Dragon's Pride (Ch 56)

Blood spews from Yui’s mouth as she’s slammed through a wall and her body skips across the street on the other side. Bakugou isn’t doing much better after pulling the pin on one of his gauntlets, his own opponent somehow absorbing the blast and sending it back at him. He managed to push past his surprise and dodge, but the arm he had just fired at the villain with was caught in the blast and is covered in burns. He’s lucky that it wasn’t his other arm that got caught in the blast or else he might not have been so lucky.

Yui struggles to her feet, ignoring the cuts and scrapes on her face and hands and what she’s pretty sure is a broken rib. The fact that the villain she’s facing managed to hit her hard enough to break her rib despite how strong the materials are that make up her costume is a major cause for concern, but she still can’t stop smiling. Those other villains? They didn’t put up much of a fight, if any at all. They couldn’t get through the protection her costume gives her, and she’s not so reckless as to let them hurt her just so she can enjoy herself more. No, they were a warm up, but this guy? He’s going to give her a fight!

She watches as broad, the white suited man walks towards her, expression hidden behind the hockey mask covering his face, before Kendo jumps down from the second floor of the building she was just thrown out of to bring her enlarged fist down down on his head with a scream of effort. Unfortunately her attack is blocked by one of the reddish black tails that extend from his waist, the thorny appendage causing the orange haired girl to grind her teeth before using the contact to try and slam her knee into the side of his head, but he doesn’t even bother using his second tail to block, just holds up a hand to catch it. Yui can see the small burst of air the impact causes, but the villain is unmoved.

He squeezes down and Yui can hear Kendo let out a cry of pain before casually tossing her to the side where her back hits a lamppost hard enough to snap it off, the sharpened metal dragging twin bloody furrows across her sides as her momentum rolls her across the sidewalk. The man slowly shakes his head before turning back towards Yui, pausing a moment at seeing her standing. He stares at her for a moment before putting his thumb over the knuckle of the finger next to it and popping the knuckle, doing the same for each of the fingers on his right hand before he speaks.

“You, are interesting,” he says before resuming his calm walk towards her.

She spits a glob of blood to the side and bares her teeth in a bloody grin. “And you, are fun!” She says with excitement coloring her voice before she charges back into the fight.

`~`

Fumikage grits his teeth and closes his eyes against the onslaught of wind the villain redirects against him, Maleficent needing to wrap around his body and grip the ground to prevent him from being thrown down the street like Tetsutetsu from his sister hero class. But he is not alone in standing against the villain’s gale, Bondo having worked with Tsubaraba to create a barrier using his glue paired with the other boy’s air barriers to dampen the winds and stick his feet to the floor. Kuroiru is hidden in the depths of shadow, unable to depart to launch a sneak attack without the wind dragging him from their protective embrace.

The villain, a woman he recognizes from the news as being referred to as Hurricane Katrina, makes a show of yawning, her unzipped pilot jacket untouched by the winds under her control. “Come on kiddos, you got to do something if you don’t want to get blown away.” She smirks, her eyes flashing darkly in amusement. “You don’t want to get blown away like your little friend now do you? Because I can do this all day, can you say the same?”

Fumikage doesn’t respond, choosing instead to put his faith in the member of class 1-B that this woman seems unaware of, as of yet. Just as he hoped, he hears the woman cry out in surprise and the winds slightly weaken a few minutes later. “What the-!” The sound of a strong impact cuts her off before the wind dies down to the force it was prior to her taking control of it, allowing the bird-headed boy to open his eyes and see the aftermath of the quick confrontation. Juzo Honenuki stands above the unconscious woman who is submerged up to her waist in the ground, looking as if it had turned to putty beneath her feet and was unable to support her weight.

The 1-B recommended student gives Fumikage a nod of acknowledgment before turning back to the building containing the classmates who had been within when the villain attacked. Meanwhile Fumikage departs to search for the steel-quirked boy who was separated from them, Kuroiro undoubtedly going off to search as well.

Fumikage knows that they were lucky to have Honenuki with them, or else the villain would have been much more difficult to defeat. She was perfectly suited to take advantage of the terrain, but Honenuki’s quirk rendered him effectively immune with the support equipment he has allowing him to get the positions of those above ground while he is under. Even with that advantage though, things still could have been problematic had the villain been prepared for the possibility. It is only through the advantage of the surprise attack that they managed to so swiftly defeat her with so little injury.

He can only hope that such is the case for the other students in their own battlefields.

`~`

Kyoka grits her teeth as she’s thrown backwards yet again before finally managing to undo the straps keeping her boots on and letting them fly free from her feet while she tumbles to the ground. She lets out a sigh of relief that’s filled with irritation at needing to abandon the majority of her hero outfit to stop the villain from using the bits of metal scattered across it to throw her around like a ragdoll.

She gets to her feet and glares at the villain who’s dressed like half of her nun outfit was meant for Halloween. A white skirt that’s so long it completely covers her feet and still has enough fabric to bunch up where Kyoka would assume her ankles to be, coupled with an equally white headdress with a flap that she can close over her face that comes with shoulder pads and a full length cape attached, and essentially a chest wrap, leaving the space under her breasts and above her hips completely open. She also has black sleeves and a white armguard on her left arm, and a gold gauntlet that stretches up to her elbow on her left arm. It’s weird as hell, and that’s not even counting the literal target tattooed in the center of her forehead.

She one hundred percent looks like she’s part of a cult and Kyoka does not want to deal with that. Unfortunately, said cult woman is also a villain, and is currently trying to kill her and her classmates, so she has to deal with her. And knowing her luck she’s absolutely going to have to deal with whatever other crazy people are in this woman’s cult later.

Fuck. Her. Life.

Still, at least she’s doing better than Tsunotori. Yaoyorozu and Ashido were lucky in that they didn’t have any metal attached to their costumes, so apart from Yaoyorozu losing her sword and needing to avoid making anything else out of metal she hasn’t been all that affected by the villain’s quirk, which is the same situation as Ashido since her costume didn’t have any metal in the first place. Tsunotori though…

The hoof-footed girl lets out another yell and shouts what Kyoka assumes are curses in English as the villain takes advantage of her metal horse shoes to use the American girl as both shield and weapon, forcing Kyoka’s classmates to constantly abort their own attacks to avoid hitting the buxom blonde. She flexes her hand and gets ready to launch herself at the villain, One For All thrumming like a furious symphony beneath her skin in a way she hasn’t felt since her first attempts to use the quirk, before Izumi somehow merged it with her own. But she freezes when she feels a tugging at her throat, and her choker shoots towards the woman, coming to a stop in front of her face where she studies it with narrowed eyes.

She breathes in sharply and says something, but Kyoka is far, far too fucking pissed to bother listening. Because this bitch did not just take her fucking mark from her! Her calling card seems to pulse in time with her heartbeat, with her quirk, with One For All, blood rushing towards the crescendo of the symphony coming from her body. She angles her jacks towards the woman and digs her toes into the stone beneath her feat while her fingers curl. “Give. That. Back.” She growls, the depths of her anger flooding the area and forcing her classmates to take a step back, breaking off their attempts at assaulting the bitch. Oh, she better give her mark back now. She isn’t going to ask again.

The cultist tilts her head to the side before slowly shaking her head in disappointment. “You don’t even know what you have here, do you? To shame the Gods by garbing yourself-”

Kyoka’s rage doesn’t let her have the patience to listen to the bitch long enough to constitute her words as the start of a monologue, feeling as if her boiling emotions burst from her ears with one thought roaring through her mind.

This thieving bitch dies.

`~`

Hitoshi feels a shiver run down his spine and he finds his eyes instinctively looking towards the landslide zone even though he’s too far to even remotely see anything. Unfortunately he’s not in a position to be distracted.

“DIE!”

Fortunately, he regularly spars against Yui so he’s easily able to react to the large man with an axe-hand and an iron jaw as he tries to cleave the hero student in half with a powerful overhand swing. He steps forward and swings armored right arm into the curve behind the axe head, pushing against it to parry it to that side as well as push himself to the left where he spins on his heel before bringing the spiked knuckles on his left hand into the man’s hip and injecting the mild neurotoxin into his bloodstream. He skips back to avoid the backhand swing from taking his head off and smirks behind his half mask as the man wobbles unsteadily.

Sure, he’ll have to meet with Emerald to work out a more potent disabling drug, but half a dozen hits isn’t too bad a deal to watch the large villain finally crash to the ground. Ignoring that though…

Hitoshi looks back at the landslide zone just in time to see a white streak flying towards the center plaza, quickly followed by a black blur, and he can’t help but wince.

“Looks like someone pushed Kyoka’s rage meter to the max.”

`~`

Tomura Shigaraki blinks when one of his higher leveled NPCs crashes to the ground a few feet away from him and Kurogiri, taking his attention away from the heroes’ desperate fighting against his force of mobs. A few of the kids have gone down, though the sword psycho is always quick to cut down anyone who tries to finish them off while Eraserhead gets them to safety. And that’s not even mentioning the brunette with a construction worker’s vocabulary who seems to enjoy beating his mobs with his other mobs. Honestly, he’s enjoying watching that happen too, but he can’t cackle at the sight since it would be ‘unprofessional’ to laugh at his own underlings.

Anyways, the NPC that crashed to the ground. From their outfit he can tell that they’re from some random NPC faction that his Sensei mentioned might be worth paying attention to, but given the state she’s in Tomura has his doubts. She’s missing her right arm, has a hole the size of a fist in her stomach, and at least one of her legs is broken, and likely her back as well. Probably some internal damage given how she vomits blood while trying to crawl towards him.  Not that she gets more than a few inches before something else crashes onto her.

The leader of the League of Villains blinks again before giving Kurogiri an accusing glare and gesturing to both Stendhal and the figure rising from the NPC’s broken body. “Why didn’t you tell me that there were so many minibosses here!?”