The concrete block was twelve centimeters of standard training material bolted to a stand in the corner of Training Ground Gamma's solo bay, the kind of equipment that had been there long enough to have accumulated the surface marks of previous sessions conducted by previous people for previous reasons.
Yami hit it with his right fist at baseline — no OFA, no fragment active, just the body at its current training state. The knuckles registered the impact normally. The block didn't move. His hand reddened in the specific pattern of a full-contact strike on a fixed surface, the capillaries underneath doing their job.
Control reading: Baseline, no modifiers.
He hit it again at one percent OFA sustained, which he'd been able to hold accurately for about three weeks now — the calibration improvement being the product of daily practice in the quiet hour before school and the Battle Trial's forced deployment data. One percent produced a marginal force increase. The block's mount shifted slightly. His knuckles didn't redden.
At two percent: notable force, the block's mount screeched once against its bolts, his hand fine.
At three percent: the wall behind the block got a new mark. His hand fine.
At four percent: he felt the fragment engage on the return recoil. Not consciously — he couldn't direct it, couldn't choose the moment. The Shock Absorption was passive, reactive, it caught what came back and absorbed twenty-two percent of it, and the difference was felt in the wrist rather than the hand, a cleaner stop to the recoil force that would normally travel up the arm's structure. It was good. It was genuinely useful.
At five percent: the fragment stuttered.
The strike landed and the recoil came back at full volume, no absorption, his wrist taking the load it was not supposed to take alone at this percentage, and he pulled the hand back and flexed it twice and the wrist reported: strained, not broken, that was closer than comfortable.
He hit the block at four percent four more times. Three of them: fragment active, clean result. The fourth: nothing. The fragment's malfunction — one out of every eight to ten strikes, the system's behavior at this tier of fragment development, Lv.1 instability expressed as a probability of simply not working.
Twenty percent reduction with a ten percent chance of zero reduction, he worked through, bracing his forearm against the wall to give the wrist a rest. Net effective reduction is lower than the stat suggests because the malfunction windows create unpredictable gaps. Combat application: useful for sustained low-intensity contact, unreliable for high-stakes single strikes.
He wrote nothing down. The infirmary still smelled like it had smelled in September when he'd woken up from the first death, that specific antiseptic-and-something-organic combination that medical spaces accumulated over time, and he'd spent twenty-four hours in the absence of all smell and the first thing he'd noticed when he'd come back was the hospital gown and the second was the smell, and the smell had been good in the specific way that things with sensory content were good after the void.
He hit the block at three percent twelve more times and the fragment engaged on eleven of them and didn't on the twelfth, and he added the data to the tally and decided this was sufficient for the day.
The rooftop had the same rust on the fence and the same view of UA's campus that it had the first time he'd eaten there, three weeks ago in a different version of the school year — before the Battle Trial, before Momo's library confrontation, before the USJ and the void and the fragment in his bones. He'd brought two rice balls because the cafeteria had been too many variables post-USJ and he'd packed extra this morning on the theory that extra would be useful.
He was sitting on the retaining wall with the second rice ball half-finished when the rooftop access door opened.
Momo Yaoyorozu came through it with her school bag and a thermos and the specific directional quality of someone who had located a thing and was approaching it with intention.
She sat on the opposite end of the retaining wall without asking if the space was available, which she'd also done in the library, which he was starting to understand as her version of the social gesture that Kirishima expressed as I'm in your corner. Different vocabulary, same content.
"How was the training session?" she asked.
"Useful. Inconclusive in places."
She opened the thermos. Green tea — the smell reached him across three meters of April air. "Which places?"
He considered the available answers. The fragment couldn't be disclosed. The OFA percentages couldn't be disclosed. The system's reward structure was the least disclosable thing he owned.
"The part where the new element doesn't perform consistently," he said. "It works most of the time. There's a failure rate I'm trying to characterize."
She looked at the campus below them for a moment. "Failure rates in quirk applications are common at developmental stages. The mechanism isn't fully calibrated yet." She paused. "The resurrection quirk, or the enhancement component?"
"The enhancement component." The closest available truth to an accurate one.
"New development?"
He thought about the fragment, about the void, about the Shock Absorption passive sitting in his bones and misfiring on one in ten. "Recent," he said.
She looked at him then — the direct look, the one she used when she'd finished the peripheral data and was going to the central question. "When you went through the wall at USJ," she said, "before Nomu. You moved All Might deliberately."
"Yes."
"You knew the counter-punch was coming."
"I read the trajectory."
"From forty meters, in a fight operating outside any reference speed you've trained at." She said this not as an accusation but as a description of a fact that required additional information to resolve. "That's either a very good read, or something else."
"I've been studying how people move since before school started," Yami said. This was true. It was not the full truth. "Pattern recognition. It helps more than strength when the strength gap is what it is."
Momo held her thermos in both hands and looked at the campus for another moment. Then: "I want to help you with the testing." She said it the way she said most important things — directly, without preamble, as if the question of whether she'd say it had already been settled somewhere before the conversation began. "Whatever the new element is. I can build measurement equipment that the training room doesn't have — force gauges, impact panels, variable resistance setups. It would give you better data than hitting a concrete block."
He looked at her.
"I saw you die," she said. The sentence arrived with the specific weight of something that had been sitting behind other sentences for three days and had finally moved to the front. "I watched the impact geometry and I did the force calculation afterward — the numbers for the survival time Nomu took to register as a kill suggest you held baseline human structural tolerance for about three times the normal duration before critical failure. That's not resurrection. That's something ongoing that I don't understand yet." She looked at him steadily. "I would like to understand it. And I think you would like data that helps you survive better than you did at USJ."
The second rice ball was in his hand. He'd stopped eating it when she'd sat down. He finished it now, in two bites, because his stomach had been making its own observations about the day's timeline and the rice ball was the available solution.
"Next week," he said. "Wednesday. After Hound Dog's session."
Her expression did not produce a visible reaction to this — the engineering problem she'd been offered had been accepted, and she was already somewhere in the vicinity of designing the measurement apparatus. He recognized this state. He'd seen it in the library when he'd asked her the first technical question and the forty minutes had passed without either of them tracking them.
She reached into her bag. Her palm was already at the lipid-draw state, the shimmer at the forearm visible in the afternoon light, and the foam sphere formed over three seconds with the precision of someone who had been working on miniaturization applications specifically — the stress ball landed in his palm with the weight of something that wasn't quite real and was entirely functional.
"For the testing," she said, "or your hands, whichever needs it more."
She packed her bag and left the rooftop with the same quality of unhurried intention she'd arrived with, and Yami sat on the retaining wall and squeezed the stress ball once, and the foam compressed smoothly and evenly and released, and the Shock Absorption fragment did not engage, because the force was below the threshold where it was relevant.
Ten percent malfunction rate on one side. Momo Yaoyorozu on the other.
He squeezed it again on the train home, standing, one hand on the overhead grip and the other cycling through the compression-and-release, watching the campus disappear into the city behind the train's windows. Somewhere in a faculty building on that campus, a meeting was running late. Somewhere in that meeting, a list of agenda items had his name on it three times.
The stress ball was good for the hands. He'd give it that.
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