The last piece of garbage was an exercise bike with one wheel missing, the other bent at an angle that implied violence, the whole structure seized with rust into a shape that bore no resemblance to its original function. He got his hands under the frame, found the balance point the hard way on the third attempt, and hauled it across what had once been a garbage field and was now, visibly, unmistakably, a beach.
Sand. Actual sand. Grey-brown and wind-packed, stretching from the road to the waterline without interruption for the first time in longer than Yami had been alive in this body.
He set the bike at the collection point by the road and turned around.
All Might was in hero form. He hadn't told Yami he was switching — just arrived in the golden-hour light wearing the Symbol of Peace the way you put on a coat against the cold, and the size of it, the sheer reality of it after three months of the skeletal man in the oversized tracksuit, still landed with full force. The thumbs-up came with the precision of something that had been practiced ten thousand times and still meant it every single time.
Then the hero form coughed.
Not a small cough. The kind that crumpled the upper body forward, that required one hand on a concrete block for support, that ended with All Might pressing a handkerchief to his mouth and the handkerchief coming away with a red that the evening light made worse than it probably was. He straightened slowly, tucking the handkerchief away with the practiced speed of someone who had been hiding this for years.
Yami looked at the cleared beach for a moment.
"You should go," he said. "Rest."
"Tomorrow is the exam," All Might said, and his voice was still the hero voice, carrying in a way that his true form's voice never quite did. "You're ready."
"I know." He looked at the water. The sun was going into it at the low angle that turned the surface gold, and the cleared beach caught the light and held it, and it was, objectively, a good view. "You're going to come."
"To observe. I have an arrangement with the staff." A pause. "I don't intend to intervene."
"I know."
He walked home while the light finished its descent, and his arms were sore in the specific deeply-located way that had become so familiar across twelve weeks that he'd stopped calling it pain and started calling it baseline. Sixty-two push-ups on the day he'd started. Today he'd done four sets of twenty pull-ups between hauling sessions and considered stopping because his lats wanted him to, not because his will had given out. The gap between those two states was the whole of three months' work measured in muscle fiber.
[PASSIVE TRAINING LOG — FINAL DAGOBAH SESSION: CUMULATIVE TOTALS — STR 12.1 | END 11.6 | AGI 11.4 | DUR 10.8]
He checked the overlay on the walk home, reading it the way he read anything now — peripherally, between thoughts, without disrupting the forward motion. The numbers had plateaued in the last two weeks, the rapid early gains giving way to the slower accumulation of a body that had adapted to its current load and needed new stimulus to keep moving. OFA would be that stimulus, eventually. Right now it was information about where he stood going into tomorrow.
Slightly above peak-trained human across the board. In a room full of quirk users, that was still near the bottom.
He wasn't planning to win the exam through stats.
The apartment was clean in the way that apartments became clean when someone had nothing left to postpone. He'd done the dishes. He'd put the newspaper — the one from his first morning, with the circled entrance exam date — into the drawer rather than leaving it on the wall, because looking at it had started feeling like superstition and he didn't have the tolerance for superstition tonight.
He sat at the table with the UA orientation paperwork he'd received via mail two weeks ago and went through the practical exam format one more time.
Urban arena. Multiple battle centers, each containing a different candidate pool. Robots in three point-value categories deployed throughout. Zero-pointers deployed late, one per center, designed to overwhelm rather than to be fought. Rescue points awarded secretly for aid given to fellow examinees — the scoring rubric not shared with candidates, the category not officially acknowledged.
His villain point projection: 20 to 28, depending on robot density in Battle Center B and how the OFA output held up through sustained use. That was not a passing score on its own. The top scorers in canon entrance exams had accumulated 75 or more points through high-efficiency quirk use. His 3% OFA could drop one-pointer robots reliably, struggle against two-pointers, and handle three-pointers if he was strategic about approach vectors.
He was not going to win the villain points category.
He drew the arena layout from memory — it was published in UA's publicly available entrance exam overview documents, which he'd read twice at the library and once from the orientation packet. He marked the zero-pointer deployment zones. Marked the chokepoints where struggling examinees would cluster when it appeared. Marked the distance between those chokepoints and the exit gates.
The plan's keystone was the zero-pointer.
When it arrived — and it would arrive, because this was the UA entrance exam and the zero-pointer was structural, not optional — it would move through the arena creating a zone of maximum panic. Examinees would flee. Some would be too slow, too injured, too exhausted from the prior combat phase. The zero-pointer would not stop for them. That was the moment.
A death that happened while putting his body between the zero-pointer and an examinee was not an accidental death. It was not a dramatic death. It was a classified death — the system would log the zero-pointer as a new killer, an A-tier or above by any reasonable estimation, which meant the fragment drop probability was the highest it had been since the Sludge Villain. Not a null roll. Real odds.
He'd also, on the way to the floor, be publicly demonstrating the resurrection quirk in front of UA's full camera coverage, every examiner on the panel, and several hundred witnesses. Enhanced physical recovery would not cover coming back to life. That cover story ended tomorrow.
He'd thought about this for six weeks. The conclusion hadn't changed.
"I die and come back. That's my quirk. I can't control when — it's a passive resurrection, not a toggle. Full recovery. No special boost."
Simple. True enough to survive scrutiny. Complicated enough to invite further questions, which he would answer in the specific way of someone managing an extraordinary situation with practiced calm.
All Might already knew. UA would know by tomorrow afternoon. The rest followed from there.
He checked the alarm on his phone — the cracked-screen one he'd found in the school bag on his first morning, which had survived three months of beach work and two drops off a refrigerator and still functioned if he held it at the right angle. Three alarms: five-thirty, five-forty-five, six AM. Redundancy for a morning he couldn't afford to oversleep.
He put the papers in order. Set out tomorrow's clothes on the chair by the door. Ate the last of the rice standing at the stove because he'd forgotten to sit down and only noticed when the bowl was empty.
The OFA hum was low and present in the background of his body, the way it always was now — not intrusive, just there, like white noise from a machine you learned to stop hearing but would notice immediately if it stopped. He stood in the kitchen with the empty bowl and paid attention to it for a moment: the specific quality of warmth that lived in the shoulder and flowed outward when he asked it to. Still strange, after all this time, that something this large could feel this quiet when he wasn't pushing it.
In eight hours he walked through UA's gates. In twelve, if the plan held, he was going to let the largest robot in the exam run him over.
He put the bowl in the sink and went to lie down and ran contingencies until the calculation stopped producing new variables and exhaustion finished the job.
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