He was there before six.
Not by design — he'd left the apartment early because he hadn't been able to stay in it, which was its own kind of data. He'd lain on the futon after midnight with OFA-less muscles and the specific inability to stop running scenarios, and eventually the running scenarios had made more sense as walking, so he'd dressed at five-thirty and gone out into the pre-dawn cold and walked routes he'd already memorized until the sky turned gray and then orange and by the time he reached Dagobah Beach there was enough light to see the garbage clearly.
It looked like a lot of garbage in the early morning.
He climbed a refrigerator that had been used as a footstool by something larger — judging by the flattened top — and sat on it and looked at the scale of the debris field from a slight elevation. Three hundred tons was the number his memory supplied. He had three months before the entrance exam, which meant roughly twelve weeks of mornings and evenings, less whatever time All Might required for the supplementary training that would presumably come with a world-ending power transfer.
"Deku did this in ten months," he thought, "and his baseline was comparable to mine."
Ten months of Dagobah Beach cleanup had produced a body capable of wielding One For All without immediate catastrophic failure. Three months would not produce that. Three months would produce a body marginally more capable than the one he currently occupied, with a dormant power inside it that he couldn't touch yet, heading into an entrance exam where he needed to demonstrate a viable quirk to a room full of hero professionals.
The math was uncomfortable.
He was still working through it when footsteps came through the debris field from the road side — precise footsteps, placed deliberately, the gait of someone managing their body with conscious attention. All Might arrived through a gap between two shipping containers and looked at Yami on the refrigerator without apparent surprise.
"You're early," he said.
"You're later than yesterday." Yami climbed down. "You coughed this morning."
All Might stopped. The too-large eyes narrowed fractionally. "I cough most mornings."
"I know." He said it without thinking, and then caught himself half a beat after the words were already out. All Might's expression shifted — not alarmed, but alert, recalibrating in real-time. "You looked like someone who's been managing it for a while," Yami added, and the save was functional if not elegant.
The silence between them was the kind that had texture. Yami let it sit.
All Might eventually looked at the garbage-covered shoreline and said, without preamble: "I've made my decision."
There was something clinical about how he delivered it. Not cold — there was visible weight behind it — but stripped of the theatrical elements of the Symbol of Peace, the man in the undersized clothes was someone who had learned to say difficult things briefly because long versions hurt more.
"The green-haired boy has what I've been looking for for years," All Might said. "The instinct. The fire. He didn't calculate the cost — he just moved, because walking away wasn't in him." He paused. "That's rare. That's the thing I needed to see."
Yami's jaw was tight. He unclenched it. "But."
"But you present a different problem." All Might sat down on a nearby chunk of concrete and looked at his own hands for a moment. "The power I want to pass on — One For All — it destroys its users. It has destroyed every user. The Quirk stockpiles and magnifies, and at full output it exceeds what a human body is designed to survive. Every wielder I've trained has paid for it in bone, in tissue, in years of life." A pause that had weight behind it. "You cannot stay dead."
The ocean ran its regular commentary in the background.
"A vessel that can push past the body's natural breaking point without permanent consequence," All Might continued, and the analytical framework of it was clearly something he'd been building since yesterday, "changes the calculus in ways I don't fully understand yet. If the power damages you beyond recovery, you come back. If you push it to a percentage that would kill a normal successor, you come back." He looked up. "I'm not choosing you because your heroism was greater. I want you to know that."
Yami kept his voice flat. "You're choosing me because I'm a more durable container."
"I'm choosing you because the alternative is watching another young person break themselves apart on a power that was never designed to be wielded by a human body, and right now you're the first candidate in thirty years who changes that equation." He stood up. There was discomfort in the movement — not just physical. "It is not a flattering reason. I thought you deserved to hear it without decoration."
The honesty of it landed harder than almost anything else he could have said.
Yami had prepared for the moment All Might chose him. He'd prepared the right expressions, the right responses, the humility and the determination and the understood weight of responsibility. He had not prepared for All Might to look him in the eye and say I'm picking the tool. The Symbol of Peace was supposed to choose the hero. This man was choosing the safe bet, and doing it with his eyes open, and being honest about what that meant.
"The other boy," Yami said.
"Will find another path." All Might said it quietly. "He has the fire. Fire finds a way." He paused. "I have to believe that."
Whether he did believe it was not a question Yami was in a position to ask.
The hair came out of nowhere — All Might reached up and pulled a single strand from his head with the matter-of-fact motion of someone retrieving a bookmark. He held it out between two fingers. Yami looked at it. In his peripheral vision the system interface sat quiet, no notifications, no warnings, nothing. Just the text overlay and the empty fragment slots and the unspent skill point, all of it waiting.
"Swallow it," All Might said. "The transfer isn't instantaneous. Your body needs to be conditioned to channel the power, or the first time you try to use it, you'll break every bone in your arm." He gestured at the debris field with his other hand. "Three months. Every morning before school. Work from the road edge inward. I'll check your progress twice a week and add combat training when you're ready."
Yami took the hair.
It was such a small object for something this consequential. He put it on his tongue. Swallowed. Nothing happened — no warmth, no surge, no dramatic sign. The system gave no notification. All Might was watching him with an expression that was impossible to read except for the part of it that looked like a man paying a price he'd decided was worth paying.
"Your quirk," All Might said. "At UA — how will you explain it?"
"Enhanced physical recovery," Yami said. "Secondary mutation class. Not resurrection — just abnormal regeneration. Nothing that draws attention to the resurrection's full scope."
All Might considered this for a moment, then nodded once. The nod said: acceptable cover. Use it. We won't discuss this in proximity to anyone else.
"Monday," he said. "Seven AM. Bring work gloves."
He left through the gap in the shipping containers, and Yami stood on the sand-that-wasn't-really-sand-because-it-was-all-built-on-garbage and looked at the scale of what twelve weeks had to achieve and breathed out slowly.
He'd gotten what he came for. He'd positioned correctly, built the right partial-truth, let the math of his resurrection do the work he'd calculated it would do. The plan had executed exactly as designed.
Midoriya Izuku had been two blocks from here last night, reading a sports drink label in a convenience store with scraped hands, still training for something he didn't know had already been given to someone else.
Yami picked up a broken microwave from the edge of the debris field. Carried it to the road and put it down. Went back for another. His arms were not particularly strong. His back made its feelings about this known by the fourth trip.
He kept going because movement was easier than standing still with the specific gravity of what he'd just taken, and because twelve weeks was exactly as long as it was whether he started now or in the morning, and because the alternative was sitting in the apartment with a dead man's hair somewhere in his digestive system and thinking about a green-haired boy who was going to find another path.
All Might had to believe that. Yami understood the mechanism of why he had to believe it. He carried another microwave to the road and understood that believing it and it being true were different propositions, and filed the gap between them in the part of his head where he kept things he'd decided not to look at directly yet.
The debris field didn't look meaningfully smaller when he left an hour later.
He was back the next morning at six fifty-nine.
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