The boxing gym opened at six. The karate dojo opened at seven-thirty.
I mapped the gap before I signed anything. Fifteen minutes of travel between them, give or take, depending on which route I walked. That left me roughly ninety minutes at the first before I needed to leave, which was enough for conditioning work and bag rounds if I didn't waste time. The dojo ran two-hour morning sessions. I could be out by ten, eat something cheap, sleep until three, then read until dark. Repeat.
I wrote the schedule on the inside cover of my notebook and looked at it for a long time before I committed money to it.
Three thousand four hundred yen per month for the boxing gym. Four thousand two hundred for the dojo. Seven thousand six hundred total, recurring, non-negotiable once I'd signed. I had forty-nine thousand left after moving costs and the first month's room deposit. The training fees would eat roughly fifteen percent of that per month if I wasn't earning. I gave myself eight weeks before the math turned ugly.
Eight weeks to make the investment pay something back.
---
The boxing gym was called Harada's, though there was no sign with that name, just a hand-painted kanji above a metal door that read *Hit Hard, Think First*. The owner, a compact man in his fifties named Harada Sou, looked at my hands when I walked in, then at my posture, then at my face.
"No Quirk use in here," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I know."
He charged me the first month upfront in cash and pointed at the jump ropes without another word.
The other members were mostly young men who'd lost construction work after the Final War damage assessments froze half the district's rebuild contracts. They trained the way hungry people train — methodically, without ego, because ego costs energy they couldn't afford. Nobody asked what I did for work. I didn't ask them. It was the same unspoken rule as the bunker, just with better lighting.
My form was wrong for the first two weeks. I knew it before Harada told me, because I could feel the wasted motion in my shoulders every time I threw a straight. He corrected my stance once, adjusted my guard twice, and then left me to figure out the rest through repetition. That suited me. I don't absorb instruction well when someone is watching. I need to be alone with a problem before I can solve it.
By week three I could hit the heavy bag for four minutes without losing structure. Small number. I wrote it down anyway.
---
The karate dojo was different. Sensei Mochizuki ran it like a classroom. She was sixty-something, short, and had the particular stillness of someone who had long since stopped needing to prove anything. The style she taught was practical — derived from full-contact tournament forms but adjusted for real confrontation. No performance kata. No tournament scoring focus. Just clean mechanics and pressure testing.
She paired me with a man named Fukui on my third session. He was forty, heavier than me, and had been training here for six years. He threw me to the floor four times in eight minutes.
"Again," Mochizuki said each time. Not *you're doing well* or *good effort*. Just *again*.
I appreciated the economy of it.
The floor was hard. My tailbone ached for three days after the first session. I kept the pain out of the arithmetic because pain is not a variable — it's just a tax on progress, and taxes are built into the budget from the start.
What I was actually buying wasn't muscle. I understood that clearly. I was buying reaction time and physical confidence, the kind that changes how you move through a building at two in the morning, the kind that changes what options you think you have when something goes wrong. The body influences the calculation. I'd learned that on the logistics job when my hands shook on the scanner. I couldn't afford shaking hands.
---
Toga found me on a Thursday, the fourteenth day after I'd offered her work.
I'd half-expected her not to come. The offer had been measured, deliberately low-pressure, and she'd left without answering directly — just a look that I couldn't fully parse, somewhere between assessment and something older and harder to name. I'd given it maybe forty percent odds she'd follow through.
She was sitting outside the boxing gym when I came out at nine-forty. Knees pulled up, chin resting on them, watching people pass with that particular kind of stillness that reads as bored to anyone who isn't paying attention. I was paying attention.
"You smell like sweat," she said.
"I just finished training."
"I know. I watched through the window for a bit." She said it without any particular weight, like it was just information. "You're slow."
"Yes."
"You're going to keep training anyway."
"Yes."
She stood up. She was shorter than I remembered from the registry photo, but the registry photo hadn't captured how she moved — a slight constant readiness, weight never fully settled, like she was always one decision away from doing something fast.
"What's the job," she said.
Not *what's the arrangement* or *tell me more about the work*. Just: what's the job. Direct. Economical.
"Not yet," I said. "First I need to know what you can do that you're willing to do, and what you won't. Those are different questions and both matter."
She looked at me for a moment. "Most people skip the second question."
"Most people aren't paying for the work themselves."
Something shifted in her expression. Not softened exactly — more like a door opening a centimeter, just enough to indicate there was something behind it. She looked away down the street, then back.
"Transformation," she said. "You know that already."
"I know what the registry says. Registry files describe the Quirk. They don't describe the person using it."
A pause. Then: "Blood. I need a small amount. I can hold a form for about an hour, maybe longer if I'm calm. I don't like staying still when I'm holding a face. It makes it harder to keep." She said it flatly, like she was reading from the same kind of notebook I kept. "I won't hurt people you're not already planning to deal with as problems. I won't do anything where I'm exposed for more than fifteen minutes."
I ran the numbers. Transformation capability, one hour window, a contact with real operational discipline underneath the surface instability. The instability was a cost, but I'd priced it in already.
"Fifteen percent for brokerage, standard rate," I said. "I source the jobs. You execute the parts that need your Quirk. We split the rest sixty-forty, my favour, because I carry the mapping and planning overhead."
She tilted her head slightly. "Why not fifty-fifty."
"Because this is the first job and neither of us knows yet if this works. Sixty-forty protects both of us if it doesn't. If the first three jobs clear clean, we renegotiate."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Fine," she said. "What are you training for, anyway."
I thought about it honestly. "So the next time something goes wrong inside a building, I have more options than running."
She nodded once, like that was a satisfactory answer, and fell into step beside me without being asked.
The math was still tight. The schedule was still brutal. But something had shifted — faint, barely measurable, like a column that had been showing zero for weeks finally clicking to one.
I wrote *asset: confirmed* in the notebook that night and fell asleep before I could second-guess it.
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