UA's main gate was larger than the screen had prepared him for.
This was the recurring problem with this world — not the heroes, not the villains, not the power system, all of which matched their screen representations with reasonable fidelity. It was the scale. The gate rose two stories above the pedestrian approach, the UA emblem embedded in the arch in a bronze that had been polished so many times it glowed, and the line of incoming examinees stretching back from it toward the station had the particular quality of people who had been training for something long enough that the anticipation had gone past excitement into something quieter and more private.
He joined the line at the back and kept pace as it moved forward.
The faces registered before the names did — visual input processed against the internal catalogue he'd been carrying since December, and the matches arrived with the low-level surreality of someone who'd learned geography from a map and was now standing inside it. A girl in pink with gravity-quirk-smooth movement who caught herself mid-stumble without touching the ground. A tall figure with glasses and chopped arm movements who walked like every meter of space was a navigation problem to be solved rather than territory to be crossed.
And ahead, shoulders cutting through the crowd like the crowd was an inconvenience the city had inexplicably placed in his path: blond hair, hands shoved into pockets, every line of his body transmitting the specific message that proximity was at the pedestrian's own risk.
Yami stayed in his lane. He was not going to manufacture a Bakugo interaction before he had any defensible reason to know who Bakugo was.
The gravity-quirk girl came up beside him near the gate entrance, reading a folded page of orientation notes with the focused energy of someone making use of every remaining second. She nearly stepped into a crack in the pavement and corrected without looking, feet lifting slightly, whole body floating upward two centimeters before settling back to ground. The adaptation was unconscious, the quirk responding before the brain consciously processed the hazard.
She noticed him noticing.
"Sorry," she said. "I do that when I'm nervous."
"The zero-gravity correction? Don't be sorry." He nodded toward the gate. "Useful in there."
She smiled — the open, unguarded kind that belonged to someone who smiled at strangers because she hadn't yet accumulated enough reasons not to. "I'm Uraraka."
"Ichigo." He let the line carry them through the gate. "Good luck in there."
"You too!" She fell back slightly as they entered the main approach, absorbed into her own pre-exam ritual of reviewing the notes, and he kept walking.
There she is, he thought. That's a real person who smiles at strangers and practices her landing corrections while nervous. The gap between screen-character and actual-human continued its process of closing, and he continued his process of letting it close without editorializing.
Present Mic was exactly as advertised.
The orientation hall could have seated twice the number present and still felt deliberately cavernous, the stage lighting arranged to give maximum theatrical benefit to a man who had built an entire career on maximum theatrical benefit. The explainer sequence — robot categories, point values, arena layout, time limit — was delivered at a volume that suggested everyone in the room was slightly hard of hearing and also standing at a concert.
Yami listened with the fraction of his attention the information required, which was small, and used the rest to locate Battle Center B on the arena diagram overhead and re-confirm the deployment zone geometry. The diagram matched his memory exactly. The zero-pointer appeared at the end of the timer countdown, deployed from a sealed gate in the north section of the arena.
Confirmed. North gate. Deployment window: final three minutes.
He'd enter from the south. Work east and west as the robot density allowed. When the north gate opened, move north. Find someone in the zero-pointer's path. Get in front of them.
Iida's hand was in the air two rows ahead, arm at a precise angle. The complaint about the brochure's inadequate explanation was slightly different from the one Yami expected — directed at a different target, a different muttering examinee, someone he didn't recognize who'd apparently been working through the math aloud in the row behind him. The correction was formal and not unkind and entirely Iida. Yami allowed himself a small moment of recognition at the absolute predictability of this.
He opened the orientation pamphlet and looked at the UA emblem printed on the cover page. Held it for a moment.
His previous life's version of this moment had been a lunch break. A laptop on a desk cleared of everything except the bento container. The door to the breakroom closed so the sound didn't bother anyone. He'd watched this exact scene — the orientation hall, Present Mic at the podium, the crowd of nervous fifteen-year-olds — on a seven-inch screen while eating cold tamagoyaki at a company cafeteria table alone, because his work schedule and everyone else's lunch schedule had stopped overlapping sometime around the second year.
He put the pamphlet in his bag.
The orientation wrapped with the standard UA encouragement — Plus Ultra delivered with enough conviction to actually land, which was probably the whole point of hiring someone with Present Mic's specific skill set for this particular speech. The crowd started moving.
Yami let it move past him. Let the surge clear from the immediate space. Picked up his bag and joined the tail end of the flow toward the arena assignments, walking at a pace that arrived at Battle Center B's staging area with three minutes to spare and two hundred other people to not bump into.
The staging area was loud in the assembled way of people doing different pre-combat rituals simultaneously — some stretching, some talking, some very still. He found a position near the gate and stood in it and did not stretch because he'd already done that at five AM and doing it again would be displacement activity.
His hands were fine. Wrapped at the knuckles with athletic tape he'd bought from the convenience store yesterday — not because they needed protection, but because bare knuckles against metal edges accumulated microcuts that distracted attention at the wrong moments, and he'd learned this the hard way in week three of beach training.
[SYSTEM — EXAM DAY: OFA STATUS: 3% CEILING — ACTIVE. PASSIVE STATS UPDATED. TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS: 1. FRAGMENT INVENTORY: 0/5.]
One entry in the ledger. One null roll. This was the day that changed both of those numbers.
The gate in front of him was the height of a building, metal, designed to be impressive before it opened and cleared before anything else could be. It began to move with the mechanical grind of something very large in a very well-maintained track, and the arena beyond it was a city block in miniature, mock storefronts and intersections and alley mouths and overhead walkways, the whole constructed environment built to test a specific question: what do you do when the environment is trying to kill you?
He'd spent three months preparing a specific answer.
The gate finished its arc and the examinees pushed forward and Yami walked into Battle Center B at his own pace, and the first one-pointer robot came around the corner of a mock convenience store before he'd covered thirty meters.
He adjusted his grip, channeled three percent, and went to meet it.
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