He had been in the presence of demon generals, war criminals, and one genuinely unsettling bishop.
None of them had ever been this loud.
The child was five years old.
....
The park three blocks from the apartment was small. One set of swings, a climbing frame with a missing rung, a bench that wobbled if you sat on the left side. He sat on the right side and watched.
Bakugou Katsuki was holding court in the middle of the grass.
He already knew what this looked like. He had seen the anime. He had read the wiki. He had, at one point in his first life, watched a forty-minute YouTube video breaking down the psychology of Bakugou's early arc. He thought he had been prepared.
He had not been prepared for the volume.
The boy was sparking off the bark of a tree just to watch it char. The other kids in his orbit kept exactly the right distance — close enough to seem like friends, far enough to avoid the hands. Bakugou hadn't shoved anyone in the last six minutes, which meant the social temperature was currently stable, which meant it was probably about to change.
'Standard dominance maintenance,' the MC noted. 'He's done the energy expenditure math without knowing he's done it. Not bad for five.'
A smaller kid wandered too close to the tree.
Bakugou shoved him. Not hard. Just enough.
The smaller kid sat down in the grass and looked confused. Bakugou's orbit re-stabilized at the correct distance.
'There it is.'
He watched for another few minutes. Bakugou's hands were interesting — the activation was consistent but patterned. Right hand dominant. The left sparked slightly behind the right, compensating. He catalogued it without knowing why he was bothering. Force of habit.
Then Bakugou noticed him.
....
It started with a look across the grass.
He was used to being looked at and doing nothing in response. He had twenty-three years of practice before the BC life and forty years of practice after it. He sat on the bench with his hands on his knees and looked back.
Bakugou's look lasted three seconds longer than it should have.
Then he walked over.
His orbit followed at distance — four kids, mixed ages, the specific body language of people who want to be close to the action but not in it. He recognized the formation. In the Clover Kingdom it meant someone was about to make a point to an audience. Same principle, smaller scale.
Bakugou stopped in front of the bench and looked down at him.
He was five. Bakugou was five. The height difference was negligible. It didn't seem to matter to Bakugou.
"You're the quirkless one," Bakugou said.
'He did his research. Or someone's mother talked.' He looked up. Said nothing.
"Deku," Bakugou said. It wasn't a name yet, just a label — useless, can't do anything — deployed with the casual precision of a child who had learned very early that language could wound people. "Everyone knows about you."
He let that sit for a second.
'He's waiting for the flinch,' he noted. 'Or the denial. Or the look that means it landed.'
He didn't provide any of those.
Bakugou's eyes narrowed slightly. He had not gotten what he came for.
Then he raised his right hand and opened the palm.
CRACK.
A small explosion. Close range. Maybe thirty centimeters from his face. The heat bloom was real — he tracked it, clocked the activation speed, noted the right-hand lead — and then it was done.
The other kids pulled back.
He blinked.
That was it. That was the full response. He blinked because his eyes needed to, and then he looked at Bakugou again and waited.
'I once watched Asta sever a curse that had already killed six captains,' he thought. 'With a broken sword. Standing in a hole. This is a nice party trick.'
Bakugou held the smoking palm up one beat longer than he'd intended.
He was waiting for something. He had done the thing. The thing always worked. The thing was supposed to produce a result and the result was supposed to be immediate and obvious and it had not happened and now his hand was still up and there was no result and something had gone wrong in the architecture of the moment and he did not have a word for what.
He lowered his hand.
He stared.
The MC looked back at him with the mild expression of someone watching weather.
Bakugou turned around and left. His orbit followed. Nobody said anything.
He watched them go.
'He is exactly like the anime,' he thought. 'This is almost comforting.'
....
Inko was waiting at the park gate.
She had that look — the one that meant she'd been watching from a distance and had made herself not intervene. He appreciated the restraint. He had spent nine years in his last life learning when to hold back and when to move, and she had apparently figured some version of that out in five.
"How was the park?" she asked.
"Fine."
She fell into step next to him. Took his hand. He let her.
"Did you make any friends?"
He thought about Bakugou's face when the reaction didn't come. The extra beat. The lowered hand.
"There was a boy who could make explosions with his hands," he said.
She brightened. "That sounds exciting."
"It wasn't un-exciting," he said.
She seemed satisfied with that. They walked home.
He did not think about the explosion.
He thought about the activation time. The right-hand lead. The left compensating half a beat behind. He thought about what that would mean in five years, in ten. What it would mean when the hands were bigger and the explosions were larger and the boy had learned to use them properly.
'Going to be a problem later,' he noted. 'Not today's problem.'
He held his mother's hand and looked at the cracks in the sidewalk and did not perform anything he didn't feel.
Bakugou got home at six-fifteen.
He dropped his shoes at the door. He went to the kitchen. His mother was at the counter and didn't look up.
"How was the park?"
He put his bag down on the floor.
"There was a weird kid."
Mitsuki looked up. "Weird how."
"He didn't run away."
She turned around now. Something in her son's voice was different — not upset, not angry, which would have been normal. Just off. Like he was trying to identify something and couldn't.
"What do you mean he didn't run away?"
"I showed him the explosion," Bakugou said. "He just looked at me."
Mitsuki set down the spatula. "Maybe he didn't see it."
"He was right there."
She didn't have an answer to that. She looked at her son's face — the small frustrated line between his brows that meant something had happened that he didn't have a category for yet.
"Which kid?" she asked.
"Midoriya's kid," he said. "The one they said has no quirk."
She picked the spatula back up.
"Maybe he just wasn't scared," she said.
Bakugou looked at the table. Said nothing.
She watched him from the corner of her eye while she stirred. He sat there for a while, working on something he couldn't finish. Eventually he went to do his homework.
She kept stirring.
He just looked at me.
Kids didn't just look at Katsuki. Not after the hands. Everyone looked away eventually — everyone moved back, or moved out, or moved somewhere that wasn't directly in front of an explosion at five years old.
She didn't know what to make of it either.
She decided not to.
--
TO BE CONTINUED