“We’ve got to get higher!” Minoru sprinted for the tallest building nearby. “We need to see what we’re working with if we’re going to stand a chance!”

  “Sure thing!” called Ashido as she jogged alongside. The height advantage really drove home how unfair the world was. “We doing stairs, or are you going up the side?”

  Minoru eyed the side of the building. “Let’s both try going up the side. I think I can keep my grapeshot from sticking to you, and if I fail you can just melt through it.”

  “Fine by me!”

  Minoru grabbed a couple of grapeshot off and leapt at the wall. As he ascended the building, he glanced down and saw that indeed Ashido was successfully climbing up using his grapeshot. She was, in fact, moving a little faster than he was and had to pause every few feet to wait for him to re-establish his lead. He refocused and tried to move a bit faster.

  Soon both of them reached the rooftop, and ran to the edge to peer across an increasingly large area of devastation growing in between them and the exit.

  “There!” said Minoru, pointing. “Principal Nezu is controlling that wrecking ball!”

  “Alright, so what’s the plan, then?” asked Ashido, bouncing on her feet. How was she so energized after scaling the entire building? Minoru felt like his arms were going to fall off.

  “My Quirk is our best bet of capturing Nezu, and he definitely knows it. I’ll head his way to try and split his focus and you head for the exit.”

  Ashido cocked her head at him, then shrugged. “If you’re sure.”

  “Try to keep out of sight of Principal Nezu!” Minoru shouted, already running for the edge of the roof. “Honestly, it might make the most sense to head for the buildings that have already been destroyed, since it gives him fewer tools to work with.” Plus she was so ridiculously mobile, without him slowing her down she had a real chance of escaping.

  “But don’t we—“ he heard her saying behind him, but he’d reached the edge of the roof, and with a quick toss of a pair of grapeshot to bounce off he sent himself sailing across to the next building over and missed whatever she was trying to say. Probably not a big deal.

  It quickly became obvious that Nezu was wise to his ploy, as the wrecking ball curved back around after blocking off Ashido’s most direct route toward the exit and utterly demolished the building he’d been hoping to jump to. “Shit!” swore Minoru, and immediately charged for the door on the roof that must lead to the stairs downward. Nezu doubtless had figured out what he was doing; if he wanted even a faint chance of catching the principal out, he needed to break line of sight fast.

  As he entered the stairwell, Minoru shot a quick glance over his shoulder, but Ashido was nowhere to be seen. Hopefully she made it out, because he wasn’t going to have any time to spare worrying over her; with Principal Nezu literally dropping buildings in his path, he was going to need to get creative.

  The next fifteen minutes were a blur of dodging through empty streets, backtracking, climbing obstructions, and one memorable moment when Minoru was forced to adhere a slowly toppling wall to another wall just long enough to duck underneath.

  There were a couple times when the wrecking ball left him alone for a stint and he heard collapsing buildings a short distance away, and while he wasn’t super happy that Ashido was still trapped with him, he was certainly thankful for the breather.

  At last, Minoru arrived at the base of the building atop which the control booth for the wrecking ball that Principal Nezu was using was located, and as quickly as he could manage given his aching limbs and shortness of breath, he began to scale the outer wall.

  Minoru had to duck inside a couple of times both to take some time to breath and to avoid being spotted as the control booth turned to and fro, but he finally made it to the roof. The control booth was a lot larger than he expected and the side mainly facing the roof was without any sort of windows. With a final effort, Minoru sprinted across and ducked inside, then as quickly as he could adhered the door shut with his grapeshot. There, that should keep the principal a bit more constrained. Minoru didn’t relish the thought of trying to chase him across the city.

  At the sound of grapeshot slapping into place, Principal Nezu glanced over from where he was perched on the chair in front of the controls, one hand wielding a steaming cup of tea.

  “Ah, Minoru Mineta! You’re a little later than I anticipated; I was beginning to wonder if I’d accidentally crushed you under a building somewhere.”

  The principal let out a peal of slightly-unhinged laughter, and Minoru inadvertently took a step back before rallying. “I’m here to capture you, Nezu!” he said, brandishing the handcuffs.

  “Is that right? And where is your lovely partner, hm? Making a solo run for the exit, perhaps? You do realize that you both need to cross the finish line to pass the test, do you not?”

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  “Uh.” Minoru paused. He had indeed overlooked that detail. That must have been what Ashido was trying to say when he rushed off. Whoops.

  The principal was overcome with another gale of laughter, to the point that he ended up slopping some tea out of his cup as he set it down near the controls. “Ah, I needed that. I truly did. Thank you, Mineta, but I do believe this is going to be my win. Now, to just make sure the lovely young Ashido receives the lesson about looking before she leaps…” He reached toward the controls once more and Minoru tensed to try and rush him, but the entire booth suddenly rocked in place as the wrecking ball dropped clean off and fell to the street with a resounding CRASH.

  Both Minoru and Principal Nezu paused and stared out at the swinging end of the metal ropes that formerly attached the crane arm to the wrecking ball. As the ropes swept near a building, a pink blur vaulted off, sliding across the roof and quickly out of sight.

  “Well,” said Principal Nezu after a moment. “Well, well, well, how exciting! I didn’t anticipate Miss Ashido somehow managing to destroy my wrecking ball! How did she even get there, I wonder? I can’t wait to watch the footage!”

  Minoru took a quick glance around the control panel, and tossed several grapeshot in the path that he expected Nezu to take if he tried to climb out of the nearby booth window, which appeared to be the only one in the booth able to open.

  “But as impressed as I am with Miss Ashido, I must admit I was entirely prepared for you, Mineta, even without that extra bit of counter-weight. Do try not to do anything that I didn’t anticipate, would you? I’d hate to grievously injure a budding young talent.”

  Before Minoru could react, the principal vaulted out of his chair, tapping the front window with a forepaw which somehow resulted in it popping out of its socket and sailing through the air. He simultaneously shoved a control hard over with his back foot. The crane arm came swinging around, and the principal scampered up it, Minoru reflexively dodging around the still-swiveling chair to try and catch up.

  As the crane arm passed a certain point, however, the entire scaffolding groaned and shrieked, causing Minoru to skid to a halt. No way…the principal couldn’t have somehow rigged this building to collapse, could he?

  The principal hopped off the crane arm as it passed a nearby building, paused to wave jauntily to Minoru, and then scampered out of sight just as the crane arm collided with a building further along, wrenching the entire control booth off into the air.

  “Shit!” Minoru scrambled for the nearest wall, frantically grabbing for grapeshot, but wasn’t nearly fast enough. Even as he slapped grapeshot against the wall in an attempt to anchor himself, the control box listed under his feet, and began to slide completely off the roof.

  The next few moments were a series of horrifying drops and collisions as Minoru was thrown bodily about the interior of the control box in its uncontrolled descent toward the ground.

  When at last it came to rest, Minoru found himself desperately clutching the swivel chair near the control panel, a couple of grapeshot wedged between him and anchoring his shirt to the chair as his arms cramped around its back.

  He raised his head, coughing as cement dust billowed around him. The control booth had twisted around as it fell, and now lay at an angle, causing the floor to slant sharply upward. The window was almost completely blocked by the crumpled remains of the crane arm where it lay intertwined with broken pieces of the building it had sat on—or perhaps the buildings around it, judging by the impacts Minoru had experienced on the way down.

  “What the hell,” he groaned as he tried to extricate himself from the chair. Although he didn’t think anything was broken, his entire body hurt, and he finally had to just slip out of his costume’s shirt because it was too firmly attached to the grapeshot. He couldn’t believe that Principal Nezu had thrown him off a freaking building!

  After giving himself a few moments to try and catch his breath, Minoru levered himself to his feet with a groan and very carefully tried to climb over the control panel to investigate his options for getting out of this mess.

  He was unhappy to find that there weren’t very many. Although light was filtering through the debris somewhere, he was unable to find any spaces large enough for even his small frame to make it through, and when he worked his way up the slope of the floor to the door, he found it and the window nearby completely clogged with debris.

  Frankly, he counted himself lucky the entire control room hadn’t been crushed.

  As the sounds of the announcements of other team’s success filtered through the loudspeakers to his half-buried location, Minoru, he spent some time resting and then further exploring the confines of the control box, but without finding any way to escape.

  Eventually he paused in trying to pry a promising-looking piece of steel away from where it was blocking what he had determined was his most-likely egress point. “What is that smell?” There was a weird sound, too, sort of a sizzling…

  Minoru sprang up and climbed as fast as he could to a higher portion of the control panel. He was just in time, as the steel around the door buckled and bent inward before collapsing with a horrible smell and shriek of metal, accompanied by a thin layer of what looked like slime.

  Minoru clapped an arm over his nose and mouth, coughing violently, as Ashido’s pink head peeked through the hole she had melted straight through concrete and steel. “Mineta! You’re alright!”

  “Ashido, what—“ Minoru had to stop as a waft of the chemicals or whatever the acid had interacted with in the debris washed over him and set him desperately coughing once more. “Weren’t you going to escape?”

  “Eh, well, I thought we both needed to cross the finish line to pass, anyway, so I was just kind of winging it and hoping I could distract Principal Nezu so you’d have a shot at him when I saw the crane fall off the building with you in it. And I couldn’t just leave you there!”

  Minoru couldn’t do anything other than helplessly laugh, which sent him into a third coughing fit.

  “Let’s get you out of there,” said Ashido. “Let me just water down this acid a bit first. I might have let it get a little out of hand when I saw how much rubble was lying on the crane.”

  “Yeah,” said Minoru. “That sounds like a plan to me.”

  A dirty and difficult time later, they’d just cleared the edge of the rubble and were able to look across the mostly-destroyed test area towards the exit gate when the loudspeaker emitted a harsh buzz and announced the end of the test. They had failed.