Year three of the plan.
The body was cooperating. Poorly, but cooperating, and poorly was better than last month.
....
He started every morning the same way.
Up before Inko. Quiet. Three sets of breath work in the dark, then proprioception drills in the narrow strip of floor between his bed and the wall. Nothing that looked like training if someone opened the door. Everything that was.
His balance had improved. His reaction time was ahead of where it should be for seven. His aerobic ceiling had moved in a direction he could actually measure now, which was more than he could say for Year One.
Year One had been humbling.
'I once held a defensive line for six hours on a broken ankle,' he thought, failing to maintain a one-legged stance for the fourth time in a row. 'This body is genuinely embarrassing.'
He held the position for three more seconds. Then he moved on.
No point dwelling. The math was the math.
....
PE was its own kind of field research.
He kept his performance exactly where it needed to be — adequate, unremarkable, the kind of kid who passes without being remembered — while running a completely different operation in his head.
The boy in the second row had a hardening quirk. He activated it every time a ball came near him, automatically, without thinking. Left shoulder tension first, then the flare. 0.7 seconds from tell to activation, maybe less if he was scared. The hardening covered his arms and chest but not his lower back. Nobody had ever made him think about his lower back. Nobody had ever needed to.
The girl by the fence had levitation. She took a three-point stance before launch — weight forward, heels lifting, a slight tilt in the chin.
He filed it. He didn't know why he was building this yet. He just knew that he would need it, and that the time to observe people was before they knew they were being observed.
He turned back to the game.
A classmate across the field put everything he had into a ball kick. Full quirk output, no pacing, no thought.
CRACK.
The kid sat down. Hard. Recoil.
"You okay?" he called over.
"Yeah."
He went back to watching.
'Classic overextension,' he thought. 'I watched senior captains do exactly this. More power, less thought. Same principle. Different kingdom.'
....
The tea was the right temperature.
He knew it was the right temperature because he'd been paying attention to how she made it for three years. The cup. The ratio. How long she let it steep before she got distracted by something else and forgot about it entirely.
He set it on the counter next to where she was sorting mail. Didn't say anything.
She looked at the cup. Then at him. He was already heading back to the table.
"Izuku."
He sat down. "Hm?"
She was quiet for a second. "You can talk to me. You know that."
"I know."
He pulled his book back over. She picked up the tea.
That was the whole conversation.
He heard her take a sip. Then another. The mail sorting resumed.
The thing about Inko was that she had started learning his language without realizing she was doing it. She'd stopped asking direct questions about how he was doing. She'd started asking about peripheral things — what he wanted for dinner, whether the homework was interesting, if he'd seen the hero segment on channel four. And she listened to how he answered those things instead of what he said.
She was getting good at it.
He was going to make sure she never had a reason to need to be.
....
The chapter close was always math.
He sat at his desk after dinner and ran the numbers the same way he ran them every few weeks. Current output versus projected requirement. Current body age versus target development window. The acceptable margin on all of it.
He looked at his hands.
Stronger than last year. He could prove it — reaction time, grip baseline, the proprioception scores he tracked in a notebook that looked like homework from the outside. The numbers moved. Slowly, but they moved.
Still nowhere close to where he needed them.
He ran the projection. At this rate — Phase 1 clean through to Phase 2 at ten, serious escalation through thirteen, a dojo at fourteen —
Fourteen was realistic.
Fourteen was when the baseline he actually needed became achievable.
He looked at his hands a moment longer.
The question he didn't let himself answer was whether a fourteen-year-old's ceiling — even a well-built one — was going to be enough for what was coming.
He didn't know. He couldn't know. The math stopped there.
He closed the notebook.
Somewhere in this city, Bakugou Katsuki was probably doing the same thing.
Probably louder.
He wondered which of them understood what the other was actually building.
He didn't think Bakugou knew yet.
--
TO BE CONTINUED