Hero of Radiance: Apollo [HOLD]

Chapter 22: Dominating Pressure & World Class Threat

3rd POV:

Let it be known that Izuku Midoriya was a boy of hardships but also some good fortune as he pushed through life taking each challenge head on and learning how survive against great threats. However, at this very moment is when Izuku was wondering if god cursed him due to how powerful his quirk was and how easily he could play with life and death with his two hands. The reason Izuku was thinking like this is because up until this very moment, he was going through the second semester of his school without any real issue. Izuku and the duo were pushing their way up the leaderboard for the school wide competition but now... now he felt like everything was about to all apart and the world was going to be destroyed due to the man that was standing in front of him and the duo. Izuku would describe the man as fitting for the position of being the lord of hell himself due to the sheer pressure that he produced from his mere presence alone but Izuku was not one to bend his knee that easily like the man wanted him to do. No... Izuku refused to bend for he knew death only waited if he submitted to the man and his lovers would not be spared for the reach of this man regardless of promises.

Now don't get confused as we are going to look back to the start of the semester and see how everything has unfolded to this point in time as events started to play out to make this meeting between Grace (Izuku) and the lord of hell himself happen. As Izuku, Ozy, and Zahara all arrived back at their school for the start of their second semester, they learned of the competition that would be taking place across the entire school as it was called the Royal Gladiator Challenge as the students would have their fights take place inside of a stadium that was reminiscent of an old gladiator themed stadium due to how the Americans were obsessed with old Greek architecture style buildings which this was built in a Greek theme for the stadium. As such, two opponents go in with only one left standing and being able to fight. The thing about this competition was that once you challenged someone you had to keep going to challenge the next person on the ranking and then the next and so forth until you stopped with your defeat. As such, everyone that was in the school from the previous year already had a ranking and the newest students would be the ones mainly challenging the upper years until everyone had a rank. Once that happened the upper year students would challenge anyone above them if they wanted to try to push for a higher rank and this just kept going as anyone could challenge anyone that was a rank higher than them.

This competition was set up like this for many reasons but the main ones were the fact that it forced a sheer amount of competition and challenged the students to keep growing against their peers as they needed to learn overcome the challenges that were in front of them. It also serve as a form of entertainment between the students and staff as it allowed them to feel the intensity of being forced to overcome the odds to beat the villains with everyone watching and judging your performance as citizens and the media will constantly do. This was to help them get ready for that and adjust so that they would not break under pressure outside of the school because as students of a World Hero Association school, once they graduated they would become agents of the World Hero Association meaning they would have the entire world watching their actions with a fine tooth comb unlike just having one or a few countries watching your performance if you were a normal famous hero like All Might was who was known across the world but yet wasn't a WHA hero as the man really only worked in America in the past and now worked really in Japan only. All Might of course has been to other countries but never really stayed there or gone back often like World Heroes who constantly are on the move most of the time and are sent where they are needed instead of just being stationed in one single country for the majority of their time.

Anyway, back to the tournament itself! Izuku, Ozy, and Zahara of course wanted to reign supreme and Izuku highly doubted he was going to have any issues going up the ladder because in all honestly he wanted to challenge the number one position right away but there was a rule against that. You could only challenge someone that was two ranks above you at maximum. This was to force people to compete with each other and not just skip everyone and aim for whoever is at the top as it would sooner or later burn out whoever is in the top positions due to fighting every single person that believed they were strong enough. No, instead you need to work up the ranks and be within two ranks of whoever you wanted to fight so that you were forced to gain skills to adapt to different opponents that you would come across in the tournament. Izuku resigned himself to his fate and started to prepare himself for the long path to the top of the ranks but also was willing to take it for what it was... a training method of patience and gaining experience so he decided to take it one opponent at a time instead of skipping some like he could. Ozy and Zahra on the other hand didn't want to wait so they challenged whoever they could straight away with one of them taking the lowest current ranked person and then the second lowest ranked person right after challenges were being accepted by the school staff. All in total there was 99 students across the entire school with 15 of them being first years, 57 being from the second years, and 27 being considered third-year students who have yet to graduate since the school held them back one year due to the school believing they lacked something. However, Izuku learned from his homeroom teacher that all of those 27 will actually be graduating this year since they have covered what the school was wanting them to fix before they were allowed to graduate.