Two weeks earlier — Naruhata rooftops
The city is a shallow bowl of neon and late trains. Wind combs the tar. Koichi Haimawari stands near the edge with a thermos and a cheap grin, hoodie up, board propped against a vent.
"Eyes closed," he says. "Find me anyway."
Tora obeys. Tail: tap, tap, tap. Knuckles: wrap, clockwise, twice. She inhales the rooftop air—rail dust, old rain, distant curry—and something new that Koichi palmed onto the vent handle: citrus cleaner, thin metal, the ghost of his hand.
She draws it in and lets the world answer.
Echo Mirage blooms—a translucent afterimage of the last few seconds, light and sound smudged like chalk. A silhouette leans back on the vent, shifts the board with a boot heel, chuckles once. The projection flickers as a siren yowls three blocks over; white noise fuzzes the edges.
She steps to where the after-voice laughed and touches the actual vent. "Here."
Koichi cracks the thermos. "Good. It's not about being spooky; it's about being useful." He taps his own ear. "Band-pass inserts. They'll cut flashbangs and Present Mic—but voices will be muddy. Tradeoffs."
He takes her wrists and corrects the wrap. "Clockwise. Always."
"What if I have to hit first?" she asks.
"Then you already did the slow work," he says. "You found them. Also—your code. If they show you the back of the neck, you stop. Heroes need brakes."
She doesn't like brakes. He knows. He doesn't blink.
He pockets something into her palm: a dryer sheet gone warm. "Pressure valve. Keep one. Smell it after the ugly parts."
He steps back, voice easy. "Cue phrase. Three breaths on it. 'Back to the den.'"
She repeats it, flat. Breath in fours. The world shrinks to workable.
"One more," he says, rolling his board. "Show me the Stripe Rush + Mirage combo."
She inhales the rail dust, anchors it, then takes off—zig, zag—stripes smearing into lightning while a ghost-dash lags two beats behind, a bright lie in the air. Koichi swats at the afterimage and laughs as she's already behind him.
He throws his voice as he moves. "Save the Feral for when the house is really on fire. And eat." He flicks a pouch at her—glycogen gel. "If you don't feed the engine, it eats you."
She hates that he's right. She tucks the gel where it will live on exam day.
"Say it," he prompts.
"Back to the den," she says, not looking away from the edge. The city breathes. She breathes with it.
⸻
Darkness. A low electrical hum. Then the red dot in the corner of the frame blooms to life: REC.
Static slides aside. A hooded girl enters from the left edge of the screen and is briefly swallowed by the crowd surging toward U.A. High's gates. When she rises back into view, the camera tightens: amber eyes, feline-bright; a thin nap of fur catching light along the cheekbones; tiger stripes running loud and certain over the wrists and up the forearms where the cuffs ride back. Her ears are pressed flat beneath the hood. A tail is banded tight around her waist, disguised as a sloppy belt.
REC—Observation Log: Subject "Prototype 01" on approach. Gait economical. Vigilance elevated. Maintain distance. Continue surveillance.
⸻
Up close, U.A. is too clean. Steel and glass throw back a bright morning that has no business being so cheerful. The air tastes like warm asphalt, battery acid, polish, fried dough. Every sound arrives separately—shoe rubber, zipper teeth, a laugh hitting the wrong pitch—until the entire walkway becomes a handful of pebbles tossed against her eardrums.
Tora adjusts her grip on the satchel strap. One claw slides out, catches fabric, retreats. Tail: tap, tap, tap. Knuckles: rewrap, clockwise. The ritual dials her hands back into herself.
A boy with black hair bisected by a stripe of red drifts into her periphery and matches pace without meaning to. Heat radiates off him, but it's caged, balanced by a breath of cold. He looks over once, a quick assessment that leaves no fingerprints. Gray-blue eyes. Spine straight. He keeps moving.
Rei Todoroki, the murmur says. She files him under quiet and dangerous.
A different shoulder hits hers on purpose.
"Watch it."
Green eyes spear her from under hair that can't decide if it's storm-dark or sun-bleached. There's a nicked-knuckle arrogance to the grin that follows, as if he likes starting sprints he knows he'll win.
Toshinori Midoriya. The name rides the air around him like static.
Tora lowers her gaze and lets him clip past. Her ears lie flatter beneath the hood. Her tail twitches once, then stills against her hip.
Don't stand out. Don't startle. Survive the morning.
⸻
The check-in hall is a river dammed and forced into orderly lines. Proctors slide forms along smooth counters; a printer sighs; someone's deodorant fights a losing battle with nerves. A girl in front of Tora fumbles her ID—three drops, three apologies. Tora keeps her distance so no one brushes her tail.
"Name?" the proctor asks.
"Shinkami, Tora." She keeps it even, eyes on the laminate sign that says NEXT PLEASE so she doesn't have to look at the way the proctor's gaze trips over her stripes.
"Room A-3 for the written. Good luck."
Luck is for prey.
Her fingers find the ear inserts in her pocket. She doesn't seat them yet. Not until the lights hum just so.
⸻
The auditorium blooms into rows and rows of desks beneath white light that hums just on the edge of audible. Present Mic hits the speakers like a grenade, and half the room laughs just to let pressure out of their lungs.
She presses the inserts in; the top-end shriek shears away, voices blunted to shapes. Tradeoffs. Koichi's voice in memory: You can always ask them to repeat. You can't unring your skull.
"WELCOME, FUTURE HEEEEROES! WRITTEN FIRST—THEN WE BLOW THE ROOF OFF WITH THE PRACTICAL!"
Tora scans without turning her head. Rei sits two blocks left, posture like a ruler, pen poised. Toshinori sprawls one desk forward and three to the right, a stretched rubber band ready to snap. Farther ahead, Raijin Kaminari drums an anxious rhythm against the wood—ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum—until the proctor whispers please and the tapping stutters into stillness, then starts up again softer.
Test booklets land with a papery thud and a flutter of edges. Tora flips hers open. The letters are crisp, black, symmetrical, and immediately try to float off the page.
SECTION I: HERO LAW.
Question one: a liability scenario with three bystanders, one villain, collateral damage projections, loopholes gnawing the margins. She hears a high heel slip somewhere in the back row. Her ears flick. She presses the pad of her thumb into the paper until the slight give of pulp reminds her to stay.
She writes what she knows: get them out alive; minimize harm; don't let a second threat bloom while you're crushing the first.
SECTION II: PHYSICS/MECHANICS.
She sketches the arc of a thrown object, then erases because she's drawn claws on the curve without meaning to.
SECTION III: ETHICS.
"What defines 'necessary' force?" The word necessary is a knife-edge. It shines. It remembers. She puts the knife down in the safest place she can find: proportional to real threat, reduced when restraint is possible. A whisper of Koichi again: Brakes. Her hand shakes only at the end of the sentence where the period lands too hard.
Across the aisle, Rei's pen never hesitates. Toshinori scribbles fast, faster, throws a glance at the clock like he's offended by the concept of minutes. Raijin, three rows up, pinches the bridge of his nose and mouths numbers to himself like prayers.
By the time the bell rings, the air smells like sweat and pencil wood and relief. Tora has answered enough to look like she belongs. She isn't sure she does. But she did not run.
⸻
Between the written and the practical there is a thin slice of time where the school pretends everyone eats. Vending machines hum. Sunlight stabs across the courtyard. Tora stands in the shadow along the wall and unwraps something bland enough to pass for food and steady enough to stay put. She chews slowly, counting breaths in fours—scent in, hold, scent out, hold—until the shake inside her wrists eases.
The gel tab rides out of her sleeve into her palm. She pops it; sweet salt floods her tongue, artificial fruit, engine fuel. In her pocket, the dryer sheet is warm with body heat. She doesn't pull it out. She knows it's there.
On the far bench, Toshinori is already narrating the fight he's about to have. Raijin laughs too loud and then flushes; his hands make fireworks when he's nervous. Rei sits under a gingko and studies patterns in the leaves like they might offer a better plan than noise.
"Move it, 1-A hopefuls!" a staffer calls. "Report to Ground Epsilon!"
Tora drops the wrapper in the bin and follows the smell of oil and ozone.
"Back to the den," she murmurs to herself, and her pulse obeys.
⸻
Ground Epsilon is a pretty ruin: staging facades painted with just enough graffiti to look real, alley mouths that hide fans and speakers and steel ribs. The gates grind open. Somewhere, machinery clears its throat.
Present Mic, god help them, is louder outside.
"POINT VALUES! ONE, TWO, THREE—NO FOUR-POINTERS THIS YEAR EXCEPT, YOU KNOW, THE BIG GUY! DON'T LOOK FOR A START SIGNAL—THERE ISN'T ONE!"
The pack surges. Tora does not.
She lets bodies flood past until the noise thins enough that individual sounds separate again.
She sips the air by a shutter: oil weight, hot dust, rubber. Anchor down. Echo Mirage flares—a 10-second smear of what just happened in a ten-meter bubble. In the projection, the shutter hiccups; a two-pointer's head noses out, camera twitching left-right-left. A second bot pivots behind it, lighter tread, joint whine just off-center. The siren a block over fuzzes the edges, but the shapes hold.
She kills the Mirage before it draws eyes and runs the map.
First contact is a two-pointer shouldering out of a loading bay. She takes the knee. When it drops, she rides the fall and rips the cable sets in the joint. It dies with a sigh and a spark. The spark is warm on her knuckles; the sigh smells like ozone.
Two more come nose-first down a narrow street. She doesn't give them her nose. She goes up, claws hitting brick, tail counterbalancing the arc. She lands behind them and takes their backs open along the seam where armor lifts if you push it the wrong way.
A third lunges and pins. Maul 'Em. She drives it to the pavement, weight through the sternum plate. Its arms buck in a programmed pattern—she inhales the hot-metal breath from its vents, pops a micro-Mirage of its last flinch, and the ghost of the arm telegraphs early. She shifts, catches the elbow before it throws.
She doesn't roar. The roar is in her bones, bright and ancient. She makes it a line of breath instead and keeps moving.
Across the block, Toshinori ricochets off a mailbox and uses the bounce to launch into a three-pointer. When he laughs, it sounds like he remembers joy is a muscle you can train. Rei pulls a sheet of ice across a flooded intersection to force a one-pointer to tilt; fire welds it to the curb. Raijin sprints with his head up and his heart down, metronome failing him in fits. He keeps grinning anyway.
Tora tests the combo—Stripe Rush + Mirage—in a cross street: zig, zag, and the air keeps a bright after-Tora two steps behind. A one-pointer bites at the ghost and whiffs as the real one slides past and takes its ankle. The Mirage pops when a nearby PA squeals—ambient noise shatters the edges. Noted.
She cuts a corner and nearly runs up a set of knees.
The Zero-Pointer isn't here yet. But its shadow is: a street-length flicker over the far buildings, a hush under the crowd that means a bigger noise is coming.
The bigger noise arrives as a mistake.
Ba-BOOM.
The blast hits out of order. Sound should climb and fall like a tide. This comes like a misfired piston.
Raijin is in the middle of it with his hand on his chest, grin gone, eyes too wide. Every heartbeat slams a shockwave into the streetlights; they ring like struck bowls. His mouth keeps saying it's fine while his diaphragm argues otherwise.
Tora flinches and hates that she does. The wrong rhythm crawls up her spine and tries to take her balance out from under her. She flattens her ears so hard the skin stings. The map in her head judders and then resettles around one imperative: that boy is going to die if she doesn't move him or kill the thing coming for him.
She inhales to anchor an Echo Mirage—ozone, tar, scorched rubber—but the ozone punches the projection to static. Countered. Fine. Then teeth.
The thing coming for him has already found the sound.
The Zero-Pointer shoulders a rooftop aside and introduces its head to the street. People scatter. Even the robots hesitate. The hand that drops toward Raijin could cover a car.
"Back to the den," she whispers, and the world narrows to a solvable problem.
Tora is moving before her thinking catches up.
Wall. Knee. Handhold. Brick scuffs her pads; the grit under her claws is real enough to drown the wrong drumbeat for three seconds. She hits the arm where plates overlap, jams her hands in up to the wrist, and pulls a bundle of cable out by feel. The bundle fights to stay in; she fights harder. Sparks tart the air. Metal screams. The joint gives. The arm slams into the asphalt and stays there.
The Zero-Pointer tries to shake her off its elbow. She uses that to get higher. Her tail whips sensors off the housing. Her claws find another choke point and unspool it. The behemoth kneels without meaning to, then pitches onto its side like a building remembering gravity.
She drops in front of Raijin, lands low, and bristles without thinking, her body drawing a line between him and everything with a pulse.
A maintenance hatch on the bot she crippled jerks open on a human reflex—a proctor tech in a panic, hands up, neck bared by instinct. Her code flares: back of the neck shown; do not strike. She shifts her stance to cover without cutting. The choice burns and passes.
"Get up," she tells Raijin softly, because the roar wants out and she won't let it. "Now."
He does. Not elegantly. Not bravely. He does.
Sirens whip the air into ribbons. Present Mic's voice rides them: "AAAND—TIME!"
The Zero-Pointer hums a low mechanical grief and goes quiet.
Tora slides her claws back in. It is like convincing a storm to be a pond. She picks her hood up off the street where it fell—a tear along one ear—and drags it back over her head. The ear inserts whine as she eases them out; the world comes back too bright. She is careful not to look at anyone who might have seen too much.
She walks out with the first wave, because being first means fewer eyes behind you. The gel ghost-sugar still coats her teeth. In her pocket, the dryer sheet waits like a harmless joke.
⸻
The staging lot after is a spill of voices, shoe squeaks, scraped knees, one spectacular victory dance that ends in a twist of ankles and laughter so relieved it hurts. Toshinori throws a shadow that thinks it owns the sun. Rei reads the scuff marks on his gloves like tea leaves. Raijin looks at Tora until she looks away from him, then looks at the ground and smiles at it instead.
Up in the girders, a lens pivots and drinks them in.
REC—Observation Log: Prototype 01 neutralized eight (8) low-value targets; engaged and disabled Zero-Pointer via joint disconnection and sensor compromise; executed protective interposition for secondary subject (Kaminari-Raijin). Quirk notes: deployed olfactory-triggered projection (Echo Mirage) for reconnaissance and misdirection; projection integrity degraded by sirens/ozone. Behavioral: maintained perimeter; avoided peer clustering; recovered mask post-exposure. Adherence to restraint protocol observed when presented with surrender cue (cervical exposure). Indicators of attachment to secondary subject: present, growing.
Assessment: Adaptation stable. Escalation potential high. Continue surveillance.
The red dot holds steady. The feed cuts.