Motivation - SPORADIC UPDATES

Nine

"Zero Gravity, would you mind stepping over here for a second?" Kazue asked, turning his head slightly to look over his shoulder at the brunette girl. Her eyes widened at the name of her Quirk, but she walked over hesitatingly regardless. "Can you hold out your hand?"

She did as requested with a confused 'okay' and he touched the ball to the pads on her fingertips, using his free hand to tap her shoulder lightly and send out a small pulse. He didn't need much energy to activate her Quirk, since a single touch could negate the effects of gravity on any object, and the ball was just one thing.

Kazue nodded in thanks, turning back around before whipping the ball through the air with none of his previous holding back.

"That better?" he muttered rhetorically, shoving his hands in the pockets of his gym uniform. A score of infinity couldn't even be considered doing something halfway, and Kazue was still annoyed that Eraser Head had figured him out so quickly. Whatever. He needed at least one extraordinary score, anyway, so he might as well tie for first in the ball throw.

~

Shōta narrowed his eyes imperceptibly after the brown-haired kid left the circle to go back to standing at the back of the class, eyes unfocused and staring off into space. Something hadn't quite felt right earlier, when he'd used his Quirk on the boy. On anyone else, the hero would have felt the tell-tale slight strain on his eyes when he erased someone's Quirk.

But not this time. Nothing felt different at all, which made no sense. According to the student file, the kid's Quirk was Amplify, where he could boost anyone's Quirk just by touching them. Not exactly a front-line hero Quirk, but one good for support.

The only way it would make sense would be if the boy had inherited his father, the Number Seven pro hero in Japan's Quirk. That might explain why Shōta's Quirk had no effect, even if that didn't appear to be the way Dreynen's Quirk worked, either. Both Amplify and whatever the top hero's Quirk was called evidently required physical contact.

One thing was for sure, and that was that the kid didn't even want to be here, and Shōta didn't need to look at the answers to his interview questions to know it. All he needed to see was the completely dead expression on the brunet's face, one that the man just so happened to share.

~

~-~-~-~

The remaining three tests were a pain in the ass, especially now that Kazue knew that Eraser Head was onto him. It felt like the man's dead eyes were boring into his skull every time he was doing anything, forcing the brunet to produce actual results instead of just ones that would get him in the middle of the class score wise.

The way things were going, Kazue wasn't going to end up in tenth or eleventh place. By his calculations through watching everyone else and building a mental scoreboard, he'd end up in either sixth or seventh place, beating out several people who actually used their Quirks for most, if not all of the tests.

Kind of sad, really, but expected of someone who'd been training Quirkless for most of their life, whereas the most practice pretty much everyone else did was in their own home.

"Okay, I'll quickly tell you the results," said Eraser Head, looking a little dead inside. "The total is simply the marks you got from each test. It's a waste of time to explain verbally, so I'll show you the results all at once."

Pulling out a projector device from his pocket, the hero pressed a button. The scoreboard of the class was instantly projected into the air with a light-blue tint, arranged into ten rows and two columns. Kazue let out an annoyed sigh upon spotting his name in seventh place, right behind someone named 'Shōji Mezō' and beating out 'Ojiro Mashirao'.