A week had passed.
Not a week like any other. Seven days that cut something old away and planted something new in its place. Gym Gamma hadn't changed. Its concrete walls and suspension bridges hanging over the void were exactly as they had always been. But the people walking through it were not.
And there was one pattern that remained constant through all seven days.
Every dawn, before any student opened their eyes, Zoro had already disappeared from Heights Alliance. Nobody noticed his absence at that hour. But every morning, when the students arrived at Gym Gamma and looked at the monitoring screens, screen seventeen was never empty. It showed a teenage swordsman moving between the suspended bridges as though he were calculating the entire structure with each step. The sweat on his neck made clear that this was not the beginning of his day. It was the middle of it.
Midoriya saw the screen on the first day and wondered. On the second he understood. By the third he had stopped wondering.
Todoroki said on the fourth, watching the screen without any particular expression, "Every morning the same thing. At least two hours ahead of us."
Nobody responded. But Bakugo pressed his gauntlets and turned toward his section with slightly faster steps than usual.
In Section 7, Midoriya found what he had been searching for. It wasn't a big moment of clarity. It was a kick. One kick with his right foot that released a portion of One For All at the precise instant his reinforced boot made contact with the concrete barrier in front of him. The sound that came out wasn't the crack of an explosion. It was the sound of something breaking quietly. The barrier split down the middle. Midoriya stood staring at his two undamaged hands, then opened his notebook and wrote with frantic speed.
In Section 3, Bakugo found his answer in precision rather than power. Instead of the wide explosions that filled a space, he started testing the release concentrated at a single specific point at the front of his right fist rather than the full palm. Smaller. Faster. A thousand times more piercing. He erased one of Ectoplasm's clones in a third of a second without it costing his wrists anything. Ectoplasm didn't comment, but he wrote a long note.
Todoroki faced his section's moving walls differently on the fifth day. He didn't stop them with ice and didn't melt them with fire. He started with ice on the left and fire on the right in one circular motion that created an air pressure difference behind it, obstructing the wall's movement without touching it at all. Iida looked at him then at the wall. "Pressure differential from opposing temperature forces," he said with absolute seriousness. "That's pure physics."
Iida himself had been working on his own problem with measured patience. The forward sensing system Power Loader had built arrived on the third day. It malfunctioned twice on the fourth. By the fifth, Iida had adapted to it enough that his collisions with walls dropped from seven times to twice. On the seventh day, while Power Loader watched in complete silence, he didn't collide once.
Kirishima found the change in fluidity rather than hardness. The new flexibility built into his suit allowed his hardening to emerge from within the movement rather than at its endpoint. He hit a wall with the front of his hardened shoulder instead of his palm. The wall gave. His hand felt nothing. "It feels like the rock started moving with me!" Kirishima shouted, the grin on his face visible even through the shadow.
In Section 12, Yaoyorozu began improving in speed more than precision. On the first day she needed twelve seconds to produce a hand guard. By the seventh it was four. Midnight stopped writing "Precision is excellent, speed will decide it." In its place she wrote: "Starting to decide it."
Tokoyami approached his problem in a way nobody had anticipated. Instead of forcing Dark Shadow to comply in narrow corridors or trying to shrink it by strength alone, he started talking to it. Not in loud words, but in a low tone like someone calming a restless creature. Dark Shadow settled. Then shrank on its own. Then moved through the corridor with ease. When Ectoplasm asked him about the technique afterward, Tokoyami said, "I don't know if this is control. But it walks with me now."
And screen seventeen stayed lit longer than any other.
The training with Shimotsuki began at four in the morning, before any trace of sunlight.
On the first day of the week, Zoro mastered coating Wado Ichimonji alone.
On the third, the coating began extending to Sandai Kitetsu with the same density.
On the fifth, at four twenty-four in the morning, Zoro drew all three swords at once and closed his eyes. Shimotsuki stood five meters away without moving.
Then the darkness appeared.
Not on one sword. On all three at the same moment, with the same density, without any of them trembling.
Shimotsuki looked at the swords. Then at Zoro's face. Then at the swords again.
"Do you feel any drain?"
"Less than I expected."
"Hold it for two minutes."
He held it for three.
Shimotsuki sat on the rock across from him and murmured in a very quiet voice. "You are gifted, boy. You learned in one week what most swordsmen spend years reaching this point."
Zoro didn't reply. But he sheathed the swords very slowly.
On the sixth day, the second phase began.
"Close your eyes."
The small valley surrounded by forest on all sides. The cold dawn breeze moving leaves in a barely audible whisper. The sound of the waterfall in the background. And Shimotsuki standing somewhere.
"Listen. Not to what makes sound. Listen to what almost makes sound."
Zoro didn't understand at first. Then he placed his hand on Wado Ichimonji's hilt without drawing it. And stayed still.
In the second minute, he noticed something. The air near the direction of the waterfall was moving differently. It wasn't a sound. It was an anticipation.
When he opened his eyes, Shimotsuki was standing directly behind him at a distance of one meter, his palm raised in the air as though he had been about to strike.
"How did you know?"
"I didn't know." Zoro stood. "But the air changed."
Shimotsuki nodded. "That is the beginning."
What happened on the morning of the seventh day was different from anything before.
It wasn't theoretical training. In the middle of a combat movement session, when Shimotsuki was pressing him with unusual intensity, something occurred that Zoro hadn't planned. A single movement. An automatic response to what he had sensed a fraction of a second earlier, too fast for any eye to track.
Three swords. One timing. An angle he had never tried before.
Shimotsuki stopped.
He said nothing for several seconds.
Then he said slowly, "Do that again."
"No."
Shimotsuki raised an eyebrow.
"That one is for the exam." Zoro sheathed all three swords.
Shimotsuki looked at him, and in his eyes was something Zoro had never seen in anyone's eyes before. Not admiration. Something deeper than that. Something that resembled relief.
"Fine," the old man said. "Keep it."
On the evening of the seventh day, Aizawa gathered Class 1-A in the large common room of the dorm.
He carried no tablet and opened no file. He stood in front of them with his hands in his pockets and his eyes sweeping the room.
"The provisional hero license is not a test of power." He started without preamble. "Nobody in that arena cares how strong your explosions are or how deep your ice goes. What matters is one decision: can you protect someone who doesn't belong to our world in a situation that gives you no time to think?"
He paused.
"If you walk in with only a combat mindset, you will fail. That is an order, not a warning."
In the silence that followed, All Might spoke for the first time since he had sat in the corner. His voice was quieter than they were used to.
"Years ago, I failed a similar exam the first time. Because I went in thinking about what I could do. Not about what the person in front of me needed."
He looked slowly around the room. "There are people in this room ready to succeed in ways you don't yet know. Trust your methods. Trust each other. Then forget all of it and do what needs to be done."
After midnight, the dorm was quiet but not asleep.
In Midoriya's room, the lights were off but his fingers were still turning pages of the hero notebook. In Aoyama's room, a layer of plastic covered the small mirror because he had decided not to look in any mirror until the exam was finished. In Todoroki's room, the bed was made and the light was off and the man himself was not in the bed, and nobody had noticed that.
In the left wing, Uraraka sat on the edge of her bed staring at the palm of her hand. "Does getting the license actually mean I've become a hero?"
"It means they'll allow you to try." Yaoyorozu answered from her own bed without raising her head from the book.
"That's more frightening than the exam itself."
"I know."
A pause.
"Momo. Are you scared?"
Yaoyorozu closed the book slowly. "Of what specifically?"
"I don't know. You choose."
"Of being good enough instead of just being precise. There's a difference."
Uraraka looked at her. "Yes. That's exactly it."
On the ground floor, Midoriya stepped out of the dorm's back door with slow steps, testing the pressure of his foot on the ground. He didn't exactly want to train. He wanted to feel something working correctly.
He found Zoro sitting on the outer step sharpening a sword in the dark, working by touch alone with no light.
"You can't sleep either?" Midoriya said.
"I'll sleep after the exam." Zoro said it without raising his head.
"That's not an answer."
"Your question wasn't that good either."
Midoriya sat on the step beside him. They were quiet together, the sharpening making its steady sound in the calm night.
"Zoro," Midoriya said finally. "Are you ready?"
The sharpening stopped.
"I'm always ready." Zoro said it to the dark in front of him. "The only question is what's going to try to stop me."
On the second floor, Uraraka noticed light in the back courtyard and looked out the window. Yaoyorozu moved to stand beside her.
"They're still awake?"
"It appears so."
They watched in silence for a moment.
Yaoyorozu said quietly, "That's why it's difficult to catch up to either of them."
In the monitoring room, the screens were still showing recorded training footage from the past days. Aizawa reviewed them in silence, the blue light from the screens casting a shadow across his features. All Might sat in the corner watching without speaking.
Aizawa stopped at a recording from the fifth day. Section seventeen. The triple coating.
He said nothing for a long time.
Then he moved to another recording. Section seven. Midoriya and the first kick.
"There are two things in this class that don't resemble the rest."
He didn't turn toward All Might. He looked at Zoro's recording. Then at Midoriya's.
"But each of them has their own secrets I don't yet know."
All Might went still in his seat.
And Aizawa didn't add anything.
One by one, the lights of Heights Alliance went dark.
Some students fell asleep almost immediately.
Others stayed awake until the very last moment.
But when the sun rose, there would be no room left for hesitation.
Because the Provisional Hero License Exam was waiting for every one of them.
.
.
For Advanced Chapters:
Chapter 111 is now available
In the second stage of the provisional Hero License Exam
[ Between rescue and fighting ]
Zoro vs Gang Orca soon
Pat re on.com/AZTh