Chapter 5: Temper
Summer turned to Autumn, Autumn to Winter, and Midoriya's new study plan-focused lifestyle continued as the date of the U.A. entrance exam inexorably drew nearer.
On the morning of the exam, he woke up and flexed his Quirk, as had become his habit.
[3.96 SPELL COMPENDIUM UNLOCKED - 150 STORED]
This time a PDA dropped into his hand, and over breakfast he gave it a quick browse. Skimming through the entries - Accel, Active Air Mine, Air Armor - it listed hundreds of spells? Tapping through the entries, each one described a magical effect like compressing air in the caster's hand to fire as a bullet. If this was real, it would be incredible!
Below the spell description, rather than the incantations and hand movements he'd expected from fantasy novels and comic book wizards, there was an attached "activation sequence" which was meant to be loaded onto a "CAD".
"Computer-aided design?" He mumbled, tapping the link and finding a glossary of terms. No, the spells needed "Casting Assistance Devices" to perform, tools which converted "psions" into electricity.
He reached out with his sense for materials, but thinking about CADs came back with nothing. He had more luck when he considered the components to make one himself, but there was a feeling of incompleteness, and reading further told him about the "induction stone" needed for all CADs which his material sense also came up empty on.
A quick search online confirmed his suspicions, that neither CADs nor induction stones existed. Which meant his Quirk had pulled in a digital spellbook from… the future? An alternate universe where magic was real? What would happen if his Quirk gave him a CAD next? He had assumed all his items already existed in the world, but this changed everything.
He was in charge of his Quirk, he reminded himself, not the other way around. Today was the most important exam of his life and he needed to focus on it to give it his all - and go beyond! He still slipped the PDA into his pocket, though, just in case his Quirk came through with the other half.
-----
Soon, he was walking up from the subway and through the gates of U.A., the shoulder of his uniform still damp from where his mom had hugged him goodbye and his breath making clouds in the cold February air.
"Outta my way, Deku. Don't miss your last chance to drop out."
He looked behind him but Bakugo was already shouldering past, slamming into him and sending him tumbling. He tried to find his balance but tripped over his feet and toppled forwards, the ground rushing up to meet him -
It still felt like he was falling, but the ground had stopped getting any closer. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and a girl with a blonde bob and long bangs tilted him back upright as he floated in midair.
"Are you alright? Sorry, I saw you falling so I used my Quirk on reflex." She tapped her fingertips together nervously, dropping him onto his feet, then gave the departing blond boy a sour look when Izuku failed to respond. "That was so rude, I hope I don't end up in the same class as him."
"Huh? Ah, Kacchan? No, it's alright, he's always like that," Izuku said, defending his childhood friend on his own reflex.
"Oh, is that just how he greets you?" She muttered something about boys. "Well, anyway, good luck on the exam!"
He mumbled a reply as she left, already congratulating himself on speaking to a girl his age.
-----
The written exam lasted for two hours but Izuku felt like it had only been ten minutes between sitting down, opening the paper to start writing, and then hearing the proctors call for everyone to stop writing.
The questions had ranged from multiple-choice math and literacy questions that reminded him of the hardest parts of the standardized tests at school, to lengthy science or engineering problems asking him to estimate how much air was in the Musutafu subway system (five lines times the 13 kilometers across the city times pi times the radius of the tunnels squared, and he could come back to think about the stations later) or explain why the government spread salt on the roads in winter (the grit made it less slippery, and had something to do with melting points? Or was the question asking about the economics of why they did it?). The essay at the end on why he wanted to be a Hero was almost a relief. He'd even caught a glimpse of the desk next to his, and it looked like that student had an entirely different paper!
His hand cramped from holding his pen so tightly, but that didn't matter. It was time for the practical exam.
Seeing Present Mic live was amazing; his radio shows and podcasts couldn't convey how loud his voice was as it filled the vast assembly hall - was it to do with the speaker collar he wore? The other students seemed unimpressed by his stage presence as he briefed them on the types of robots they'd be fighting, but Izuku couldn't help muttering his awed observations.
Unfortunately, the only other student from his middle school applying to U.A. was sat right next to him. Bakugo had no patience for that. He slammed a palm down on the desk in front of him to shut Deku up with the miniature explosion it produced.
"Shut up, Deku," he added.
Then a stern student with glasses raised his hand to call out the two of them in front of the entire auditorium. Izuku sunk even further down into his seat, his face burning with embarrassment, as Bakugo shouted back. He could feel the whole room's eyes on him through the rest of the presentation, and he found himself wishing his Quirk could turn him invisible.
Maybe if he thought about it really hard?
[932/1000 WORDS]
No, his Quirk seemed unwilling to cooperate in making him disappear.
A small mercy was that the two of them would be tested in different groups. Even with his new armor, he didn't think he'd survive being stuck in the same city block as the explosive boy if he was given half an hour to cut loose.
-----
It was on the bus to the training ground that his Quirk finally responded, earning him odd looks from the other examinees as he suddenly started mumbling about delayed responses and proximity exposure.
[15.52 ALCHEMIST - INSUFFICIENT CHARGE - 250 STORED]
He fumbled for a notebook to record the latest activity of his Quirk. Even if it was a failure, it still provided evidence for what caused it to act up and whether he could ever get it under conscious control.
-----
In front of the replica city, Izuku opened up the box with his name on it containing the items he'd registered for the exam.
Unlike the ones he'd seen in museums or online, the chain shirt he'd made with Mr. Amakiir's guidance was fitted closely to the curves of his body to distribute the weight and provide more protection. He'd even shown him a special weave to use for the rings so that it could be worn on its own without pinching bare skin or catching hairs, which was apparently a serious issue in his teacher's line of work. Izuku was wearing a t-shirt underneath for the extra padding, though.
He had also gone back over the blueprints his Quirk had given him and found that his new insight into modular construction helped to understand them. He'd belatedly realised that one reason his attempt to make a model satellite was so unsuccessful was that he'd tried to build it all at once, instead of taking a single section at a time. He'd broken down all the designs into individual components as preparation for his next attempt, and that had provided the inspiration for his second project.
When he took it out of the bag, it looked like a narrow metal Thermos, but a flick telescoped it out into a baton. Another extended it into a long staff taller than he was. The original design for the sections had come from the retractable pole for the wind-powered heaters, but he had changed the order the pieces slid out in so that his collapsible weapon was well-balanced in either baton or staff form.
Armed and armored, Izuku finally felt ready for the practical test. He joined the milling crowd at the starting line, receiving a couple of approving nods from some of the similarly well-equipped students, and wondered if he could take a selfie to show his mom.
"Go!"
"Huh?" Turning around, the other students had already started sprinting into the replica city. He ran after them, a cold sweat running down his back from falling behind as soon as the test began.
As he got a couple of blocks into the city, the front line of students slowed down significantly as they ran into the robots waiting for them in the streets, and clouds of dust started billowing out from where they fought. Some kind of laser tore through the air in front of him, then another student clapped and made a concussive shockwave that blew a robot into the wall of a nearby building. The pileup of people competing for robots was becoming increasingly chaotic, and Izuku could already hear the beginnings of ugly arguments over the resulting wreckage.
He looked around the square, and found that he could see through a relatively undamaged building into the next street. Packing his staff down so it wouldn't get in the way, he clambered through.
The sound of the fighting was muffled but still audible as he reached the other side, finding the road empty and clear. It must have drawn in all the nearby robots, he realised.
"Twenty minutes remaining! That's right, you're one-third of the way through, dear listeners! Make us proud out there, okay?"
Flicking out his baton again, he started to run deeper into the training ground.
-----
As he turned a corner, a one-point robot burst out through the front wall of a building, showering the street with concrete fragments.
It loomed over him. Izuku remembered seeing the diagram of the single-point robot in the handout with the outline of a person for scale, but he hadn't realised until then that the person was meant to represent an adult man rather than his own short height.
Unlike Izuku, it hadn't frozen in place when they spotted each other. Moving forward with deceptive speed, it rolled over the rubble of the street with its thick single wheel and threw a backhanded swipe with a claw as large as his torso as soon as he was within its reach.
The impact sent Izuku tumbling onto the floor but he rose to his feet, pushing himself up with his baton. It hurt, but it was nothing worse than all the times Bakugo had knocked him down. Extending his weapon into a full-length staff, he stepped back and started to jab at the head of the robot, trying to catch it where he assumed all the fragile components would be.
Evading with serpentine ability, another swipe of the claws knocked his staff to the side and tore the front of his open tracksuit top, but it harmlessly skittered over the rings of his chainmail underneath. The robot cocked its head like a dog, scrutinising the metal, and Izuku took the opening to swing his staff back into the side of its head with all his strength, knocking it a few degrees to the left with a clang. It recentered its gaze on him and pounced.
A hasty step back stopped him being caught bodily, but the claws still came close enough to catch the rings of his armor and in seconds he was lifted into the air by the front of his chainmail pinched in its grasp. Reluctantly, Izuku let go of his staff to squirm and wriggle out of his shirt, dropping out of it to the ground. He flipped the top inside out around the claw as he slipped out, trapping the fingers inside the chainmail to protect himself now he was no longer armored, then scrambled over the broken concrete and slammed a sharp chunk of the debris right into the lens of the head looking down on him.
With a soft "ping" like a microwave timer, the blinded robot powered down and slumped backwards, hunched over around its wheel. Izuku panted on his knees in front of it, catching his breath and calming his racing heart before he disentangled his chain shirt from the claw and picked up his staff. He'd earned a point!
...a single point. How were the other students with their powerful Quirks doing? He could hear more sounds of combat off in the distance. Maybe if he got closer, he could take a robot by surprise or work with someone to take them out.
-----
Izuku reached the crossroads where the fighting seemed to have moved to, only for the students to turn as one as the street was cast into shadow by the appearance of the zero-pointer robot.
It was taller than any of the buildings in the simulated city. He watched, transfixed, as the examinees nearby abandoned their fights with two- or three-point robots and ran past him back down the street that had brought him here.
Ahead of its massive treads, Izuku spotted a girl trapped under rubble. His body started to move on its own to help her, but what could he do?
[11.50 TRUE BALANCE UNLOCKED - 50 STORED]
Oh, he could do that.
His Quirk had delivered: suddenly, for the tools he made, their original material properties were more like guidelines.
Grabbing a chunk of concrete he bashed the last section of the staff into a crude point, the crumbling debris acting as a far more effective hammer than it had any right to. He ran past the fleeing students and towards the towering robot. Its titanic form drew closer to the girl trapped under the rubble. With a wordless shout, he cocked his arm back and threw.
It wasn't a good throw, it was barely even on-target. Midoriya had thrown perhaps a dozen javelins in his life, and he hadn't remembered any of the advice from those middle school P.E. classes. His improvised spear hit the zero-pointer at an angle with a screech of tearing metal, then dangled down from where the tip had got stuck, looking like a solitary whisker on the side of its massive head. But the zero-pointer's motion stopped. He'd done it.
Then the truck-sized head swung round to focus on him, and Izuku had sprinted halfway down a blocked alleyway before he could form a coherent thought about how maybe he should've planned a little further ahead.
Still, it hadn't gone too badly, had it? The girl was saved, and even if he was trapped, there was no way the zero-pointer could -
A sound like a concrete waterfall interrupted him. Looking over his shoulder, the giant robot was pulling apart the buildings on either side of the alleyway like they were curtains. Izuku's eyes widened as it rolled forward and tore his hiding place even further open to the sky, then they began stinging and watering from the thick haze of dust cascading down. He coughed and tried to swallow, but in an echo of the sludge Villain attack his throat was too dry and dust-choked to do even that.
"The test! Is! Over!"
He had never been so happy to hear a teacher's voice as when the zero-pointer halted in its tracks.
-----
Word count: 2628/12532
A/N: The Spell Compendium was a bit of a letdown, but there wasn't much Izuku could do to make use of it. True Balance should be fun, though - I'll have to think about how it interacts with any advanced materials that get unlocked.
One butterfly has come home to roost: as he wasn't controlled by the sludge Villain, Bakugo hasn't been so viscerally confronted by how his Quirk and strength can hurt people, and so he's more prone to showing off his power. At the same time, having not been rescued by Midoriya, he's less conflicted about him and still sees him as a useless nuisance to be shut down rather than a potential rival or competitor. Let me know if you have dissenting thoughts on how this would affect him, or advice on how to better convey those changes.
Also, the word count bit is a one-off joke, I'm not planning to give Izuku access to my word count as I'm writing the story! If you'd like to see meta stuff like that, you might enjoy An ordinary novel but every 10,000 words the audience kills the least interesting character.
Spell Compendium (The Irregular At The Magic Highschool) (100): This small PDA-like device contains a large selection of Activation and Magic Sequences for your personal use. Secret or unique Sequences cannot be included in this selection.
True Balance (Earth Girls) (300): Despite how crude the raw materials seem, the finished weapons and tools of your work are perfectly suited for their job. A hammer you make of stone and wood is just as fine a tool as one you could make out of steel, and a stone spear cuts just as deeply as any you could make of carbon fiber and razor-honed alloy.
On the morning of the exam, he woke up and flexed his Quirk, as had become his habit.
[3.96 SPELL COMPENDIUM UNLOCKED - 150 STORED]
This time a PDA dropped into his hand, and over breakfast he gave it a quick browse. Skimming through the entries - Accel, Active Air Mine, Air Armor - it listed hundreds of spells? Tapping through the entries, each one described a magical effect like compressing air in the caster's hand to fire as a bullet. If this was real, it would be incredible!
Below the spell description, rather than the incantations and hand movements he'd expected from fantasy novels and comic book wizards, there was an attached "activation sequence" which was meant to be loaded onto a "CAD".
"Computer-aided design?" He mumbled, tapping the link and finding a glossary of terms. No, the spells needed "Casting Assistance Devices" to perform, tools which converted "psions" into electricity.
He reached out with his sense for materials, but thinking about CADs came back with nothing. He had more luck when he considered the components to make one himself, but there was a feeling of incompleteness, and reading further told him about the "induction stone" needed for all CADs which his material sense also came up empty on.
A quick search online confirmed his suspicions, that neither CADs nor induction stones existed. Which meant his Quirk had pulled in a digital spellbook from… the future? An alternate universe where magic was real? What would happen if his Quirk gave him a CAD next? He had assumed all his items already existed in the world, but this changed everything.
He was in charge of his Quirk, he reminded himself, not the other way around. Today was the most important exam of his life and he needed to focus on it to give it his all - and go beyond! He still slipped the PDA into his pocket, though, just in case his Quirk came through with the other half.
-----
Soon, he was walking up from the subway and through the gates of U.A., the shoulder of his uniform still damp from where his mom had hugged him goodbye and his breath making clouds in the cold February air.
"Outta my way, Deku. Don't miss your last chance to drop out."
He looked behind him but Bakugo was already shouldering past, slamming into him and sending him tumbling. He tried to find his balance but tripped over his feet and toppled forwards, the ground rushing up to meet him -
It still felt like he was falling, but the ground had stopped getting any closer. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and a girl with a blonde bob and long bangs tilted him back upright as he floated in midair.
"Are you alright? Sorry, I saw you falling so I used my Quirk on reflex." She tapped her fingertips together nervously, dropping him onto his feet, then gave the departing blond boy a sour look when Izuku failed to respond. "That was so rude, I hope I don't end up in the same class as him."
"Huh? Ah, Kacchan? No, it's alright, he's always like that," Izuku said, defending his childhood friend on his own reflex.
"Oh, is that just how he greets you?" She muttered something about boys. "Well, anyway, good luck on the exam!"
He mumbled a reply as she left, already congratulating himself on speaking to a girl his age.
-----
The written exam lasted for two hours but Izuku felt like it had only been ten minutes between sitting down, opening the paper to start writing, and then hearing the proctors call for everyone to stop writing.
The questions had ranged from multiple-choice math and literacy questions that reminded him of the hardest parts of the standardized tests at school, to lengthy science or engineering problems asking him to estimate how much air was in the Musutafu subway system (five lines times the 13 kilometers across the city times pi times the radius of the tunnels squared, and he could come back to think about the stations later) or explain why the government spread salt on the roads in winter (the grit made it less slippery, and had something to do with melting points? Or was the question asking about the economics of why they did it?). The essay at the end on why he wanted to be a Hero was almost a relief. He'd even caught a glimpse of the desk next to his, and it looked like that student had an entirely different paper!
His hand cramped from holding his pen so tightly, but that didn't matter. It was time for the practical exam.
Seeing Present Mic live was amazing; his radio shows and podcasts couldn't convey how loud his voice was as it filled the vast assembly hall - was it to do with the speaker collar he wore? The other students seemed unimpressed by his stage presence as he briefed them on the types of robots they'd be fighting, but Izuku couldn't help muttering his awed observations.
Unfortunately, the only other student from his middle school applying to U.A. was sat right next to him. Bakugo had no patience for that. He slammed a palm down on the desk in front of him to shut Deku up with the miniature explosion it produced.
"Shut up, Deku," he added.
Then a stern student with glasses raised his hand to call out the two of them in front of the entire auditorium. Izuku sunk even further down into his seat, his face burning with embarrassment, as Bakugo shouted back. He could feel the whole room's eyes on him through the rest of the presentation, and he found himself wishing his Quirk could turn him invisible.
Maybe if he thought about it really hard?
[932/1000 WORDS]
No, his Quirk seemed unwilling to cooperate in making him disappear.
A small mercy was that the two of them would be tested in different groups. Even with his new armor, he didn't think he'd survive being stuck in the same city block as the explosive boy if he was given half an hour to cut loose.
-----
It was on the bus to the training ground that his Quirk finally responded, earning him odd looks from the other examinees as he suddenly started mumbling about delayed responses and proximity exposure.
[15.52 ALCHEMIST - INSUFFICIENT CHARGE - 250 STORED]
He fumbled for a notebook to record the latest activity of his Quirk. Even if it was a failure, it still provided evidence for what caused it to act up and whether he could ever get it under conscious control.
-----
In front of the replica city, Izuku opened up the box with his name on it containing the items he'd registered for the exam.
Unlike the ones he'd seen in museums or online, the chain shirt he'd made with Mr. Amakiir's guidance was fitted closely to the curves of his body to distribute the weight and provide more protection. He'd even shown him a special weave to use for the rings so that it could be worn on its own without pinching bare skin or catching hairs, which was apparently a serious issue in his teacher's line of work. Izuku was wearing a t-shirt underneath for the extra padding, though.
He had also gone back over the blueprints his Quirk had given him and found that his new insight into modular construction helped to understand them. He'd belatedly realised that one reason his attempt to make a model satellite was so unsuccessful was that he'd tried to build it all at once, instead of taking a single section at a time. He'd broken down all the designs into individual components as preparation for his next attempt, and that had provided the inspiration for his second project.
When he took it out of the bag, it looked like a narrow metal Thermos, but a flick telescoped it out into a baton. Another extended it into a long staff taller than he was. The original design for the sections had come from the retractable pole for the wind-powered heaters, but he had changed the order the pieces slid out in so that his collapsible weapon was well-balanced in either baton or staff form.
Armed and armored, Izuku finally felt ready for the practical test. He joined the milling crowd at the starting line, receiving a couple of approving nods from some of the similarly well-equipped students, and wondered if he could take a selfie to show his mom.
"Go!"
"Huh?" Turning around, the other students had already started sprinting into the replica city. He ran after them, a cold sweat running down his back from falling behind as soon as the test began.
As he got a couple of blocks into the city, the front line of students slowed down significantly as they ran into the robots waiting for them in the streets, and clouds of dust started billowing out from where they fought. Some kind of laser tore through the air in front of him, then another student clapped and made a concussive shockwave that blew a robot into the wall of a nearby building. The pileup of people competing for robots was becoming increasingly chaotic, and Izuku could already hear the beginnings of ugly arguments over the resulting wreckage.
He looked around the square, and found that he could see through a relatively undamaged building into the next street. Packing his staff down so it wouldn't get in the way, he clambered through.
The sound of the fighting was muffled but still audible as he reached the other side, finding the road empty and clear. It must have drawn in all the nearby robots, he realised.
"Twenty minutes remaining! That's right, you're one-third of the way through, dear listeners! Make us proud out there, okay?"
Flicking out his baton again, he started to run deeper into the training ground.
-----
As he turned a corner, a one-point robot burst out through the front wall of a building, showering the street with concrete fragments.
It loomed over him. Izuku remembered seeing the diagram of the single-point robot in the handout with the outline of a person for scale, but he hadn't realised until then that the person was meant to represent an adult man rather than his own short height.
Unlike Izuku, it hadn't frozen in place when they spotted each other. Moving forward with deceptive speed, it rolled over the rubble of the street with its thick single wheel and threw a backhanded swipe with a claw as large as his torso as soon as he was within its reach.
The impact sent Izuku tumbling onto the floor but he rose to his feet, pushing himself up with his baton. It hurt, but it was nothing worse than all the times Bakugo had knocked him down. Extending his weapon into a full-length staff, he stepped back and started to jab at the head of the robot, trying to catch it where he assumed all the fragile components would be.
Evading with serpentine ability, another swipe of the claws knocked his staff to the side and tore the front of his open tracksuit top, but it harmlessly skittered over the rings of his chainmail underneath. The robot cocked its head like a dog, scrutinising the metal, and Izuku took the opening to swing his staff back into the side of its head with all his strength, knocking it a few degrees to the left with a clang. It recentered its gaze on him and pounced.
A hasty step back stopped him being caught bodily, but the claws still came close enough to catch the rings of his armor and in seconds he was lifted into the air by the front of his chainmail pinched in its grasp. Reluctantly, Izuku let go of his staff to squirm and wriggle out of his shirt, dropping out of it to the ground. He flipped the top inside out around the claw as he slipped out, trapping the fingers inside the chainmail to protect himself now he was no longer armored, then scrambled over the broken concrete and slammed a sharp chunk of the debris right into the lens of the head looking down on him.
With a soft "ping" like a microwave timer, the blinded robot powered down and slumped backwards, hunched over around its wheel. Izuku panted on his knees in front of it, catching his breath and calming his racing heart before he disentangled his chain shirt from the claw and picked up his staff. He'd earned a point!
...a single point. How were the other students with their powerful Quirks doing? He could hear more sounds of combat off in the distance. Maybe if he got closer, he could take a robot by surprise or work with someone to take them out.
-----
Izuku reached the crossroads where the fighting seemed to have moved to, only for the students to turn as one as the street was cast into shadow by the appearance of the zero-pointer robot.
It was taller than any of the buildings in the simulated city. He watched, transfixed, as the examinees nearby abandoned their fights with two- or three-point robots and ran past him back down the street that had brought him here.
Ahead of its massive treads, Izuku spotted a girl trapped under rubble. His body started to move on its own to help her, but what could he do?
[11.50 TRUE BALANCE UNLOCKED - 50 STORED]
Oh, he could do that.
His Quirk had delivered: suddenly, for the tools he made, their original material properties were more like guidelines.
Grabbing a chunk of concrete he bashed the last section of the staff into a crude point, the crumbling debris acting as a far more effective hammer than it had any right to. He ran past the fleeing students and towards the towering robot. Its titanic form drew closer to the girl trapped under the rubble. With a wordless shout, he cocked his arm back and threw.
It wasn't a good throw, it was barely even on-target. Midoriya had thrown perhaps a dozen javelins in his life, and he hadn't remembered any of the advice from those middle school P.E. classes. His improvised spear hit the zero-pointer at an angle with a screech of tearing metal, then dangled down from where the tip had got stuck, looking like a solitary whisker on the side of its massive head. But the zero-pointer's motion stopped. He'd done it.
Then the truck-sized head swung round to focus on him, and Izuku had sprinted halfway down a blocked alleyway before he could form a coherent thought about how maybe he should've planned a little further ahead.
Still, it hadn't gone too badly, had it? The girl was saved, and even if he was trapped, there was no way the zero-pointer could -
A sound like a concrete waterfall interrupted him. Looking over his shoulder, the giant robot was pulling apart the buildings on either side of the alleyway like they were curtains. Izuku's eyes widened as it rolled forward and tore his hiding place even further open to the sky, then they began stinging and watering from the thick haze of dust cascading down. He coughed and tried to swallow, but in an echo of the sludge Villain attack his throat was too dry and dust-choked to do even that.
"The test! Is! Over!"
He had never been so happy to hear a teacher's voice as when the zero-pointer halted in its tracks.
-----
Word count: 2628/12532
A/N: The Spell Compendium was a bit of a letdown, but there wasn't much Izuku could do to make use of it. True Balance should be fun, though - I'll have to think about how it interacts with any advanced materials that get unlocked.
One butterfly has come home to roost: as he wasn't controlled by the sludge Villain, Bakugo hasn't been so viscerally confronted by how his Quirk and strength can hurt people, and so he's more prone to showing off his power. At the same time, having not been rescued by Midoriya, he's less conflicted about him and still sees him as a useless nuisance to be shut down rather than a potential rival or competitor. Let me know if you have dissenting thoughts on how this would affect him, or advice on how to better convey those changes.
Also, the word count bit is a one-off joke, I'm not planning to give Izuku access to my word count as I'm writing the story! If you'd like to see meta stuff like that, you might enjoy An ordinary novel but every 10,000 words the audience kills the least interesting character.
Spell Compendium (The Irregular At The Magic Highschool) (100): This small PDA-like device contains a large selection of Activation and Magic Sequences for your personal use. Secret or unique Sequences cannot be included in this selection.
True Balance (Earth Girls) (300): Despite how crude the raw materials seem, the finished weapons and tools of your work are perfectly suited for their job. A hammer you make of stone and wood is just as fine a tool as one you could make out of steel, and a stone spear cuts just as deeply as any you could make of carbon fiber and razor-honed alloy.
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