Hayashi knew before Mineta said anything.
It wasn't telepathy or any particularly developed perceptive quirk. It was the clinical observation of someone who had spent years watching trained bodies and could read in the way a person moves the story of what had recently happened to them.
Mineta arrived at the dojo the Monday following the alley incident, backpack on his shoulder, wearing his usual expression—which was neutral by default and didn't reveal much. But something about how he crossed the room, the way his eyes scanned the space before the rest of his body committed to entering, made Hayashi look at him in a particular way.
He let him warm up. Let the first twenty minutes of the session pass without saying anything beyond the usual technical corrections. And then, in a natural pause between exercises, he asked without preamble:
"— When was it?"
Mineta looked at him.
"— How do you know it happened?"
"— You move differently." Hayashi didn't elaborate, as if that were sufficient explanation, which it probably was. "— When?"
"— Thursday. Alley on the way home. Three boys, one being bullied."
"— Were you hurt?"
"— No."
"— Them?"
"— Neither. Just spheres on the ground and a push redirection. They left."
Hayashi processed this silently for a moment.
"— How did you feel during it?"
It was a question Mineta hadn't expected. It wasn't the kind Hayashi usually asked, whose questions tended toward the technical and concrete rather than the experiential.
"— More uncontrolled variables than expected," he replied after a second. "— And something worked that isn't yet consistent in the dojo."
"— What worked?"
"— Spatial perception. At the peak of tension, I had a second of total clarity of the space. All the bodies, all the positions, without conscious effort."
Hayashi nodded slowly, with the expression of someone recognizing something already known by another name.
"— Stress-activated response," he said. "— The nervous system at maximum alertness processes the environment more efficiently than at rest. It's real, it's documented, and it has a problem."
"— It isn't voluntarily reproducible," said Mineta.
"— Exactly. And if you try to rely on it, you start needing stress to function well. That's a path that leads nowhere good." Hayashi crossed his arms. "— What you need to learn is to produce that level of attention without needing stress as the trigger. The goal of training is for your brain to do in a boring Tuesday what it does in a crisis moment."
"— How do you train that?"
"— Slowly." — A pause. — "And with more discomfort than we've been using so far in the dojo."
Mineta looked at him.
"— What does that mean in practice?"
Hayashi uncrossed his arms and pointed to the center of the tatami.
"— It means that starting today, we're going to add real pressure to the exercises. Not danger. Pressure. There's a difference." — He positioned himself in a Chi Sao stance in front of him. — "And it means that when you make a mistake, the consequences will be more immediate than a verbal correction."
What followed during the next hour was the hardest session Mineta had had in the dojo since day one.
Hayashi didn't change the exercises. He changed the intensity with which they were executed and the speed with which he penalized errors: pressure on an arm that lost structure, an imbalance exploited immediately when weight was misaligned, a clean entry when the guard opened for half a second too long. Nothing that left marks, everything real enough for the body to make decisions before the brain finished thinking them.
At the end of the session, Mineta was sweating, forearms reddened from repeated contacts, with the expression of someone who had processed an unusual amount of information in a short time.
"— How was spatial perception?" Hayashi asked while collecting the mats.
Mineta thought.
"— Better than previous sessions at the same intensity. Not at alley level, but closer than ever in the dojo."
"— Good." Hayashi stored the mats without ceremony. "— Same thing next week."
The second year of preparation began, in terms of the calendar, three weeks after the conversation with Hayashi.
Mineta marked it in the notebook not with any ceremony, but with a practical entry:
Year Two. Current state:
Height: 116 cm.
Push-ups: 38 straight. Running: 15 continuous blocks.
Quirk: functional limit 15 spheres simultaneously with clear awareness. Physical limit 34 spheres before symptoms. Attention fragmentation: reproducible under favorable conditions, maximum sustained duration 12 seconds.
Dojo: advanced integration of styles in progress. Pressure sessions added to protocol.
He read it once, closed it, and went to breakfast.
One hundred sixteen centimeters.
Eight more than when he started. Not the dramatic transformation some part of him had vaguely expected in the first months, but real and measurable. The growth rate had consistently accelerated with sustained physical training. His doctor, during the annual review organized remotely by his parents with the practical efficiency of people managing their child's life from another continent, had said he was in the expected percentile for his age and that regular exercise was excellent for development.
His parents responded with a mixture of relief and distant guilt that Mineta had learned to recognize in their communications. They sent money, asked about school, promised visits that sometimes happened and sometimes didn't.
They were good people. They just weren't there.
And that absence, which in other circumstances might have been a problem, in his was simply the condition that made training possible without inconvenient questions.
The awkward question came from an unexpected direction.
Sato Hina, the mitochondria girl, had developed in the months after the first exchange a habit of occasionally asking him questions about academic material. Not systematically or frequently, but in those moments when someone had tried to understand something on their own and reached a point where a different perspective was needed.
Mineta had answered each time with the same practical brevity as the first occasion. It wasn't exactly friendship. It was more like a mutual academic service relationship, though the service went in only one direction.
One Tuesday in October, however, Sato asked a question unrelated to academic material.
They were in the hallway after class, Mineta with his backpack already on his shoulder heading to the dojo, and Sato intercepted him with the energy of someone who had been considering doing something for a while and decided to go for it.
"— Hey. Can I ask you something that isn't class-related?"
Mineta looked at her.
"— Depends on what it is."
"— I've noticed you've been coming to school differently for months." — She paused as if calibrating her words. — "Not different weird. Different… I don't know. Calmer. Less like before."
Mineta waited, because that wasn't the question yet.
"— You used to be pretty unbearable," Sato continued, with the direct honesty of someone who has decided that if they're going to say it, they'll say it fully. "— I won't pretend otherwise. And now you're not, or at least not the same way. And I wondered what happened."
It was the question Mineta had mentally prepared for in theory from day one, the one he knew someone would eventually ask. And yet, now that it was here, he found that the prepared answer—the edited, socially acceptable version about maturing and changing priorities—felt unsatisfying in a way he hadn't anticipated.
Not because it was false. It was true in every sense that mattered.
It was unsatisfying because the person asking wasn't the person Sato had known before, and fully explaining that was impossible without information he couldn't give.
"— I realized I was being a version of myself I didn't like," he finally said. Vague but not false. "— And I decided to change some things."
Sato looked at him for a moment, evaluating if the answer was complete or if more lay beneath.
"— And martial arts?"
Mineta blinked slightly.
"— How do you know that?"
"— I saw you leave the Seiryuu Dojo a few weeks ago. I live in that area." — A pause. — "My older brother trained there for a while. He's good."
"— Yeah." Mineta adjusted his backpack. "— I want to enter UA. For that, I need to know how to fight."
Sato processed that.
"— UA." — She repeated the name as if weighing it. — "That's ambitious for someone with a quirk of… sorry, I don't know exactly what your quirk does."
"— Sticky balls."
"— …Sticky balls."
"— Yes."
There was a brief silence containing the discreet evaluation of someone who doesn't want to be rude but can't help the obvious reaction.
"— Then martial arts make sense," Sato finally said, with a diplomacy Mineta found genuinely amusing.
"— Makes sense," he confirmed.
Sato nodded, expression of someone who got the information she wanted, even if she wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.
"— Well." She picked up her own backpack. "— Good luck with UA."
"— Thanks."
She went down the hallway in the opposite direction. Mineta watched her for a second, then continued toward the exit.
Interesting, he thought, for the second time regarding Sato Hina.
The pressure protocol Hayashi had introduced in the dojo began producing results Mineta hadn't anticipated in the form they took.
He expected improvements in response speed, fluidity of style integration, consistency of spatial perception under stress. All of these occurred gradually but measurably over the following weeks.
What he hadn't expected was what Hayashi called, on one of the few occasions he used terminology sounding like more than direct technical instruction, "economy of motion."
"— You're doing too much," he said one Wednesday, stopping him mid-Chi Sao sequence that Mineta thought he was executing well. "— Not in terms of technique. In terms of effort. Every movement contains more energy than necessary."
"— Isn't it better to use more energy than less?"
"— No." Hayashi looked at him with the specific patience reserved for conceptual errors rather than technical ones. "— In a thirty-second fight, extra energy doesn't matter. In one that lasts five minutes, or ten, or more, the one who has used exactly what's necessary at each moment has considerably more in reserve than the one who has been wasting it."
"— Understood. How do you correct it?"
"— By paying attention to what you don't do." Hayashi adjusted his position. "— Wing Chun has a concept: the correct movement is the smallest that produces the necessary result. Not the largest it could produce. The smallest that produces it. Every extra millimeter is energy you don't get back."
Mineta worked with this concept over the following weeks with the same meticulousness he applied to the quirk protocol. It was harder to measure than quirk parameters because it was qualitative rather than quantitative, but Hayashi had a way of signaling excess moments with precision, making it possible to learn from the specific error rather than the general one.
What he gradually discovered was that economy of motion and attention fragmentation of the quirk shared the same underlying logic.
The correct movement is the smallest that produces the necessary result.
The correct attention is the minimum that produces the necessary perception.
When he tried applying the economy principle to quirk awareness work, the result was immediate and surprising: instead of trying to perceive all spheres with maximal clarity, he tried to perceive each one with exactly the clarity necessary for what he needed from it.
Functional limit didn't increase. But durability did: he could maintain awareness of fifteen spheres for considerably longer before fatigue began to degrade perception, because he wasn't expending cognitive energy unnecessarily.
He recorded it in the notebook with the specific satisfaction of someone who has found a connection they've been seeking for a long time:
Economy of motion applied to quirk: attention has a cost. The cost can be reduced without reducing the outcome if attention is calibrated to real need rather than maximum possible.
Practical implication: the quirk limit isn't just how many spheres I can have active. It's how much attention maintaining them requires. If I reduce the cost per sphere, the effective limit rises without changing the physical limit.
He underlined that last line.
Then wrote below, in smaller script:
Hayashi doesn't know he's teaching me things about the quirk. Neither did I until a few weeks ago. Knowledge doesn't have boundaries as clearly as we think when we categorize it.
The second year also brought a change at school that Mineta hadn't planned, and which happened gradually enough that there wasn't a concrete moment to pinpoint it.
The reputation of the original Mineta remained the original Mineta's reputation. There was no way to erase it and he wasn't actively trying. But something in the combination of consistently good academic results, different attitude, and the occasional rumor that the "ball dwarf" knew how to fight had begun subtly shifting the dynamics.
It wasn't popularity. It wasn't something he sought or found particularly interesting.
It was simply that the space he occupied in school had stopped being that of someone ignored by habit and had become someone ignoring required an active decision that not everyone bothered to make.
A small difference. But real.
The notebook entry at the end of the tenth month had a different tone than previous ones.
It wasn't just data. It was closer to an honest assessment of the state of things.
Ten months.
What works: integrated protocol, attention economy applied to the quirk, physical base, dojo pressure work. All producing measurable results and direction is correct.
What doesn't work yet: attention fragmentation remains inconsistent outside favorable conditions. Full integration of the three styles in the dojo still has visible gaps, especially in transitions between Wing Chun and JJB. Height remains the same.
What I don't yet know: if the theory about quirk expansion beyond the head is viable. I have the logic. I don't yet have any evidence it works in practice.
A pause in writing. Then:
Approximately two years remain until the UA exam. Enough time if progress keeps this direction.
But there's something I've been avoiding thinking about directly and I think it's time to: even if I reach UA in good condition, even if the quirk evolves in some way, even if style integration becomes fluid, I will still be small.
Not as small as at the start. But small.
And UA isn't just the entrance exam. It's the three years that follow. The war to come. Situations where someone my size with my quirk will have to find a way to be effective that doesn't rely on the same variables as most.
That's the real problem. Not the centimeters. The strategy I build around the centimeters.
I need to think more about that.
He closed the notebook.
Outside, the neighborhood was doing the things normal neighborhoods do on a weeknight. A family arguing with the TV in the background. A dog barking at something probably unworthy of the effort. The piano from the building across, which had by now progressed from the clumsy first-month notes to something recognizable, played a slow melody Mineta didn't recognize but sounded like something long learned.
One hundred sixteen centimeters.
Two years.
The strategy around the centimeters.
I'll think about that tomorrow, he told himself.
And for once, he fell asleep before his brain had time to start.
End of Episode 9.