𝐃𝐄𝐈𝐓𝐘 || ᵇ.ᵏᵃᵗˢᵘᵏⁱ

XVII

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"Hey dad," Aeri said quietly as she answered the phone. The school week was finally over and it seemed her father had gotten sick of waiting for her to calm down and call him first.

"How long am I gonna have to find out about what you're doing from Twitter rather than from you?" Her dad asked, a teasing lilt to his voice.

"Sorry..."

Aizawa sighed. "It's okay. I expected you to be mad for a while, I didn't expect you to start beating up your classmates."

"You don't understand, It's ruthless here, ask Jungwon. It's survival of the fittest. You either establish dominance or you spend the year being beaten up and bullied. There's a ranking system and a social heirarchy that even the teachers abide by," Aeri said. She pulled up Twitter on her Ipad to see the video for herself, only to find that someone had posted her rank evaluation fight too, and all of Jungwon's.

"Bakugou told me," Aizawa hummed. "He came to me a couple days ago asking me to send you to a different hero school if you can't be here. Jungwon mentioned the obsession with competition too."

"It's a bad environment for Jungwon to be in, he just got off the psych ward and even though he won't admit it, I know he's embarrassed that I beat up Hae Jiho for him. He doesn't want me to fight his battles. It's like a really fancy modern day Hunger Games in there. Did Bakugou tell you about the girl in my class? Baek Minju? The lowest ranking student in 2H-1?"

Aizawa sucked air in through his teeth. "Yeah, it's brutal, but there's not anything I can do and I know Jinyoung won't listen... have you tried Hyoseop?"

"Hyoseop went there too. It's hard to see anything wrong with it when you experienced it for three years like it was the norm, Jungwon and I went to a customary hero school—villain attacks and wars aside—before we came here, Jinyoung, Hyoseop and all the others in my class didn't. And you know how it is with school bullying here, the laws around juveniles are blurry and students get away with shit they shouldn't, it's worse when those students are the most powerful 30 kids in the top school in the country."

"Stick it out as long as you can, sweetheart."

"I don't want to, dad, and neither does Jungwon. It's hard to recover when you're looking over your shoulder for the next person that's gonna try take you down for the top rank. If we're not gonna be here for long, why can't we just have UA curriculum work sent to us, we complete it at home and train with the brothers? That would make more sense considering we're gonna come home to take midterms based on the UA curriculum. Even if we're in school, we're still falling behind because our grades depend on how we do at UA, not at SHA."

Aizawa was silent for a second. He knew Aeri was right and she was compromising. She'd still stay in Korea to get better but she'd homeschool herself and if he wanted to, Jungwon would do the same.

"I'll speak to Jinyoung," he said after a minute.

Aeri let out a sigh of relief. "Thank you."

"You'll have to attend until I sort it out though, deal?"

"Deal, thanks dad, I'll talk to Jungwon about it... before you go, do you think I should get an agent or something to manage my image, because I'm scrolling through Twitter right now and I seem very violent without context."

"It might be worth looking into, ask Hyoseop about it."

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After finishing her homework an hour or so later, Aeri teleported to the kitchen to grab a snack and a bottle of water only to flinch when someone let out a frightened yell. Aeri froze with a shuriken in hand as she looked towards the culprit with wide, bewildered eyes.