Ultra Responsibility (My Hero Academia X Spider-Man Reader)

Issue 25 - The Sports Festival Part 2

The Sports Festival started the way it always did, with the kind of noise that made your ribs vibrate.

A stadium packed to the brim. Flags snapping in the breeze. Cameras on cranes sweeping overhead like hungry metal birds. Present Mic's voice crackles through the speakers, turning every breath into a headline.

Students lined up on either side of the starting field, shoulder to shoulder, stretching fingers, shaking out legs, trying to look calm while their nerves did backflips. Some stared straight ahead like they were about to charge a battlefield. Others fidgeted, laughing too loudly at jokes nobody really made.

Then the ground trembled.

Not a gentle rumble, not a "maybe a truck drove by" vibration. The kind that made people stumble, that rattled teeth, that caused a few students to lose their balance and catch themselves in a panic.

Heads snapped up.

The air seemed to tighten.

And something rose.

At first, it looked like a shadow moving wrong; last, the sun had glitched. Then the crowd gasped as four gleaming mechanical arms unfolded above the line, each joint whirring with purpose. Metal claws bit into the ground, and the arms pushed.

Otto Octavius lifted himself into the air.

He wasn't flying. He was being carried, hoisted by his own invention like a king ascending a throne. The arms held him high enough that he could see over the entire starting field, over the first stretch of the course, over the giant gates where the robots waited like sleeping giants.

The reaction was instant.

Support course students stared in open disbelief. Some hero course students looked unsettled, the kind of unsettled that didn't match the bravado they wore like armour. Even the ones who had quirks that could tear through concrete had a moment where their eyes flicked to those arms and thought, without wanting to: That is not normal.

Otto looked down at them all, and the expression on his face wasn't excitement.

It was a judgment.

His mouth curled, just slightly, as he'd stepped into a room full of people who couldn't possibly understand the language he spoke.

"Baffoons," he muttered to himself, too low for the crowd, but the mic on the field caught a whisper of it, and the nearest students heard enough to feel the chill. "They act as if they have never seen true power."

His eyes darted across the line, tracking reactions, measuring fear, measuring respect, deciding which one tasted better.

"Maybe they haven't," he added, almost fondly, like he was pitying them.

A voice cut through the tension, bright and familiar.

"Otto?"

Mina Ashido had turned, eyes wide. She leaned forward like she couldn't help herself, like curiosity was a gravity well. "You must be Otto, right? Peni and Y/N talk about you all the time. Your support gear is... It's super cool."

For a second, it almost looked like Otto would respond normally. Like he would nod. Like he would accept the compliment. Like, he would be a person instead of whatever this was.

Instead, he glanced at her the way someone glanced at a stain on a clean shirt.

"I don't make friends with quirked freaks," he said, flat and cold, and turned away before she could even react.

Ashido blinked, the smile on her face caught in the middle of forming, then dying. For once, she didn't snap back with a joke. She just stared at him, confused in a way that didn't feel funny.