He was already three blocks from the apartment when he admitted he was doing reconnaissance.
The cover story, to himself, had been I need to learn the neighborhood. Which was true and also completely beside the point, because what he was doing was walking the route he'd seen on a screen in a different life, checking geography against memory, cataloguing the gap between the map in his head and the map under his shoes.
Musutafu was loud in the way mid-sized Japanese cities were loud — the constant white noise of traffic and pedestrians, the occasional commercial jingle from a pachinko parlor or a speaker outside a clothing store, someone's earbuds turned up too high on the opposite sidewalk. He walked without hurrying and let the city press its specific texture against him.
The tunnel underpass was exactly where he expected it. Low-clearance concrete, wide enough for two lanes of traffic and the pedestrian path running parallel, the whole structure dark in a way that noon sunlight didn't entirely fix. He walked through it once, clocked the sightlines, the width of the pedestrian section, the nearest cross street. Good place for a villain to corner someone. Bad place to run from anything with range.
He came out the other side and kept walking.
UA's campus was visible from the rise of the road heading east — the distinctive architecture unmistakable against the skyline, that odd combination of imposing and somehow collegiate, the way prestigious schools managed to look like they had money without looking like they were trying. He didn't approach. Just looked. Three months before the entrance exam, the first-years weren't there yet, which meant the building was full of second and third years he had incomplete information on, teachers who noticed unusual behavior, and a principal who was, by all accounts, a small rodent of unsettling intelligence.
Not a destination. Not yet.
Dagobah Beach was a twenty-minute walk from the underpass. He went anyway.
The trash was there. Mountains of it, dense and irregular along the shoreline, appliances and shipping containers and forty years of illegal dumping piled into a landscape that looked less like a beach and more like the aftermath of something. He stood at the edge of the road looking at it and thought: "A specific boy is going to spend ten months cleaning this and emerge able to throw buildings."
He was not a specific boy. He was twenty-four years old wearing fifteen's face, and he had three months.
He turned around and went to find the library.
The public library was twenty minutes back the other direction, three floors, the serious kind of quiet that smelled like carpet and industrial cleaner. He found a terminal, pulled the UA entrance exam documentation from their public-facing materials, and read everything available.
Written exam: five subjects, standard academic content. He'd done well in school. That wasn't the problem.
Practical exam: combat exercise against robots worth points. Villain bots in three categories — the weaker ones worth one, two, and three points respectively. The fourth type, the zero-pointer, a giant designed not to be fought. Rescue points awarded secretly for helping other examinees in danger.
He stared at this for a while.
The villain points required either a combat quirk capable of destroying robots or the physical ability to destroy them without one. The robots were made of metal. A baseline human teenager with no enhanced strength, no energy projection, no special ability whatsoever had no pathway to accumulating enough villain points to pass. Zero pathway. The math was not ambiguous.
The rescue points changed the calculus slightly. He didn't know the cap. He didn't know the formula. He didn't know if enough rescue actions could compensate for zero villain points, and he had no way to find out without access to grading records he couldn't get.
"Functionally zero odds of passing through normal means."
He wrote it on the corner of the notepad he'd brought and stared at it and then wrote below it: so what are the non-normal means.
The answer was one line: the Sludge Villain incident.
All Might would be present. All Might was looking, the same way he'd been looking all his life, for a specific quality of courage that had nothing to do with strength or quirks. The green-haired boy had earned his attention not by winning but by running toward something he couldn't possibly beat because walking away wasn't a calculation he was capable of making. The test wasn't can you fight. The test was will you move.
The problem was that will you move still required moving fast enough and doing something visible enough and coming close enough to dying that a hero decided it mattered. The Sludge Villain had nearly killed Bakugo. Deku had thrown a bag at its eye.
Yami closed the browser tab, returned the notepad to his bag, and walked home.
He did push-ups in the apartment that evening until his arms gave out. The count was thirty-seven. He lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling — the wrong ceiling, still, and probably always — and his arms shook against the floorboards and he thought about the gap between thirty-seven push-ups and throws a school bag at a villain's face while it's actively drowning someone.
"Three weeks," he told the ceiling. "Train harder. Run the route daily. Be in the right place when the explosion goes off."
The ceiling did not offer a counter-argument.
He set an alarm on the phone he'd found in the school bag — cheap, cracked in one corner, charged to forty percent — and ate both remaining tangerines standing at the counter, staring at the newspaper on the wall.
The condolence flowers cast shadows in the lamp light that looked, briefly, like hands.
Three weeks of running the tunnel route every morning, afternoon, and sometimes evening.
Three weeks of push-ups, sit-ups, the basic calisthenics he vaguely remembered from mandatory school PE in a different life, his body adapting faster than he'd expected because fifteen-year-old physiology responded to stimulus like it was making up for lost time. He ran until his knees ached. He ate the apartment's remaining rice rations carefully and spent three hundred yen on protein at a discount grocery store. He tracked everything on the second sheet of paper taped beside the newspaper: sets, reps, times, the slow migration of thirty-seven push-ups toward fifty-one.
No system appeared. No hidden power awakened. He was a teenager who could now do fifty-one push-ups and had memorized the layout of the Musutafu tunnel underpass in enough detail to sketch it from memory.
He read the news every morning and watched for any mention of an escaped villain with a living sludge body. Nothing for the first week. Nothing for the second. On day nineteen, standing at the convenience store television after his morning run, he thought seriously for the first time: what if the timeline already diverged? What if the Sludge Villain escapes on a different day? What if he never escapes?
He bought a rice triangle at the register and ate it on the sidewalk and told himself: he escapes. He's already escaped. He's somewhere in the sewer system under Musutafu right now. Just wait.
On a cold Tuesday afternoon, three weeks and two days into his vigil, he was two blocks from the tunnel when he heard the explosion.
Not a hero's explosion. Not the controlled, percussive crack of a practice range. The kind of explosion that builds on itself, that other sounds step back from, that comes with a subsonic pressure change you feel in the chest before the ears register it.
He was already running before the second one hit.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!