Bakugo went first.
The softball left his hand trailing plasma and covered the distance in a flat line that didn't arc so much as refuse to arc, the explosion behind it sustaining the velocity past the point where physics wanted to take over. The measuring system beeped once. The number on the display was 705.2 meters.
The class was quiet for a moment.
"That's my benchmark," Aizawa said. "Note it." He collected the ball, held it out to the next student, and ran the sequence at the pace of a man who had done this many times and found efficient rather than fast to be the relevant variable.
Yami stood at the back of the line and ran calculations.
He'd spent the month before school working through this specific problem. The Apprehension Test in canon had revealed OFA to Aizawa through Deku's softball throw — the "something that feels like a lie" observation that had been the first crack in the containment. Yami's situation was structurally different: Aizawa already had a file on him. Resurrection (details pending) was already on the quirk register, already flagged as unusual, already connected to a death-and-return on UA's own cameras. The question wasn't whether Aizawa was watching closely. He was. The question was what watching closely should see.
Todoroki's throw: an ice ramp that launched the ball on a controlled trajectory. Distance: 502 meters. Every motion precise and expending the minimum necessary.
Uraraka's throw: zero-g assist, the ball leaving her hand and continuing until it cleared the field's boundary, the display reading ∞ while the class made appreciative sounds and Uraraka bent forward with one hand at her mouth managing the nausea threshold.
Yaoyorozu created a launcher. Efficiently, two seconds of construction with the lipid shimmer visible at the surface of her forearm where the material was drawing from, and the cannon discharged the softball at a number that made the display recalibrate. She noted the result, returned to the line, and checked something off her mental list.
Yami watched the way she did it — not with the showy quality of someone performing for attention but with the focused economy of someone for whom the test had already been reduced to a problem with a specific optimal solution. The cannon had been the optimal solution. She'd implemented it and moved on.
She's better than the anime showed, he thought, filing it accurately, and then filed the whole sequence: lipid shimmer on the forearm, the two-second construction lag for complex objects at first-day effort levels, the quiet confidence of someone who knew her ability thoroughly and found no reason to underperform. Data point. Relevant later.
His name was called.
He picked up the softball from Aizawa's extended hand. Walked to the marked position. Felt the weight of twenty-one pairs of eyes — twenty classmates and the teacher, in the specific distribution of attention that came from a room of people who'd been watching each other establish capability baselines and were now waiting for the final unknown.
Four point seven percent.
He'd run the number at home the week before, backwards from the result he wanted to arrive at. A throw that would place him solidly mid-table — not last, not notable, high enough that the recorded number was defensible as an aberration of the resurrection quirk's secondary effects rather than evidence of a different power source. 68 meters. The math had produced 4.7% as the output required.
He channeled it, held it at the exact percentage with the practiced precision of six weeks of calibration work, and threw.
The ball left his hand with a crack that wasn't explosive and wasn't subtle and landed just past the 68-meter marker. The display confirmed: 68.4.
He walked back to the line.
Aizawa wrote something on the clipboard with the pen pressure of someone making a note that had weight behind it. He didn't say anything. He didn't look up from the clipboard for four full seconds, which was four seconds longer than he'd spent on any other single student's throw.
Yami slotted back into the line and kept his expression at baseline.
The physical gauntlet ran in a sequence he'd known was coming and had planned for with the same architecture as the throw: every metric calibrated toward the invisible middle. Sprint — he let the AGI allocation from the arena do its work without additional OFA boost, covering the distance in a time that was quick but not implausible for someone with above-average physical conditioning. Grip strength — straight baseline, no OFA, his actual hands after three months of hauling things far heavier than a grip dynamometer. Standing jump — three percent sustained on the takeoff, the extra height registered as good but not exceptional.
Endurance run: nine laps. He hit the wall at lap seven the way a body with genuine fatigue hit a wall rather than the way a body with power reserves hit a wall it was choosing to stop at, and his lap times on eight and nine reflected the degradation accurately.
Eleventh in sprint. Thirteenth in grip. Ninth in endurance.
The standings during the test's midpoint had Bakugo near the top of every category, followed by Todoroki, followed by a cluster of three or four where Yaoyorozu was consistently present. Yami was in the bloc below — visible as a person performing well for an unknown quantity, unremarkable among the performances that were genuinely remarkable.
Which was the point.
He was filling his water bottle at the field's equipment station when Kirishima materialized beside him with the same quality of sudden friendly presence he'd been demonstrating since homeroom — the social equivalent of a door opening, requiring no particular preparation on the other side.
"Solid showing," Kirishima said, and slapped his back. Not hard. The kind of slap that communicated I'm in your corner rather than I'm establishing physical dominance, which were two different things that sometimes used the same gesture. "You hardening under that uniform or is that just actual muscle?"
"Three months of lifting garbage," Yami said.
Kirishima's expression indicated this was the correct answer. "That's manly."
"It smelled terrible."
"Even better." He filled his own bottle and looked at the field where the remaining tests were wrapping up. "You were at the exam, right? Battle Center B?"
"Yeah."
"My center was D. Heard B had some kind of incident." He didn't ask directly — the question was in the phrasing, the open-ended offer that let Yami fill it or not.
"An incident," Yami agreed, and took a long drink of water.
Kirishima, to his credit, took the non-answer with complete grace and moved on to discussing the grip strength metric and whether hardening counted as an unfair advantage in that category specifically, a question he appeared to have genuine feelings about.
Yami listened and said reasonable things in the appropriate places and watched, from the corner of his vision, Aizawa on the observation platform above the field reviewing the clipboard with the focused attention of someone building a picture from data points.
The pen was in Aizawa's hand.
He hadn't stopped writing since the softball throw.
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