Aizawa didn't need coffee.
He had been standing for half an hour in front of the monitoring station, His eyes moved between screens at a steady, measured rhythm, but every time they passed screen seventeen, they stayed a moment longer than necessary.
"Tomorrow. At dawn."
He said it while watching screen after screen, the sentence was still turning in the back of his mind like an engine that wouldn't switch off.
He moved his gaze to screen three.
In Section 3, three of Ectoplasm's clones surrounded Bakugo from different angles at the same time. The clones weren't attacking so much as closing in, stepping forward, stepping back, disrupting his rhythm. Bakugo wasn't rattled, but he couldn't find a clean opening either. He shouted and launched an explosion toward the left clone, which evaporated and reappeared from behind in the same second.
"Be faster in your decision," one of the clones said, its tone completely free of provocation. "The time between seeing an opportunity and deciding to exploit it is the distance where heroes die."
Bakugo didn't reply. But his eyes narrowed slightly.
Aizawa shifted to screen twelve.
Midnight was standing on an upper platform monitoring three students at once. The section consisted of multiple floors with movable walls that shifted every two minutes. The goal wasn't combat, but finding, finding the right path in a constantly changing environment without wasting energy at every turn.
Uraraka used her Quirk the moment the corridor narrowed, lifting herself and bypassing the moving wall from above. She arrived faster than the others, but Midnight wrote a note: the solution was available from below as well, at a lower cost.
Yaoyorozu stopped before every shift and thought before moving. She was creating small tools to help determine the direction of the next corridor. Slow, but precise. Midnight wrote: precision is excellent, but speed will decide it in the real exam.
Jiro walked in complete silence, striking the walls with faint pulses through her quirk and listening to what bounced back, the way a bat reads space with sound. Midnight raised an eyebrow and wrote: this is unexpected.
Aizawa moved to screen eight.
Cementoss raised a concrete wall in front of Iida every time the latter opened a path. Iida accelerated; the wall rose. Iida changed direction; another wall appeared. The problem wasn't Iida's speed, but that his speed made him collide with what he couldn't see because he was moving faster than his reading of the environment.
"Slow down by twenty percent," Cementoss said.
Iida stopped. "But slowing down means..."
"It means you arrive a second late, but you arrive. Colliding with a wall does not count as arriving."
Iida fell silent. Then he slowed down.
In the adjacent section, Tokoyami and Dark Shadow moved together through corridors so narrow only one body could pass. The problem was that Dark Shadow is an independent entity in a space that doesn't allow independence. It struck the walls and fell behind its owner. Tokoyami tried to shrink it, but the entity resisted by its own nature. Ectoplasm watched from a distance and wrote a brief note: the most important training here is understanding, not control.
Then Aizawa returned to screen seventeen.
It always pulled him back.
The silence in Section 17 was different.
It wasn't the silence of someone hesitating. It was the silence of someone reading.
Zoro stood on a suspension bridge no wider than two shoulders, with a void extending ten meters below him. He didn't look down. He looked ahead, where the bridges branched in three directions, each leading to a different platform connecting to other corridors leading to still more.
He closed his eyes for a single moment.
He wasn't trying to see. He was trying to hear. The pulse of the place. The weight of the air in each direction. The slight difference in the sound bouncing off the right bridge compared to the middle one told him the right led to a wider open space. The middle was more resonant, meaning more enclosed.
He opened his eyes and moved left.
Not the fastest path, but the one that let you know what was behind you as you advanced.
On the monitoring screen, Cementoss stopped writing for a moment and followed Zoro's movement. He couldn't quite identify what he was seeing. The student wasn't using a Quirk. He wasn't flying, accelerating, or changing the environment. He was just walking. But the way he walked in a place like this made the observer feel the section was adapting to him, not the other way around.
Zoro crossed a four-meter-long thin beam without looking at his feet once. He reached the first platform, assessed what was in front of him, and drew Wado Ichimonji from its sheath in one slow, calm motion.
No enemy. But he wanted to feel how the sword behaved in this space. A single sword extends a meter and a half. In a corridor a meter and a quarter wide, any horizontal strike would hit both walls. Possible, but he needed a different angle. He tried a vertical strike, more suitable. Then a diagonal strike at forty-five degrees, better still.
He returned the sword to its sheath and continued.
Aizawa kept his eyes on screen seventeen. The night before, the answer had been three words. "Tomorrow. At dawn." And this morning, he still couldn't fully identify why watching this particular student carried a different weight than watching the others.
Then he heard footsteps approaching from behind him.
"Amazing how he makes the hardest section look like a daily stroll."
Aizawa turned. All Might was standing behind him, one hand on the door frame, his now-exhausted body in simple civilian clothes, his smile present as usual, but his eyes were tracking the screen.
"Why are you here?" Aizawa said in a tone that carried neither welcome nor coldness. "You're still in the recovery phase."
"Sitting alone gets boring." All Might said it simply. "And I'm still a teacher. I want to see how they develop."
Aizawa looked at him for a moment, then returned his gaze to the screens. "Don't interfere with the training."
"Of course not," All Might said. Then he added after a short silence: "Unless I feel there's something worthwhile."
Aizawa didn't answer.
All Might walked slowly between the sections. None of the teachers stopped him. His presence had a strange effect on the students who saw him. Each one accelerated slightly without realizing it, as if their bodies wanted to prove something.
He stopped at Midoriya's section.
The student was training on concentrating a single flow in his right arm only while maintaining full body movement, partial control. He had been improving clearly since the Kamino events, but the effect on his hands was still visible in how he gripped the beams after every exercise.
"Young Midoriya."
Midoriya turned quickly and found All Might standing there, watching him with a calm gaze that held no prior judgment.
"All Might!"
"Continue. Don't stop for me." All Might sat on the adjacent beam with a movement that showed how different his body had become from what it once was. "Tell me. When you release the flow in one arm, where does the energy you don't use go?"
Midoriya thought. "It stays in the body... sometimes it leaks into other parts unintentionally."
"That's the problem," All Might said. "Energy that isn't directed doesn't disappear. It looks for an outlet. And the closest outlet is what you use most." He paused. "Think about what that means. Don't answer now. Think during training."
Midoriya remained standing, his eyes moving like someone trying to assemble puzzle pieces scattered in distant places. He was thinking about his legs, about the movement he had neglected while focusing everything on his fists.
All Might walked on.
When All Might reached Section 17, Zoro had finished assessing the space and was sitting on the edge of an upper platform, sharpening Wado Ichimonji with a small stone he always carried in his pocket.
All Might looked at him from below the bridge for a moment, then climbed up.
Zoro didn't hear him climb, but he sensed him two steps before he arrived.
"Were you expecting someone other than me?" All Might said as he reached the platform.
"No." Zoro replied without raising his head from the sword. "I wasn't expecting anyone. But you're here now."
All Might sat on the other side of the platform and looked at the sword.
"Wado Ichimonji. The sword Kenji gave you." He said it in a way that showed he knew the details. "You take good care of it."
Zoro stopped sharpening for a moment, then returned to it. "It's a duty."
A short silence followed. Then All Might said, "How do you find Gamma?"
"Better than the classroom."
All Might laughed softly. "If Aizawa heard you, he'd take that personally."
"It's not an insult. The classroom is necessary. But this place has something real about it."
All Might looked at the suspension bridges and intertwined pillars. "I enjoyed what I saw from you today. You read the place before you move. Most students move and then try to read."
Zoro didn't reply.
"Zoro." All Might turned to him directly. "A very important guest will come to you. Tomorrow at dawn. Someone who came specifically to oversee the development of your abilities."
Zoro stopped sharpening. He placed the sword on his thigh and looked at All Might calmly.
"Yoroimusha," he said after a moment. "The hero who gave me Yubashiri in the exam."
All Might shook his head slowly without confirming or denying.
Zoro thought, then said slowly, "Or Shimotsuki."
All Might went quiet.
"But that's impossible," Zoro added, his voice carrying a calm certainty. "The old man doesn't leave the dojo. What I saw of him in Hosu was enough to tell me he chose to stay away. No way he'd come to a place like UA in the middle of all this noise."
All Might looked at him with an expression that couldn't quite be read. "Don't think too much. Continue training. Tomorrow you will know."
All Might stood slowly and adjusted his clothes. Before he started descending, he stopped.
"One thing. What you're being trained on in Gamma is fitness, speed, and endurance. That's what others see and measure." His tone turned more serious. "What you and your guest will work on together is something entirely different. The first strengthens the body. The second straightens what is inside it."
He didn't wait for a response and descended.
Zoro remained alone on the platform. He looked at Wado Ichimonji in his hand. The sharpening had been finished for a long time, but he was still holding the stone, lost in what All Might had said.
As the sun neared the horizon, Aizawa announced the end of the first training session in Gym Gamma. The students emerged with exhaustion written on their faces, some limping, others clutching their shoulders, but the determination still shone in their eyes.
Everyone returned to Heights Alliance. The atmosphere in the dining hall was unusually quiet, everyone eating quickly before escaping to their rooms for rest. Midoriya sat in a corner, staring at his plate without eating, his mind still replaying All Might's words. He was moving his leg under the table involuntarily, as if trying to sense the energy his teacher had spoken of.
Zoro ate his meal in silence as usual, then headed straight to his room. He didn't speak to anyone and showed no sign of fatigue or anxiety. But once inside, he didn't go to sleep immediately. He sat in a meditative position with his three swords placed before him, preparing for the next day.
The night passed slowly for everyone.
At 4:00 AM, an hour before the first sliver of light would appear, the lights in Principal Nezu's office were already on.
Nezu sat behind his small desk with a cup of tea in front of him that he hadn't touched yet. All Might sat in the corner in silence, watching the clock. Aizawa stood by the window with crossed arms, watching the path leading to the main building.
Outside, in the silent corridor, the sound of footsteps was heard.
Slow. Steady. Neither rushing nor hesitating.
The door was knocked once.
"Come in," Nezu said.
The door opened, and Shimotsuki Kozaburo entered.
His back bent with the weight of years, but his step was not that of someone who needed support. His face, carved by decades, carried a calm that didn't resemble fatigue but rather something that had solidified through years until it became nature, not a decision. His eyes were strikingly alert.
Aizawa looked at the old man with a sharpness that masked deeper questions. Who was this man who arrived at dawn? The weight Nezu and All Might had placed around his arrival, and the pressure this old man's presence carried, spoke of something larger than a retired swordsman coming to oversee training.
Shimotsuki turned toward Nezu. "Where is the boy?"
"Training outside," Nezu said with a calm smile.
In the back courtyard of the dormitory, Zoro had already begun his training as usual.
Dawn hadn't arrived yet, but he could feel its approach in the way the air shifted from the heavy stillness of night to something lighter and sharper. He was training on holding all three swords together while maintaining balance, a position requiring immense mental and physical focus.
He heard the footsteps behind him a moment before they arrived.
He stopped, returning the swords to their sheaths one by one without turning. Then he turned slowly.
Shimotsuki Kozaburo stood ten meters away. A distance behind him, Aizawa stood with crossed arms, watching the scene in silence.
Shimotsuki looked at Zoro. He didn't say good morning or ask how he was.
"Your balance is poor," the old man said coldly.
Zoro raised an eyebrow. "Poor?"
"You rely on the strength of your arms to hold the swords. Swords are not held with arms. Swords are held with the soul. And if your soul is scattered among three, you will fall in the first real confrontation."
Aizawa stepped forward, cutting through the tension. "Zoro, this guest will oversee your special training. Staying here will disturb the others." He then directed his words to Shimotsuki: "Let's go to the area Principal Nezu has designated. There's an isolated space within UA's walls, surrounded by forest and small mountains, that will be perfectly suitable."
Shimotsuki nodded slowly. "Lead the way."
The three walked through UA's silent corridors under the growing light of dawn. The area Nezu had chosen was a small valley hidden behind Gym Gamma, characterized by rugged terrain, massive rocks, and a small waterfall pouring into a peaceful lake.
Shimotsuki stopped in the middle of the open space and looked at Zoro.
"Here, no one will hear you as you scream in pain." He paused. "Draw your sword. Show me how you fall."
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