The apartment was dark except for the system interface, which was not a real light source — it overlaid his vision rather than casting illumination — but which his brain had categorized, over four months of living with it, as a kind of ambient presence that filled the space between alone and entirely alone.
He was lying on the floor of the one-room apartment because the futon had developed an opinion about the spring in his lower back and the floor had not.
The interface showed him what it had been showing him for a week:
[System Level: 2] [Skill Points: 2/3 — Quick Recovery Lv.1 locked] [Fragments: 0/5] [Deaths: 2 — Next Fragment Opportunity: Unique Entity Kill Required]
Two skill points. Cheapest node in the visible tree cost three. The gap was one skill point, which was one unique entity kill, which was something the sludge villain had been too low-tier to reliably provide and the zero-pointer had been too classification-ambiguous to attribute. The system did not count environmental kills. It did not count kill-assists. It required a specific event type: Yami Ichigo, killed by a named or classifiable unique entity, without the self-inflicted lockout trigger activating.
The Nomu was a unique entity. Classification unknown — but it had been created, named, deployed. It was a constructed being rather than a natural hazard. In the system's logic, a constructed being with intentional purpose was attributable in the way the zero-pointer had not been.
He'd been running this calculation since he'd confirmed the USJ trip date on the school portal. Three days, the travel to the facility, the morning schedule. The attack in canon came through Kurogiri's warp gate approximately twenty minutes into the rescue training exercise. Seventeen-hundred students estimated between hero course years one and two, staff present including All Might, Thirteen's zone. Yami had been in the system for four months and accumulated two null or empty death rewards. He needed the third skill point before the system hit its plateau ceiling on passive gains.
The Nomu was the answer.
The problem with the answer was that the Nomu had been designed to kill All Might. The spec sheet, extrapolated from anime: Shock Absorption at minimum five times human structural tolerance, Super Regeneration outpacing any damage rate Yami could achieve, strength classification in the range that had put All Might at his absolute limit. Against Yami at 3% OFA ceiling and base stats in the low double digits, the exchange was approximately ten seconds from contact to death.
He didn't need it to be longer than that.
What he needed was for All Might to be present, functional, and not dead before Yami achieved the contact position. The meta-knowledge timeline had All Might arriving approximately twelve minutes into the villains' presence on site — Kurogiri warp, class scattering, Aizawa vs the ground-level villains, All Might's entrance. The Nomu's deployment came after All Might arrived, during the direct engagement phase.
Twelve minutes of surviving in a facility with one-hundred-seventy-plus villains while not using OFA above his injury threshold and not getting killed by something that would trigger the lockout, and then three to four minutes near the central plaza to get into position.
His phone screen lit up on the floor beside him. All Might (Toshinori Yagi) across the notification.
He answered it.
"Young Ichigo." All Might's voice in his civilian register — thinner, the result of the injury, but warm. The specific warmth of a person who had decided that the people he called were people worth calling. "I wasn't interrupting study time?"
"Reading," Yami said. Not a lie. He'd been reading earlier.
"Good, good. Staying on top of coursework — essential." A brief pause that had the texture of an older person finding the transition from small talk to reason. "The rescue training trip tomorrow. I'll be teaching the session personally, along with Thirteen."
"I know. The class got the brief."
"Ah." The sound of something being set down on All Might's end. "I wanted — I don't know what I wanted. To mention it." Another pause. "You'll be in good hands."
Yami stared at the ceiling. The glass figurine was on the windowsill where he'd put it, catching the streetlight in the absent way of something made to catch light.
You'll be in good hands. From a man who had approximately forty-three minutes of hero form remaining and who was going to spend somewhere between twelve and twenty of them fighting a creature that had been built specifically to end him.
He almost said: Don't come. Almost said: Tell Thirteen you're unwell. Almost said: There's going to be an attack and I have read it in sufficient detail to know that you will reach your limit and I can't do anything about that except tell you now while there is still time.
The version of Yami who had died in an office in Osaka at twenty-four, having never done anything that mattered to anyone, said nothing.
"I'll be ready," he said.
All Might's warmth came through the phone's speakers. "You always are, young man. You always are." He paused. "Get some rest. Tomorrow's a real class — Thirteen's zone isn't simple even without incident."
The call ended.
Yami put the phone down and looked at the ceiling and did the math he'd been doing since he'd confirmed the date. In how many versions of tomorrow did everyone come home. In how many versions did All Might survive the Nomu engagement without burning through his final reserve. In how many versions did Yami position himself correctly and achieve the contact and come back from the void with the skill point that opened the first node of the tree.
In how many versions did he miscalculate the Nomu's response time and die to the lockout condition instead — self-inflicted, invalid, seventy-two hours of nothing and no reward.
The glass figurine on the windowsill threw a small spectrum across the wall above the window when a car passed on the street below. Five colors. Brief.
He'd held it up in the library and watched it do that and thought: something made from nothing, just because she could. He'd said that to himself and believed it, which meant that four months into a life that wasn't supposed to be his, he was capable of being genuinely impressed by a thing a fifteen-year-old had made while explaining molecular alignment.
Small mercies, he thought. You find them where they are.
The apartment was small and the ceiling had a water stain in the corner that he'd been watching change shape for a month and a half, and the newspaper on the wall above his desk still had the entrance exam date circled in red ink — the first thing he'd done in this body, four months ago and a world away, standing in a one-room flat with thirty-seven push-ups of evidence that he could survive here if he was careful enough.
He'd been careful enough so far.
The bus left at nine AM.
He closed the system interface and lay in the dark and waited for sleep to find him, which it did eventually, around three in the morning, somewhere between the forty-second scenario calculation and the forty-third.
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