ShuraZero
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Chapter 49: Assassination of Physics
🕑 Added 2025-09-28 18:31:45 +0000 UTC"AND NOW, THE EVENT ALL OF JAPAN HAS BEEN WAITING FOR!! THE FIRST ROUND OF THE FIRST-YEAR SPORTS FESTIVAL!"
Present Mic's voice was a thunder that shook the stadium to its foundations.
"THIS YEAR IT'S... AN OBSTACLE COURSE! A FOUR-KILOMETER LAP AROUND THIS VERY STADIUM! OUR SCHOOL IS FAMOUS FOR ITS FREEDOM OF ACTION! AS LONG AS YOU DON'T LEAVE THE COURSE, ANYTHING GOES!"
Midnight, at the starting line, raised her whip, a sadistic smile on her lips. The air grew thick with palpable tension. Hundreds of students crowded the entrance of a narrow tunnel, pushing and shoving, looking for the slightest advantage.
"ON YOUR MARKS!" Midnight shouted.
Izuku glanced at his team. A quick nod to each of them: Ochako, Momo, Toru. Their faces were a mix of nervousness and icy focus.
"GET SET!"
The whip cracked through the air, a sharp and final sound.
"BEGIN!!"
The chaos was instantaneous. The mass of students stampeded into the tunnel. Shouts, shoves, the flash of dozens of Quirks activating at once.
But above the pandemonium, one figure moved with terrifying calm. Shoto Todoroki, without even quickening his pace, touched the concrete ground with his right palm.
"Don't make it so easy for me," he muttered to himself.
A massive wave of sharp, white ice erupted from the ground, spreading backward at incredible speed. It swallowed the tunnel floor and froze the feet of dozens of students on the spot; their faces of surprise and ambition twisted into masks of panic. While his competitors were trapped like insects in amber, he glided forward on his own highway of frost, seizing a decisive lead in the very first second.
The ice rushed toward Izuku's team. An instant before it reached the tips of their shoes, as other students around them were already being caught, Izuku's voice cut through the air, clear and authoritative.
"NOW! PLAN DELTA!"
The execution was so perfect, so simultaneous, it looked like a single movement performed by one being with four bodies.
Ochako slapped the ground with the pads of her five fingers. An invisible and precise field of zero gravity bloomed around them, lifting the four of them just inches above the wave of ice spreading beneath their feet.
In that weightless fraction of a second, while they were suspended, Momo was already in action. With her hands clasped, her skin glowed, and four pairs of ice skates emerged from her forearm. They weren't simple skates; they had a robust design with small turbines on the heels. It was a template she had memorized and practiced to perfection.
"Gear up!" she ordered, her voice calm and efficient as she handed a pair to each of them.
To cover that precious, vulnerable instant as they fastened the skates in mid-air, Toru acted.
"Covering!" she announced.
She raised her hands and released a controlled pulse of light. It wasn't a blinding flash that could cause harm, but a dazzling, disorienting pulse that burst right in the faces of the nearest competitors who had managed to dodge the initial ice. Their rivals flinched instinctively, giving them the vital space they needed.
They landed with a soft, metallic click on Todoroki's ice track, skates already on and secured.
"Boost!" Izuku commanded.
The turbines on their heels ignited with a hiss, and as a single unit, they shot forward, skating with a speed and grace that brutally contrasted with the chaos around them.
In the commentary booth, Present Mic leaped to his feet, nearly ripping off his headphones.
"UNBELIEVABLE!! WHILE SHOTO TODOROKI TAKES A DECISIVE LEAD BY FREEZING THE COMPETITION, A SMALL GROUP FROM CLASS 1-A SEEMS TO HAVE COMPLETELY ANTICIPATED HIS MOVE!! THEY DODGED THE ATTACK AS IF THEY KNEW IT WAS COMING AND ARE NOW USING TODOROKI'S OWN ICE RINK AGAINST HIM!!"
Beside him, Aizawa, his face still partially bandaged, watched a monitor with an impassive expression.
"It's not like they knew, Mic," he said, his voice a tired, monotonous drone. "They knew. They analyzed their most obvious opponent and prepared a specific countermeasure. This isn't a reaction. It's an execution."
"WHAT IS THIS COORDINATION?! CLASS 1-A ISN'T PLAYING AROUND, FOLKS!"
Upon exiting the tunnel, the race leaders ran into the first real obstacle, and the ground trembled beneath their feet.
"LOOKS LIKE OUR RACERS HAVE REACHED THE FIRST STOP IN HELL!! THE ROBO INFERNO BARRIER!!"
From the bowels of the earth, with the screech of rusted metal and the roar of multi-ton pistons, emerged the silhouettes that haunted the examinees' nightmares. The gigantic Zero-Point robots from the entrance exam, a dozen of them, rose like a wall of steel, completely blocking the path.
"Are you kidding me?!" a Class 1-B student yelled, stopping dead in his tracks. "It's them from the entrance exam! It's impossible to get past!"
"So this is what they used against them!" Kendo exclaimed, assessing the situation.
Todoroki didn't even slow down. His expression didn't change. With an almost casual gesture, he raised his hand, and an even more massive and powerful wave of ice than the last one surged from the ground. It engulfed three of the robots in an instant, freezing them in grotesque poses. One of them, unbalanced by the weight of the ice on its upper body, began to lean slowly, its frame groaning under the pressure. Todoroki passed under its legs without missing a beat, his highway of ice already extending on the other side.
"Get out of my way, you scrap heap!" a voice roared from the sky.
Katsuki Bakugo didn't bother looking for a path underneath. Propelling himself with a series of deafening explosions, he ascended in an arc of fire and smoke to fly over the heads of the metal giants, laughing like a maniac as he did.
"THAT'S RIGHT, PEOPLE!! THE FAVORITES ARE SHOWING US WHY! TODOROKI AND BAKUGO CLEAR THE OBSTACLE WITH AN OVERWHELMING DISPLAY OF INDIVIDUAL POWER! NO ONE CAN KEEP UP WITH THEM!"
Izuku's team reached the wall of robots. The giant Todoroki had unbalanced was toppling over, blocking the path he had taken. To their right, other robots were beginning to lock on with their red lasers.
They didn't stop to think. There was no pause to deliberate. The plan was already made. They skated at full speed toward the legs of one of the central, still-active robots.
"We're not stopping!" Izuku's voice was a whip, firm and clear over the metallic noise. "Physical Nullification Maneuver! Momo, get ready! Ochako, on my mark!"
"Ready!" Momo replied.
"On your order!" Ochako confirmed.
They skated in their Delta formation, a human spearhead aimed at almost certain death.
"Momo, now!" Izuku commanded.
As they glided at breakneck speed, Momo's Quirk activated. From her exposed back and arms emerged a large, dense, and heavy object: a powerful industrial electromagnet, with two large circular plates humming with contained energy. She held it in front of her with visible effort; the weight nearly unbalanced her on the skates.
"Hold on!" she yelled, her voice strained from the effort.
They were mere feet from passing under the mechanical titan. Its enormous metal feet could crush them at any second. Izuku didn't hesitate.
"OCHAKO!"
Ochako reached out, her fingers brushing the metal surface of the giant's ankle just as they passed underneath. A pink glow enveloped the metal plate. In that instant, the robot's countless tons of steel became weightless. The ground beneath its foot no longer groaned. The giant, for a fraction of a second, floated.
"Without weight, there's nothing holding it to the ground!" Izuku shouted, science and strategy merging into a battle cry. "Toru, the flash! Blind the one on the right so it doesn't fire on us!"
"Got it!"
Toru, skating backward to maintain formation, released another pulse of light, this one more focused, aimed directly at the optical sensors of an adjacent robot that was about to fire on them. The robot's laser shot harmlessly into the sky.
"MOMO, FULL POWER TO THE ELECTROMAGNET! NOW!"
Momo let out a cry of exertion and activated the device.
The effect was immediate and violent. The weightless robot, stripped of its connection to the earth, was pulled by the irresistible magnetic force. Instead of an obstacle, it became a projectile. It was torn from its spot, its body, dozens of meters long, moving sideways through the air as if it were made of cardboard. It crashed with unheard-of violence against the two robots beside it.
The result was a cataclysmic chain reaction of metal. The sound of twisting steel and fist-sized sparks filled the air. The three giants collapsed together into a mountain of smoldering scrap, tearing a huge gap in the Robo Inferno wall.
The path was clear.
They hadn't destroyed it. They had used physics to turn the obstacle into the solution.
In the commentary booth, Present Mic's jaw was hanging open, but no sound came out. Beside him, Aizawa watched the screen, his face impassive, but something in his single visible eye gleamed with analytical intensity.
That wasn't an attack of power, he thought. It was an assassination of physics. That kid… Midoriya… he doesn't just train them. He teaches them to think, to deconstruct the problem. He's a walking strategy machine.
The team skated through the smoking remains of the robots, a trail of steam from their skate turbines marking their path. They left behind a platoon of stunned students who now had to decide whether to climb the mountain of scrap or find another route. In a matter of seconds, they had secured a solid third place, right behind the human rocket that was Bakugo and the high-speed train that was Todoroki.
The scene cut back to the VIP box. The pro heroes, who had seen displays of power their whole lives, were speechless.
"OH MY GOD, DID YOU SEE THAT!" Mt. Lady shouted, jumping to her feet and pointing at the giant screen, her professionalism forgotten in a fit of pure excitement. "They didn't break it! They used it as a weapon! They turned it into a damn wrecking ball! That's a headline! 'The Ingenuity of Class 1-A!' I love it!"
"The coordination..." Kamui Woods murmured, his voice laced with a deep and almost fearful respect. "The prior planning... it's flawless. The Midoriya boy gave the orders at the precise moments. Yaoyorozu created the exact tool for the job. Uraraka executed the critical nullification part. And the Hagakure girl created the tactical opening."
He turned to the other heroes, his expression hidden but his tone deadly serious.
"They aren't four individuals working together. They're a single unit executing a plan. That... that is terrifyingly efficient."
"They didn't spend a drop of energy on combat," Death Arms added, nodding slowly, impressed. "They used the obstacle's potential energy against it. Minimized risk and maximized the result. That's what pros do in the field."
"But is that what the public wants to see?" Mt. Lady wondered, sitting back down, though her eyes never left the screen. "Cold strategy or explosive power? The surgeon's scalpel or the war hammer?"
