Hikari stood with her arms crossed, watching as a succession of students stepped up to take their turn throwing. Of course, she had a trick up her sleeve that the others didn't--her quirk. She nodded at Rei, grinning.
"Just watch how I do, huh?" She certainly seemed confident. "Oh, yeah. I'm Iwamoto Hikari. I think you'll be hearing my name a lot in the future..." Okay, cool it. Hikari didn't need to sound that full of herself. She took a moment to stretch, then stepped into the circle as her turn came. She hefted the ball in one hand, gauged the weight, then half-closed her eyes as she concentrated. She didn't need to, necessarily, but she wanted to really give this one her all. Then, she stepped forward as if she were merely tossing a baseball across the diamond, reducing the already minimal inertia of the ball to practically nothing. She grunted, hurling it as hard as she could. Then she stepped back and shaded her eyes, watching the arc of the thrown object with curiosity. It rocketed out of her hand like a bullet from a gun. Without inertia to stop or slow the ball as long as Hikari could keep her eyes on the thing, it hurtled down the field at a breakneck pace.
The ball lept from your hand and arced an almost completely flat line over the hardened dirt of the school field, then the grassier part beyond that, and then finally resumed the normal behaviour of the ball once your eyes finally stopped focusing on it.
"Two kilometers, six hundred and forty three meters."
Aizawa looked at her with a bit of a surprise, something mentally shifting behind the tired eyes.
That sounded about right. The boy brought his hands up to shade his eyes as he looked back at the exercise field. "Ah, it's my go."
He jogged up to the pitch and stared up at the sun as he thought. Regeneration didn't offer him much in the way of moving other objects. Could he...?
Nagisa crouched down to his feet. "Pass me a racket?" He plunged his hand elbow deep into his shadow and was rewarded with a nasty crunching noise. Nagisa pulled out a broken ragged stump of flesh and bone from mid-forearm down, though it was already healing at a breakneck pace, shadow particles bubbling out of his stump before solidfying into solid flesh.
Ah no, yeah. That was pretty much what he had expected. He shook his arm about until he could flop a new wrist around. No help from his quirk today. Instead Nagisa just threw the thing like it was a regular fastball, lobbing it up and out.
Gran Torino looked at the wrist devoured and visibly frowned.
I swear the world exists to spite me. Eraserhead of all people. Pah, at least he's got enough sense to see what a fuck up you are.
"You alright, boy?"
Aizawa in turn just looked at the ball throw and waited for his device to spit out a number.
"Sixty two meters."
Kuroko frowned a little at the test they'd been presented with. Testing their Quirk-enhanced athletic abilities? That actually made a lot of sense, as it provided a quick baseline that told the teachers what they could use their Quirks for already, and how creative they were. The issue was...
'Can I even use my Quirk to get a better score here?' Kuroko pondered, chewing her lip in thought. Just melting the outside of the ball to make it smaller wouldn't help, as even though there'd be less air drag on the ball it would have less momentum, and would probably actually fly less far than just the plain ball. Melting the inside of the ball and trying something with that? She might be able to make the ball curve or something that way, but just plain making it fly further didn't seem like it was possible. Melt off parts of the ball to reshape it into something better for throwing? ...no. It was a nice idea, but Kuroko had to admit she simply didn't know what the best shape was for throwing something; any attempt to make a dart or something could easily backfire on her.
No matter how she looked at it, using her Quirk on the ball seemed like a bust, so Kuroko turned her attention to the rest of the test. Perhaps there was something there that she could work with...?
'Wait.' Kuroko thought, blinking as an idea struck her. 'Would that work? Am I even allowed to do that?'
Kuroko chewed her lip again as she thought the matter over, before eventually sighing as she came to the only real conclusion she could. "Well. Only one way to find out." She muttered to herself, before settling in to wait for her throw. And before long, the eleventh turn- her turn- came.
Upon stepping in the circle, rather than make any move to throw the ball Kuroko instead walked up to one of the marked edges and crouched down. She frowned for a moment, digging her fingers into the dirt before the edge of the ring, and then her eyes abruptly flickered yellow-brown for a split second. At that exact instant, Kuroko plunged her fingers deeper into the suddenly-liquid dirt beneath her fingers, gripped the still-solid length of dirt that the line was drawn on, and with a small grunt of effort pulled.
No longer connected to the ground around, but instead floating on and surrounded on all sides by a layer of liquid dirt, a section of line almost a meter long came free from the circle's edge as Kuroko pulled it up out of its new trench.
'Huh. It actually worked.' Kuroko thought, somewhat surprised but nonetheless pleased by both her success and that neither teacher was immediately calling her out to stop her- and immediately grimaced at the feeling. Doing her best to ignore the unwanted sensation, she collected several more lengths of line, bending them and setting them next to one another so they formed a small circle-ish shape. She took a few moments to hopefully join the different sections more securely by pressing the ends together whilst partly melting them, then stepped in her newly made circle and crouched down. Then, slowly and very carefully, she gripped the front and back dirt clumps- making sure that she was doing so on the inside of the circle- and began shuffling up the field.
The first few steps were tense as Kuroko half-expected one of the teachers to yell at her to stop and tell her that she'd been disqualified, but after neither one commented on her actions she felt the tension vanish and the unwelcome sensation of her heart lightening as it seemed what was trying was, in fact, allowed. 'Great. Just great.'
Several minutes of careful movement later, Kuroko stopped and stood up, panting slightly from the effort of pulling the dirt along with her the whole way. For a moment she just stood there, half bent at the waist as she tried to get her breath back, before straightening up and palming the softball. Then, taking care not to fall out of her small personal circle, Kuroko took a deep breath before winding back and throwing the ball as hard as she could. Her eyes followed it as it arced briefly through the air, and then-
-thud.
Kuroko kept looking at where her ball had landed for a second, then shook her head and began trudging back to the rest of the class. 'That was a terrible throw.' She admonished herself as she walked, her shoulders sinking at the realisation that- despite moving the circle up the field- she might have accidentally sabotaged her score simply through a lack of mundane throwing skill. It was a depressing thought, one that made her heart fall and that twisted her face into a momentary smirk, and by the time she was back with the rest of her fellow students her mood had returned to normal.
Not speaking to anybody as she reached them, Kuroko simply rejoined her place in the lineup with tired sigh.
Eraserhead's tired eyes sparked with interest as he watched the student visibly rearrange the field with her quirk as she walked it down the field. After the admittedly terrible throw, she'd still managed a decent hundred and seventeen meters as she walked closer to the teachers.
"Sokahiko?"
The old man tilted his head to look at the girl, pausing for a while.
"Good to see a brain, but a brain alone won't take you so far. Let it stand, Aizawa."
After Kuroko's unorthodox approach, the next two were almost classically mundane, with Jiro and Sachiri scoring fifty nine and sixty four meters repectively. Tokoyami let his shadow throw the thing for him, scoring a good ninety six meters even with the creature cringing under the japanese sunlight.
Todoroki took to the field, and produced a giant pinnicle of ice to smash the ball, scoring him five hundred and forty four meters, to which the boy only made a small noise of dissapointment.
Finally coming to the last five, Fukidashi yelled BOOM as he threw and the ball complied, scoring an impressive three hundred and fifty meters exactly. Bakugo, of course, had already done his throw.
Shinsuke watched his classmates set up to the circle one by one, getting scores far beyond the range of a normal person, no matter how fit they were. And while his quirk could be very useful, it didn't really offer any physical boosts. Well, it wasn't as if this came as a large surprise. There was no time to lament his lack of an offensive quirk. There was an obstacle in front of him. He needed to overcome it. And he'd be damned if he failed at the first hurdle he faced after all of the training he underwent to get into U.A. What to do....
When it was finally his turn, Shinsuke stepped out onto the circle outline and looked down at the ball in his hands. He could do anything to throw it as long as he didn't step outside the circle right? He grinned. If that was the case...
He quickly shrugged off his PE jacket, quickly turning it into a makeshift shepard's sling. Dropping the ball into the body of the jacket while holding it by the arms, Shinsuke whirled the improvised weapon faster and faster before releasing once it had picked up enough speed. While the ball hadn't travelled anywhere near as far as, say, Bakugou's attempt, it still went further than it would've if he had only used his physical strength.
He flashed a thumbs up and a grin to Aizawa.
"Didn't step outside of the circle! How's that for rational!"
"Eighty Five meters worth. Congratulations."
The taller teacher seemed immune to the kids smirk, even as Gran Torino snorted at the light mockery.
Reiko used her poltigiest to telekinetically manuver and then throw the ball from a distance down the range, gaining a decent two hundred and ten meters.
"Oh, definitely. But the home room teacher" Rei paused and lowered her voice "Seems kind of lazy? So it's hardly surprising that this is pretty uninspired, is it?"
With that said, on her to throw - last, which was just typical - she smashed a spike of shadow into it as hard as she could manage it. Some pieces of the ball flew quite some distance, but much of it just sprayed around the circle.
"Whoops."
As the last throw of the day came up - although describing some of the acts here as throws is being a bit liberal with the term - the ball disintegrated at her hit, something that prompted unfiltered shock on his face.
"That's unusual, these are usually tougher than that, perhaps it's caused..."
The teacher trailed off into silence, looking at the fragments of the ball. Raising his head, he shook it once.
"Foul ball, zero meters."
That done, Gran Torino, who had vanished sometime during Shinsuke's throw came back, dragging a robot like machine behind him.
"I thought we were doing grip test."
"And I thought I told you that was stupid. If they had strength they'd had the chance to show it, unless any of these people have finger based quirks they haven't shown yet."
Gran Torino turned around, ignoring Aizawa.
"Fifty meters test next. Fast as you can, don't interfere with others, stay inside your lane, start when we say, all the usual. Do it in pairs in order, again. After this we might try doing something interesting that'll give you all a chance to show off."
And with that said, he blasted off to the end of the half distance track and set up the robotic timer. Three, two, one, Race!
