Chapter 3 — Sinister Start Line
Izuku begins the U.A. Entrance Exam - and is soon surprised by how short it is, only to learn after finishing writing all the answers that it is indeed the entire exam.Two hours later, the students are taken to the practical exam battle grounds, and Izuku wonders why there are no simulations for search and rescue when he trips over a bottle of nausea pills. At Tae's suggestion, Izuku attempts to find the owner of the pills, only to get interrupted by a blue-haired boy who believes Izuku is a plant. Izuku eventually manages to get rid of him, but then Present Mic starts the test.
Izuku and Tae go into the testing grounds, with Tae using her strength to hold the robots tight while Izuku turns them off. Tae complains about needing blood, and Izuku decides to stop to give her some, but then an enormous robot enters the grounds and begins to attack the buildings, causing the would-be hero students to run away. Before he can do the same, though, Izuku hears the brown-haired girl from earlier asking for help, and he has Tae rescue her while he distracts the huge robot.
Tae quickly gets the girl from under the rock that trapped her and takes her away, but Izuku makes a mistake and gets punched by the giant robot, sending him flying away. The girl attempts to help him by using her Quirk on him, but the sudden deceleration breaks his neck, rendering him temporarily unconscious until his body knits itself together. Between the shock of almost killing Izuku by accident and then seeing him come back to life, the girl faints. Just then, the test ends. Recovery Girl begins to heal those students that are hurt, and the blue-haired boy reflects on Izuku's heroism and bravery.
One week later, Izuku receives a letter from U.A.: while he earned a perfect score on the written exam, the twenty points he got in the practical would not be enough to grant him a place in the Hero Course - at least, not without counting the sixty points he got from rescuing the girl, placing him as the student with the highest mark. Inko faints from seeing his son face off the zero-point robot, and Izuku realizes he needs to come up with some hero costumes.
A month afterwards is the beginning of the school year at U.A., and Izuku and Tae go to their assigned classroom, Class 1-A. On the door, they meet the brunette girl, who thanks them for saving her, complaining that she only got in trouble because she had lost her medication - the pills Izuku found before the exam. Izuku forgives her for her instinctive reaction towards Tae and the two present themselves, the girl being Ochaco Uraraka.
Inside the classroom, they meet their future classmates, among them the blue-haired boy, who apologizes to Izuku for his previous actions during the examination, and then to Uraraka for preventing Izuku from giving her her pills. Their conversation is interrupted by their homeroom teacher, Shota Aizawa, who gives them a set of gym uniforms and tells them to meet outside for Quirk testing. But before they begin, Aizawa threatens to expel whoever comes last in the testing. The first to do a test is Izuku, much to Bakugo's shock, as Aizawa tasks Izuku to send a ball as far as possible: Izuku has Tae place the ball a thousand metres away, which she easily arranges.
Izuku finds himself happy that he might actually fit in the school.
Tropes That Appear In This Chapter:
- Child Prodigy: This chapter shows the first hints of how intelligent Izuku is, as he blazes through the U.A. written exam in a few minutes (getting a perfect score in it) and then asks the proctors if it is actually that short.
- Entertainingly Wrong: After grilling Izuku for his Innocently Insensitive behavior, Iida ends up deducing that Izuku was planted into the applicants in order to cull the weaker-willed ones, when really he's just another would-be student.
- Innocently Insensitive:
- When Izuku raises his hand to ask Present Mic something, he in-turn thinks he needs to feed "that thing", Izuku taking offense on Tae's behalf.
- When Izuku thinks the written exam is too short, he asks Present Mic if that's all there is. While Izuku was being sincere with his question, everyone else found the idea of the exam being longer exasperating, Present Mic thinking he was the token Insufferable Genius who thought that academic smarts would get him through the entire process while Iida thinks he was purposefully trying to demoralize everybody."...I just wanted to make sure that the exam I received was complete," Izuku said, holding up the packet in question. "Mine only has a hundred general knowledge and law questions, twenty-five low difficulty mathematics problems, and an essay. It seems kind of short, and I'm worried that it's wrong somehow or a part fell out."
The green-haired teen did not expect for the auditorium to explode with cries of despair at his words. Apparently the length of the exam, and the prospect of writing an essay, didn't sit well with some.
- Internal Reveal: All Might finds out that Tae is not Izuku's sister, which he had thought was the relationship between them and that Izuku had not corrected.
- Ludicrous Precision: Tae places the ball exactly one thousand metres away, much to everyone's shock.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: During the Entrance Exam, Izuku gets sent flying when he's hit by the Zero Pointer. Ochako successfully stops him by using her Quirk, but the sudden deceleration snaps Izuku's neck. Fortunately, Izuku has a Healing Factor and is fine seconds later, though he does mention how much fixing his neck hurts.
