Aizawa waited until everyone was seated.
This was a technique Yami had noticed across the first week — the teacher used silence as a tool the way some people used volume, letting it accumulate weight before he said anything into it. The class rustled, settled, the post-trial energy looking for somewhere to go and finding the room inhospitable to release.
"Debrief," Aizawa said. He had the tablet in one hand and a posture that communicated he was going to say something about every team and none of it was going to be comfortable, which was the kind of teaching philosophy that produced either excellent students or trauma, often both simultaneously.
He worked through the teams. Iida's analysis was thorough in the places it was praise and thorough in the places it wasn't. Uraraka received specific feedback about her gravity quirk's nausea threshold as a tactical liability that opponents would eventually learn to exploit. He noted that she'd identified and executed a viable route, which was its own kind of praise delivered without the shape of praise.
When he reached Bakugo, the class shifted almost imperceptibly. The blond hadn't moved since sitting down. His forearms were on the desk and his eyes were at a fixed point approximately two meters past the front wall.
"Power-first strategy is effective against power-class opponents and nearly useless against non-power-class opponents," Aizawa said, not unkindly. "You were unable to quickly neutralize a target who presented no offensive threat because you defaulted to force when evasion required a different response. Note it."
Bakugo's eyes moved to Aizawa. Moved away.
"Ichigo."
Yami, in the back row, kept his hands on the desk and his face at the expression that communicated listening rather than prepared.
"Your combat analysis of Bakugo's opening sequences was unusual," Aizawa said. "Specifically: you anticipated the follow-up strike from the opening blast correctly on the first exchange. Your registered quirk has no combat-analysis component." He paused. "Explain."
The explanation that Yami had prepared across three days, revised twice and reviewed once more last night, came out in the same even register as everything else he'd said this week.
"I watched his throws and movement during the Apprehension Test's sprint section. The same mechanics that generate his quirk's explosive force affect his natural arm positioning. The follow-up from a right-hand opening is a structural tendency, not a learned pattern — it comes from how he braces." He let that sit for a moment. "I work with what I have. Observation is something I have."
The classroom was quiet in the specific way of twenty people deciding whether something sounded true.
Aizawa looked at him. The look lasted four seconds, which Yami counted. Then he made a note on the tablet and moved to the final team without further comment.
He did not believe it. The note on the tablet would say something, and that something would join the other somethings accumulating in Yami's file, and eventually the file would be large enough that Aizawa would stop building it and start using it. The timeline on that was unclear. Yami gave himself a month before the first real confrontation, which was optimistic, and three weeks, which was probably more accurate.
"Class dismissed," Aizawa said. "Battle Trial performance notes will be posted to your portals by end of week."
The social aftermath of the trial sorted itself in the corridor outside with the speed of a class that had spent three hours processing the same events and was now ready to discuss them.
Kirishima materialized at Yami's left shoulder as if he'd been waiting for a gap in foot traffic. "That Bakugo dodge," he said, and his expression contained the specific delight of someone who had watched something technically unrequired happen and found it personally meaningful. "The first one, where he went left and you just — straight into the counter. That was manly."
"It worked once."
"Still counts." Kirishima fell into step beside him. "The second time he blasted you through the wall was also pretty manly, to be honest. In a different way."
"The resilience way."
"The getting-up-immediately way. Which is the best kind." He paused. "How are the bruises?"
"They exist."
"Classic." Kirishima nodded with the gravity of someone who had made a thorough peace with physical consequence as a feature of their chosen field. "You want to practice sometime? I've been working on hardening-against-impact combinations and I need someone willing to actually hit me."
"Your hardening absorbs impact. Hitting you would be bad for my hands."
"That's kind of the point of the practice." Kirishima grinned at him. "We could work something out that's also useful for you. Two-way."
The conversation had the texture of something that was not quite a friendship yet and was in the process of becoming one, and the awareness of this was simultaneously pleasant and slightly dizzying. He'd had work colleagues in his previous life, and managed acquaintances, and the low-maintenance proximity of office social structures. He had not had the thing that Kirishima was apparently offering, which was uncomplicated genuine interest in another person's continued existence and improvement.
"Let me know when," Yami said.
"I'll text you." Kirishima produced his phone with the speed of someone who had been waiting for permission to do this since approximately the water break during the Apprehension Test.
Kaminari appeared from around a locker room door with the quality of someone who had been waiting for a gap in the conversation and had decided this was it. "Hey. The sidestep. Can you teach me that? Specifically the — " He made a gesture with his whole upper body that was attempting to replicate the movement and landing somewhere in the range of experimental modern dance. "That."
"It's footwork," Yami said. "There's nothing special about it. You practice the weight transfer until the response is automatic."
"But how did you—"
"I practiced."
Kaminari looked at him with the expression of someone who had expected a more interesting answer and was recalibrating. "Okay but like — can I practice with you? Because my footwork is — " He made a different gesture that also communicated modern dance but in a minor key.
"Ask Kirishima," Yami said. "He just offered practice sessions."
Kirishima, to his credit, immediately said: "Yeah, come, the more the better."
Yami reached his locker while they negotiated the details behind him, extracted his bag, and noticed, in the process of removing things from the locker's top shelf, that Todoroki Shoto was at the locker two doors down.
This was either coincidental positioning or not. In a forty-student class with a shared locker room, the probability of any two specific people ending up at adjacent lockers was low enough that it wasn't the default assumption.
Todoroki collected his bag without comment. Turned toward the exit. His gaze, in the half-second of the turn, crossed Yami's position at the angle you'd expect from someone who was moving through a space and tracking it normally, and then held for the duration that distinguished noticed from passed over.
Then he left.
Yami watched the door close and filed the moment under data, pending category.
The rooftop had a rusted fence and a view of UA's campus in the afternoon light, and nobody had claimed it as a regular lunch spot, which meant that Yami found it empty when he arrived with his cafeteria tray — rice, pork belly, miso soup, side of pickled vegetables — and sat on the concrete retaining wall with his back to the fence and the campus below him and the specific mild pleasure of eating something hot in fresh air after a morning that had included getting hit through a wall.
The food was significantly better than it had any reason to be for an institutional school cafeteria. He'd thought this the first day and confirmed it every day since. The cafeteria rice didn't have the overcooked institutional quality of every cafeteria rice he'd eaten in his previous life. He ate all of it.
The campus below had the organized beauty of a place that had been built with intention — not accidentally pretty, but deliberately arranged to communicate something about what happened inside it. He could see the training grounds from here, the corner of Building 3 visible over the facility structure, the scorch marks from Bakugo's opening entrance still visible on the exterior wall from this angle.
He adapted faster than I expected, Yami thought, for the third time since the fight. The pattern-reading window was ninety seconds. In his internal model of Bakugo, the window had been longer — the anime had simplified a complex fighter, trimmed the adaptive capability to make the patterns legible to an audience. The real person was faster and less predictable and Yami's catalogue of him was accurate only to the level of fidelity the anime had captured, which was apparently not the full level.
First fidelity error. First real demonstration that knowing the story and knowing the person were not the same category of knowledge.
He finished the miso soup. Held the bowl and looked at the campus.
The group chat notification had arrived during lunch — someone had added him to the Class 1-A main channel sometime in the previous hour, and the channel's most recent activity was a thread titled "Battle Trial: Best moments???" with thirty-seven replies and a poll that had four options, one of which was "Yami dodging Bakugo round 1 (send post)" and which was currently winning by a margin that he found equally flattering and alarming.
He scrolled through it for a moment. Kirishima had sent a five-second clip someone had screen-recorded from the monitoring room footage. Kaminari had replied with five consecutive identical fire emojis. Iida had written a full paragraph about the importance of viewing training exercises as learning opportunities rather than content for entertainment, which had received twelve laugh reactions.
Bakugo was not in the chat. Or was in the chat and had notifications turned off. The distinction didn't change the read.
He put the phone away and watched a cloud cross the UA campus and thought about the week ahead: normal classes, one Wednesday Hound Dog session, whatever Todoroki's lingering look at the locker had been the beginning of, and somewhere in the range of one to two weeks beyond that, a field trip to a rescue training facility where a hundred and seventy-plus villains were about to interrupt a school excursion.
He needed the third Skill Point before USJ. Quick Recovery Lv.1 at three SP reduced his post-resurrection vulnerability window from five minutes to three — and the USJ had, in canon, produced deaths in the building. Not for the hero course students, but in its chaos. The system classified kills by unique entity. The League of Villains were unique entities.
USJ gives me the fragment opportunity I've been waiting for, he thought. If I play it right.
The problem was that playing it right at USJ required not dying to something that would trigger the suicide lock-out, not dying to a repeat killer before the cycle gave him a new entry, and dying to something tier-appropriate enough to give him a real fragment rather than another flat reward or null roll.
The problem was also that the gap between dying strategically and dying accidentally in a situation full of villains was narrow in theory and nearly invisible in practice.
He stacked his empty tray, tucked it under his arm, and stood up from the retaining wall.
His phone buzzed. New message in the class chat from Kirishima: "Who's signing up for the rescue training field trip next week? I CANNOT WAIT for the disaster simulation"
Below it, from Kaminari: "bro what if something actually goes wrong though haha"
Yami pocketed the phone without replying and went back inside, and the afternoon light on the UA campus held its particular quality of a place that was about to stop being ordinary.
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