By the time the students return to the classroom, the energy is completely different.
The girls enter in a cluster of overlapping conversation and laughter, several of them still talking excitedly over one another.
Kaminari looks up immediately from his desk.
"Why do you all look so happy?"
"It's a secret," Mina says instantly.
"What kind of secret?"
"The classified kind."
"That's not a real answer."
"It is now."
Kaminari narrows his eyes suspiciously.
"Did something happen in the locker room?"
"That question somehow sounds illegal," Jiro says while walking past him.
"I DIDN'T MEAN IT LIKE THAT."
Mina nearly falls into her chair laughing.
Kaminari points accusingly between them.
"No, seriously, what happened?"
"You'll never know," Hagakure says cheerfully.
"Why does that sound threatening?!"
He is just about to continue pestering them—
When the large door at the front of the classroom slides open.
The woman who walks in is thin, somewhere in her forties, with sharp features softened only slightly by time, in a fitted charcoal skirt suit, her dark hair pulled back cleanly. She moves to the front of the room without hurry, sets a single folder on the desk without opening it, and looks at them.
The room, which had already been going quiet, finishes going quiet.
"My name is Yamamoto," she says.
Her voice is steady. Clear. Used to being listened to.
"I teach Hero Ethics and Law."
Her gaze moves across the room, taking in every student.
"Since you have completed battle trials today with All Might, I want you to understand something before we begin. The law doesn't pause for training exercises."
The room is still.
"What you did today in that building would, in a real operation, be subject to legal review. Every building you damaged. Every civilian area you entered. Every decision you made about force."
Nobody was making noise before she said that. The room somehow gets quieter anyway.
"Not to contextualise it as a threat," she says. "To contextualise it as a reality. You are not just learning to fight. You are learning to operate within a system of accountability. Those two things are not in conflict. They are the same thing."
She opens the folder.
"Let's talk about what that actually means."
For the next fifty minutes, she walks them through the legal framework governing hero activity in Japan, the provisional licensing structure, the conditions under which quirk use is legally sanctioned, and the liability frameworks attached to property damage and civilian injury.
She is not dry about it. She makes bureaucratic reality feel like it matters, which, as she points out twice, it does.
"Quirk usage without provocation in a civilian zone," she says, writing a figure on the board. "That's the average settlement value. Per incident. Comes out of the agency budget. Comes out of the hero's professional record." She turns around. "Questions?"
Iida's hand goes up immediately.
"In cases where the hero acts pre-emptively to prevent greater harm, is the legal threshold for justification fixed, or assessed case by case?"
Yamamoto looks at him for a moment.
"Case by case," she says. "Which is why documentation matters. Any hero who acts without keeping a record of their reasoning is a hero who cannot defend themselves in review. Good question."
Iida writes something down with an intensity that suggests he is not planning to forget it.
At the back, Kaminari leans toward Sero.
"Is it just me, or is this terrifying?"
"Yes," Sero whispers back.
"Wonderful."
Behind him, Kirishima mutters under his breath, "We are getting sued in the future, aren't we?"
Koji nudges him from behind lightly. "Don't say that…"
Hagakure's sleeve raises slightly. "What happens if the damage was technically caused by the villain's quirk, but the hero's actions created the conditions that —"
"Excellent question," Yamamoto says, turning back to the board. "Proximate causation. Let's get into that."
The period runs to its end with the class considerably more aware of liability law than they had been that morning.
Students shift in their seats. Pens are set down only for the doors to open once more.
The next teacher steps in as Yamamoto gathers her folder and leaves without unnecessary words.
The second afternoon class brings a different energy into the room entirely.
The man who walks in is mid-thirties, with round silver-framed glasses, and a plain grey shirt tucked into dark trousers with a faculty lanyard at his chest. He sets his bag down on the desk and introduces himself as Tanaka.
"Quirk psychology," he says. "Specifically, today, the relationship between emotional state and quirk output. Who wants to tell me what they think the connection is?"
Several hands go up.
He points at Uraraka.
"When you're scared or angry, your quirk might activate by accident," she says. "Or become harder to control."
"Correct, and also —" he points at someone else.
"The output changes," Tokoyami says. "Not just the control. The strength."
"Also correct. Here's the thing most people don't talk about."
He pulls up a slide, a graph with two overlapping curves. "Emotional amplification of quirk output is real and documented. Stress, fear, rage, they push the numbers up. Which sounds useful. It is not always useful."
He looks at the graph.
"Because emotional amplification is indiscriminate. You get more power and less precision simultaneously. In a real emergency, that is frequently the worst combination available to you."
The room sits with that.
"There are exceptions," he continues, glancing around. "Some quirk types interact with emotional state differently. Some improve under pressure. Some are partially or fully immune to the effect. But as a baseline, the more you feel, the less you aim. The goal of your training is not to remove the feeling. It is to build a floor beneath it. To give you something steady to stand on when the feeling is loudest."
He changes the slide.
"With that in mind, let's talk about what happened to you this morning."
The class looks at each other.
"Not specifically," he says, with a slight smile. "Generally. High-pressure situations, unfamiliar opponents, unknown environments. Walk me through what you felt, and I'll tell you what your nervous system was doing."
What follows is one of the more unexpectedly honest conversations the class has had since arriving at U.A.
People describe, with varying levels of comfort, the specific texture of being afraid and trying to function anyway.
Ashido talks about the moment before her match when her hands had started moving without her deciding they should.
Kirishima describes the calm that sometimes arrives in the middle of something dangerous, which Tanaka identifies as a stress dissociation response and not, unfortunately, evidence that he had solved anything. Useful in the moment, unreliable as a habit.
The period closes the same way it opened, with people talking, only now with slightly more vocabulary for what they'd felt that morning.
"Awareness first," Tanaka says. "Control comes after."
They leave with that sitting quietly in the back of their heads.
The last class of the afternoon starts with the door opening a fraction harder than the others.
The man who steps in fills the frame without trying to.
Hayashi is not young. Somewhere in his late forties, broad through the chest and shoulders with a calmness about the way he stands that comes from decades of doing the thing he teaches rather than simply knowing it. His dark hair is cut short, and a pale scar runs from his left jaw to just below his ear, which he does not attempt to conceal. He wears a plain black training shirt and dark trousers, no jacket, and stands at the front of the room with his arms loose at his sides and looks at them for a moment before he says anything.
"Combat Fundamentals," he says.
"Some of you may not know this subject. That's because it wasn't present in the U.A. curriculum until this year."
He folds his arms loosely.
"This is a new addition to the hero course curriculum. A formal one. Before now, this kind of instruction fell to homeroom teachers on an informal basis, which, as anyone who has watched a first-year hero class fight can tell you, produced inconsistent results. The faculty made a decision at the start of this academic year that foundational combat education needed to be its own subject, taught consistently, across all year levels. So here we are."
He lets that land.
"My name is Hayashi. I spent eleven years teaching in U.A. before leaving to work directly with active pro hero agencies on close-combat development. Some of the people I trained are working now. Some of them are well known. I came back because I was asked to, and because I think this subject matters more than most of what gets taught in a school like this." He looks at them evenly. "I'm not going to be modest about that."
A few students straighten slightly without deciding to.
"Before I get into anything else, a question." He looks around the room. "How many of you have had formal training before enrolling here? Structured, consistent, with a curriculum behind it."
A few hands go up.
Todoroki. Momo. Ayaka. Izumi. Iida.
"How many of you have had informal training? A parent, a sibling, someone who taught you things without it being official."
A few more hands, some overlapping with the first group.
Hayashi nods. He doesn't comment on who raised their hand or who didn't.
"Everyone else came in on instinct, natural ability, and whatever they picked up watching pro heroes on television." He says this without condescension. "That's not a failure. That's just where you're starting from. This subject exists to give everyone in this room the same foundation."
He moves to the board and writes three words.
Distance. Timing. Commitment.
"These are the three things every physical confrontation is built on," he says, turning back. "Every quirk, every fighting style, every hero and every villain who has ever thrown a strike or evaded one was operating inside these three variables, whether they knew it or not. We are going to make you know it."
He taps Distance first.
"The space between you and your opponent is not static. It is a resource. It can be spent, protected, manipulated, or denied. The moment you stop thinking about distance as something that just exists between two bodies and start thinking about it as something you control, the way you move in a fight changes completely."
He moves to Timing.
"Most fights are not decided by who is stronger. They are decided by who is faster to the right decision at the right moment. Strength matters. Speed matters. But a slower person who reads the situation correctly will beat a faster person who doesn't, more often than you would expect. We will talk about why."
He steps back and looks at the full board.
"Commitment," he says. "The moment you move in a fight, you are making a decision. A strike. A step. A feint. A guard. Once you commit to it, your body has to follow through. Your opponent reacts to that commitment. That is what combat is."
He lets the silence settle for a second.
"People think fighting is about strength. Or quirks. It isn't." His gaze moves across the room. "Strength matters. Quirks matter. But combat itself is a skill. Timing. Positioning. Reading intent. Understanding distance. Understanding rhythm. Understanding what your opponent is trying to do before they fully do it."
He taps two fingers lightly against the desk beside him.
"This subject exists because too many young heroes rely entirely on their quirks. The moment that advantage is disrupted, restricted, countered, or removed…" his expression hardens slightly, "…they fall apart."
A few students straighten unconsciously.
"You will learn martial arts here. Multiple forms. Striking. Grappling. Restraint techniques. Movement. Balance. Weapon disarming. Environmental combat. Team combat." His eyes narrow slightly. "You will also learn how experienced fighters think. How they pressure opponents. How they bait reactions. How they control the pace of a fight."
He folds his arms.
"A fight is not just throwing attacks at each other until somebody falls. A real fight is information. Experience. Adaptation. Decisions made in fractions of a second."
His gaze shifts briefly toward a few students near the back.
"A powerful quirk can win battles," he says evenly. "But skill is what allows you to survive when things stop going according to plan."
"And trust me." A faint edge enters his voice. "Eventually, things always stop going according to plan."
A few notebooks are open now, though most of the class has gone quiet, simply listening to him speak.
"Since we are short on time today, and most of you have already spent the morning beating each other through concrete walls," he says dryly, "we'll keep this session to an introduction."
A few students shift slightly at that.
Kaminari sinks lower into his seat.
The instructor glances briefly toward the clock mounted near the front wall.
"We begin proper training next week. Until then, I want you to pay attention to something."
He raises a hand slightly.
"The next time you watch a fight, whether that's a sports match, hero footage, combat training, anything, stop looking at the flashy part of it."
His eyes move slowly across the room.
"Don't focus on the punches. Don't focus on the quirks. Don't focus on explosions."
He taps two fingers lightly against the desk.
"Watch the distance between the fighters."
The room stays quiet.
"Watch how they move around each other. Watch who controls the pace. Watch who forces reactions and who keeps getting forced to respond."
His voice remains calm, measured.
"A skilled fighter can tell you who's winning a battle long before the first real hit lands."
A brief pause.
"Sometimes the fight is already over before either side realises it."
For a moment, several students unconsciously think back to their matches earlier that day.
Todoroki's ice failing to pin Izumi down for even a second.
Tokoyami being slowly cornered inside the tape-filled room.
Jiro and Kaminari running endlessly through a hallway that should not have existed.
The teacher watches the shifting expressions across the classroom and says nothing about them.
Then he steps back toward his desk.
"That's enough for today."
He picks up a thin folder from the desk without looking at it.
"When the bell rings, you're dismissed."
Almost as if it had been waiting for him to finish speaking—
The bell rings through the building.