My Hero Automata

Chapter 56: Provisional Exams

Summary: The Provisional Exams are here!

Chapter 56: Provisional Exams

There was a half-disturbing and half-depressing level of JSDF presence around the testing site. In a way, given that the Hero Schools had been so directly targeted by the League of Villains, Izumi supposed the military vehicles and careful identity checks were a near-inevitable result. Now that the government beyond the HPSC was involved at all, they were being just as ham-fisted and indelicate about that involvement as every government the world over tended to be in such situations.

It was hard to really blame them for that. The whole reason that specific departments like the HPSC existed, was to put the right experts in the right places to make the gears keep turning at least semi-efficiently. When those 'right experts' failed, the 'wrong experts' were forced to brute force solutions that were less than ideal. She supposed, frankly considered, that the fact the military was sticking to a purely defensive intervention was a good sign that someone, somewhere, high up the military chain of command at least understood that much. Hopefully, that meant the situation could still be wrangled back under control before everything completely broke down.

Izumi shook off those dark thoughts as they finally made it through the last checkpoint. That one had at least been interesting, in a way. They'd set up a QE scanner to check Quirk Signatures against ID files provided by the school. That sort of tech wasn't far enough along yet, outside Izumi's own Quirk-Provided scanners, to provide something like a viable 'fingerprint' for a person's QE field. But it could tell you the general composition of a QE field. Enough to, say, clue you in that someone had a fire-based Quirk instead of a transformation Quirk. Using it to make sure that each student matched their recorded Quirk type was an admittedly fairly clever way to weed out possible shapeshifters.

But that was that, and this was now, and Izumi put the idea aside in favor of examining the rest of the attendees, all clustered in their own school groups. Because of the checkpoints, they hadn't had a chance to interact with any of said groups before being funneled onto the arena floor, giving her plenty to analyze as she ran her eyes and a few discrete sensors over the crowd. Profiles of older students taking the exam, who had appeared in internships with heroes or events prominent enough to be spotted, flitted through her mind as they were identified. There were very few other First Years here, even giving the crisis...and there were also far fewer attendees in general, which was a little alarming.

She knew several schools had been hit hard. Not just by the attacks, but by dropouts from students who were suddenly a lot less certain that Heroics was the right career for them. She had not, however, thought it was this bad. There were less than 700 hero students present, in an exam she knew usually boasted well over a thousand participants per testing site. Part of her figured it was for the best. If those students hadn't had the fortitude to stick things out when the going got rough, then it was probably better to weed them out now.

The rest of her, however, knew that was a bit unfair. Not to mention a dangerous thought process. After all, the most likely students to have pulled out were Rescue and Support oriented heroes, of which there was always a shortage in the first place. Healers, sensors, scouts, and similar were always needed. And if what she was seeing was accurate, Japan was going to be hurting for them if this trend continued. Still, there was nothing she could do about that, and it was time to pay attention as an official from the HPSC had stood and was addressing the crowd.

"I'm sure all of you here have noticed your reduced numbers. Not to mention, of course, having experienced the checkpoints on the way in. These things are signs of the recent dangerous times in the Heroics field. Events such as the attacks on the various Hero Academies have caused us to revaluate these exams. Previously, the passing rate was nearly fifty percent, on average. Despite you representing some of the best and brightest, with the increased difficulty and new focuses we have introduced today...we expect less than thirty percent of you to pass."