The first thing All Might said when he arrived at the beach that morning was: "Your body is ready."
Not I think you're ready. Not let's see if you're ready. A declarative statement, the way he talked about things he'd already finished evaluating and had moved on from. Yami set down the car door he'd been carrying and looked at him.
"Ready to try the activation," All Might confirmed. "Not to use it. To try the channel."
Six weeks earlier, standing in this same garbage field with a hair going down his throat, the word ready had been something in the theoretical distance. Now it had arrived and the gap between theoretical and actual was immediately, physically apparent. Yami's stomach moved in a way that had nothing to do with hunger and he identified this as the body's version of this is real now and filed it accordingly.
"Right arm," All Might said. "Channel it down through the shoulder and into the forearm. Don't push — feel for it first. It's been in there since December. Your body knows where it is."
He'd been aware of OFA as a presence for weeks — a quality of warmth at the body's base register, below the surface of ordinary sensation, something that was there when he focused on it and background-noise when he didn't. The way you became aware of your own heartbeat when you listened for it. He'd felt it most clearly during the hardest carries, when his muscles were at their limit and something underneath seemed to hum louder, as if it was paying attention to the effort.
He raised his right arm.
"Feel for it first."
He found it the way you find a word you'd forgotten — not by reaching for it directly but by approaching sideways, the attention unfocused and waiting. The warmth was there. He let his awareness settle around it rather than grasping.
Something opened.
Not slowly. Not dramatically. One moment it was contained and the next it was moving — flooding down through the shoulder and into the bicep and the forearm with a velocity that suggested it had been ready for considerably longer than today, and Yami's vision fractured briefly, the world going momentarily sharp and over-bright at the edges, and the power arrived in his hand like a current through wire and he had approximately half a second to feel how enormous it was relative to everything he'd prepared for and then his brain said flick the debris, that's the test, flick and he flicked his index finger at the rusted panel on the ground in front of him.
The panel launched.
Not fast-rolled-across-the-ground launched. Launched launched. It cleared the debris field in a flat arc and hit a dumpster forty-three meters out with a sound like a gunshot, the impact leaving a visible dent in the dumpster's side.
The pain arrived six inches behind the action. His index finger had two distinct wrong-angles in it that hadn't been there a second ago, and the nerve signal from both was electric and immediate and loud, the kind of pain that doesn't build but arrives all at once and demands acknowledgment.
He held the finger against his palm and breathed through it.
[OFA DISCHARGE DETECTED — ESTIMATED OUTPUT: 8.1% | INJURY: RIGHT INDEX FINGER, TWO FRACTURE POINTS]
"That was too much," All Might said.
"Yes." Through his teeth. "I can tell."
All Might crossed the distance between them and looked at the finger without touching it. "How bad?"
"Fractured. Two points. Not compound." He'd seen enough injury classifications in his previous life's company health insurance forms to know the difference, and the angles confirmed the type. "Manageable."
"You'll have it properly seen to."
"I'll wrap it." He looked at the dumpster across the field. "Forty meters."
"Forty-three." All Might said this with something that was almost but not quite satisfaction — the expression of someone who had known what was in there and was watching the proof emerge. "You put approximately eight percent of the current capacity into a finger flick. Without intent to maximize force."
"So the ceiling on 'not trying' is already eight percent."
"The ceiling on unfocused output is eight percent. Which is why we're here." All Might walked to the cleared section of beach and sat on an overturned bathtub in the way he'd adopted as his primary supervision posture across eight weeks of training. "Come here. We're going to spend the afternoon finding the floor."
The floor, as it turned out, was a precise and frustrating thing.
They worked through the afternoon with debris panels as targets — start at maximum restraint, feel the threshold, back off, feel the output, log the result. All Might observed and called corrections. Yami's fractured finger was wrapped in strips torn from his spare undershirt with the functional inelegance of field medicine, the two fracture points immobilized as well as cloth allowed, and they proceeded as if injury were a scheduled inconvenience rather than a reason to stop.
"Eight percent breaks things. That's the damage ceiling. Work down."
Seven percent caused joint strain in the elbow. Not injury — the specific grinding pressure of a joint being asked to absorb force it was designed to route rather than contain. Painful. Sustainable for one or two applications before the socket started sending alarming messages.
Five percent was the strain threshold. Consistent application at five percent produced a three-day soreness in the tendons of the forearm that he could feel already, the echo arriving before the training session was even finished.
Four percent was workable but costly. Precise control at this level required concentration he didn't yet have the habit of maintaining, and twice it drifted upward toward five and corrected with a flare of heat in the wrist.
Three percent was the number.
He found it in the afternoon's seventh trial — channeled it down through the shoulder, felt where it settled in the forearm, held it there — and the sensation was clean. Not painful. Not straining. A hum that moved through muscle fiber like a low current, something that belonged there when the threshold was respected, something the body could sustain without complaining about the demand.
He threw a panel with it. It landed twenty meters out. Not forty-three. Twenty — clean, controlled, aimed.
"There," All Might said.
He threw two more at that level, walking the aim, watching the consistency. Both landed within a meter of the target he'd selected. The output was reliable. The output was dramatically less than eight percent's raw force, but it was his — he could place it.
[OFA CALIBRATION LOG: 3% FULL COWL — SUSTAINED OUTPUT VIABLE. JOINT STRAIN: NIL. FRACTURE RISK: NIL AT CURRENT CONDITIONING.]
The sun had moved from overhead to a low angle over the water, the light going amber in the way it always did at Dagobah in the early evening. Yami sat down on a cleared section of concrete and looked at his wrapped finger and breathed.
"Three percent," All Might said. "That is your operating ceiling until your body develops further."
"What does three percent give me practically?"
"Speed slightly above a trained athlete's peak. Strength roughly in the same range. Jump distance improved. Reaction time — noticeable. You won't break a wall with it. You won't outrun a vehicle." A pause. "You'll outrun a person. You'll hit harder than anything your size should hit. You'll be faster than the other entrance exam candidates expect from someone without a visible quirk."
"And the zero-pointer."
All Might didn't answer immediately.
The zero-pointer was the question Yami had been structuring his entrance exam strategy around since the library research in late November — the massive villain bot designed not to be fought, the one that drove examinees away and created the conditions where the secret rescue points could be earned. In canon, it had been Deku's desperate attack on the zero-pointer that had started everything. The rescue that followed had been what All Might saw. The moment that confirmed the choice.
That dynamic no longer existed in the same form. Deku wasn't receiving OFA. He would enter the exam Quirkless, which meant the practical exam was, for Midoriya Izuku, most likely a wall. No villain points. No visible power to demonstrate. The rescue points depended on someone else being in danger, which meant depending on the zero-pointer creating an opportunity and Deku being positioned near it.
He doesn't know what he doesn't know, Yami thought. He's training at Dagobah for an exam that's already rigged against him, and the only person who could say anything about it is the person who caused the rigging.
He pressed the wrapped finger against his palm and felt the dull percussion of the fracture from the morning's first test.
"Three percent," he said again, pulling himself back to the calculation. "If I can hit five percent for a single burst — just one, not sustained — would that be viable against the zero-pointer?"
"The zero-pointer cannot be destroyed at five percent OFA by a trainee." All Might's voice was careful. "What it can be is redirected. A strike at the right structural point with five percent output — even briefly — would affect its locomotion. Slow it, turn it, disrupt targeting. Enough to create a window."
"For me, or for other examinees?"
All Might looked at him. The evening light made the gaunt face harder to read. "Both, potentially."
Yami thought about the entrance exam layout. The placement of the exam applicants. The timing of the zero-pointer's appearance in the practical field. A disruption to its targeting that slowed it for forty seconds would create exactly the kind of chaos in which a Quirkless boy throwing himself at a wall could become visible. Rescue points required someone in danger. Danger required proximity to the machine. Proximity required either courage or misfortune.
He knew which one Midoriya Izuku had.
He also knew that he couldn't engineer this without it being visible to All Might that he was engineering it, which opened questions he wasn't ready to answer.
"One thing at a time," he told himself. "Control at three percent first. Then range at four. Then the single-burst calculation at five."
He needed six weeks of consistent work to reach the exam with reliable three-percent full cowl, and the possibility of a one-shot five-percent application that didn't fracture something. The fractures could be managed — they healed in two weeks and the system ensured no permanent damage — but walking into an entrance exam with an active bone injury was a variable he wanted to eliminate.
He found a popsicle stick in the debris near his feet and duct tape in the outer pocket of the school bag. He remade the finger splint with more care than the morning's improvised version, the two fracture points immobilized properly this time, the tape tension even.
All Might watched this without comment.
"The entrance exam," Yami said, pressing the last strip of tape flat. "I'll need a clean strategy that doesn't require anything above three percent sustained. The five percent burst is insurance, not primary."
"I agree." All Might stood, the bathtub making a hollow scrape as the weight lifted. "What's your primary scoring mechanism?"
"Rescue points." He looked at the repaired finger. "I'll position near the zero-pointer. Let the chaos redistribute the other examinees. Take the hardest hit the environment offers — something that puts me in the kind of danger that gets visible — and then use three percent to be useful to whoever's in trouble nearby."
"Deliberate exposure to danger."
"I'm good at that."
All Might was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "Don't be flippant about it."
He hadn't meant it as flippant. He'd meant it as accurate. But there was something in All Might's tone — the flatness of someone who had watched too many people be cavalier about harm and understood what that cavalcade eventually produced — and he didn't argue.
"Right," he said. "Three percent control over six weeks. That's the target."
"Seven AM Monday." All Might moved toward the road. "We add combat basics. The physical conditioning was the preparation. Now we build what you do with it."
Yami listened to his footsteps recede through the debris field and sat on the concrete until the sound disappeared entirely, and then he looked at the dumpster forty-three meters out with its new impact dent, and then he looked at the piece of paper in his jacket pocket — the All Might sticker note that had been there for two days and which he'd stopped pretending he was going to take out.
Six weeks to the exam. Three percent ceiling. One viable burst application. A Quirkless boy on the far end of this beach who didn't know the exam was coming in the way he expected.
The entry problem had become the positioning problem had become the strategy problem, and every layer of it connected to the layer below, and the layer below everything was the piece he couldn't touch without hands he didn't have.
He got up. Worked the last twenty minutes of daylight. Walked home.
The finger throbbed steadily all the way back, which was fine. It was an honest kind of pain — he'd done something that cost something, and the cost was itemized and proportionate, and he understood the whole transaction clearly. He could work with honest pain.
It was the other kind he was still learning to manage.
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