The microwave ding preceded the kick by four seconds, which was four seconds of Yami thinking this apartment smells like old building and taiyaki before Gran Torino's foot connected with his left shoulder at a speed that sent him sideways into the kitchen doorframe.
He caught the doorframe. Held on. The shoulder had the opinion that this was not how arrivals typically began, and the opinion was not wrong, and he noted it and filed it in the category of operational data.
"Good," Gran Torino said, from the position that was not the position he'd been in four seconds ago. "You didn't go completely down."
The apartment was small and organized in the specific way of someone who had owned these items for a long time and had settled them into their correct positions and stopped moving them. The UA All Might merchandise on the side table was the specific merchandise of someone who had strong feelings about the person it referenced. The microwave was still running — the timer hadn't reached zero — and the smell of reheated taiyaki was present in the air.
Gran Torino was not pretending to be senile.
He had not, in fact, begun pretending. He'd opened the door, looked at Yami with the eyes of someone who had trained enough people to recognize the specific quality of a person who had information they couldn't explain, and said: "You already know I'm not actually old and stupid. I can see it in your face."
Which had been, as an opening, more accurate than comfortable.
"It's your posture when I walked in," Yami said. "You checked three sight lines and noted the door hinge's position in the first two seconds. That's not senility."
"It's also not what I wanted to discuss." Gran Torino retrieved the microwave's contents — two taiyaki, the filling visible through the split that always appeared when someone reheated taiyaki in a microwave without knowing the correct power level. He set one on the table and ate the other standing, watching Yami with the assessment expression that was the compact, efficient version of the same expression All Might used when he was watching something and developing an opinion about it. "Show me the Full Cowl."
He showed the Full Cowl. Three percent, distributed — the system he'd developed across six months of controlled use, the percentage ceiling that the ribs and the wrist and the general architecture of a fifteen-year-old's body had agreed was sustainable.
Gran Torino watched him hold it for thirty seconds.
"Precise," he said. "Mechanically correct." He finished his taiyaki. "Tactically useless."
The first exchange lasted three seconds.
Gran Torino's Jet quirk launched him off the kitchen wall at a velocity that bypassed the range where Yami's reaction time could generate a useful response, and the contact was brief and decisive and landed him on the apartment floor with the specific quality of having been put there rather than having fallen.
He got up.
Second exchange: four seconds. He'd adjusted his weight forward anticipating the wall-angle — Gran Torino came from the ceiling instead and the correction came half a second late.
Third exchange: four seconds. He tracked the ceiling correctly and Gran Torino came from the floor, which was not an angle he'd assigned probability to, and the floor was cold through his costume.
He got up after the third one and stood in the apartment's center and accepted that the situation required a different input than he'd brought to it.
"You fight," Gran Torino said, from somewhere above him — the old man had settled on the refrigerator top with the casual ownership of someone who used high surfaces habitually, "like someone who learned from footage."
"I've trained in person."
"You've trained mechanics in person. Your form is correct. Your timing is calculated." He dropped from the refrigerator without using his quirk — just dropped, landed with the economy of excellent muscle memory, and was at Yami's eleven o'clock before the landing's sound had finished. "Calculated is what someone does when they don't have instinct yet. It's slow."
Yami thought about the Battle Trial, about the ninety seconds before Bakugo adapted. Thought about the Deku fight, about the moment he'd stopped fighting the version he expected and started fighting the person in front of him. The difference between those two moments was the difference Gran Torino was describing.
"So how—"
"Same way you learned to walk," Gran Torino said, and hit him.
Two hours.
The method was exactly what it sounded like: Gran Torino moved through the apartment at speeds ranging from this is possible to track to this is a theoretical object that appears in post-processed photographs, and Yami's function in the exercise was to not be where he was when contact arrived and to be in a useful position when the window existed. No instruction. No correction. Just the immediate physical consequence of incorrect positioning and the absence of consequence for correct positioning.
He took seventeen hits in two hours.
The seventh one came off the south wall at an angle he'd begun to develop an anticipatory sense for, and he wasn't out of the way in time but he was partially out of the way in time, and partial was better than zero, and the contact was glancing rather than direct.
The fourteenth: Gran Torino's approach from the northeast corner at hip height — he'd been calculating ceiling and wall angles, not floor angles — and the calculation failure landed him on the kitchen floor again.
The seventeenth: Gran Torino came from the window side at speed, and Yami's body was already moving left before his mind had finished the reasoning, and the contact was the back of Gran Torino's palm, the specific quality of a controlled check rather than a strike, and Gran Torino was grinning.
It was the first time the old man had grinned since he'd opened the door.
"There," he said. "That one wasn't from your head. That was from your gut."
The distinction was real and physical and Yami had felt it — the difference between the response that came from having processed the angle data and the response that came from a different layer, below calculation, the layer that had started to form somewhere between the twelfth and seventeenth exchange when the same spaces had been threatened enough times that the body had begun forming opinions about them.
It's not muscle memory yet, he thought. But it's the beginning of the path to muscle memory.
He sat down on the kitchen floor, because the kitchen floor was where he was and standing was a project that could be started in a moment. His shoulder was going to have opinions in the morning. His back had started having opinions approximately forty minutes ago and had not been dissuaded. The taiyaki on the table that Gran Torino had left for him was cold, which was what happened to taiyaki that were left on tables during two-hour training sessions.
He ate it anyway because he needed the calories and cold taiyaki was still taiyaki.
Gran Torino was writing something in a small notebook at the kitchen table with the focused attention of someone who had run enough internships to have a documentation process. "Tomorrow," he said, without looking up, "I'm adding the weighted cuffs."
"How much weight."
"Enough that you'll stop relying on the speed bonus."
This was going to be unpleasant. He looked at the apartment ceiling — a water stain in the northeast corner that had been there long enough to have dried fully, the specific history of a building that had been occupied for decades by someone who didn't prioritize cosmetic maintenance.
In the original timeline, Gran Torino had used this same apartment and this same method to take Midoriya Izuku from reckless OFA output to Full Cowl: functional. The specific competence of this old man in three days of chaotic apartment combat had moved canon's protagonist further than months of formal training had.
What he could do with someone who had the ceiling of the system's development potential and two weeks of this method — that was an interesting calculation.
He'd calculate it in the morning. His back was still filing its complaint and it deserved acknowledgment.
The spare futon was adequate. Gran Torino's apartment had the temperature of someone who kept the windows open in early June and had personal preferences about airflow that guests adapted to. He could hear the old man moving around in the kitchen — not sleeping, doing whatever someone who had trained heroes for decades did in the late evening when there was a student on the futon.
Gran Torino said something. Low enough that the words didn't carry but the tone did — the particular quality of a person talking to themselves or to the memory of someone they'd trained before.
Something about Toshinori picking another strange one.
He let this sit in the specific quality it occupied — somewhere between a complaint and an affection, the tone of a person who had opinions about the students his best one produced and was filing the current student in that category.
Outside, the early June night had the quality of the season. Somewhere in Hosu, Iida Tenya was doing something.
Don't go alone, he'd texted. The message had been read. No reply had come.
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