The bar was loaded to 140 kilograms.
Izuku stepped under it.
'Seventy kilos heavier than last month. Seventy. What the hell am I becoming.'
He'd stopped counting the days somewhere around month three. Time wasn't dates anymore. It was plates added. Lines of code rewritten. The slow, creeping expansion of the thing living underneath him.
The Shadow Hound was always there.
Coiled under his feet like a second heartbeat. Always feeding. The drain was constant, pulling from somewhere behind his sternum, taxing every breath he took. It felt like walking through waist-deep water, twenty-four hours a day, forever.
The first week he'd collapsed halfway up a flight of stairs because his legs just quit.
'You want to be a leech? Fine. I'll build legs that don't quit.'
He unracked the bar.
The weight came down on his traps like God's own opinion of him. His legs bent. The world narrowed to the burning column of his spine and the cold drag of the Hound underneath him, feeding, always feeding, turning a 140-kilo squat into something that felt like 200.
He hit the bottom of the hole. Stayed there.
One second. Two.
GHOSTEMANE in his left ear. "Nihil." Bass so low it registered in his teeth. A building collapsing in slow motion.
He drove through the floor.
The bar racked with a sound like a gunshot.
He stood there breathing, staring at himself through the sweat running into his eyes, and he looked at his right forearm. The silver scar where the bone had fractured in January. First day. First mistake.
'I was stupid. Stupid and impatient and I nearly killed this body before I had a chance to use it.'
He loaded another plate.
***
Dagobah Municipal Beach at night looked like the aftermath of a war fought entirely by household appliances.
Junk piled twenty feet high. Rusted car husks. Broken washing machines. A school bus folded almost in half by something he'd decided he didn't want to think about. The air smelled like salt water and rust and the green, organic rot of sea-soaked foam.
Izuku stood at the mouth of one of the narrow corridors between the piles. Gauntlet on his right hand. Version 2.4. Still ugly. Getting better.
'Come out.'
The shadow at his feet moved. It peeled upward from the sand like smoke given weight, solidifying into the Hound. Shepherd-sized. Violet eyes. The air around it dropped four degrees.
'Attack the bus. Left flank.'
It didn't hesitate. The creature re-appeared at the bus frame and hit it like a wrecking ball. Metal groaned and tore.
Izuku was already moving. He came in from the right, punched through a washer drum, and let the gauntlet fire. The discharge cracked like trapped lightning. The drum blew apart.
They fell into a rhythm over the next hour. The Hound moved and he moved, two points of violence converging on junk from different angles.
And that's when he noticed something that made his skin crawl.
The creature was reading him. Not his commands. His intent. When he angled left, it went right. When he slowed, it accelerated. Like it was wired into his nervous system and running slightly ahead of his thoughts.
'That's either incredibly useful or it's the setup for something that kills me.'
He watched it rip the engine block out of a sedan carcass.
'Probably both.'
He fired the gauntlet again.
The capacitors whined. Then the heat came. Sharp. Chemical. Wrong. Radiating up from the inner housing in a spike that his sensor array screamed about three hundred milliseconds too late.
The capacitor bank blew.
A contained, vicious crack. Then 70 joules of misdirected thermal energy looking for somewhere to go, and the nearest conductor was the inside of his forearm.
"SHIT—"
The burn traced a line from his wrist to his elbow. Branching. Red. The skin raised in a pattern that looked like a Lichtenberg figure, like lightning had written something into him that he couldn't read yet.
He sat down on a collapsed refrigerator and pulled out his phone with his good hand.
The pain was bad. Really bad. The kind of bad where your brain starts sending helpful suggestions like "maybe scream" and "consider passing out" and you have to actively override them with "no, we're taking notes."
He opened his notes app.
Cap bank: 3x 400v/680μF staged discharge. Thermal runaway at ~900ms continuous fire. Rewrite cycle to 600ms hard cutoff. Thermistor feedback on pin 9. Ceramic cap buffer.
He looked at the burn again. Took a photo. His hand was shaking.
'Occupational hazard. Occupational hazard. Occupational hazard.' If he said it enough times it almost sounded reasonable.
The Hound sat beside him in the dark. Perfectly still. Violet eyes watching the water.
He looked at it.
It looked back.
'When did you start looking at things?'
No answer. Obviously. But the question sat in his stomach like something he'd eaten that wasn't agreeing with him.
***
Ten months.
He stood in front of the bathroom mirror at 11:47 PM the night before the exam.
The body in the mirror wasn't the one he'd started with. The skinny kid with ribs showing and arms like broomsticks was gone. In his place was something that strained the seams of a black t-shirt. Forearms mapped with veins and the silvered geography of healed damage. Fracture scar. Burn scar. A dozen smaller ones from the beach, from the gym, from the cost of conducting electricity through meat and bone.
His eyes were cold. The green in them had gone dark, the same shade as deep water.
'You look like shit,' he told the mirror. 'You look like shit and you have an exam in seven hours and there is a shadow monster living in your feet.'
The mirror didn't argue.
He thought about the exam. Robots. Point system. Simulated urban combat designed to reward people who fought loud and flashy enough for the judges to notice.
He'd spent ten months not being noticed.
He'd pulled old UA exam footage online. News segments, tourist phones, paparazzi drones catching the outer boundary. He had schematics for the 0-pointer. Three likely approach corridors mapped from previous year deployment patterns.
He had a gauntlet running stable at 700ms discharge with ceramic buffer caps and a thermistor kill-switch.
He had a shadow that moved faster than anything in this world had a right to move.
He had a body that could carry 150 kilos up a flight of stairs without losing breath.
What he didn't have was certainty.
The magic was growing. The Hound was stronger. More present. More aware. And twice in the last month it had moved without a command. Once during a nightmare — he'd woken up to frost on his bedroom floor and violet light bleeding out from under the bed. Once when Inko had dropped a plate in the kitchen and the shadow at his feet had shifted toward the sound before he'd even registered the noise.
That scared him.
Not "filed it" scared. Not "noted for later" scared. Actually scared. The kind of scared where you lie awake at 2 AM and stare at the ceiling and wonder if the thing you made is still the thing you made or if it's become something else while you weren't paying attention.
He turned off the bathroom light.
The shadow in the mirror disappeared.
But he still felt it at his feet. Patient. Waiting.
'Tomorrow,' he said to it. Quietly. In the dark. Like he was making a promise to something that might or might not keep promises back.
He lay on top of the covers and let the bass fill his skull until there was no room left for anything else.
The exam was in seven hours.
He was ready.
He was also not ready.
Both things were true.
He slept.
TO BE CONTINUED