Requiem of the Broken

Chapter 8: Vertigo

Ochako was exhausted or at least felt like it. She hadn't done a night patrol in a long time and her body just wasn't used to the experience. So despite getting plenty of sleep, she still felt tired. She was hunched over her kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and the other holding her chopsticks. She hadn't had the energy to make something so she had just reheated food from yesterday. 

She needed to wake herself up, get pumped for the day ahead! Considering she didn't have work today though, she wasn't exactly sure what she should do. As she mechanically ate her breakfast, her thoughts drifted back to her previous night. Her fight in the alley had been a bit sloppy. She had almost made a fatal mistake and could have gotten stabbed twice in the back. She had fallen into the thug's trap, and only her old instincts saved her at the last moment. 

That settled it then, she was going to head over to the training facilities and do some training. If she was going to do this more in the future and help fight Zeus, she was going to need to up her game. The decision seemed to energize her some and she ate with some renewed vigor.

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An hour later, she was standing in an open dirt field set aside for her use. She could let loose as much as she liked, and it would all be fixed by the groundskeeper whose quirk could manipulate dirt over a designated area.

She stood in the middle of the empty field, eyes closed, and keeping herself calm and collected. She needed to be focused, she had a great store of power within herself but ever since her awakening she had never had the time to train that power in a more precise and focused manner.

Objects she touched, had their gravity erased and as such she could manipulate her surroundings in very unique ways. This had changed however when she had nearly died trying to save her parents, a massive beam had collapsed from the ceiling and had impaled her through her right breast. She had been lucky though and it hadn't fallen far enough to punch straight through her, instead just impaling her right breast entirely, breaking multiple ribs on that side, and a small puncture in her lung. As she lay trapped, bleeding out, and the fire burning her right side just below her head, she had felt something roil inside of her, her desire to live and save her parents giving birth to a new power inside her. With the last of her strength, she had placed one hand on the beam and had just tried to remove it from her body. She didn't really remember much honestly, but from what she had been told she had actually launched the beam with enough power to fly out through the weakened ceiling, and fall to the ground below along with a massive shower of additional debris. This had been what had saved her life, as a hero had homed in on the location of the abnormal explosion and rescued her before she could die.

She breathed out, and let that memory go, forcing herself to focus on what her quirk could do. The awakening had let her touch an object and change the force of gravity affecting that object, but only on inorganic matter. For whatever reason, she could still only erase gravity on organic materials. Additionally, her quirk could spread from the initially touched object to other objects nearby. Anything and everything from rocks to pure energy, she could manipulate or affect. She also discovered that her body was actually highly resistant to G-forces if not flat-out impervious, flying at extreme speeds, and dramatic de-acceleration that would rupture a normal person's organs had little to no effect on her. Still made her stomach turn over and feel a bit sick if her de-acceleration was too dramatic though. She also had complete and perfect control over her own field of gravity, essentially allowing her to fly and move without the need of having to touch the ground. Air resistance was after all, essentially meaningless to her now that she could just repulse the air in front of her. She could create a sort of gravity armor around her body, which also allowed her to hit things really hard and really fast, without the fear of hurting herself. This newfound capacity for combat prompted her to seek out heroes with fighting styles as close to hers as possible or skills that would be beneficial, such as Mirko for her acrobatic capabilities, Hawks for his wealth of knowledge in air combat, and even Gran Torino before his death.