Good.
Noise from the left side of the auditorium pulled his attention. A girl with pink skin and short pink hair and small yellow horns was standing on her seat, waving at someone four rows away. Loud enough that the people around her were either grinning or covering their ears. Her school uniform looked like she'd put it on at a dead sprint. Black sclera, yellow irises. She was grinning so wide it was structural.
Mina Ashido. He knew her too. Acid quirk, dissolved robots while laughing about it, and from the look of her she hadn't changed between the page and real life. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
She dropped back into her seat and immediately started talking to the person next to her, a kid with a tail who looked like he'd been drafted into a friendship he hadn't applied for. Her hands never stopped. She touched people while she talked, grabbed arms, bumped shoulders. Constant.
Riku watched her for a few seconds longer than the room required.
She was nothing like Yu or Midnight. She didn't have a filter and she didn't seem to need one. Energy slamming into everything around her at full volume. The acid on her skin caught the auditorium lights and sheened.
A feedback squeal from the speakers cut through the crowd noise. Present Mic hit the stage in a leather jacket with a directional speaker mounted on his neck and a grin that could sell toothpaste from space.
"WELCOME TO TODAY'S LIVE PERFORMANCE!" His voice quirk hit the auditorium at volume and half the crowd flinched. "EVERYBODY SAY HEY!"
Silence. Three hundred teenagers staring at him.
"TOUGH CROWD!" He didn't care. He launched into the format. Battle centers, faux villains, point values by tier. Destroy robots, rack up points, highest scores get in.
Riku already knew all of this. He watched the crowd instead. Midoriya's pen was a blur, Bakugo hadn't moved, and in the front row Momo was updating her sketch with the new data in handwriting so neat it looked typeset. Mina's leg was bouncing. Acid beaded on her kneecap and she wiped it on her skirt without looking.
A hand went up. A kid with glasses and rigid posture. Iida, Riku remembered. He stood up and pointed at Midoriya. "You there! With the curly hair! You've been muttering this entire time. If you're here on a pleasure trip, leave immediately!"
Midoriya went red and shrunk in his seat. His notebook closed so fast the pen rolled off the armrest.
Present Mic moved on. "AND THERE'S ONE MORE TARGET WORTH ZERO POINTS! An obstacle! Think of it as a trap in a video game!"
Zero-pointer. The massive robot nobody was supposed to fight. The one Midoriya was going to punch into the stratosphere in about an hour. Riku's lips twitched.
He stood and his body responded like a machine that had been idling too long and wanted a road. The Drain's charge was still in his muscles. He rolled his shoulders and felt Midnight's scratch marks pull under his shirt.
The crowd funneled toward the exits. Bakugo shouldered through people without slowing down. Midoriya was behind Riku somewhere, apologizing to everyone he bumped. Momo had already left through a side door. She'd mapped the exits before the briefing started and Riku watched the door close behind her with a grin he didn't bother hiding.
Mina passed him on the stairs.
She was talking to someone else, her hands moving, laughing at her own joke. She brushed his arm as she squeezed past and the Allure Aura spiked on contact. A sharp pulse that made her stop mid-sentence.
She looked at him. Yellow eyes on black sclera, her mouth still open from the word she'd been saying. Her gaze dropped to where her forearm had touched his and then came back up.
"Oh," she said. Her skin flushed darker pink for half a second.
Then she grinned. "Sorry! My bad! Good luck out there!" She punched his shoulder like they'd been friends for years and disappeared into the crowd, her laugh trailing behind her.
Riku watched her go. Acid had beaded on the spot where her fist hit his shirt. A tiny hole was dissolving through the fabric. He could feel the tingle on his skin where her knuckles had been.
He looked down at the hole in his sleeve, then at the back of her pink head vanishing down the stairs.
He was going to have to deal with that eventually.
The battle center was a mock city. Full-size buildings, streets, intersections, all built to be destroyed and rebuilt for the next class. Riku stood at the starting line with forty other students and most of them were stretching or psyching themselves up or looking at the fake skyline with the expression of people who'd just realized this was real.
Riku didn't stretch. His body was already warm. The Drain's charge made his muscles feel pre-loaded, springs compressed and waiting.
Present Mic's voice hit the speakers overhead. "AND START!"
No countdown. The manga had been accurate about that. Half the crowd was still processing the word when Riku moved.
He was through the gate and into the city before anyone else took a step.