Bakugou had been yelling for four minutes and twelve seconds.
He had started the mental timer at the one-minute mark, purely out of scientific curiosity about whether there was an upper limit.
There wasn't one, apparently.
....
The hallway was standard issue. Lockers, bad lighting, the particular smell of a school that had been using the same cleaning products since before quirks were a thing. Bakugou's crew flanked the walls on both sides — three of them today, up from the usual two. Full deployment.
Bakugou himself stood center. Arms crossed. Palms crackling with small, rhythmic pops.
He had brought his whole kit.
'Nine-year-old me, first life, would have had a bad time here,' he noted. Not alarmed. Just accurate. 'Anime fan. No combat experience. Yeah. Very bad time.'
He was not that person.
He tilted his head slightly and waited.
"You think this is a joke?" Bakugou said. His voice had that specific register — the one that expected the sentence to land like a physical thing.
It was not a question that wanted an answer, so he didn't give one.
"Hey. I'm talking to you."
'He is, in fact, talking to me,' he confirmed internally. 'Correct on all counts.'
The pops in Bakugou's palms got louder. The crew shifted. The hallway had the shape of a scene expecting a specific outcome — someone backing against the lockers, someone finding the nearest door, someone doing something that meant Bakugou's system had worked again.
He stood with his hands at his sides.
Bakugou's dominant hand twitched.
And there it was.
He had logged this two years ago, first time at the park: the micro-tension in the right forearm that came before activation. He'd updated the file three times since. It was consistent. Every single time, right forearm first. About 0.4 seconds of lead.
"If you ever actually commit to throwing one," he said, "you lead with the right forearm."
Silence.
"0.4-second tell. Might want to look at that."
He said it the way he'd meant it — flat, factual, like pointing out someone had a thread hanging off their collar.
Bakugou's expression did something complicated and unresolved.
One of the crew laughed, caught themselves, and stopped.
He checked the clock above the nearest classroom door. Class started in three minutes.
"Okay," he said. "I should get going."
He went.
....
The classroom was warm in the specific way classrooms got when the heat hadn't adjusted to the weather outside yet. He found his seat. Opened his notebook. Copied from the board.
Bakugou came in forty seconds later.
He didn't look up.
The chair scraped. Hard. He felt the weight of a stare on the back of his neck — Bakugou's, specifically, the kind with actual intent behind it. He turned a page. Kept copying.
'Here's the pattern,' he thought, while noting down conjugations he could recite in three languages. 'Bakugou runs a closed loop. Fear in, dominance out. He has never encountered an input he couldn't process. He doesn't have a contingency for an input that just… isn't there.'
Another line from the board.
'He'll keep trying. Different angles. Same structure.' He paused on that. 'There was a captain in the Azure Deer who ran the same system. Louder. Better armed. Still the same loop underneath. That captain eventually either adapted or stopped. I can't remember which. A lot happened after that part of the war.'
He tapped his pen once.
'The thing is — he keeps coming back. Different day, same direction. He's not just performing anymore. Something underneath the noise is actually looking for something, and it can't find it because it doesn't know what it is yet.'
He turned another page.
'Not my problem yet.'
....
One of Bakugou's crew fell into step beside him at lunch. The shorter one, the one who always stood slightly behind.
"Hey," the kid said. Like he'd been working up to it. "You know he's not going to let that go."
"I know," he said.
"It'd probably be easier if you just—"
'I once de-escalated a standoff with a captain carrying three active curses and a war debt,' he thought. 'Easier wasn't a concept available to me there either.'
"I'm good," he said.
The kid peeled off.
He got his lunch.
....
Walking to next period, Bakugou looked at him from across the hallway. He logged it without looking back.
Then again from two rows over during math.
Then a third time at the end of the day, by the lockers, a look that had the shape of a question that hadn't found its sentence yet.
He collected his bag. He left.
'He's going to do that again,' he thought, stepping out into the afternoon. 'Every time. For years, probably.'
He turned the corner.
Neat.
The tall one — the one who always stood to Bakugou's left — caught up with him just past the school gate.
"Hey," he said. "Why didn't you just blast him?"
Bakugou threw his bag against the nearest wall hard enough that something inside it rattled.
The tall one waited.
The shorter one, who had followed at a safe distance, looked between them and said nothing.
"He's quirkless," the tall one said. Not a taunt. Almost genuinely confused. "It's not like he could do anything. Why didn't you just—"
"Forget it."
"But—"
"I said forget it."
Bakugou grabbed his bag off the ground. He walked.
The thing was, he had run the full sequence. Presence, volume, activation, proximity. He had done it clean. He had done it the way it always worked.
And the other kid had stood there, and tilted his head, and named the tell in his forearm like he was reading off a list.
Like it was nothing.
Like Bakugou was a homework problem he'd already solved.
He had never been a homework problem anyone solved.
He was nine years old and he was walking home and something had gone wrong in that hallway today and he didn't have the vocabulary for what.
He kicked a pebble off the path.
He was going to figure it out.
He didn't know why he was sure of that. He just was.
--
TO BE CONTINUED