The first time it exploded, Mina was laughing so hard her goggles flew off. Yours were halfway melted. A large scorch mark had claimed the wall behind her, and the school lab reeked like someone boiled a car battery inside a volcano.

“That’s the third one this week!” she cackled, wiping soot off her cheeks like it was blush. “We're getting better! That one only singed my eyebrows.”

You, meanwhile, were busy picking burnt fragments of your lab coat off the ground, internally calculating how many more weeks until graduation and whether spontaneous combustion disqualified you from science credits.

“Mina,” you grumbled, “my quirk literally detonates on contact with high-reactivity materials. Yours is acid. It’s like pairing fireworks with bleach. This was doomed.”

“Nonsense,” she chirped. “All great discoveries are born from controlled chaos!”

“That wasn’t controlled. That was a war crime.”

You didn’t hate her. You just didn’t particularly enjoy being on fire every 48 hours. Somehow, the school thought it was a genius idea to pair quirk-volatile students for a collaborative science assignment. Something about synergy, adaptability, and 'hero teamwork potential.' Aka: no survivors.

She leaned over the workstation, still bubbling with delight, poking at the gooey residue of your latest disaster. “Hey. At least we melted the beaker after we poured the solution in this time. Progress.”

You sighed. “The beaker liquefied.”

“Semantics.”

Two weeks in, and your shared table looked like a crime scene. Burnt paper. Charred goggles. A poor cactus from the windowsill now crispy as tempura.

“I had dreams,” you said dramatically, scribbling fake data into your report. “Of graduating without a facial graft. Of having eyebrows in my yearbook photo. But no. Here I am. A living lab with legs.”

“Hey!” Mina nudged your shoulder, smirking. “Science is messy. You gotta respect the hustle. Plus, explosions are kinda your thing.”

“They weren’t supposed to be my thing in science class.”

She twirled a pipette like a baton and accidentally flung acid across the room. A faint sizzling sound followed.

“Mina—!”

“Oops. Okay okay! That one’s on me.”

You deadpan-stared at the smoke trail rising from the fire extinguisher. You were beginning to suspect it might sue you for workplace trauma.

Eventually, Mina got serious. Or, well, Mina serious—which mostly meant tying her hair back and threatening the chemicals with a pep talk. “Listen up, sodium nitrate. You better not punk out on me or so help me—!”

“—You’re yelling at powder now.”

“You got a better idea, genius?”

You did. It involved flunking the assignment and living. But that didn’t seem to impress your determined partner.

Finally, after seventeen disasters, one emergency call to Recovery Girl, and a heartfelt apology to the janitor, it happened. You mixed just the right balance of her acid secretion and your unstable charge. The container fizzled. It sparked. It pulsed with unnatural, terrifying beauty.

It didn’t explode.

You both stared at it like it was the Second Coming. Then at each other.

Mina blinked. “Did we just—?”

You whispered, “I think we broke science.”

“No,” she said, wide-eyed. “We made science our b—”

BOOM.

You flew backward into a stack of safety manuals. Mina landed headfirst in the mop bucket.

Silence.

Then: “Okay,” she groaned, legs sticking out like a pink starfish, “so that one was on you.”