They'd tried four times in three weeks.
Same four guys. Same corner by the fire door. Same general energy of people who'd decided intimidation was a career path and were not reconsidering.
'They're not going to change the plan,' he thought, watching them drift into position from across the hallway. 'Which means either they're committed or they're not smart enough to know it's not working. Could be both.'
He kept walking. They followed.
The corner came up. He stopped in it because stopping was easier than making them chase him, and he wasn't in a hurry.
The lead one — Fujiwara, third year, quirk that hardened his skin — stepped close and let the size difference do the talking. He was thirteen and a half. Fujiwara was fifteen, significantly larger, and currently blocking a decent amount of light.
'He also has a 0.9-second tell before full activation,' he noted. 'Left shoulder rolls inward. If I ever need to use that, I will.'
He didn't need to use it.
"Walk away, Midoriya."
He looked at Fujiwara. Fujiwara looked back. He waited.
Fujiwara did the shoulder shove — the standard next step when looking didn't produce the right output. He rocked back one step, absorbed it, came back to the same position.
Another shove. Same result.
Fujiwara's crew looked at each other. Then back at Fujiwara.
'They're performing this for each other as much as for me,' he thought. 'If I weren't here they'd still need something to perform. That's not a me problem.'
He said: "You done?"
Fujiwara's mouth opened. Closed. They left.
....
Fifty-odd thirteen-year-olds sorting themselves into teams for dodgeball — which in a class with active quirks meant it was loosely dodgeball.
He'd positioned himself toward the back. Middle distance. Good coverage, low profile.
Then Harada — round kid, wind quirk, genuinely terrible aim — wound up and absolutely wrecked a throw. It went sideways. Badly. Arcing toward the left side of the room at speed.
Toward his head.
He caught it.
Weight shift. Wrist snap. Ball stopped.
The class moved on. He started to drop it back into play — then he registered Tanaka-sensei.
Mid-forties, former pro-hero support staff. Had been running this rotation for twelve years. Said the same six things every session and meant all of them.
He was looking at the catch.
Not at the dodgeball. At the catch.
"Nice reflexes, Midoriya."
'Here we go.'
"Lucky," he said.
Tanaka-sensei held the look for exactly half a second too long. Not suspicious. Just startled.
"Sure," the teacher said, and moved on.
He filed it.
....
Flagged: Tanaka-sensei. Incident type: reflex visibility. Confidence: low. Priority: monitor.
He ran this kind of debrief the way some people journaled. Not on paper — in his head, during the walk home, structured.
What had he shown? A fast catch. Not a quirk. Just fast for thirteen. Fast in a way that didn't match the public file he'd built on himself.
'In BC I spent twenty years invisible specifically because nobody thought quirkless meant capable,' he thought. 'Worked right up until it didn't.'
The wind off the canal was cold. He turned his collar up.
'The rules here are the same. Invisible has a shelf life. At some point the gap between what I am and what I look like gets too wide to maintain.'
A cat watched him from a wall.
'Not today, though.'
....
Fujiwara tried again on Thursday.
Same corner. He was getting tired of the corner. Not emotionally — logistically. It was taking time out of a day that had other things in it.
This time Fujiwara had a script. He'd clearly rehearsed it. Midoriya hadn't been showing proper respect. Midoriya had a problem. Midoriya needed to understand how things worked.
He listened.
Fujiwara ran out of script after about ninety seconds.
'There it is,' he thought. 'The full catalog. No new information.'
He said: "Are you finished?"
Fujiwara grabbed his shirt.
This was new.
He looked down at the hand. Looked back up. Waited.
'Okay,' he thought. 'Different kind of day.'
He didn't fight. He didn't run. He stood there with a hand gripping his collar and looked at Fujiwara the way you look at a math problem you've already solved — waiting to see if the other party wanted to show their work.
Fujiwara let go.
One of the others said something. Just noise to fill the gap. Fujiwara walked. The rest followed.
....
He got home. Inko had made rice and fish. He ate.
She asked about school. "Fine," he said.
"Were there any problems today?"
"No."
She looked at him. Trying to read something she didn't have vocabulary for.
He handed her the soy sauce before she reached for it.
She took it without asking how he'd known.
....
His debrief for the week had two entries.
Tanaka-sensei: one incident, unresolved, watch for follow-up.
Fujiwara: shirt-grab introduced, de-escalated without engagement. Pattern holding, but escalation trajectory suggests it won't hold past next month.
He kept returning to the second entry.
'The shirt-grab is a threshold,' he thought. 'After that it's hands, then weight, then something with a prop. I've seen this progression. It's the same in every world — the same few beats before someone decides words weren't enough.'
He wasn't afraid of the progression.
That was the problem, in a way. He was built wrong for this situation. A normal thirteen-year-old would have reported it by now, or found a different route to school, or simply broken under months of it and changed behavior enough to fall off their radar.
He was doing none of those things.
'What I am is not thirteen.'
The walk home tomorrow would look the same as today. Same corner. Same four guys. He'd handle it the same way.
For now.
But the clock on that was running. At some point the gap between what he looked like and what he was would get wide enough to notice. The choice was his — when, and how much to show.
He looked at his hands in the low light.
Still not where they needed to be. Two more years, roughly.
He shut the lamp off.
'When do I get to be exactly what I am.'
He didn't have an answer yet.
TO BE CONTINUED