The gauntlet was in pieces on his desk.
Version 3.0 had survived the USJ, barely. The housing had three new fractures. The accelerometer mount was bent two degrees off-center. The discharge cycle was drifting long, which meant the thermal cutoff was triggering late, which meant the next time he fired it at full power there was a non-zero chance it would cook his forearm again.
The left forearm this time. The right one had already been cooked by something worse.
He picked up the soldering iron with his grey hand. The fingers closed around it. Slow. That half-second delay between thinking grip and actually gripping.
'Good enough.'
It was 11 PM. His bedroom door was closed. Inko thought he was studying. The smell of flux and solder would be hard to explain if she walked in, but she'd stopped walking in without knocking about three months ago. Right around the time her son had come home with shoulders that didn't fit his shirts and eyes that didn't match his age.
She'd noticed. She wasn't stupid.
She just didn't ask.
He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.
He stripped the old capacitor bank and started rebuilding. Version 3.5. Same architecture, tighter tolerances. He'd ordered ceramic caps rated for higher thermal loads. The discharge window was getting rewritten from 700ms down to 500ms, which meant more voltage per pulse but shorter exposure. Hotter hits, faster recovery.
For the tournament, he needed the gauntlet to do what his shadows couldn't.
'No mana. No Hound. No cold. Just the fist and the spark and whatever ten months of iron bought me.'
He soldered a connection and tested the joint. Clean. His grey fingers were steadier than he'd expected. The nerve delay didn't matter for fine motor work as long as he moved deliberately.
It mattered for combat. A lot.
Half a second of lag in a fight meant eating a punch he should've blocked. Meant his right hand closing on a wrist a beat too late. Meant his grip failing at the exact moment grip mattered most.
'The arm is a liability. Accept it. Plan around it.'
He set the iron down and flexed the grey hand. Open. Close. Open. Close. The fingers responded each time. Half a second late each time.
'Consistent at least. Consistent I can work with.'
***
The kitchen light was still on when he went to get water.
Inko was sitting at the table with a cup of tea that had gone cold. She wasn't drinking it. She was holding it with both hands and looking at nothing.
She looked up when he came in.
Her eyes went to his arm. They always went to his arm now. He'd stopped rolling the sleeve down at home. There was no point. She'd seen it. She'd cried about it. She'd asked once and he'd said "training accident" and she'd accepted that the way she accepted everything he said now, which was completely and without any indication that she believed a single word.
"Can't sleep?" she asked.
"Working on something for school."
"At eleven o'clock?"
"It's a big project."
She looked at him.
The slow, quiet acceptance of a mother who'd realized her son had become someone she didn't fully recognize and had decided to love him anyway.
It hit harder than he expected.
'Don't. Don't think about it. Get the water and go back to your room.'
"The Sports Festival is in twelve days," he said.
He hadn't planned to say it.
"Are you going to come watch?"
Inko blinked. Her hands tightened on the mug.
"You want me to come?"
'No. Yes. I don't know. I'm performing a version of your son for an audience of one and I don't know how to stop.'
"If you want to," he said. "It's kind of a big deal."
She smiled. Small. Fragile. The first real smile he'd seen from her in weeks.
"I'll be there."
"Cool."
He filled his glass. Drank it standing at the sink. Set the glass down.
"Night, Mom."
"Goodnight, Izuku."
He walked back to his room and closed the door and stood there in the dark for about ten seconds longer than he needed to.
'That woman deserves a better son than the one she's got.'
Under his feet, the Hound stirred. Faint. Almost sympathetic.
'Shut up. You don't get to have opinions about my mother.'
It settled.
***
Tokoyami was at the seat next to him again the next morning.
Third day in a row. No explanation. No announcement. Just there, notebook out, Dark Shadow occasionally peeking from behind his collar like a nervous cat.
Izuku was reviewing gauntlet schematics on his phone when Tokoyami said, without looking up from his own notebook:
"Dark Shadow hasn't slept properly since Monday."
Izuku glanced at him.
"He feels something when he's near you. A presence. He described it as..." Tokoyami paused, searching for the word. "Familiar. In a way that frightens him."
Izuku looked at the shadow peeking out from Tokoyami's collar. The little eyes were watching him. Wary. Curious. The same way they'd been watching him for three days.
"Yeah," Izuku said. "I've got something like him. Stored. It's... recovering."
"From the USJ?"
"From what the USJ cost."
Tokoyami processed that. Quietly. The way he processed everything.
"Is it sentient?" he asked.
Izuku thought about that. About the Hound deviating during the hunt. About the frost on his bedroom floor. About the way it had pushed back when he'd told it to stay quiet.
"I don't know," he said. "I think it's becoming something. I just don't know what."
Tokoyami looked at him for the first time.
"I understand that feeling."
Dark Shadow retreated behind the collar. Then peeked out again. Held.
The Hound pulsed once at Izuku's feet. Warm. Steady.
Neither of them said anything else.
They didn't need to.
TO BE CONTINUED