Aizawa wrote SPORTS FESTIVAL on the board with the energy of a man completing mandatory administrative communications and having no personal investment in the information he was conveying.
The class's response was not similarly reserved.
Ashido was already out of her seat — not fully, she was technically in contact with the chair, but the contact was nominal. Kaminari had produced his phone before Aizawa's marker had left the board. Kirishima's expression was doing the thing it did when he encountered something he was going to commit to fully and without reservation.
Yami sat in Seat 20 and watched the room process it and filed the information in the column he'd already built for it.
Sports Festival. National broadcast. Obstacle race, cavalry battle, tournament elimination. Scouts, sponsors, agencies watching. The event that had, in the original timeline, made certain futures and ended certain trajectories and given Todoroki Shoto a context in which a green-haired boy had screamed something important at him across a fire he'd spent ten years refusing to touch.
The green-haired boy was in General Studies.
The variable it had replaced was the person currently sitting in Seat 20.
Todoroki appeared at his shoulder at lunch with the specific social timing of someone who had decided the moment existed and moved into it.
"I'm going to beat you at the Festival."
The sentence was not aggressive. It had the flat delivery of most things Todoroki said — the information-transfer quality that was native to him, the tone that could convey the temperature is seventeen degrees and I'm issuing a personal challenge in identical register. He was looking at Yami with the expression that had appeared in the locker room after the Battle Trial — the one that lingered a second longer than environmental observation required.
"That's a specific goal," Yami said.
"Yes."
"Why me specifically?"
Todoroki looked at him. "You fought beside me at USJ. You saved Aizawa. You died in the plaza and came back." A pause. "I want to know what you actually are." He said it with the directness of someone for whom the question was practical rather than philosophical. "Beating you is the clearest way to find out."
Yami ate a piece of chicken. "You're going to use your right side."
Todoroki's jaw tightened, fractionally.
"For me," Yami clarified. "Not your left. You'll decide I don't warrant the fire." He let that sit. "You might be right."
Todoroki looked at him for three more seconds with the expression of someone updating a file in real time. Then he collected his tray and left.
Rivalry established, Yami noted, with the particular quality of a plan intersecting an unexpected variable and finding the variable potentially useful.
The Sports Festival strategy was simpler than the USJ strategy in the ways that mattered and more complicated in the ways that didn't. Meta-knowledge gave him the obstacle course's layout — the minefield, the robots, the gaps, the precise geography of a course designed for hero students with widely varied abilities. He'd be able to navigate it efficiently without OFA beyond baseline, which was the ideal outcome. No cameras catching a percentage above what had already been publicly demonstrated.
Cavalry battle: team selection was the relevant variable. He needed people whose abilities complemented his concealment strategy rather than people who were simply powerful. Momo for creation-based adaptability. Tokoyami because Dark Shadow was a deterrent that required no explanation and provided both defense and offense. And one more — someone who could contribute without drawing attention to what Yami himself was doing.
Tournament bracket: the objective was to advance enough to be seen, lose before the final, and specifically lose to Todoroki in a way that forced the fire out. Canon had Deku performing this function. Deku was not in the hero course. Todoroki was going to use his right side exclusively unless someone pushed hard enough and specifically enough that the choice became untenable. Yami could be that person — and losing to Todoroki while making him work for it was the correct outcome for everyone involved, including Yami's own exposure profile.
He was thinking through the bracket permutations when the motion in the General Studies window caught his eye.
Deku was in the yard below on the pull-up bar. His hands were wrapped with the athletic tape that Yami had first seen on them in December at Dagobah — the hands of someone who had been hauling their own weight against bars and grips for months, the skin pattern of sustained upper-body training. He was wearing weighted gloves, homemade, the kind of construction that involved materials from a hardware store and a design that prioritized function over appearance.
The gloves looked like something a person built when they couldn't yet afford the equipment they needed but couldn't afford to stop training either.
Yami watched him do eight pull-ups, rest, do seven more. The form was better than it had been on the beach in January. The form had been improving since the beach in January. Whatever path Midoriya Izuku was walking, he was walking it with the same quality of attention he'd brought to every notebook page Yami had caught glimpses of from a distance — total and specific and organized toward a point he hadn't reached yet.
He's going to compete in the Sports Festival, Yami thought. From General Studies. He's going to use it as a transfer application.
The wave through the chain-link had happened two weeks ago. They hadn't had another.
He turned back to his tray and the bracket calculations, and the pull-up count from the General Studies yard continued at the edge of his peripheral vision for another twenty minutes until the lunch bell called both of them away to their respective tracks.
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