"Wha…what is…this p-power?"

"RRRRRRRRRRRR"

"Gah!"

And then the meathead before him was sent hurtling into a rock wall at nine hundred kilometers per second.

Dare you stand before me!? Izuku boomed, mentally, but he knew the other had heard him.

"What are you!? You're no ordinary walrus!"

…Wait, do you routinely fight walruses?

"Of course! I'm a real man, and the only way for a real man to get stronger is to fight other real men…or powerful adversaries like walri!"

Walri!? Had he been saying it wrong the entire time!? Had he been shaming his people!? Well…thank you for the compliment, both personally and on behalf of my people. Was it…was it even correct to call walruses his "people"? People were human! But what term could he use!?

Ah, the dilemmas of walrusdom.

Walzuku did not take long to dispose of the villain calling himself Muscular, as well as the entire top of the cliff edge. The kid - Kouta - had vanished at some point, but whether he'd run off or simply been sent flying remained to be seen.

Now, why are there villains attacking us?

Unfortunately, since becoming a Pacific Walrus, Izuku's mental function had declined somewhat – having a brain unadapted to human thought processes was not conducive to having them, and his ability to deconstruct situations, analyze them, and formulate plans of action had been partially replaced with an ability to smash his way through any obstacle with powerful body slams and scrubbing tusk action.

Rumbling his way downhill, Izuku accidentally ended up rolling, slamming into a man with a lizard's head and bandages as well as Mandalay, whose name he still hadn't been told but whose plot armour was so powerful it possessed its own nametag.

"Watch where you're going!" the Pussycat hissed, and Izuku instinctively bowed, though considering he was still rolling across the grass with the lizard-man clasped firmly between his front flippers, it did nothing but send a sharp pain up his neck that would have exacerbated any existing spinal damage. Luckily, none of this was present, and half of the previous sentence was insignificant filler content designed to fluff out the story's word count.

"Watch where you're going!" Mandalay hissed again, this time at the above paragraph. It had already broken the fourth wall and was veering dangerously close to leaping out of the hole entirely.

With a mighty grunt, Izuku heaved the scale-covered man into a tree, or more accurately through several trees, but thanks to his own special brand of plot armour, Spinner was merely rendered unconscious instead of being instantly snapped in half by several dozen times the force of gravity.

Huh. I wonder where my plot armour went?

"Oh, shit." He turned to see Mandalay watching him, concerned, and tried to give her a thumbs-up, but this was impossible. He had no thumbs. "You're gonna want to get some new plot armour, Midoriya. What happened to your old set?"

I guess I outgrew it when I turned into a walrus.

Mandalay snapped her fingers. "Ah. That might explain it. There's a dwarven smith hidden somewhere on this property, if one of your Bering Smashes didn't completely obliterate his workshop."

Sorry about those.

"It's fine," she sighed, rolling her eyes. "Just…stick to the Nikolskoye Никольское Smash from now on, 'kay?"

Got it. Where can I find this blacksmith? Izuku projected, and Mandalay pointed north to a mountain that absolutely had not been there several seconds prior.

"Mount Ironheart. He lives in a shop located somewhere around the mountain's midpoint. You'll have to climb, but if you can make it before dawn, you should be back in time to safely progress the plot."

Got it! Thanks, Mandalay-sensei!

"Please don't call me that. I feel old."

At least she's not Pixie-Bob, he thought bitterly, but –

"I heard that!"

Sorry, sorry! I'll just be going now.

As it turned out, Mount Ironheart was comprised largely of silt, clay and basalt rock, and the supposed "heart of iron" was actually a colossal vein of some sort of naturally-occurring ferrosteel and not raw iron ore.

"So," the dwarf, named Sven (he was actually from New York, but his parents were self-identifying "Iceaboos", a horrific portmanteaux of "Iceland" and "weeaboo", and named him the most basic thing possible – rather like an actual weeaboo would name their child "Yuki", or an "Ireaboo" would name their child "Liam" and be promptly disappointed by a subsequent wave of Liam Neeson namealikes several years later) told him, "you want me to craft you a new suit of plot armour?"

Ah, yes, sir. How much?

"Free! We're buddies, yeah? You ran a fetch quest for me, I'll love you forever."

I literally walked…er, waddled ten feet to fetch a mysteriously detached chunk of "Mountain's Heart Ore" that was just lying on the ground and brought it back to you. That's like offering someone room and board because they fetched you a spoon.

"Hahaha!" cackled Sven, in the ancient tongue of NPC. "That's the spirit. You just hold tight and I'll have this ready in just a minute."

And he paced over to his forge, utterly oblivious to Izuku's baffled stare. Then again, he hadn't even seemed to notice that Izuku was a literal walrus, so perhaps Sven was not the most perceptive.

Barreling back into the nonexistent fray in his gleaming new breastplate, Izuku stood proudly before the two remaining Pussycats; Pixie-Bob's helmet had saved her a skull-crushing at the hands of a – man? but Izuku swore he'd heard the lizard-man call them "sis" – and Ragdoll was nowhere to be found, though as she hadn't worn protection, she was most likely dead, or being played with by some hapless redheaded child.

"Holy shit. That took you long enough."

The quest was long and arduous.

"Please stop talking like that."

Just then, there was a colossal crash from 24.8 meters off (just how anyone could measure so accurately escaped the realm of plausible explanation and careened off into Saturn, crashing through the gas giant before becoming caught in its orbit and returning to collide with the solid core, completely obliterating the entirety of Saturn and leaving Uranus as the only ringed planet [with the possible exception of Neptune, which a simple Google search could have verified if only someone wasn't too lazy to type "Neptune" into the search bar], much to the dismay of intergalactic stain removal salesmen – "ring around the planet? not anymore!" – only there was no longer a planet, and nobody with a cosmic bottle of Shout! was willing to say that they'd clean just Uranus with it – but where is this aside going? why is it demonstrating the maturity of humour that one would expect from a nine year old?) and a massive black claw sliced through the forest, causing roughly as much damage as one of Izuku's Bering Smashes. The source was none other than a pitch-black monstrosity the size of several school buses, which had in its clutches none other than –

Tokoyami-kun!

Before anyone else could act, however, a pair of high pitched screams raced into the clearing before their owners; ignoring their disloyal screams, which clearly didn't care enough to stick around 'til the bitter end and were content to leave their owners die, Yaoyorozu and a side character who wouldn't appear again for at least six more arcs but whose Quirk was conveniently suited to his intended purpose – Izuku was pretty sure his name was Archie – rushed after the piercing sounds, deciding that Dark Shadow was less dangerous than the other bird-faced hulk of a creature currently pursuing them. Upon closer inspection, Izuku noted that it had a chainsaw for an arm, with the other arm weighed down by an entire lawnmower – an inefficient adaptation, but certainly one he'd write down in his hero notebooks later. (Or he would, if he had hands.)

"How the fuck has nobody come to help us yet!?" Yaoyorozu shrieked, but as she and Akemi sprinted for their lives, the thing – which Izuku dimly recognized as a Noumu, from the USJ incident, before he'd gone full walrus – stopped dead, revving down the power tools sprouting from what were likely its arms at some point.

It was staring directly at Dark Shadow, who paused in its destructive rampage to survey the Noumu.

"…Cuuute…"

Everyone in the clearing, including Dark Shadow, was rendered speechless. (Yaoyorozu and Arby's had already fled.) What the fuck? ran through all of their minds, including Dark Shadow's.

"Excuse me?" the behemoth rumbled, and Tokoyami struggled feebly.

("Please put me down." He was ignored.)

"You…cute."

The weed-eater that had taken the place of one of its left arms twitched excitably, and the Noumu staggered a step towards Dark Shadow, who recoiled somewhat.

"Yeah, no, I don't think so. Can we not do this?"

"Me…want…date?"

Why does it sound confused on whether or not it wants a date?

"You're asking me?" Mandalay quipped. "I couldn't figure out whether or not I wanted a date until I was twenty-seven, and then it was just a dried apricot."

I can't tell if that's an innuendo or not.

"For a dehydrated fruit, he was very polite, but I just couldn't deal with it in the bedroom."

ENOUGH! If walri could blush, Izuku would be burning up.

"Me no want date."

"But…me…flowers?" And the Noumu lunged for a nearby bush with a pair of gardening shears, pruning off a makeshift bouquet with remarkable skill. "Call…Edward."

"Robert Pattinson has been dead for a century and a half. I appreciate the thought, but I just couldn't do it with that hedge trimmer you've got going on."

There was no innuendo here, either – one of the Noumu's limbs was an electric hedge trimmer, despite it already having four described limbs.

"It's….unsettling, okay? I'm sorry."

Something twitched in the Noumu's face, and it revved up a pizza cutter. Raised the appendage.

"You…just like everyone else! Me thought you were different!"

"Please calm down. We can talk this out – " The dark titan attempted to placate the Noumu, which had started to shred the flowers with a pair of nail clippers, tears trailing down its green-skinned face.

"No! Me tired of this!"

And, with a resounding cry, it barreled towards Dark Shadow, who began to back away into the forest before turning in a full-on run (or as close as an incorporeal shadow could get to a run). Thinking quickly, Izuku rushed to save Tokoyami –

N-Noumu-kun! B-baka!

The Noumu stopped dead once more, letting the pressure cooker on its back simmer down.

"Fish?"

No, I'm not a fish. I'm a walrus. I...I understand how you feel. Being different! Nobody wants me, either. I'm – I'm not like the other students at Yuuei. You…you have to understand that you're not alone! That –

Bang.

The Noumu collapsed, spouting blood from a hole in its head, and everyone turned to see Sven the dwarf brandishing a revolver.

"Did someone call for a smith? A gunsmith, that is!"

"No, nobody called for a fucking gunsmith!" Mandalay screamed. "We were about to have a heart-to-heart and you fucking shot it!"

"…Oh. Uh, sorry," the dwarf mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck, but Mandalay just shrugged, as did Izuku.

Eh. He was a horrifying monster with no brain, anyway. There's no changing something like that.

"I would like to object," Spinner pointed out, limping out of the trees. "He has a brain. Look, it's literally sticking out of his skull."

Look, you know what I mean. Anyway, that speech was from the heart, but I find that as a walrus, I have significantly less of a heart. All that matters to me now is protecting my harem.

"Isn't that elephant seals?" Mandalay asked, to which Walzuku only responded with an incredibly grave stare.

I'm gonna go find Tokoyami and Dark Shadow. They probably need someone to comfort them in their time of need.

"Didn't you just say you only cared about protecting your harem?"

Another grave stare, and Mandalay clapped a hand to her mouth.

Izuku waddled off into the trees and was swallowed up by the darkness – both of night, and that in his walrussy four-chambered heart.