Chapter 7.1- High Priest

Here were a million words I could use to describe Class 1-A in this universe. The one that fit best, ws special. This class was special, I told myself. And it was obvious. Special in all the ways that mattered it seemed. First things first, everyone looked much different from how they did n the anime. That was valid. It was an anime, at the end of the day and this was real life. But it wasn’t just like some things changed across mediums, but that some things were just fundamentally different. For one, Tenya Lida had exhausts that protruded not just from his quads, but also from his elbows and backs. He’d casually mentioned breaking the Sound barrier to get here from his home down in Tokyo. Tokyo to Musutafu in one morning on foot. Impressive.

He wasn’t the only one noticeable different. Aoyama did not walk in with a belt or anything of the sort. Instead, he walked in with a whole suit of armour covering his body. I hadn’t asked. No one had. In this world, people didb;’t really ask questions about others’ appearance. It was one way to get your arse kicked if the other person decided that you. We’re being rude about things, and mutant hate was the kind of shit that no one really tolerated.

Speaking for mutants, there were quite a few of them in the classroom already. There was the frog girl. Similar to her Anime self, except for the fact that I could see that her skin wasn’t skin. It looked close, for sure. But it just was not skin. Some sort of hide that looked similar to skin? Maybe. Who would ever know for sure without asking her? And then there was the boy with multiple arms.

In the anime, Horokoshi had drawn him with an appearance that provoked shock and curiosity. A spiderweb like lattice of arms that meant that moving one on one side necessitated moving the others. But he’d included the benefit that the arms had some sort of shapeshifting properties to allow them shift from fist to whatever organ he needed at whatever instance. In this world, he wasn’t so limited. Each arm was a limb of its own. Entirely separate from the others and free to move as it wished. I’d observed him pull out his chair with one hand while another took hold of his back and another helped open it and another worked to take out the contents of the bag and pile them out of the table. All this while the free hands moved of their own accord. Control over six arms at the same time. His brain must have been a marvel to look at.

And he was not even the most impressive specimen. Student, I corrected. These were my classmates and collegues, not test subjects. I moved on from him to another that had caught my attention. In the anime, Fumikage Tokoyami had been given the head of a bird for no apparent reason. In this world, he was similarly burdened. But not just burdened, but blessed. I could see it in the beautiful black wings that spread from his back. The avian head was clearly intended the compliment the wings. Mobility was not something that this class seemed to lack. A mutant with little obvious mutation was the next to draw my attention. Kyoka Jirou.

What made her special?

The fact that I could not tell. She had walked into the classroom with gigantic headphones over her ears and with her head bowed down. She didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything or anyone. That was curious to me. A marked difference from her anime self. But none of these made me the most curious. The six armed behemoth, the man with wings, and the enigmatic mystery all paled in comparison to the most impressive of them all- Toru Hagakure. She was special because I could not see her. To repeat that. I. Could. Not. See. Her. Whatever I tried. No matter how many spectrums I shifted my vision between. No matter what I tried. I could not see her.

I’d assumed that she was somehow reflecting all visible light wavelengths, but I was forced to admit that was a flawed theory. I had powers that allowed me see in Infrared, Ultraviolet, X-ray even. None of them worked. She was invisible. Truly and completely invisible.

Even worse was that I could not perceive her with any of my other senses. I could not smell her. I could not hear her movements. Her voice was audible enough, but something gave me the feeling that she was actively working to make sure that we could hear her. Even if that instinct was wrong, it still meant that she could dissapeat from all perception at will just by choosing to shut up. How the hell had a power like this not gotten her a one-way ticket to the Institute? That was the bit that intrigued me. There were a few possibilities.

For one, she could just have hidden away. But then why would she come here of all places. For another, she could have downplayed her power to all assessors. But that was still unlikely because she’d come here. Someone trying to downplay their power would have a much harder job doing so at a school for heroics. When the school was one as impressive as this one then the difficulty of that dialled up to 11.

“Hello Long-range Sniper-san” I looked up at him from my seat. The boy had singlehandedly drawn most of the class’ attention to me in one fell swoop.

“Hello Kenpachi-san” I said in reply.

“So you know my name. You have me at a bit of a disadvantage don’t you think? You know my name and I don’t know yours.” I stared into his blue eyes silently wishing for him to fuck off.

“Izuku Midoriya” I replied, not letting any of my true feelings on the matter show on my face.

“Quiet down, you lumps of nonsense” What? Aizawa entered the classroom without a ridiculous sleeping bag around his body. He looked just as sleep deprived as he did in the anime, but he was much more put together. For one, his outfit looked like it had been washed and ironed recently. His hair was also less of a mess. He wasn’t perfectly attired or mannered, but there was much more an effort in his appearance than there was in his anime depiction.

Also worthy of note. His visor. It was gold. Either plated, or pure gold, I didn’t know enough to tell. I doubted pure gold because of common sense, but I’d seen things in this world that would make the common sense of my first life seem ridiculous. His scarf was one of those things. I’d seen it in action a few times at the institute and for all the life of me, I could not explain how that thing worked without sounding insane. It responded to both his thoughts and his actions in some harmony of inputs that hurt my head to imagine.

“I am Shota Aizawa, Teacher to Class 1-A. By the end of today, we’ll see how many of you fall under that designation” He said.

Predictably, the class exploded at that.