The anatomical chart became his sacred text. The dusty, forgotten library transformed into his laboratory, his sanctuary, and his classroom. Every moment gifted to him by Hanae's pitying protection was spent on the floor, the scroll spread before him like a map to a hidden world. He did not just study it; he devoured it. His mind, once occupied with orchestrating the downfall of men, now dedicated its formidable power to memorizing the origins and insertions of the human muscular system. He committed to memory the names that sounded like a forgotten language: the sternocleidomastoid, the serratus anterior, the gastrocnemius.
This knowledge was not abstract. It was a lens through which he re-examined every moment of his agonizing existence. He would sit, perfectly still, and touch his own thin arm, his mind overlaying the image from the chart onto his own flesh. He would flex, feeling the faint, pathetic contraction of a bicep brachii, and finally understand the precise mechanics of the motion. His own body, for so long a source of pure frustration, became a living, interactive textbook. The constant thrum of pain from his bruised ribs was a lesson on the intercostal muscles. The weakness in his legs was a quantifiable deficiency in his gluteus, quadriceps, and hamstring groups.
He began a meticulous, ruthless self-diagnosis. His entire history of failure was re-contextualized not as a series of humiliations, but as a collection of flawed experiments yielding valuable data. The inability to perform a push-up was not a simple lack of "strength"; it was a cascading failure starting with insufficient stabilization from the transverse abdominis and obliques, leading to a buckling of the core, which in turn placed an impossible load on the underdeveloped pectorals and deltoids. The humiliating drop from the oak branch was a clear-cut case of grip failure, a weakness rooted in the delicate, untrained network of flexor tendons and muscles running from his fingertips to his elbows.
Armed with this granular understanding, he systematically dismantled his old training regimen and built a new one from the ground up. The era of blind, brute-force repetition was over. The era of scientific precision had begun.
His new exercises were a strange and secret liturgy of pain. They were "micro-trainings," designed to isolate and exhaust individual muscle groups with unnerving specificity. He could perform many of them in the dead of night, lying in his cot, almost invisible to any observer. He would lie on his back and practice abdominal hollowing, pulling his navel towards his spine to engage the deepest core muscles that the chart had revealed to him. He would press his palms together with all his might, engaging his chest and shoulders in an isometric hold until they trembled with exhaustion.
For his catastrophic grip failure, he declared a private war. He would hook his fingers on the thin metal edge of his cot frame and hang, his body still on the mattress, forcing only his hands and forearms to bear a fraction of his weight. In the library, he would "walk" his fingers up and down the spines of thick, heavy books, his digits cramping and burning with the effort. He performed finger push-ups against the wall, each one a small, searing victory over his own weakness.
This new methodology turned him into even more of an enigma. He spent less time in the yard engaged in obvious, mockable struggles. His efforts were now quieter, more internal, and far more intense. The other children, Koji included, found their primary source of entertainment had grown distant and unresponsive. On the rare occasions they did corner him, they were met with a profound and frustrating sense of absence.
One afternoon, Koji, driven by a lingering sense of boredom and a need to reassert his dominance, shoved Akira as he was crossing the yard. The push was lazy, confident in its expected result. But Akira, whose mind was at that moment calculating the optimal angle for targeting his tibialis anterior through controlled foot flexion, reacted with an instinct born of his new training. His constant balance work, the endless hours of standing on one leg, had begun to forge new neural pathways. His body, without a conscious command, shifted its weight, his foot adjusting, his core tightening. He stumbled, but the jarring, clumsy fall they anticipated never came. He simply caught himself and continued walking, his mind barely registering the interruption before returning to its anatomical calculations.
It was the ultimate insult. His complete and utter lack of engagement, his refusal to even acknowledge the social contract of victimhood, robbed them of their power. There was no pleasure in tormenting a rock, and Akira had made himself into something just as impassive and unyielding. The bullying did not cease entirely, but it lost its fervor, devolving into sporadic, half-hearted taunts that he processed as little more than meaningless background noise. He had won not by becoming stronger, but by refusing to participate in their reality, choosing instead to live within the far more interesting and logical world of his own physical reconstruction.
Weeks of this new, focused regimen bled into one another. He subsisted on the thin, watery orphanage gruel, a constant caloric deficit that made his progress even more of an uphill battle. But for the first time, he could feel a change. It wasn't a visible one; he was still a pale, lean child, all sharp angles and quiet intensity. The change was internal. It was a subtle, growing sense of connection, of frayed wires slowly being repaired. When he willed his hand to grip, the response was quicker, surer. His sense of balance became an innate, quiet confidence.
One evening, as twilight painted the sky in shades of bruised purple and soft orange, he stood before the oak tree. The lowest branch, his first and most definitive nemesis, seemed to hang in judgment. This was not a test of will, but a validation of method.
He reached up, his fingers wrapping around the familiar, rough bark. This time, his grip was not a desperate clench. He consciously engaged the muscles of his forearm, feeling the tendons pull taut in a connected, efficient chain. He thought of the chart, of the lines of force and the web of interconnected fibers. He bent his knees, and in one smooth, controlled motion, he lifted his feet from the ground.
His body hung, suspended. A fire ignited in his shoulders and spread down his back, a familiar agony. But it was a clean burn, the feeling of well-trained muscles working at their absolute limit. His mind was a silent metronome, counting the seconds.
One. The old record.
Two. The point of previous, agonizing failure.
Three. His knuckles were white, his teeth clenched.
Four. A tremor started in his arms, a violent shudder.
Five. The world began to blur at the edges, the pain a rising tide.
With a choked gasp, he dropped to the earth, landing in a crouch rather than a heap. He stayed there for a long moment, his chest heaving, every muscle fiber in his upper body screaming in a unified chorus of protest. Sweat and tears of pure, physical exertion blurred his vision. But through the haze of pain, his mind was crystal clear, suffused with a cold, savage triumph.
His hypothesis was proven correct. His method was sound. The weakness was not a curse; it was a variable. And he, the scientist, had just proven it could be controlled, manipulated, and systematically, painstakingly, overwritten. The climb was still impossibly high, but he had finally, truly, begun to ascend.