[Image: "Wheeze" by --oats

⚠️Warning for mild body horror⚠️]

Katsumi and Ayane followed the throng of middle schoolers into the auditorium, and found themselves seats at the end of the twelfth row, by the aisle. Katsumi's hand crept up to her neck, and she worried the butterfly mood charm on her necklace; it was yellow which apparently indicated stress. She didn't need a charm to tell her she was stressed. She tucked her knees in to allow a small girl with fluffy strawberry hair to slip past her, and took a deep breath, followed by another, and another.

"HELLOOOO PROSPECTIVE STUDENT LISTENERS!!!" greeted an impossibly loud voice. Katsumi's attention darted instantly to the podium in the front of the room where a man stood with a totally unnecessary microphone and a vacant smile. Katsumi thought that pro hero Present Mic looked a lot more stoned in person. Maybe he was just tired. "WELCOME TO THE UA HERO EXAAAAM! I'M YOUR TOTALLY TUBULAR SCHOOL DJ PRESENT MIC!!!! LET ME HEAR YOU MAKE SOME NOISE!" He held a hand to his ear and leaned toward the audience. There was a loud cheer from a large boy to the left with glowing yellow hair, but everyone else was dead silent. "YEEEAAAHH!" Present Mic shouted and pointed at the boy, his grin a little brighter now. "THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT I'M ABOUT!

"NOW, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, LET'S GET TO THE RULES FOR THE PHYSICAL EXAM!" he continued. Katsumi was pretty sure the guy's volume dial was stuck on max, and she was sure she would have found it a great deal more irritating had she not spent the majority of her childhood alongside her best friend Ayane, who also had a sound based quirk. "IF YOU LOOK AT THE CARDS IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU'LL SEE THEY LIST YOUR EXAMINEE NUMBER, AS WELL AS A LETTER! THOSE LETTERS CORRESPOND TO THE BATTLE CENTER WHERE YOU'LL BE TAKING THE EXAM! ONCE I DROP THE MIC HERE YOU'RE TO HEAD TO YOUR SPECIFIED BATTLE CENTERS OKAY?!?!" He held a hand to his ear again, and again, only one examinee responded. "YEAH!" Katsumi and Ayane compared their cards. They were examinees number 1281 and 1282, but their letters were 'B' and 'F' so they wouldn't be taking the exam together.

"NOW LET'S CHECK OUT YOUR TARGETS. IN PAST YEARS THERE HAVE BEEN THREE TYPES OF FAUX VILLAINS, BUT THIS YEAR THERE ARE FOUR. THIS IS TO GIVE THE STUDENTS WHOSE QUIRKS ONLY WORK ON HUMAN TARGETS AN EQUAL CHANCE AT ENTRY! AS USUAL, THERE WILL BE THREE TYPES OF ROBOTIC FAUX VILLAINS, BUT THERE WILL ALSO BE ONE RANK OF FAUX HUMAN VILLAINS, WHICH SHOULD REACT TO MOST QUIRKS LIKE HUMANS WOULD, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE NOT ACTUALLY PEOPLE. KEEP IN MIND THAT THEY'RE PROTOTYPES, SO THERE MAY BE A FEW BUGS.

"YOU EARN POINTS BASED ON THE RANK OF THE FAUX VILLAINS YOU DEFEAT, AND THIS YEAR THEY'RE COLOR-CODED. YELLOW IS ONE POINT, BLUE IS TWO POINTS, AND RED IS THREE POINTS. IT'S IMPORTANT TO NOTE, LISTENERS, THAT KILLING A FAUX HUMAN VILLAIN, EVEN ON ACCIDENT, WILL RESULT IN A TWO POINT DEDUCTION.

"YOUR GOAL IS JUST TO IMMOBILIZE THEM, YOU HEAR?!" As Present Mic spoke, a video game animation of him defeating robots ran on the screen behind him. "THERE WILL ALSO BE ZERO POINT ROBOTS WHICH ARE JUST THERE TO THROW YOU OFF, SO YOU'D DO BEST TO AVOID THEM. YOU HAVE TEN MINUTES TO SCORE AS MANY POINTS AS POSSIBLE AND BE A UA ROCKSTAAAR!! ARE YOU READY?!?!?!" Once more, a single cheer echoed across the otherwise silent auditorium. "THEN GET TO YOUR BATTLE CENTERS!!!" He dropped his mic, and the students filed out toward their respective battle centers.

Katsumi followed the other examinees to battle center 'B' where she would not take down any robots, and certainly not any people. In her head she devised a strategy to avoid all interaction. Ten minutes was the time limit. She could sustain flight for ten minutes easily. Once she reached the gates of the battle center, she stood off to the side of the crowd to transform, knowing it would take a few moments. She removed her jacket and tied it around her waist, then held her hair up so it wouldn't get tangled up in her feathers. With only a low backed halter top on her upper half, she began the process.

She felt the painful stretch of skin and the splinter of bones as she focused on growing what amounted to a second pair of arms from her back. She felt the weird squishy sensation as her breast hardened into powerful muscle which spread up through her shoulders. She felt a heavy pressure on her eyes as the lenses stretched to allow her to see clearly at farther distances, and then felt suddenly lighter as her bones hollowed, and all her muscles and organs shrank to the bare minimum weight. Then finally the prickle of hundreds of feathers as they sprouted rapidly on her newly formed wings. She took deep breaths as she waited for the pain to subside to a dull ache in her back, and then finally to nothing as her body adjusted to her new form.

She let her hair down and turned to see a boy looking on in horror. She blinked in surprise and examined her form to make sure she hadn't gotten anything wrong and made herself terribly grotesque. The feathers had sprouted on the right set of arms, her skin hadn't changed color, her feet weren't unseemly wide to help her steer.

She concluded that he had probably gotten a bit disturbed watching her slow methodical transformation, which was understandable. Fast transformations looked significantly less like something out of a horror film, but they were more painful, so Katsumi opted to go slowly when she had the time. She had probably completely derailed his concentration, but it was his own fault for watching her while she was changing.

She beat her huge wings and took off a few feet from the ground, just to make sure her new wings worked before touching back down. She'd gone for light blue feathers this time. they matched her shorts, and were better to avoid being spotted in the sky.

"Don't you know it's rude to stare," she said to the boy, not looking at him.

"Sorry!" he squeaked, and scampered away.

"GET READY!" Present Mic's voice boomed over the intercom. "AND GOOOO!!! BREAK A LEG EVERYBODY!!"

Katsumi took off and swooped into the gate. She had no intention of doing anything at all, until one of the other students did something which Katsumi thought to be exceptionally stupid, and overused their quirk right out of the gate. A girl in a Kimono placed her hands on the ground at the first sight of one of the robots. There was a flash of light and a massive Chinese dragon flew out of the ground by her hands and into the sky. It let loose a mighty roar which echoed for miles, then rampaged through the little city, crushing robotic villains en masse, but the girl who summoned it began to sway, knees trembling as she drew herself up to her full height.

Anyone else would have missed it, but with Katsumi's hawklike vision she noticed the sweat on the girl's forehead, the dragon slowing down almost imperceptibly, she saw the girl begin to fall before it happened, and dove as fast as she could. Katsumi pulled up less than a meter from crashing, caught the girl just before she hit the ground and veered sharply upward, hovering a few meters up to regain her balance.

"You stupid or something?" Katsumi asked the girl. "Haven't you ever heard of conservation of energy? Don't you know humans are persistence hunters?"

"Mn . . . what?" the girl groaned.

"Don't give a hundred percent from the get-go or you won't have enough energy to go the distance," Katsumi reiterated. She landed on a roof far away from the action. "You gonna be okay, kid?"

"Yeah, I'll be fine . . . I'm just . . . tired . . ." she bit her lip, face scrunching up with effort, and then her eyes drifted shut and she passed out. The dragon kept on attacking, getting slowly weaker. It wouldn't disappear until after the four minute mark, scoring the unconscious girl way more points than she deserved in Katsumi's opinion.

Katsumi grunted and rolled her eyes then dropped the girl off on the roof and seated herself on the edge of the roof to watch the fight. Many of the kids seemed pretty pathetic, but they held their own. Every once in a while she'd notice someone pretty interesting, most notably a girl who crushed robots like soda cans, lifting them and throwing them into each other. One boy short-circuited robots with sheets of water. Another trapped himself, then switched his body with his target's, a clever use of his quirk, if only it didn't take him so long.

A minute and a half into the course, she noticed a boy who took down whole groups of faux human targets with one breath, literally, but after a while he began coughing and wheezing like his victims, and when one of the robotic targets came behind him, Katsumi jumped off the building, spreading her wings to catch her half way down and propel her toward the boy. His quirk would have no effect on an inorganic enemy. She grabbed him and flew him to the nearest roof, to catch his breath, hating how much harder her wings had to work to lift a second body.

"Dude, taking down all those guys at once was badass, but you should really check your six if you're gonna break down coughing afterwards," Katsumi advised once she landed. He whipped out an inhaler and took a deep breath from it. His breathing evened out significantly.

"I thought I di-did," he took another deep breath. "M-must have m-m-missed one." he caught his breath after a moment and stood up straight. "Thanks for the save, b-but could you take m-me b-b-ba-back down there?"

"Sure thing, if you're sure you're recovered." He nodded and Katsumi grabbed him and took him back down, more of a controlled fall than an actual flight, conservation of energy and all that.

Name: Ryuko Tenshi; Quirk: Dragon—By placing her hands on the ground, she can summon different dragons in different sizes and with different abilities, and they will follow her directions

After the four minute mark, Katsumi started to see more and more students in over their heads. She sighed heavily, groaning on the inside with every dumbass kid she had to pull out of a tight spot.

"How are so many of you so stupid?" she grumbled, struggling to hold up the weight of yet another moron. "You can't be a hero if you die during the entrance exam!" She dumped said moron several meters away and retreated to the nearest landing to rest her wings for a moment. More than seven minutes passed, and so far she had managed to avoid taking out any of the faux villains.

That's when two of the zero-point robots appeared. They were not at all proportional to how they looked at the exam orientation. They were as tall as the buildings around them, and many of the students could do nothing but run screaming. Katsumi was struck with a sudden desire to take them apart, open their access panels and see how they worked. They were huge, powerful, articulated tanks, basically, and she couldn't score any points for disabling them.

She swooped in on the first one, starting at the ground and circling it, steadily gaining altitude, until her superior eyes saw it, an access panel on what equated to its back. The robots were slow, but there was nothing to hold onto by the panel. She focused on her kneecaps, putting as much mass as she reasonably could into them, grit her teeth, and changed the shape of the bones, extending them through her skin, making them sharp hooks and burying them into the metal of the robot's below the panel. "Shit that hurts," she griped, prying open the panel as blood ran down her shins.

The wiring was exceedingly simple. She didn't even need any tools to shut the machine down. She ripped out a green wire, and touched it against a different connector for a few seconds. it sparked, and when she disconnected it, the robot's lights dimmed and it stopped moving. She sighed with disappointment, wishing it would have been more interesting, and unhooked her knees and moved onto the second robot, digging her sharpened kneecaps in and repeating the process. She figured she might as well shorten the list of things on the battlefield that might very well kill the reckless idiots below.

"That's that." She sighed when she was done, pulling her knees off. The bone was chipping. Her calves were now covered in blood and her socks were soaked, but at least she'd worn shorts. She flew to a sidewalk away from most of the action.

Healing was the trickiest use of her quirk. It required intense focus, and continuous effort. Her quirk couldn't actually heal wounds, only give her body's natural healing process a head start by closing the wounds temporarily. If she fell asleep without giving her body a few hours to heal up naturally, the gashes on her knees would reopen the moment she lost consciousness. She would wrap her knees in bandages when she got home, just to be safe.

Katsumi retracted her wings, dropping the feathers on the ground around her rather than reintegrating them since it was easier, and returned to her usual human form as fast as she could stand so as to focus on fixing her knees without the added irregularity of hollow bones and weak ligaments. She changed her kneecaps back last and the moment she did, her knees began to bleed at an alarming rate, dipping blood all over the ground and across the sky-blue feathers she'd scattered about.

She forced herself to focus through the pain and stitch together her veins and arteries, careful to close the skin last to prevent internal bleeding and minimize swelling. Her knees felt raw when she was done, as she'd expected, but the pins and needles she felt as she connected the blood vessels and muscle tissue faded more quickly than the ache of morphing a limb.

"Holy shit!" squeaked a voice from somewhere off to the left. Katsumi turned to see the same boy who'd seen her change at the gate before they entered.

"What did I tell you about staring?" She stood up and looked disdainfully at her bloodstained socks. "At least my shoes are already red," she grumbled, then looked up and saw another robot directly behind the boy. "Look out!" she warned him, stretching her hand toward him.

Then three things happened, each so close after the other that one might almost think they happened simultaneously. First, Katsumi released heavy porcupine quills from her hand which shot like bullets toward the robot. Second, the timer went off that signaled the end of the ten minute time frame. Third, the quills hit the robot, digging into its gears and causing a chain reaction of locked joints that immobilized the thing.

"You saved me," the boy said, looking over his shoulder incredulously.

"Yeah, nice going numb-nuts. I almost scored points because of you!" Katsumi scolded. "If I'd shot that thing a second sooner that would have been three points."

"Isn't it . . . the goal to score points?"

"Don't presume to know what I want." Katsumi scowled, massaging her palm where the quills had come out. Quick changes always hurt more.

"And what about you two dears?" An old woman came down the street, Recovery Girl. "Oh my, dearie you're covered in blood, where are you injured?"

"I'm not injured." Katsumi brushed passed the woman and toward the exit, ignoring Recovery Girl's attempts to stop her.

[Worth noting that because of the main characters quirk, this level of body horror is gonna persist throughout. It won't be in every chapter, but with quirk training and any major battles, it'll be there. Let me know if I need to tone it down some and I'll try to oblige. Love y'all.

<3 Raaor!]