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

Issue 54 - All for Progress

Peni dragged the scrap in like she was hauling a tiny metal glacier.

A homemade sleigh, more shopping trolley than sled, screeched across the corridor tiles. The wheels complained. The metal complained. Peni complained too, quietly, through gritted teeth, because dignity was a thing and she was trying to keep what little she had left of it.

By the time she reached the support workshop door, she was out of breath, hair sticking to her forehead, palms blackened with grease.

"Okay," she wheezed, tugging the sleigh through the threshold. "Whoever invented 'recycling' has never met a staircase."

She pulled her tablet out, thumbed it awake, and started logging everything she'd scavenged. Copper wiring. Actuator joints. Bent aluminium plates. Two servos that might still work if she bullied them hard enough. A dented but intact battery casing.

She tallied the haul against her inventory with the kind of focused, exhausted routine that felt like prayer.

Then she dragged the sleigh deeper into the workshop and stopped at her section.

A curtain hung there, thin and dusty, like it was trying to hide a secret from the world. She grabbed it and pulled.

Her mech hung in the shadows.

Half-finished. Half-dream. Half-ruin.

Panels missing. Wiring exposed like nerves. One arm disassembled and laid out in pieces on the bench. The torso suspended from a frame, cables running through it like veins that weren't connected to anything yet.

Peni stared at it for a long moment, her expression softening into something lonely.

"We're getting there," she murmured, like she was talking to an old friend. "Aren't we, old girl?"

She set the tablet down, rolled her shoulders, and started sorting the scrap.

She held parts up to the mech, tilting them, comparing angles, checking compatibility in her head like a silent puzzle. This could replace that. That could be welded here. This would need machining. That one was garbage.

Her mind slipped into the comfortable hum of problem-solving.

Until a bang snapped it in half.

Then a crash.

Then another bang.

Peni froze, ears pricking. Tools clattered. Something heavy hit the floor. A string of muffled swearing followed, the kind that sounded like it was being chewed through teeth.

Peni leaned out from behind her curtain.

Otto was across the workshop, hopping on one foot, face pinched in pain, holding the other like it had personally betrayed him. A set of tools had been kicked over, scattered like spilled dice.

He yelped again and thumped the bench with his fist.

Peni blinked once, then called out, loud enough to cut through his spiral.

"Whoa. Who pissed in your coffee this morning?"

Otto jolted, like he'd forgotten the concept of other humans. He straightened fast, too fast, trying to rearrange himself into composure.

"Peni." His voice cracked slightly. He cleared his throat. "I... I didn't know anyone else was still here."

He glanced at the mess, then away, like if he didn't look at it, it might stop existing.

He tried again. "I was just..."

His shoulders sagged. Whatever he'd been holding together slipped.

Otto slumped down onto a stool with a long, defeated exhale, and threw a spanner aside like it was useless.