Chapter Text
A beginner of chess learns the power of “white first” very quickly.
"Hellspawn, today's plans are postponed for who knows how long, and Kami help us when he shows up." Aizawa slipped from his yellow sleeping bag, capture weapon wound around his shoulders, and Izuku couldn't help the way the corner of his mouth twitched when he pictured the man as a caterpillar shedding its cocoon for wings. His thought process nearly made him skip over the words of his homeroom teacher before he backtracked. Aizawa-sensei, scared of someone? There was only one person in the building who could give their teacher that look, and that was–
The tired hero's capture weapon rustled and Aizawa's face paled.
"Am I a mouse? A dog? A bear? One thing’s for sure, I'm the principal!"
–Nedzu.
"Good morning, Class 1-A! As Aizawa-kun said, your curriculum will undergo some changes. Something he forgot to mention, however, is that I will be your instructor for the next three weeks!"
Suddenly, the class understood why their teacher was so pessimistic about their lesson plans. There were a few moments of silence where Izuku raised his hands to his ears as the tension grew. Tick, tick, tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Boom.
The room erupted in chaos.
Aizawa flared his eyes for a few moments, hair raising in spite of gravity, as he waited for the room to quiet. It only took twelve seconds, Izuku noted. An improvement from the last time pandemonium switched to silence by their sensei’s gaze (read: the time Mina’s acid burnt a hole through the floor, sending the whole class through the ceiling of the room below them).
"Now that everyone's settled," Nedzu grinned into his teacup–and where had that come from–"I'd think you'd like to hear about your assignment for the next better part of a month."
The wall behind Aizawa and the principal lit up, and Izuku couldn't help but notice that the title of the slideshow that displayed on the wall was familiar.
Hero VS Villains: Hero Class Edition.
Wasn't that exam discontinued a few years back?
"Let's get straight into it!" Nedzu began excitedly.
Izuku’s hands twitched in preparation but, by the way the tired erasure hero slid a hand down his face, he knew they were in for a ride.
"It's quite simple, really. Your class will be divided into two teams: the heroes and the villains, and you will take your exam over the course of five days. Each team will have a leader, randomized of course, and it is each of your individual choices that will lead to who is on each team!" He spread his arms out wide, nearly spilling tea over the rim of his cup, before composing himself.
Izuku spotted Uraraka slowly raising her hand from the corner of his eye.
"Sir, do you mean we get to choose what team we'll be on? Couldn't that lead to one team being overpowered, like having nineteen against one?" Iida looked ready to jump in at her question, and Izuku guessed he had the same concerns. Aizawa only sighed into his scarf in relief as Nedzu hopped out of it and onto the podium with a mischievous grin.
"Precisely! It's all about how malleable your morals can be, especially so for the hero student who has to lead the villain's team. Speaking of, I'd like to assign those roles now, if you don’t mind!" The suited creature wasted no time clicking a button in his paw, switching the slideshow to what looked like a randomizer with 1- A school photos inserted. Izuku reasoned, though, that the chimera had pulled a few more strings and that the pick of students wasn’t quite so random as he would lead them to believe.
"So, without further adieu, the leader of the hero and villain teams will be..." With a bit of dramatic flair, and a drumroll from Kaminari's desk, the randomizer-not-randomizer halted to a stop and Izuku felt himself freeze as his own face stared back at him from the screen. "Bakugou Katsuki as the hero’s patriarch and Midoriya Izuku as the villain team’s leader! How exciting. Now, each team will have a two week planning period…”
Izuku zoned out after that, barely catching the pitious looks thrown from his classmates and the way Bakugou leveled a glare at him over his shoulder.
They will see that an opponent will prefer the white pieces if given a choice.
There was no way that anyone would join his team, no way that they would work with “villain” as a title. If any of their other training exercises spoke for their standpoint, it was that they vehemently denied being villains even when distinctly labeled as such during prior exams. Not to mention Izuku, who wanted even less to be the center of attention, wanted even less to be a villain when so many people had told him that being quirkless was worse than a crime, wanted even less to–
Thankfully, he focused back after a rather obvious gesture from Aizawa, meant to catch his attention, and the teen showed his gratitude with a small smile. He couldn’t let himself get distracted now, not when he’s been given such an extremely difficult, morally debilitating role. With his teacher's nod, he turned his focus to Nedzu, who was prattling on different rules and safety measures.
"...of course, to keep things fair, you will not be allowed outside help during the exam from any of the U.A. teachers or students from other classes. Your teams will have limited access to the support labs for any gear you may require, however."
And, oh, if the way the beady eyes of the chimera flickered to Izuku as he didn't speak for the loophole he had left wide open, then nothing else could have.
After all, he never said anything against recruiting the principal.
This was a perfect opportunity, this was his chance to show everyone from before when he was nothing that he was something. This was the final say-so he needed to turn people’s attention towards his strengths, not his weaknesses. This was a test, no, a game of skill, that he would win handily.
And this? Izuku felt his lips rise in a smirk.
They feel a sense of empowerment even when they are playing a stronger opponent.
This was going to be fun.
07:45 a.m.,14 days before the exam: U.A. High School
“Deku-kun…” Uraraka grimaced, her nose scrunching with pity. “Are you sure you don’t want to ask kocho-sensei to change his mind? I’m sure he could pick someone else.” Iida, who had forgone staying in his seat after the principal went on his merry way and their homeroom teacher had dismissed them for the rest of the day, nodded vehemently.
“Yes, as a hero-in-training, it must weigh on your mind to take up the mantle of ‘villian’ in this exercise. Surely you want someone else to take your place?” The rest of the class crowding around Bakugou’s desk was proof enough that no one would offer to exchange roles, so Izuku shook his head.
It wasn’t like he wanted to back out, anyway.
“No, I think I’ll be alright.” He smiled, and his friends seemed to drop their worried disposition eagerly. They must’ve thought he would ask them to switch with him, he figured, wringing his hands underneath his desk. Something twisted in the bottom of his stomach as he realized they wouldn’t have joined him regardless, but he pushed it aside. “You guys should go enlist with Kacchan, I think he’s got a list on his desk.”
At his name, Bakugou threw a harsh snarl as he turned in his seat to face him.
“You need all the help you can get, being the coward you are, but you’re sending away the only possible recruits you have? Don’t act like you’re above me, damned nerd!” The explosive teen slammed a hand down on Izuku’s desk, small pops showering light across the wood. They stopped momentarily, and the greenet looked to the podium to see Aizawa glaring at the other with glowing, crimson eyes. The silence ended as soon as it began, their teacher having only resurfaced from sleep for a moment, and then Bakugou huffed and switched his attention back to the team list on his desk. The other two members of the “Dekusquad,” he had heard Mina call them once, gave him a spare glance, before stepping just a few feet away to scribble down their signatures for the hero team.
Half-heartedly, he took a glance at the similar paper he had been given by Nedzu before the mouse-dog-bear had evacuated the room. He expected an empty list, completely barren of any writing or names of his classmates. What he received was among those lines, all except for the arrow in the bottom right corner of the page. He flipped it nonchalantly as if he were reading a book, keeping attention away from himself.
There, on the back of the not-empty sheet of paper, was a small note.
“Midoriya-kun, would you please come to my office? Your friends are busy enough enrolling with the heroes for you to slip away. – Am I a mouse, a dog, or a bear? One thing’s for sure, I’m the principal! Nedzu.”
With a shiver at the startling accuracy of the principal’s message, he slowly stood and slunk his way out of the classroom, no other occupants but Aizawa tracking his moves. He probably already knew why he was leaving, anyway.
The classroom door slid on it’s tracks quietly, and just as silently Izuku made his escape. The route he chose to Nedzu’s office was the longest, giving him more time to think. It felt like just seconds before he reached the grand double doors, even if in reality it was a few minutes, and he shook himself free of the slowly growing anxiety rooting itself in his chest as he raised a fist to knock. Once. Twice. A third time.
The doors swung open wide like the jaws of a starving beast.
“There you are, Midoriya-kun! Come in, come in, why don’t you?” The voice of the school’s principal sounded from the back of the barely-lit office, shutters closed on the windows behind the mahogany desk. He gulped as he stepped into the room and couldn’t stop himself from jumping at the sudden closing of the doors behind him. The boy’s heart pounded ruthlessly until he sat in the chair in front of the desk, collecting himself while Nedzu smiled and pushed a cup of tea towards him. Izuku sipped it gratefully.
“I do hope you enjoy tea, Midoriya-kun.” At that, the chimera picked up his own teacup, sipping at it with a calculating look to his features.
“You can just call me Izuku.” He internally reprimanded his own words and rushed to elaborate. “Assuming we’re working together, at least, kocho-sensei.” Izuku stopped at the chuckle that grew into roaring laughter, twisting a loose thread from his blazer.
“You’re quite astute, aren’t you, Izuku? I’m glad; I have a feeling I’ll enjoy this partnership more than I previously expected.”
No one sees the way they wear matching grins in the shadows of the office.
08:16 a.m., 14 days before the exam: Conference Room 3
“Here’s your mission briefing.” Shouta, dull and tired, dropped a manilla folder in the dark of the board room. Eighteen hero students sat with broad smiles in the chairs surrounding the long, sleek oak table vibrated in anticipation, while one Bakugou Katsuki leaned back on the wall behind the obsidian haired man.
He flipped open the cover of the folder, revealing dozens of papers chock full of information. With a sigh, Shouta slid a sheet to the side for the teen behind him to see, gesturing for him to step forward.
“As the Patriarch, you’ll be in charge of assigning team roles to each hero. Considering the vast quantity of members, you’ll most likely have multiple people stuck to an occupation.” The sound of pages flipping let Shouta know that Bakugou was looking through the set parameters as he explained. Iida leaned forward from his spot nearby, grabbing a page of the rulebook and reading it aloud.
“According to the team preparation sheet, it would be best for the team to have multiple heroes assigned to command positions–”
“Tch,” the ash-blond cut off the class president, “I get who needs to do what and what needs to go where, Four Eyes. Don’t tell me what to do.” He scoffed and Shouta rolled his eyes minutely. The kid wasn’t wrong, in fact he’d probably been thinking about it since the moment his name appeared on the screen, but he should’ve been more tactful with his delivery.
“Bakugou, remember that you’re leading a team now. Your and their grades rely on your cooperation and leading skills, so if you don’t take peer review well, you’ll only tank your grades further.” With crackle from his palms and settling anger, the teen sifted through the papers in the folder. Good. He was taking this seriously.
“Hey, teach, what’s this about multiple villain objectives when we only have one?” Along with his gruff questioning, the Patriarch shoved a sheet in front of Shouta’s face. He glowered and pulled back to read the paper before leveling a glare at his student.
“While your objective is to stop the villains, the villains also have their own objectives to complete over the span of the exam’s five days. Your goal of stopping them correlates with each attempt they make to meet their tasks. Understand?” At Bakugou’s nod, he continued. “You’ll be given no clues as to what their objectives are, where they occur, or how they may be able to occur. The villains, however, don’t have such an issue seeing as the heroes only goal is to stop them.” Shouta paused, his gaze wandering to each of his student’s faces in the conference room. Each of them sat attentive, just barely leaning forwards in their seats.
”During the exam, your methods of stopping the opposing team are simple,” Shouta brought up his hand, counting them off on his fingers. “One: you can apprehend the villains until there are no remaining members. Two: the villains are unable to escape the test site by the end of the proctored exam. Or three: the villain's leader is captured.”
At Asui’s raised hand, the not-paid-enough teacher (who was actually paid enough, seeing as U.A.’s income was incomprehensible) stopped and pointed at her to signal for her to speak.
“So, where is the test site, ribbit?”
Shouta grimaced.
8:21 a.m., 14 days before the exam: Nedzu’s Office
“The exam is in Kamino Ward?!”
“Don’t worry, Izuku,” he calms the student. Nedzu knew, of course, that his reaction was likely to happen, what with his attendance of the event. “Kamino Ward’s property is under technical ownership of U.A.”
Izuku gaped like a fish. It was quite amusing, and the principal had to remind himself not to grin maliciously at the thought of people being stuck in tanks for once. Not with the boy in the room, at least.
“W-what? How do you get ownership of an entire city?” The question was met with the sound of an empty teacup clinking against the small plate it rested on. The teen startled, seemingly reminded of his own tea that sat patiently on the polished desk in front of him.
“It’s simple. When the Scourge of Kamino destroyed the ward, U.A. paid for and executed reparations. However, I,” he said, stopping for a moment to chuckle, “I was able to convince the government that Kamino Ward be under the school’s protection in return for practical use of the city.”
The boy quieted further, if possible, before opening his mouth to question again.
“The city occupants signed a waiver when they returned that stated that U.A. would use the ward as training grounds.” Nedzu waved a paw as he interrupted Izuku’s train of thought. He knew what the greenet would say regardless. “In return, they receive basic protection from the school and lower fees inside of the city. During the exam, they’ll actually still be roaming and living in the ward as always, but they’ve been alerted to the upcoming possible destruction of a few dozen buildings. Anyone who wants to leave is allowed to, so don’t fret, Izuku.” He tacked the final bit on as an afterthought, claws running along the seams of his suit’s sleeves.
There was a sigh of relief and the following sound of sipping tea. Nedzu thought it strange that the teen would be so worried for the sake of others when they had barely been brought into the equation, but he pushed it aside as Izuku pulled a composition notebook out from the inner layers of his blazer. And if that wasn’t interesting, how he had sewn his own hidden compartment into the fabric, then the title of the notebook certainly was.
Hero Analysis for the Future: #13. Oh, he had heard about these alright; Aizawa-kun told him (well, more like he told the U.A. staff room and the principal had just happened to be listening in from the cameras) about how he had peeked over the teen’s shoulder to see what he was so intently focused on, expecting a sketchbook. Instead, he had found a treasure trove of information, listing every weakness, strength, and mannerism of Snipe on just one page. Needless to say, from then on Nedzu would try to catch a glimpse of the tome’s pages from the cameras installed around the school. What he had found only served to grow the shiver of excitement he suppressed as he now waited eagerly for the book to be offered to him.
“This is one of my analysis journals–I started them when I was four, so they’re not very good, but I think it could be a good start for planning against the heroes. Maybe.”
Oh? The boy wasn’t confident in his abilities, but that would change, he supposed. The whole exam was for the sole purpose of assessing his capabilities and molding them into something exquisite, after all.
“Well, hand it over, here, here!” Nedzu couldn’t help the way he reached over the length of the desk, clenching his hands into fists sporadically like a child grasping for a toy they just couldn’t reach. Sue him, he was out of patience–he’d been waiting to get his grip on those notebooks since he first learned they existed!
What he found inside did not disappoint. In fact, it was beyond what he had expected as he flipped through the pages.
The earliest pages held a table of contents, listing pages up into the nineties. There were observations on rising heroes or ones just making their debut like Mt. Lady, a sheet with prior costume ideas here, an autograph from All Might there. The analysis he had seen so far were perfect, leaving some room for improvement of course, however from that double-paged signature onward the quality grew exponentially. Nedzu assumed this was from his training: first-hand experience involving villains and life-threatening combat only serving to improve his examinations and lean them further in depth. He could only imagine what the greenets first notebook looked like.
“Sorry that they’re not very good, kocho-sensei. I’ve been working on improving them–” The boy was cut off by the principal clapping his paws together, the journal littered with full analysis of each of his classmates dropping to the surface of the desk. Nedzu cleared his throat, adjusted his tie for a moment, and then leaned back in his leather swivel-seat with an impish grin.
“This works out wonderfully, Izuku. Truly impressive work, I could barely believe it wasn’t professional!” The teen blushed, bringing a hand up to rub at the back of his neck in his bashfulness. “Now, is there anything else before we continue our battle plans?”
Izuku moved his hand from the nape of his neck to his chin in quiet consideration, gazing at the principal. He snapped his fingers and leaned back in his own seat, crossing his right leg over his left in faux confidence with a smile.
“I’m going to need one of those swivel chairs. They’re dramatic, don’t you think?”
Nedzu cackled.