---
### Week One
Monday started with Isaac sending him a text at 5:47 AM.
**Isaac:** *you up?*
Ren was not up. His alarm was set for six. He stared at the text through one half-open eye, considered violence, and put the phone face down on the pillow.
It buzzed again.
**Isaac:** *ok since you're clearly awake now here's your program. 4 gym days, 3 swimming days. gym is monday wednesday friday saturday. swimming tuesday thursday sunday. i'll meet you after school mondays and wednesdays, we do the other sessions solo or together depending on schedule.*
**Isaac:** *also cut out soy*
**Ren:** *its not even 6am.Let a guy sleep 😭*
**Isaac:** *phytoestrogens. they mimic estrogen in the body. you want to maximise natural testosterone production during puberty not suppress it. also avoid seed oils. cook with butter or olive oil.*
**Ren:** *isaac pleaseeeee stfu*
**Isaac:** *and fix your sleep. 9pm to 6am. nine hours. non negotiable. your growth hormone peaks during deep sleep cycles three and four which you only hit if you're getting enough total time. your regeneration quirk handles physical repair but your nervous system still needs real recovery.*
**Ren:** *ISAAC*
**Isaac:** *what*
**Ren:** *its 5:50 in the morning*
**Isaac:** *optimal sleep window is 9pm to 6am. so why are you awake. go back to sleep for 10 minutes and then get up properly. i'll send the full program doc during lunch.*
Ren put the phone down he did not go back to sleep, who could? He lay there for ten minutes staring at the water stain on the ceiling, feeling his cursed energy hum faintly under his skin, and thinking about how his life had gotten very complicated very fast.
His mom was already up when he came downstairs. She was at the stove doing her thing, three pots, an apron over her clinic clothes, humming something that wasn't quite a song. The kitchen smelled like grilled mackerel and miso.
"You're up early," she said without turning around.
"Couldn't sleep."
"Nightmares?"
"No, Isaac texted me about phytoestrogens at five in the morning."
She turned around with a look that said she didn't know what that word meant and had already decided she didn't care. "Sit and eat."
She put the food down in front of him. Rice, miso, mackerel, pickled cucumber, tamagoyaki. Everything at the perfect temperature because her hands had touched every plate. He ate. She sat across from him with her tea, watching him the way she always did in the mornings, like she was making sure he was still the same kid who'd gone upstairs the night before.
"Your father left already. Early meeting."
"On a Monday?"
"He said something about a client trying to claim villain damage on a property that was damaged by a hero. Apparently the insurance distinction matters." She sipped her tea. "I never understand his job."
"Nobody understands his job. That's why he has it."
Mom laughed out loud, it was a good laugh, the kind that came from somewhere warm. She reached across the table and fixed a bit of his collar that was folded wrong, then let her hand rest on his shoulder for a second before pulling back.
"I'm at the clinic until five today. There's leftover curry in the fridge if you're hungry after school."
"Thanks, Mom."
"Love you."
"Love you too."
She kissed the top of his head on the way out, going up on her toes to reach, and then the house was quiet.
---
School was school. Tanaka-sensei talked about the evolution of hero agencies from government-funded operations to private enterprises. Ren took enough notes to not get called out and spent the rest of the period circulating cursed energy through his body under his desk. Nobody could see it. Nobody could feel it. It was like flexing a muscle that didn't exist in anyone else's anatomy.
He was getting noticeably better at moving it. On Saturday he'd barely managed five seconds of holding CE in his hand. By Monday afternoon, sitting in Tanaka-sensei's class, he could push energy into his right fist and hold it there for over two minutes without it slipping. The basic act of channeling CE was becoming natural, like learning to balance on a bike. The first few days were all wobble and collapse. Now the balance was settling and the real question was how far he could push it.
Between classes he started experimenting with efficiency. Holding CE in his hand was one thing. Holding it while doing something else, walking, writing, listening to a teacher, was harder. The concentration split drained him faster. But by the end of the school day he could maintain a low-level reinforcement in one hand for almost ten minutes if he wasn't doing anything too mentally demanding. That was progress. Real, measurable progress.
After school he met Isaac at Iron House Gym.
Isaac was already there, obviously, because is HIM. Isaac was always already there. He was doing hip circles next to the squat rack in a tank top that said RECOVERY IS NOT OPTIONAL and talking to an older guy about ankle dorsiflexion. The older guy looked like he wanted to leave but didn't know how to without hurting the younger lads feelings.
"Ren!" Isaac abandoned the ankle conversation immediately. The older guy escaped with visible relief, sighing out loud. "Day one of the program. You ready?"
"Depends on what's first."
"Squats. Obviously. But warm-up first. Full dynamic sequence. Hip flexors, glutes, thoracic spine, ankles. Fifteen minutes."
"Fifteen?"
"Twelve if you actually try instead of standing there looking at me like I'm wasting your time."
They warmed up. Isaac walked him through every movement with the focus of a man performing surgery. Leg swings, hip circles, glute bridges, thoracic rotations, ankle rocks against the wall. Ren had been lifting for two years and had never warmed up properly before Isaac got his hands on him. His previous approach had been "put weight on bar, lift bar, repeat until bored."
"The difference between warming up and not warming up," Isaac said, demonstrating a deep lunge with rotation, "is the difference between training for ten years and training for three years before something tears. Your quirk repairs damage. It doesn't repair bad habits."
"You've said that before."
"Because you haven't fully absorbed it yet. When you stop needing me to say it, I'll stop saying it."
Squats. They worked up through the weights. 60 kilos for a set of ten. 150 for eight. 240 for five. 280 for three. Isaac watched every rep like he was judging a gymnastics routine.
"Brace before you unrack, not after. You're losing tension at the top. There, better. Knees tracking, good. Depth is solid. One more."
Working set: 320. Ren unracked, walked it out, breathed, braced, and sank. The bar bent across his traps. He hit depth and drove up, grinding through the midpoint where his quads wanted to quit. Racked it.
"Clean," Isaac said. "Forward lean is still there but it's less than last week. How'd it feel?"
"Heavy."
"Good. Heavy is the point." Isaac made a note on his phone. He tracked everything. Sets, reps, RPE, rest times, bar speed. He had a spreadsheet that Ren had never looked at and never intended to look at.
They moved through the rest of the session. Romanian deadlifts for posterior chain, leg press for volume, walking lunges for stability, finished with core work that Isaac insisted on and Ren tolerated. Fifty minutes total. Isaac high-fived him on the way out and immediately started talking about Wednesday's session.
"Upper body pressing. We're going to focus on bench but I also want to introduce some overhead work. Your shoulders have been lagging behind your..."
"Isaac."
"Yeah?"
"I just finished. Can I have the walk home before we start planning the next one?"
Isaac grinned. "Fine. But stretch tonight. I mean it. Twenty minutes minimum. Hamstrings and hip flexors."
"Sure."
"Promise me."
"I'm not promising you anything."
"You're going to pull something and I'm going to say I told you so."
"Goodnight, Isaac."
---
The law study started at 7 PM.
Ren sat at his desk with his laptop open, a fresh notebook next to it, and his phone on the other side of the desk, face down. He'd told himself five hours. That was the goal. Five hours of solid, focused study on Japanese criminal law, because he had a courtroom in his head that he couldn't use properly and the only way to fix that was to learn how the legal system actually worked.
He opened the first article. An overview of criminal trial procedure in Japan. He read the first paragraph. Then the second. The structure of Japanese courts, district courts handling serious cases, summary courts for minor offences, high courts for appeals. Okay. Fine. This was manageable.
Third paragraph. The role of the public prosecutor in Japanese law. Prosecutors had enormous discretion, they decided which cases to pursue, and they only pursued cases they were essentially guaranteed to win. That's why the conviction rate was ninety-nine percent. Not because every defendant was guilty but because prosecutors filtered out anything that wasn't a sure thing before it reached trial.
That was interesting. He wrote it down. *Conviction rate 99%. Prosecutors only bring guaranteed wins. System filters at prosecution stage, not trial stage.*
Fourth paragraph. He read half of it. His phone buzzed on the other side of the desk. He ignored it. Read another sentence. Buzzed again. He reached for it without thinking, flipped it over, and saw a notification from a group chat. Just a meme someone posted. He looked at the meme. It was decent. He scrolled down. Someone had replied with another meme. That one was funnier. He scrolled again.
Twenty minutes later he was watching a video ranking the top ten hero debuts of the last decade, and he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there.
He put the phone face down again. Went back to the laptop. The article was still there. He found where he'd left off. Read for another twelve minutes. Solid twelve minutes this time. Notes and everything. Then he hit a section about hearsay evidence rules that was dense enough to make his eyes glaze and he caught himself reaching for the phone again before his hand was even halfway there.
He pulled his hand back. Stared at the screen. Read the hearsay section. Hearsay evidence, statements made outside of court offered to prove the truth of their content, was generally inadmissible in Japanese criminal trials. Witnesses had to testify in person. Documents could be submitted as evidence but only under specific conditions.
He wrote: *Hearsay inadmissible. Witnesses testify in person. Documents = conditional evidence.*
Then he wondered how that applied to the domain. Judgeman provided evidence directly. Was that hearsay? Judgeman knew everything about everyone inside the domain. If Judgeman submitted a photograph, was that documentary evidence or was it something else entirely? The domain didn't play by real-world rules exactly. It was a cursed technique that borrowed the framework of a courtroom. The rules were similar but not identical.
He wrote: *How does Judgeman's evidence work legally? Test during actual trial.*
Then his phone buzzed again and he was gone for another fifteen minutes.
By 10 PM he'd been at his desk for three hours. He counted the notes in his notebook. About two and a half pages. Maybe fifty minutes of actual focused reading. The rest was phone, bathroom breaks, staring at the ceiling, and one twenty-minute detour into reading about whether Endeavor's hero record should count differently now that people knew about his personal life.
Fifty minutes out of three hours. Roughly seventeen percent efficiency.
He closed the laptop and went to bed. His alarm was set for six. Isaac's sleep schedule. Nine hours. He lay in the dark and thought about how Higuruma had taught himself an entire power system from scratch in twelve days and Ren couldn't go twenty minutes without checking his phone.
Different breed.
"Higuruma is just built different"
---
The rest of the week followed the same pattern.
Tuesday was swimming.
Isaac had him doing laps at the public pool near the station, alternating between freestyle and backstroke in four-minute intervals. Isaac stood at the edge of the pool with a stopwatch and a clipboard because of course he had a clipboard.
"Your stroke efficiency is terrible," Isaac called out as Ren touched the wall. "You're fighting the water instead of moving through it. Extend your reach on the entry phase and stop crossing your midline."
"I'm not a swimmer, Isaac. I'm doing this for cardio."
"There's no such thing as 'just cardio.' Every movement is trainable. If you're going to be in the water three days a week you're going to swim properly or I'll drown you myself."
Ren fixed his stroke. It was easier when Isaac explained the mechanics, which he always did, in exhaustive detail, whether you wanted him to or not. They did forty minutes of laps, alternating four-minute intervals with one minute rest. By the end Ren's shoulders were burning and Isaac was dry on the pool deck looking at his clipboard like a man reviewing battlefield reports.
"We need to add butterfly next week," Isaac said as Ren hauled himself out. "It'll build your lats and shoulder mobility simultaneously."
"I can barely do freestyle without you yelling at me."
"That's why we're adding butterfly. If you can do the hardest stroke, the easy ones get easier. Basic training principle."
"That sounds made up."
"Everything sounds made up until you do it and it works. Tuesday, same time."
---
Wednesday evening. His room. The house was quiet. His mom was downstairs watching something on TV, his dad wasn't home yet.
Ren stood in the middle of the floor, eyes closed, and worked on efficiency.
Single-hand reinforcement was easy now. He could hold CE in his right fist for ten minutes straight, longer if he wasn't thinking about anything else. The energy sat there, warm and steady, like a second pulse. That part was solved.
The challenge was everything past that. He pushed CE into both hands simultaneously. Right hand first, stable, then feeding the left without letting the right drop. The energy split and both channels held, steady, for about forty-five seconds before his left side started flickering. He clenched his jaw and focused, trying to keep both streams fed evenly, and managed another twenty seconds before the left collapsed and the right followed.
Better than Monday.
Still not good enough.
"Compared to him, I'm just nothing.."
He sat on the bed and waited for his reserves to refill. Then he tried pushing CE into his legs. That was a different problem entirely. Arms felt natural because he used his hands for everything, lifting, writing, grabbing. His brain had a framework for "energy in hands." Legs were unfamiliar territory. He managed a faint reinforcement in his right leg that lasted maybe eight seconds before dissolving into nothing.
While he waited, he tried Decree. The textbook on his desk. He looked at it and thought, with genuine focus, *that book is significant.* Picked it up. Heavier. Denser. Like someone had slipped a few extra pages in when he wasn't looking. He held the judgment for about three seconds before the CE cost caught up and the book went back to being just a book.
He tried again. Same book. *Not significant.* Picked it up. Lighter. Almost flimsy, like the cover had thinned.
Third attempt. Nothing. Empty again. Two uses and done.
He flopped back on the bed. The ceiling stared back at him with its boot-shaped water stain.
"Two," he said. "My entire combat capability is two."
Thursday night he opened the domain.
His bedroom dissolved into the courtroom. Guillotines, podiums, polished wood, sourceless light. Judgeman materialised behind him, enormous and still. No defendant meant no trial. Just an empty courtroom with a floating judge that radiated impatience despite having no facial expressions to convey it.
Ren stood there and felt the space. The rules were baked into the walls. No violence. One statement each. Silence, confession, or denial. Prosecution rebuts. Verdict. He could sense all of it without being told, like knowing the rules of a house you'd grown up in.
Two minutes. Two and a half. He pushed for three but the drain accelerated past the two-minute mark and he dropped it at two forty-five.
Better than last time. Not by much, but better.
His regeneration had his CE back to baseline in about twenty minutes. He lay on his bed, sweaty and tired, and checked his template.
1.03%.
A full week. 0.03% gained.
"Cool," he said flatly. "At this rate I'll be at two percent by the time I'm thirty."
---
The study efficiency barely improved. By Friday he'd settled into a pattern that was honest if nothing else. Sit down at seven. Fight the phone for the first twenty minutes. Get maybe forty-five minutes of real reading done. Lose another chunk to scrolling. Claw back fifteen more minutes. Call it a night around ten.
Friday's session landed on something that actually stuck, though. He was reading about the concept of "actus reus" and "mens rea." The guilty act and the guilty mind. To convict someone in Japanese criminal law, the prosecution had to prove both. It wasn't enough to show someone did a thing. You had to show they meant to do it. Action without intent was an accident. Intent without action was just a thought.
He wrote it down: *Actus reus + mens rea = conviction. Need BOTH. Missing either = reasonable doubt.*
Then he thought about how that applied to his domain. When Judgeman charged someone, did the charge include intent? If someone's quirk went off accidentally and hurt someone, was that prosecutable inside the domain? Probably not the same way as deliberate assault. The charge mattered. The specifics mattered. Judgeman was precise about these things, he could feel that in the way the courtroom worked, even if he didn't fully understand all the rules yet.
He wrote: *Intent matters. Judgeman charges specific crimes. Need to understand what makes each charge legally distinct.*
That was the moment his dad appeared in the doorway.
Asano Kenji stood there in his house clothes, a glass of water in one hand, looking at the laptop screen and the notebook with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. The man's face was a closed door at the best of times.
"What are you reading about?"
"Criminal law."
His dad's eyebrow moved about two millimetres upward. "For school?"
"For hero school prep."
The eyebrow returned to its original position. His dad took a sip of water, nodded once, and left without another word.
That was as close to "I'm impressed" as Asano Kenji was capable of expressing.
---
### Week Two
Monday morning. His mom had left a note on the kitchen table next to his breakfast. *Proud of you for sticking with the early mornings. Don't forget to eat the vegetables. Love, Mom.* She'd drawn a small heart next to the word love, which she'd been doing on notes since he was six. He'd never told her he found it embarrassing because he didn't.
He ate, stretched, grabbed his bag. School.
Ren ate lunch alone on the roof, something he did two or three times a week when he didn't feel like dealing with the cafeteria. He circulated CE through his body while he ate, a habit he'd developed over the past week. It was like running a background process. His conscious mind was on the rice and fish his mom had packed. His cursed energy was doing slow laps through his circulatory system, building familiarity.
Wednesday after school. He was heading up to the roof to eat the last of his lunch when he heard it through the stairwell door.
Bakugo's voice sharp and mean. The specific tone he used for Midoriya and nobody else, because Midoriya was the only person whose existence seemed to personally offend him.
And underneath it, Midoriya's silence. The kind of silence that had texture. You could hear him not fighting back.
Ren kept walking up the stairs.
He got to the landing before he stopped.
Two weeks ago he would've kept going.
He'd walked past this exact situation a dozen times before.
Bakugo bullying Deku was background noise at Aldera, as constant and unremarkable as the school bell.
Ren had always had the same answer for it: not my problem. If Midoriya wanted it to stop, Midoriya would have to stop it. That was justice. Earned, not given.
But the teacher's memories sat heavy in his chest. The man hadn't walked past. He'd seen bruises on a girl's wrists and he'd stopped and he'd done something and the system had chewed him up and spit him out dead. The memory wasn't pushing him to act. It was just there, sitting alongside his own thoughts, asking a question he didn't have a clean answer for.
If justice only counted when the victim earned it themselves, then the teacher had been right to walk past too.
The girl could've reported her own father. She could've spoken up. She could've fought back. And she was fourteen and terrified and none of those options were real for her, and the one person who tried to help her got erased.
Was Midoriya the same? A kid who couldn't fight back, not because he chose not to, but because the gap was too wide?
Or was Ren just looking for an excuse to hit Bakugo?
He stood there on the landing, listening to Bakugo's voice carry through the door from the roof, and had the most honest conversation with himself he'd had in weeks.
The answer was both. He wanted to hit Bakugo AND he believed it was wrong. The teacher's justice and Ren's justice weren't the same thing, but right now they pointed in the same direction. That was enough.
He pushed through the door onto the roof.
Bakugo had Midoriya by the front of his uniform, shoved against the chain-link fence at the edge of the rooftop. Small pops of heat crackled from his right palm, leaving faint scorch marks on the fabric. The two extras stood behind him, as always, contributing nothing.
"This is wrong and you know it, Bakugo."
The rooftop went quiet. The extras looked at him. Midoriya's eyes went wide.
Bakugo let go of Midoriya's shirt and turned. His expression cycled through irritation, recognition, and then something combative, all in about a second. His palms crackled louder.
"The fuck did you just say?"
"You heard me."
"You wanna go, Asano? Because I've been letting your tall ass walk around this school acting like you're above everyone and I'm getting real tired of..."
He charged mid-sentence. Explosion-assisted burst forward, right hand up, palm aimed at Ren's face. Fast. Genuinely fast. The kid was athletic as hell and his quirk turned every movement into something faster and harder than it should be.
Ren said two words.
"Domain Expansion. Deadly Sentencing."
The rooftop disappeared.
A transition, couple frames it was Aldera Junior High's rooftop with its chain-link fencing and grey concrete and the skyline of Musutafu behind it. The next frame it was a courtroom.
From Bakugo's perspective, the explosion in his palm died, just stopped, the heat, the spark, the chemical reaction his quirk triggered in his sweat, all of it went dead like someone had pulled a plug. The walls around him dissolved and rebuilt themselves into dark wood panelling. The floor became polished hardwood. Guillotines appeared at the edges of the room, standing upright, blades gleaming.
He was behind a podium. His body had been moved there without him feeling the transition. When he tried to step forward, tried to lunge, tried to do anything, his body stopped and slid back to the podium like the air itself was rejecting his movement.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!"
Ren was behind the opposite podium.
Ren was calm, hands at his sides. And behind him, massive, dark, floating, was Judgeman. The shikigami's stitched eyes faced the room. Its scales hung motionless.
"Violence is not permitted in this domain," Ren said. "You can't attack me. I can't attack you. We're both bound to our podiums until the trial is over."
"TRIAL?! What trial?! I'll kill you when I..."
Judgeman spoke.
The voice was low, flat, and carried the specific weight of something that did not care about Bakugo's feelings. "The defendant, Bakugo Katsuki, stands accused of the following. On March 3rd of this year, the defendant used his registered quirk, Explosion, to destroy the personal property of a fellow student, Midoriya Izuku, specifically a notebook, on school grounds. This constitutes unlawful quirk usage resulting in property destruction by an unlicensed individual, in violation of Quirk Restriction Law Article 4, Section B, Clause 15-C."
A notebook.
Bakugo's expression shifted. The rage was still there but confusion was elbowing its way in. Not the heavy, dramatic charges of a courtroom drama. A notebook, it was just a fucking notebook. The floating judge with sewn-shut eyes had just charged him with burning a notebook.
Judgeman produced an envelope and placed it on Ren's podium. Evidence. Ren didn't know what was inside yet.
"I'll explain how this works," Ren said. He had to. Binding vow. "You get one chance to make a statement. You can stay silent, confess, or deny the charges. You can include false statements in your denial if you want. After your statement, I rebut using whatever evidence Judgeman gave me. Then Judgeman delivers a verdict. Guilty or not guilty. Those are the rules and they apply to both of us."
"This is BULLSHIT. You can't just..."
"You have three options. Silence, confession, or denial. I'd think carefully about which one you pick."
Bakugo's jaw worked. His fists clenched at his sides, opening and closing, grasping for explosions that wouldn't come. Every instinct in his body was telling him to fight and the domain was telling him no.
Midoriya was in the domain too, standing to the side near one of the guillotines. He looked like he might faint. His hands were clasped together and his face was sheet-white. Judgeman didn't address him. There were no witnesses in this courtroom. Only prosecution, defendant, and judge.
Bakugo's eyes darted around the room, he wasn't stupid. Aggressive and arrogant sure, but not stupid. He was trying to figure out the play. Ren could almost see the gears turning behind the rage.
A notebook. Yeah, he'd burned Deku's notebook. That dumbass hero analysis journal he was always scribbling in. Blew it up and tossed it out the window into the koi pond. Half the class had seen it happen. So denial was pointless, right? Everyone knew.
But Judgeman didn't know what "everyone knew." Judgeman only cared about the arguments presented inside this courtroom.
Bakugo didn't understand that.
"Yeah, I torched his shitty notebook," Bakugo said. "It was full of delusional garbage about becoming a hero.
He's QUIRKLESS.
Writing about hero analysis when you can't even manifest a quirk is pathetic. I did him a favour. Somebody needed to give him a reality check."
Ren almost closed his eyes.
There it was. Full confession, wrapped in justification, delivered with the conviction of someone who genuinely believed they were in the right. Bakugo hadn't even considered denying it. His ego physically couldn't stomach the idea of denying something he was proud of doing. Admitting it and arguing that he was justified was more important to him than winning.
"Your statement is made," Ren said. "My turn."
He opened the envelope. One item inside. A photograph. Ren looked at it and had to stop himself from laughing.
It was a phone camera photo of the koi pond behind the school building. Floating in the water, charred and waterlogged, was a notebook. The cover was partially burned. The name "Midoriya Izuku" was still legible on the front in smudged ink. That was it. That was the entire evidence. A photo of a burned notebook in a pond.
It didn't prove who put it there. It didn't prove who burned it. It didn't link Bakugo to the act in any way. Without the defendant's own admission, this photo was circumstantial at best.
Any competent defence could've argued the notebook fell, was damaged by accident, could've been burned by anyone.
But Bakugo had just told the court he did it. In his own words. On record.
Ren held up the photo. "The evidence submitted by Judgeman is a photograph of the destroyed notebook belonging to Midoriya Izuku, recovered from the school koi pond, displaying burn damage consistent with an Explosion-type quirk. On its own, this evidence does not conclusively identify the individual responsible."
He paused. Let that sit for a second.
"However, the defendant just stated, and I quote, 'I torched his shitty notebook.' The defendant has admitted to using his registered quirk, Explosion, to destroy a fellow student's personal property on school grounds. The defendant holds no hero licence, no provisional licence, and no legal authorisation to use his quirk against another person or their belongings under any circumstances. Quirk Restriction Law Article 4, Section B, Clause 15-C, the use of quirks to inflict harm or destroy property by unlicensed individuals. The defendant's own testimony confirms the charge. The prosecution rests."
Bakugo's face changed. Something behind his eyes shifted as the words landed. Not understanding, not yet, but the first crack of it.
Judgeman's scales tilted. One side dropped.
"Guilty. Sentence: Confiscation."
The courtroom dissolved. The rooftop came back.
Bakugo stood there, breathing hard. Ren watched him try to spark an explosion. His palms were dry. Nothing happened. The quirk that had defined his entire identity since childhood was gone.
"What did you DO to me?!"
"I put you on trial," Ren said. "And you lost. For the record, Bakugo, all you had to do was deny it."
Bakugo's face twisted. "What?"
"The evidence was a photo of a burned notebook in a pond, that was it. It didn't have your face in it. It didn't have your name on it. It didn't prove you did anything. If you'd just said 'I don't know anything about a notebook,' the case falls apart. I would've had to argue that you did it based on a blurry photo of a koi pond, and I probably would've lost."
Ren looked at him steadily. "But you couldn't do that, could you? You'd rather confess to something you're proud of than deny it and look like you're backing down. Your ego convicted you, not me."
Bakugo charged.
No explosions.
Just a fourteen-year-old kid running on nothing but rage and the refusal to accept what had just happened. He threw a right hook at Ren's jaw that was technically well-thrown because Bakugo was a gifted fighter with or without his quirk.
The gavel materialized in Ren's right hand. Dark metal, solid weight, connected to the Higuruma template. He shifted left, letting Bakugo's fist pass his ear, and brought the gavel down on his shoulder.
One hit. Clean.
Bakugo went down. Conscious but floored, his right arm hanging limp from the impact, his brain trying to process a chain of events that had started with him bullying Deku and ended with him lying on rooftop concrete with no quirk and a shoulder that would bruise for days.
The extras were gone. They'd disappeared sometime during the domain. The rooftop was empty except for the three of them.
Midoriya was pressed against the chain-link fence with both hands over his mouth. His eyes were the size of dinner plates.
"When could you..."
"Mind your own business."
Ren dismissed the gavel. Stepped over Bakugo. Walked to the stairwell door and through it. His back was straight, his pace was even, his face showed nothing.
He made it down one flight of stairs before his legs gave.
He sat on the steps and let out a breath that shook.
His cursed energy was gone.
All of it.
The domain, the gavel, the CE reinforcement for the swing, it had taken everything. His hands were trembling. His legs felt like they were made of wet paper. If Bakugo had gotten up and come around the corner right now, Ren would've had to fight him with nothing but fists and whatever physical strength a six-foot-two fourteen-year-old with a regeneration quirk could muster.
But it had worked. The trial had held. The argument had landed. Judgeman had delivered a guilty verdict based on evidence, admission, and a legal framework that Ren had only half understood two weeks ago.
He checked his template. 1.08%.
0.05% from a single act of justice. More than the entire first week of grinding.
He closed his eyes and let his regeneration do its work. Twenty minutes. Maybe less. His CE was already trickling back, thin but steady, his quirk treating the depletion like any other wound.
It was going to be an interesting year.
---
That evening his mom made tonkatsu. She didn't usually make tonkatsu on a Wednesday. She made it on weekends when she had time to bread the cutlets properly and fry them the way she liked, slow and careful, watching the oil temperature like it owed her money.
But tonight was tonkatsu night, and when Ren came downstairs she was at the stove with her sleeves rolled up and the kitchen smelling like heaven.
"Special occasion?" he asked, sitting down.
"You looked like you needed it." She set the plate in front of him. Extra cabbage, the homemade sauce she only broke out for special batches, rice shaped in a perfect dome. She sat across from him and watched him eat with that soft expression that meant she'd noticed something was off but wasn't going to push.
"Rough day?" she asked.
"Something like that."
"Want to talk about it?"
"Not really."
"Okay." She reached across and squeezed his hand. "Eat. It's your favourite."
It was. And it was perfect, like everything she made. He ate the whole plate and she looked satisfied in the way that only a mother who'd fed her child properly could look satisfied.
---
Thursday morning.
The day after the trial.
Ren was at his shoe locker, changing out of his outdoor shoes, when he heard hurried footsteps approaching from behind him, the kind of uneven rhythm that belonged to someone who had rehearsed a conversation in their head and was now terrified of actually having it.
"Asano-kun!"
He turned around. Midoriya was standing three feet away, bent at the waist in a bow so deep his back was almost horizontal. His schoolbag was hanging off one shoulder at an angle that defied physics.
"Thank you! Thank you so much! What you did was, I mean, nobody has ever, you didn't have to do that and I know you usually don't get involved in stuff like that and I just wanted to say that I really really appreciate..."
"Midoriya."
He stopped talking but stayed in the bow. His ears were bright red.
Ren reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. Gently straightened him up so they were face to face. Well, face to chest. Midoriya was maybe five foot four on a generous day.
The kid's eyes were red-rimmed. He'd either been crying this morning or hadn't stopped since Wednesday. Possibly both.
"You should stand up for yourself more," Ren said.
He let a small smile cross his face.
Then he turned and walked to class.
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Yo, so this is the last stock piled chapter I have go enjoy it ig. have a good day yall
also leave a review and some comments I like reading them and maybe some power stones i guess would be nice.