As he sprinted towards the downed Fly, Minoru’s thoughts went into overdrive. The other heroes were too far away to make a difference, most hanging back around the edges of the plaza as they tried to keep the nomu from spreading out into the rest of the city, and from the brief amount he’d seen of them in action he didn’t think any of them had a ranged Quirk.

  That was good and bad; on the plus side, it meant he was free to spread his grapeshot around to try and lock down the nomu. Less positively, it meant that he was going to have no help getting the Fly to safety in the immediate future.

  So: get the nomu’s attention, get it mired in grapeshot, leave a path for the other heroes to rescue the Fly. He’d lost track of the flying nomu, as well, so he’d just have to deal with that if it showed itself.

  Analysis, such as it was, complete, Minoru started pelting grapeshot as fast as he could in the direction he hoped to draw the nomu. He had a gut feeling that these particular grapeshot would stick to the pavement and the nomu, but not to anything else, though he wasn’t sure if that was true or something he was fooling himself into believing.

  As he drew closer, he started aiming for the nomu itself, although most of them fell short, and yelled as loud as he could, “Hey, you idiot monster, look over here!”

  The nomu paused, arm raised in the air over the Fly, as its head swiveled toward Minoru, who never let up on the grapeshot. At last, a pair of grapeshot connected; one on the nomu’s pectoral and one bounced off the cloth of its pants, proving Minoru’s gut instinct about what the grapeshot would stick to correct.

  The nomu reflexively slapped at the grapeshot on its pectoral with the arm that was raised and tried to rip it off its body, but of course its palm remained stuck.

  The creature shrieked, strained, and with a horrible tearing sound succeeded in pulling its hand—and the grapeshot—away, but at the cost of a large swathe of the skin of its chest going with it.

  It shrieked once more, shaking its hand rapidly but unable to remove the grapeshot from its palm, then suddenly its focus re-oriented on Minoru. The creature didn’t have any eyes, but Minoru got the distinct feeling he now had the thing’s full attention.

  Minoru dove to the side, leaving a grapeshot behind as he did something between a cartwheel and a handspring. Behind him, the nomu’s fists impacted the pavement and sent shards of it flying, the creature having jumped toward him almost faster than he could track. Minoru threw several grapeshot at key points on the ground in front of the nomu and sprinted as fast as he could in an arc around it.

  “What are you doing, kid, get out of there!” one of the heroes shouted at him. It looked like a woman with a bandana around her throat and a broad stripe down the front of her costume had followed after him.

  Minoru barely spared her a glance. “Get the Fly out of here! He’s unconscious, and I don’t know how long I can keep this thing’s attention!”

  “Damn it!” swore the woman. Minoru had the feeling she was torn between listening to him and just tackling him from behind.

  “Trust me, I’m interning with the Fly! Please get him to safety! But don’t touch the purple balls, just in case! I don’t think they’ll adhere to anything but the nomu, but they’re super sticky!”

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” repeated the female hero, but Minoru heard her moving away toward the Fly. “Get that kid out of here!” she shouted to someone else.

  “On it!” another hero cried, but Minoru didn’t have a chance to look and see who.

  While he’d been distracted by the female hero, the nomu had almost jumped after him again only to be distracted by a hero rushing it from the side. That didn’t last long, however, as the nomu simply back-handed the hero and sent them shooting through the air only to be snatched out of it by the flying nomu. That answered where that particular problem was, at least.

  Distraction dealt with, the nomu had turned back towards Minoru and rather than running after him over his grapeshot flexed his legs in what was clearly going to be another leap.

  Minoru tossed some frantic grapeshot at his feet and dove to the side, but this time wasn’t quite fast enough. The nomu landed behind him, the impact against the pavement once more sending out concrete shrapnel which pelted Minoru and threw him off course.

  He tumbled out of control, rolling painfully across the ground before fetching up against yet another piece of debris left behind by the pair’s rampage. As he scrambled to right himself with one hand, he continued throwing out grapeshot in the direction of the nomu with the other.

  Minoru made it to standing just as the nomu whirled to face him once more. Shit, he was aching and unsteady and he didn’t think he was going to have a chance to dodge before the thing jumped!

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  “Now!” someone yelled, and a hero Minoru hadn’t noticed prior dashed right up next to the nomu, ducked under its reflexive backhand, and wrapped some sort of weird tentacle things that were extruded from his back around the nomu’s knees. As the nomu reached down for him, something slammed into the thing’s upper back, sending it toppling over and straight onto some of the grapeshot that Minoru had tossed in front of it.

  The hero with the leopard print and animal paws that Minoru had run into earlier vaulted over the nomu from where he had impacted its back and skidded a bit on the pavement before re-orienting.

  “Endeavor’s on his way!” he cried out. “Just hold these things a little longer!”

  Minoru barely paid attention to him, however, because the nomu was straining, arms braced against the pavement as it shrieked and its muscles bulged and rippled monstrously. Those few grapeshot weren’t going to keep it down very long at all.

  Minoru shot a quick glance around the plaza. The flying nomu was currently swooping and attempting to break up a group of heroes who had gathered around a couple of felled people on the far side. The Fly was being hoisted towards the edge of the plaza by the woman in the striped costume. A pair of heroes dressed kind of like ninja were circling the nomu and ignoring the hero who was felled before its most recent jump towards Minoru, which was not very impressive behavior for a group of heroes.

  And just like that, the time to take in the battlefield was past. As Minoru heard the sound of skin tearing, he sprinted forward, jumped off one of the grapeshot he’d thrown out earlier in a panic, and soared above the nomu just as it forced itself up with an unearthly shriek.

  The nomu’s shoulder brushed Minoru as he went past, making his landing less controlled than he’d hoped, and by the time he got himself back under control and turned around the nomu had already slammed one of the ninja-like heroes into the ground and was holding the other’s struggling body by their head.

  Not waiting to see the inevitable conclusion of that particular conflict, Minoru took a running jump at the nomu’s back, anchored himself with a grapeshot in a mad scramble for the nomu’s shoulders as the thing whirled around and threw the poor ninja-like hero away by his head, and made it to the thing’s upper back as it began reaching up toward him.

  “Tear this off,” Minoru snarled, and slammed a pair of grapeshot directly onto either lobe of the nomu’s exposed brain tissue, letting himself drop as the nomu’s hands slapped the place he’d just been before reflexively pulling back and snatching at the grapeshot.

  Minoru hit the ground, collapsed into a clumsy roll, and scrambled away but the nomu stood frozen in place, its hands affixed directly to its brain. Despite its total lack of expression, it had an air of bafflement about it.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” said Minoru, and he turned away to try and spot the flying nomu only to find himself thrown forward by a shockwave as the nomu behind him was engulfed in a towering inferno.

  “What the shit?!” yelled Minoru, whirling in place to discover Endeavor impacting the pavement nearby and striding toward the burning, keening nomu.

  “I will handle these monsters!” shouted Endeavor. “Those of you who are unable to damage them, I need you to back up my son! He is a few blocks that way—“ the burning man pointed to the side of the plaza Midoriya had run out of “—possibly fighting alongside some of his classmates.”

  “Damn it!” shouted Minoru. “That nomu was stuck but you’re burning through my grape—“

  He didn’t have a chance to finish, because the nomu came barreling out of the blaze straight at Endeavor and Minoru was forced to dodge frantically to the side as the pro hero sent a fresh batch of flames washing over the nomu and through the place where Minoru had been standing moments before. “I’m right here you know?!” yelled Minoru, but opted to run as fast as he could across the broken pavement to get away from the burgeoning fight.

  He’d had that thing dead to rights, but there wasn’t much he could do about a hero whose Quirk so directly countered his own. Hair burned just fine, and ultimately his grapeshot was made up of his own hair.

  In any case, although Endeavor had ruined his hard work at least he’d been able to keep the nomu away from the Fly. Maybe he could check on his mentor and make sure—

  But that wasn’t to be, either, because just at that moment he noticed that the group opposing the flying nomu was losing badly. More than half of their number were wounded on the ground, a couple more were outright missing, and the last couple were wounded but still desperately fighting.

  Without really thinking about it, Minoru changed his trajectory. How was he going to…ah! There!

  As the flying nomu swooped down for another pass, one of the heroes Minoru had lost track of jumped down from the wreckage of a nearby building, landing on the monster’s back and forcing it to the ground.

  “Keep it down!” shouted Minoru. “I can trap it with—“

  But once more events moved too fast for him. Evidently one of the ninja-like heroes had either recovered or hadn’t been one of the two facing off against the former nomu. The hero pulled out a blade, jumped on the nomu’s back, and stabbed it directly in the eye.

  The nomu shrieked, a sound that got higher and higher as the thing bucked and twisted, tossing several of the heroes off and hooking one of its claws into the costume of the ninja-like hero in order to tear him away, as well.

  The thing forced itself up onto all fours, aimed its mouthpiece at the ninja-like hero, and the sound escalated past what Minoru could hear.

  Evidently it was still ongoing, however, because the pavement around the ninja-like hero exploded and the hero himself flew backwards in a spray of blood.

  Minoru, approaching from the nomu’s side and a little behind it after it had spun in place, was unaffected but several of the other heroes evidently got caught in edges of the blast radius, as well, and went stumbling away.

  Not having time to come up with a good plan, Minoru snatched a couple grapeshot off his head and launched himself at the creature in hopes that he could stick its wings to the ground or similar.

  His hopes were in vain, unfortunately, because almost at the same time as he jumped for its back, it shoved itself up into the air with a flex of its limbs and great flap of its wings. Minoru found himself impacting not with the nomu’s back, but with its waist and butt, his hands automatically wrapping around it, and as the nomu shot into the air Minoru found himself going right up along with it.