---
You've seen the statue, everyone has.
Lady Justice. Sword in one hand, scales in the other, blindfold over her eyes.
Ren found her on a Wednesday night during week three, buried in an article about the philosophical foundations of Japanese criminal law that he'd clicked on by accident while trying to close a tab.
He almost scrolled past the image.
Just another stock photo of a statue he'd seen a thousand times on courtroom dramas and legal textbook covers.
But something about her stopped him.
The blindfold.
That was the part everyone talked about, she can't see who you are, doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, powerful or nobody. She weighs the facts and nothing else.
That's the story, anyway.
That's what they teach you in school.
She is impartial, Unbiased and blind to it all.
Ren stared at the image on his laptop screen and thought about Judgeman.
Judgeman had Sewn-shut eyes, scales on both arms.
It was it's own version of lady justice.
Higuruma had built that, or his cursed technique had built it for him, pulled out of a lifetime of obsession with the law.
A man who believed so completely in justice that when his belief finally broke, the thing that came out of the wreckage was a courtroom with guillotines on the walls.
Ren read the rest of the article. There was a section he hadn't expected. A philosopher, he didn't catch the name, argued that the blindfold didn't mean what people thought it meant.
The original versions of Lady Justice didn't wear one. The blindfold was added later, and some scholars believed it was satirical.
Not a symbol of impartiality but a criticism on the idea of justice, that it is blind because justice doesn't see what's actually happening, justice doesn't look you in the eye.
The blindfold isn't protection.
It's an excuse.
He sat back in his chair.
The teacher in his memories had believed in the first version of justice, that it was fair that justice doesn't see your face. He'd spent his whole career defending people because he believed the scales could balance if you just argued hard enough that the system itself was just.
And the system had killed him anyway because the scales were never balanced they were bolted down.
Ren believed the second version, That the blindfold was a lie that justice wasn't blind because it was fair, but it was blind because looking at what it did to people would mean admitting the whole thing a was a performance inn it of itself.
And his domain had Judgeman, the literal embodiment of blind justice sitting inside of his head, waiting to pass judgment on anyone he dragged into that courtroom.
Was Judgeman fair? It knew everything about everyone inside the domain, it chooses what charges, it weighs the evidence's and it delivers the final verdict.
But Ren was the prosecutor, and the prosecutor's job was to convict.
Not to deliver justice but to win.
Higuruma had been a defense attorney. He'd spent his entire career on the other side of the courtroom, protecting people from the system.
And when he got the domain, it put him on the prosecution's side anyway.
Like the universe was making a joke he didn't ask for.
Ren had never been on the defendant side, he'd never truly cared about the system at all until a dead man's memories landed in his skull and a courtroom grew in his head overnight.
He was making this up as he went and the only guide he had was a statue with a blindfold and a shikigami with its eyes sewn shut.
He closed the laptop.
Wrote in his notebook: *Justice is blind, I'll make sure I'm not.*
Then he went to bed.
---
### Week Three
Bakugo bounced back.
By Monday he was barking at people in the hallway again, shoving a first-year out of his way at the shoe lockers, being the loudest person in every room he walked into. The humbling from the domain trial hadn't changed who he was. It had just added a new entry to the very short list of things Bakugo Katsuki avoided. Spicy food that was actually too spicy (not that he'd ever admit it), math homework, and Asano Ren.
He walked different routes when Ren was nearby. Bakugo never made it to obvious he, wasn't the type to make it look like he was running from anything. But if Ren was in the east corridor, Bakugo took the west. If Ren was eating on the roof, Bakugo ate in the classroom. It was subtle enough that you'd only notice if you were paying attention.
Deku still caught strays, but less.
The frequency dropped and the heat behind it had dimmed. Something about getting your quirk ripped out of your body in a supernatural courtroom took the fun out of picking on a quirkless kid for a while.
The routine was settling in.
Wake up at six. Eat whatever Mom left for him. School. CE practice in the margins, circulating energy between classes, reinforcing his hands during lunch, trying to extend it to his legs during the walk to the gym. Four days lifting with Isaac, three days swimming. Study law in the evening. Bed by nine.
His study sessions were stretching longer. Not because he'd suddenly become disciplined but because habit was doing the work that willpower couldn't.
His brain finally had stopped treating the laptop as optional and started treating it as part of the evening.
The phone still won sometimes, still pulled him into twenty-minute holes of scrolling. But the holes were getting shallower and he climbed out faster.
Two solid hours per night by mid-week. Sometimes two and a half if the material was interesting.
Japanese law was dense but patterns were emerging. The whole system ran on confessions. The prosecution's entire apparatus, the 23-day detention periods, the interrogations without lawyers present, the pressure and the isolation, all of it existed to produce one thing: the defendant saying "I did it." Once you had a confession, the trial was a formality. The judge confirmed what the defendant already admitted.
Inside the domain it was the same. Bakugo had confessed and the trial was over in seconds. If he'd denied, Ren would have had to actually work for it. The lesson was obvious: let people talk. Angry people talked too much. Proud people couldn't help themselves. The domain rewarded patience and punished ego.
His ego.
And theirs.
He'd started reading about, specific quirk laws alongside the real legal stuff. Quirk use in public was illegal for anyone without a licence. The only exceptions were licensed heroes, provisional licence holders, and self-defence, and self-defence only covered dodging and shielding, not hitting back. Using your quirk to attack someone, even if they attacked first, was criminal if you didn't have a licence.
Which meant basically every villain and every schoolyard bully with an offensive quirk was committing a prosecutable crime just by using their power. Inside the domain, Judgeman could charge them and Ren could argue it. The law was on his side by default.
That was powerful and kind of terrifying at the same time.
His mom noticed the changes the way she noticed everything: quietly, through food. Lunches got more elaborate. An extra piece of fruit, onigiri wrapped in the specific nori he liked, once a thermos of homemade soup that was still warm when he opened it at noon because she'd held it before he left. She never said "I'm proud of you for waking up early and studying every night." She just fed him better.
His dad came home on Tuesday and caught him at his desk.
"You're taking this hero thing seriously for once in your life," he said from the doorway.
Then he left.
Isaac was getting suspicious.
"Okay bro," he said on Thursday, spotting Ren on a bench press that had jumped fifteen kilos in two weeks. "I've been tracking your numbers and this doesn't make sense. Your squat went up 40 kilos since we started. Your deadlift is climbing every session. Your bench just jumped to 265 and that's not normal progression even for someone with your quirk."
"Good programming."
"Don't patronise me. I know what good programming produces and it's not this. You're gaining like someone who's been training for six months, not three weeks. What changed?"
"I've been sleeping more."
"Ren."
"And eating better."
"REN."
"Maybe your warm-ups are finally paying off."
Isaac squinted at him for a long time. Then he sighed. "Fine. Keep your secrets. But if I find out you're doing something stupid I'm writing you the most boring deload program you've ever seen and you're doing it for a month."
"Terrifying."
"It will be. There will be bands. Resistance bands, and kettle bells."
---
### Week Four
Friday evening.
Ren was at his desk, notebook open, three hours in without touching his phone. New record.
He tried Decree on a 20-kilo dumbbell sitting next to his desk. Looked at it, thought *this is light, this doesn't matter*, and curled it. Felt easier. Three extra reps before the CE cost caught up and the weight went back to feeling like 20 kilos.
Then he grabbed a 40-kilo dumbbell and tried the same thing. *This is light.*
The drain hit him like a wall. His body knew 40 was heavy. His subconscious rejected the decree before it even settled. The CE spiked, his arm burned, and he nearly dropped the weight on his foot.
Decree wasn't a cheat code, it was a mirror. It reflected what he genuinely believed and punished him for lying. The smaller the lie, the cheaper it was. The bigger the lie, the harder it bit back.
Template: 1.17%.
---
Saturday was a rest day.
He was on the couch, half-watching the news, half-reading about suspension of prosecution on his phone, when the broadcast cut to a live feed.
VILLAIN ATTACK IN MUSUTAFU COMMERCIAL DISTRICT.
Ren looked up.
Helicopter footage. A street choked with smoke. Something green and viscous wrapped around a person, blond hair visible through the sludge. Explosions going off in bursts. Pro heroes on scene but hanging back because the explosions made it impossible to get close.
Bakugo.
Ren sat up.
The camera shook. Heroes were shouting. The crowd was watching. Nobody was moving.
Then a kid ran in.
Just a kid sprinting toward a villain because the person trapped inside was someone he knew and nobody else was doing anything about it.
Midoriya.
Midoriya clawed at the sludge. Pulled, scratched, did nothing useful but did it anyway. The villain swatted at him. The heroes started yelling. And then All Might was there, enormous and blinding, and the whole thing ended with a single punch that shifted the weather.
Ren sat back on the couch.
He thought about the shoe locker. Midoriya bent at the waist, bowing so hard his bag nearly hit the floor. Red-rimmed eyes. *You should stand up for yourself more.*
And then, not even two weeks later, the kid had sprinted quirkless into a villain attack to save someone who'd spent years making his life miserable.
"Fair enough, Midoriya," he said to the TV. "Fair enough."
Then the second thought came.
This was the scene. The sludge villain. Midoriya running in. All Might watching a quirkless kid do what no hero on scene could be bothered to do, and being inspired by it.
This was where Midoriya got One For All.
Canon was happening. Which meant what came next, the offer, the training, the entrance exam, was probably coming too.
He could plan around that. Loosely. He remembered a handful of things from season one and absolutely nothing after.
He went upstairs. Pulled out the notebook. Flipped to the back. Clean page.
*Things I remember from season 1:*
*1. Deku gets OFA from All Might*
*2. Some kind of bird monster attacks a school facility, students are there*
*3. UA entrance exam, robots?*
Three items. His entire strategic advantage.
"Yeah I'm cooked."
He stared at the list again and closed the notebook.
---
It was past midnight when the thinking started.
The kind of thinking that only happened when the house was dead quiet and his brain had nothing left to chew on but itself.
Who was he, actually?
Not the surface answer. Not "Asano Ren, fourteen, Aldera Junior High, regeneration quirk, wants to go to UA." That was paperwork. That was what you put on a form. He meant the real question. The one underneath.
Two weeks ago he'd stood on a rooftop and activated a supernatural courtroom to strip a classmate's quirk over a burned notebook. He'd told Bakugo that his ego had convicted him. Then he'd walked down a flight of stairs and nearly collapsed because the effort of playing judge for two minutes had drained every drop of energy he had.
Was that justice?
The teacher in his memories would have said no. The teacher would have filed a report. Gone to the administration. Contacted Midoriya's parents. Done everything through the proper channels and trusted the system to handle it. And maybe the system would have. Maybe Bakugo would've gotten detention or a talking-to or a note in his file that nobody ever looked at.
And Midoriya would've kept getting burned.
The teacher had tried the proper channels. For a girl with bruises on her wrists, he'd tried everything the system offered. And the system had responded by erasing him. Every channel, every form, every report, every institution built to protect people, all of it had folded the moment it bumped up against someone with actual power.
So the teacher's way didn't work. Ren knew that. The memories proved it.
But what was HIS way? He'd called it justice. "The only justice that matters is the kind that comes from a single person deciding what's right and enforcing it." He'd believed that since before the memories, before the template, before any of it. It was the core of who he was.
And then he'd used it to take a fourteen-year-old's quirk temporally, because of a notebook.
Not because Bakugo was a threat, not because anyone was in danger, but because Ren had decided it was wrong and Ren had the power to punish it.
Judge, jury, and executioner standing on a school rooftop with a floating shikigami and an ego the size of the building.
Was that different from what the system did? The system decided who was guilty and enforced the verdict.
Ren decided who was guilty and enforced the verdict. The only difference was that Ren was one person instead of an institution.
Was that better or worse?
He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. The boot-shaped water stain stared back.
The teacher's voice, not literally, but the weight of his memories, his perspective, said: *You have power now. True power, the kind I wished I had but never did. Don't use it the way the system used its power. Don't become the thing that killed me.*
And Ren's own voice, the one that had lived in his head for fourteen years before any of this started, said: *The system killed you because it had power and no accountability. I have power and no accountability. The only difference is I'm honest about it.*
Both voices were his now.
The teacher's empathy and Ren's conviction living in the same skull, pulling in the same direction most of the time but occasionally, late at night when the house was quiet and there was nothing to distract him, pulling apart.
Decree.
His own cursed technique. The power to decide what mattered and what didn't, and have reality bend to agree. What happened when he was wrong? Not a little wrong. Fundamentally wrong. When he decreed something insignificant and it turned out to be the most important thing in the room?
Ren muttered to himself "My ego would collapse".
His judgments would flip and reverse itself, his technique would turn against him instead of helping him. Everything he'd dismissed would come crashing back amplified and everything he'd invested in would crumble. His own power would eat him from the inside out because the one thing it couldn't tolerate was a liar, and a man who believed his own judgment was absolute was one bad call away from being the biggest liar in the room.
That was the real danger.
Not Bakugo, villain's, UA entrance exam and anything else inbetween.
The true real danger was Ren believing so completely in his own version of justice that he stopped being able to see when it was wrong.
The blindfold.
Justice is blind. The statue, the symbol, the whole philosophy. And Judgeman with its eyes sewn shut, delivering verdicts in a courtroom built by a man who'd spent his life watching the wrong people get convicted.
Was Ren any different? He'd convicted Bakugo in seconds. He'd felt good about it. He'd checked his template and been happy that the number went up.
The act of justice had literally made him stronger and that was maybe the most dangerous feedback loop a person could have. Do the right thing, get stronger. Do it again, get stronger again. Never stop to ask if the thing you're calling "right" is actually right because the power keeps coming either way.
Until it doesn't.
He turned over in bed.
Closed his eyes.
The teacher had died believing in a justice that didn't exist. Ren was building a justice that existed inside his own head. If he was honest with himself, genuinely honest, he didn't know if that was better.
But it was what he had. And tomorrow he'd wake up at six, eat whatever his mom left him, go to school, practice his cursed energy, study law he barely understood, train with Isaac, and keep building toward something he couldn't fully see yet.
One percent at a time.
He went to sleep.
---
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