absolution.

fighter.

warning: my creativity died multiple times on me for/during these fights, so there's gotta be like illogical stuff in here, sorry,,

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"Everybody!" The announcer roars, "Are you ready for the third match?!" Equally as deafening, the crowd screams back, excitement buzzing in the air.

Momo silently sighs as she walks into the battlefield, already feeling the mass amount of stares on her. The sounds, the stares—none of it is helping her stay calm.

It'd felt like only seconds had passed since the beginning of the Festival, and she can't help but feel like she should've spent the time during and between the one-on-one battles more efficiently. Momo had spent most of that time planning her attacks and how to defeat Sero, ever since the match-ups were announced, but she should've... done more, or something. Ensured that her plan would work.

Oh, worrying over it is useless now. Momo steps onto the stage along with her opponent on the other side, feeling the heat of the ignited flame geysers next to her as they flare. She takes a calming breath, looking up to meet Sero's eyes (mostly) fearlessly and tuning out Present Mic's commentary. He does the same but with a lot more nervousness, giving her a grin as he raises an elbow.

"Good luck?" She offers over the roar of the crowd.

"Yeah," Sero nods. "You too."

"Start!" Present Mic shouts, and then Sero immediately starts launching his tape directly towards her.

Momo dodges the first few with mild difficulty, trying to inch closer to the middle of the platform to be far away from the boundary line. She still gets caught by a streak of tape, its end plastering itself on the sleeve of her shirt. Sero makes a noise in triumph, reeling his elbow back, and if Momo hadn't been expecting it and dug her heels into the ground, she'd have fallen.

With a moment of hesitation, Momo creates a sharp switch-blade (she can't be sure that knives are allowed) and slices through the tense, stretched tape latched to her arm. She leaves the remainder that's stuck on her skin alone. There's no time to worry about the little details, only that she keeps moving forward.

Sero doesn't look too shocked, though. There's a plan he has, and maybe the way he's shooting his tape is a part of it? Momo can't think about it for too long, though, when a shot of tape almost grazes her sleeve. Oh God—can he change the properties of his tape to make it more adhesive? Can he make it double-sided? Is it naturally double-sided? The variables she knows about Sero's Quirk are too little and reliant on surface-level observations to help her here.*

As Sero keeps shooting tape, Momo's eyes quickly dart around the platform. She doesn't have time to do a full-scale analysis, nor does she have any opportunity to, but there's a few things she does notice: there are parts of the floor lined with tape, maybe the result of the trajectory of Sero's tape in order to hit Momo. So with a quick prayer in hopes that this improv-idea and probable-risk works, she ducks down and creates three wide rectangular shields as a barrier directly on a few lines of tape, peek-holes near the top of the barricade.

The problem with this is that Momo's been rendered stationary, too, her feet stuck on Sero's tape, making this match more on the side of a waiting game. Her original plan was almost the direct opposite of that: creating a polearm and slamming into Sero as fast as she could, knocking him out of bounds. The long-range game they're playing, though, would make her polearm useless—Sero would probably be able to take it away from her anyway by latching onto the weapon like he did her forearm.

Nervously, Momo extends and retracts the metal of her switchblade again and again. Sero seems to have covered a majority of the central platform in tape, confirming that it's double-sided (because why else would he do that if not to limit her area of movement?), before aiming for her shields. Sero might've made the adhesive stronger, which serves to her benefit and demise; her shields will hold strong because they're stuck to the ground, but one mighty tug from Sero if his tape's latched on, and it'll all fall down. Momo doesn't have time to plan; she has to think.