Two weeks learned his name.
They learned the rhythm he preferred in the morning, the path he took along the river where the city hadn't yet convinced the water to behave, the hour the dojo door sighed open, the exact tone of the bell above the convenience store when it was tired. Renya let routine assemble itself around him like armor assembled piece by piece. It needed to look accidental. It needed to be deliberate.
Dawn came like the first page of a test booklet. He woke before the apartment remembered to be cold, set the practice blade across his palms, and moved. Not grand flourishes—foundation. The foot that borrowed weight, the hip that lent it, the shoulder that refused drama. A ribbon of shadow followed each motion, not snarling as it would have two weeks ago, but smoothing into the line like satin pressed by firm fingers.
"Veil of Light," he said, confirming the lie so the body could make it true. The shadow thinned into a clean sheen along the blade's silhouette. Decorative. Harmless. The kind of effect audiences called refined when what they meant was safe.
Aki padded out, hair surrendered halfway to a braid. Steam rose from her mug; the scarf around her neck made a small bright wound of color in the room. "New move?"
"New presentation," he corrected.
She watched as the shadow wrapped the blade and stayed well-behaved. "It looks… pretty," she admitted, and blinked at her choice of word. "Like something a hero would do on a stage."
"Stagecraft is a survival skill," he said, setting the blade aside. The notes spread across the table were already in order: sketches of training bots; lists of past U.A. exam tasks; an unremarkable handout on ethics that, if read carefully, revealed what the grading rubric believed a hero owed to a camera. He added a line: Obedience is examined as thoroughly as talent.
Breakfast was a quick negotiation between appetite and inventory. Toast. A slice of fruit cut into precise eighths. Cheap tea tamed by patience.
"You're trending," Aki said suddenly, almost shy. "A little, I mean. I posted that photo of you training at the park. Some kids wrote Cool Shadow Guy. Someone said UA material?"
He slid the toast toward her, accepted the news without blinking. "Let them assign names. We'll keep the one we need."
"What is the one we need?"
"Anything that can be repeated without discomfort."
She wrinkled her nose. "That's… boring."
"Appropriate," he said. "You're describing the safest form of fame."
They walked together to the station. Vendors wrestled with awnings along the way, and the smell of dough tried to distract the virtue of early rising. At the turnstile, she squeezed his hand.
"You'll pass," she said. "Because you plan. And because you're stubborn."
"I'll pass because they won't know where else to put me," he said, which was the same thing said differently.
When she disappeared into the river of uniforms, he stood until the river stopped noticing she'd been interesting. Then he took the opposite exit and gave the day to its checklist.
The dojo accepted his breath and offered its own. A broom leaned in respectful retirement against the wall. The master watched through steam rising from a tea cup and said nothing for two cuts, three steps, a turn.
"Honest," he said finally.
Renya didn't ask which part. He knew what the old man meant. The way the blade had stopped posing and resumed working. The way the breath had learned to stop narrating and start carrying.
"You've sanded your aura," the master added, faint amusement in his tone. "Manners, where there were none. Or were too sharp to eat with."
"Presentation," Renya said.
"Masks," the master corrected, not unkindly. "Just don't let them thicken into skin."
They sparred lightly—no points, only confirmations. In a half-beat exchange, his shadow tried to anticipate and failed politely. The floor remembered the foot that had been too confident and filed a complaint in the shape of a tiny notch. The master noticed and let the silence around the notch be his lecture.
"Control it," he said when they were done. "Or it will choose for you."
Renya bowed. "Understood."
At the door, the old man offered an extra sentence the way good teachers hide medicine in sweets. "And if anyone asks how your quirk works, answer in the most boring possible way."
"Why?"
"Because people forget what refuses to entertain them," the master said, and waved him out to a world that remembered too much.
Afternoon found him crossing the school courtyard in a line of shadow that made clean geometry of his steps. Agent Kurobane waited by the camphor tree like a crease that had straightened a page.
"Kurotsuki Renya-kun," the man said, and made the comma between name and honorific into a test the way only bureaucrats with appetites could. "Civil Oversight. Youth Quirk—"
"—Registrations," Renya finished, because it was the kind of word an office believed protected it.
"Mind if we walk?"
He minded. He did not mention it. They took the perimeter path in silence made for taking measurements. Teachers drifted like weather in the distance; a group of students laughed with the deep relief of people who had completed the bare minimum of something and wanted applause anyway.
"Your file is sparse," Kurobane said eventually, tone warm enough to avoid spooking prey. "Unusual for someone as punctual as you."
"I prioritize present tasks," Renya said.
"Virtue and loophole in one sentence," Kurobane murmured, almost approving. "You've never had uncontrolled manifestations? Lights that flickered when they shouldn't?… Whispers?"
That last word landed like a key shaped for a door he had not told anyone existed. Renya let a heartbeat pass, then another.
"My quirk manipulates local shadow saturation within range and line of sight," he recited, keeping the sentences tidy. "Output scales with ambient light and stress. Side effects remain within acceptable tolerance."
"Spoken like a brochure," Kurobane said.
"Truth reduces confusion," Renya replied.
"Then another truth." They paused beneath the camphor, the leaves making a sound like very quiet applause. "My quirk hears resonance. When an ability burns the wrong fuel, it sings off-key. Sometimes I hear it."
"And now?" Renya asked, allowing curiosity to make his tone warm rather than cold—any predator worth studying would test both.
Kurobane smiled by the smallest fraction allowed human expression. "Barely," he said. "Keep it that way, and we'll never need another conversation."
They shook hands. The agent's skin was cool; his grip respected. A ripple traced across Renya's palm too fine to be temperature. Weighed. Shelved. Not filed closed.
"Good afternoon," Kurobane said, and merged with faculty traffic like a rumor choosing not to be told.
Renya stepped out from beneath the camphor and let the shadow around him thin to a line a child could jump over. He continued to work.
Public training had its own theology. The park offered a rectangle of cement painted with the city's blessings: No graffiti. No scooters. No fun after nine. He placed his bag on the bench precisely within the shadow of a tree. Then he moved.
Shadow obeyed the geometry he'd taught it. Barriers rose like panes of tinted glass; ribbons curved to catch and redirect a thrown bottle someone had thoughtfully left behind; a circle the size of a manhole cover floated above the ground and held steady because steadiness looks expensive on camera.
Children paused. Phones lifted. Someone said, "Cool Shadow Guy," and the phrase folded itself into the afternoon like a joke that would become a fact if repeated enough times.
He did not change pace. He did not smile. He did not perform for the phones. People were more generous with attention if you made them think they were stealing it.
"You train like you already passed," a voice said.
Shinsou Hitoshi had appeared and arranged himself at the edge of the rectangle like a punctuation mark—period, not question. He carried his indifference like a well-folded coat, tidy and heavier than it looked. Eyes like hooks not meant for flesh.
"Preparation is cheaper than regret," Renya said, letting the circle hover, then dissolve.
"Preparation passes costs to the present," Shinsou replied.
"Then we'll pay," Renya said. The smallest smile. "You applying?"
"We'll see if the exam accepts my existence," Shinsou said with a shrug that was both honest and an alibi. "I'll remember your line, though."
"Good lines are reusable," Renya said, and meant it as a compliment. He turned back to the rectangle. When he glanced again, Shinsou had gone like a thought that preferred echoes.
The air changed. Not cold, not warm. Attentive. He could feel it now—the way observation altered the space around a person. He could sense what cameras saw, what a patient mind measured. He gave the space something harmless to record: three sets of drills, evenly timed. A misstep added with artful incompetence. A brief flinch as if startled by a pigeon.
Humility sold. Boredom soothed. Professional curiosity stayed hungry.
Night was an old friend that asked too many questions. The convenience store answered with fluorescent hymns and shelves arranged in prayers to gravity. He stocked, scanned, smiled at people whose day required remembering. Regulars became catalog entries he refused to call by name because that would pretend intimacy where there was only competence.
Two men arrived on time, wore badges that glinted like promises no one had signed, and left a tracker under the counter with the shameless subtlety of amateurs with training. Renya harvested the device without comment, stored it next to the porcelain bowl, and watched the door chime admit a better kind of surprise.
Aki, with a bento and the kind of triumph people bring home for a grade anyone can see.
"You should be asleep," he told her, accepting the chopsticks like a truce.
"I should, but you don't, so I'll make you," she said. "Also this rice wanted to see the world."
The tracker pulsed once when she stepped within range, then again, then quieted as if embarrassed by how easily it could be fooled by simple presence. He disliked it as a principle, not as technology.
They ate at the window with rain drawing lines down the glass and the city pretending to practice for a larger performance.
"Lock up," she said outside the door, serious in the way of someone trying on responsibility. "I mean it."
"I always do," he said, and meant it long before the door closed.
At shift end, he slipped the tracker into his pocket and set off home, choosing a longer route and a slower pace. His reflection turned and looked at him from the black glass of a shop that never opened. Behind that reflection, a shape he recognized asked him to be more interesting. He denied the request.
The apartment was dark in the way of rooms that had learned to wait without criticism. His hand found the phone by the sound it made, a small metal exhale against wood. The message was showy in its humility: Found your brother's ID near the south park benches. Please come claim before it gets thrown away.
Aki's reply sat beneath it: Coming now.
The room cooled. Not air. Intention.
He did not run. He arrived in the park without arriving anywhere else.
South Park pretended that lamplight multiplied safety by multiplication alone. The math didn't hold. Cones of light made islands; the darkness between sharpened into seas. Aki stood close to the edge of one island, hands tucked into sleeves, chin lifted to keep her courage from falling out. Two men bracketed her. Their posture was wrong for protection. Their smiles were right for the word that holds knives.
"We found your brother's card," the nearer said, politeness worn to threads.
"I'm usually careful," Renya said, stepping into a circle of light because sometimes you tell the world you're not afraid of it by letting it name your position.
Aki exhaled a sound made of relief and anger and something else she wasn't ready to name.
"We wanted to ask you a few questions," the other man said. "About your job. About a friend of yours."
The shadow gathered at their shoes the way water gathers around the ankles of people who have misjudged tide charts. Not a storm. Not a spectacle. A quiet thickening that respected the civil engineering of the lamp posts while refusing the moral engineering of the men.
"Let her walk to me," Renya said, and the instruction lifted from the air into their knees.
Aki obeyed without looking down. Trust made her steps careful; fear made them fast. He did not touch her when she reached him. He did not need to. The men bent at the angle pride reintroduces itself to gravity.
"Stop recording," he said.
"No camera—" the nearer began, and the shape in his pocket went dark like a child pretending sleep.
"Tell Agent Kurobane you lost the thread tonight," Renya added. "If he sent you, he'll understand this sentence. If he didn't, learn his name before you use it again."
"What are you?" the other spat, breath short.
"Homeowner," Renya said, and allowed the shadow to recede cleanly. No bruises to argue in daylight. No tears to insist on witness. They folded to hands and knees and accepted the ground's brief lecture about gravity.
When they looked up for a reckoning, he was already elsewhere.
Aki sat on the sofa with the blanket around her shoulders like a treaty signed in haste. The apartment smelled faintly of soap and rain and the kind of fear that would leave if you asked it politely enough and fed it a story.
"You looked… different," she said, then flinched, as if the words might bite.
"A rescue looks different from the inside," he said, taking the chair opposite because closeness is a gift, not a right. "It's true in hero work and everything else."
"I know you saved me." She spoke quickly, outrunning the part of her that had wanted to ask for proof. "I'm not scared of you. I'm just—"
"New to this angle," he supplied.
She nodded as if he'd told her a secret and not simply a tolerance. "Okay."
"Sleep," he said, gentler. "We can argue philosophy when the sun pretends to be objective."
"Promise?"
"On the condition you actually sleep," he said, and watched relief make her smaller and braver at once. The door clicked like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence both of them understood only enough to continue reading.
The tracker lay on the table where he had left it; the porcelain bowl waited beside it like an altar rented by the hour. He opened the device, learned its organs, taught his fingers the seams. Narrow band. Hungry. Researched by offices that wore Oversight like perfume.
The shadow flowed over the components, rearranged hunger into usefulness, refit appetite into alarm. A harmless charm now, one that would hum to him when others tried to hum at him first.
The television spilled light like gossip. A segment on the U.A. exams tried to predict the unpredictable with the confidence of people who had decided they preferred prediction to accuracy. In the B-roll that eased the segment into commercial, a familiar profile passed in a government corridor. The camera did not love him. The microphone did not find him. Agent Kurobane moved like a man accustomed to erasing his footprints and then being asked to teach the technique without describing it.
"If you're looking," Renya told the screen, "look properly."
His reflection sat in the glass alongside the moving images. The veil settled across the shadow at his shoulders; the line of his mouth smoothed into something a clerk would describe as appropriate for minors. He watched the boy in the reflection and decided the boy would be believed if he told the right lie.
"If they want a hero," he said to the room that had learned the difference between echoes and company, "I'll give them one."
He poured tea into the porcelain bowl. The liquid stilled with the discipline of someone who understood the value of stage directions. He watched his face in the surface—tidy, precise, framed by a darkness that had been taught to behave in public. He let silence do the work words would have spoiled.
Across town, Agent Kurobane arranged photographs and reports on a desk that refused to show personality. A map of the district hung on the wall with pins that had not yet agreed to call themselves an investigation. He replayed a clip: a park at night broken into geometry by lamps; a piece of shadow disagreement that could be explained by lens, by dew, by bad luck. He replayed it anyway.
A colleague leaned in the doorway with the posture of a man who wanted the world to be simpler than it was. "Dangerous?"
"Deliberate," Kurobane said. "Those are not the same word."
"He's a kid," the colleague protested.
"That's what makes this interesting," Kurobane replied, and cut the screens into darkness. He preferred to see problems where they lived, not where cameras pretended to house them.
Renya set his phone on the table and opened Aki's social profile. The post of him training at the park had gathered comments like crumbs: Cool Shadow Guy.Maybe UA.Looks clean, not creepy. He left a new image there—a tidy photograph of the park schedule, the time he usually occupied a corner to practice, the angle from which the light behaved best.
Bait must taste like truth.
The shadow stirred as if to offer opinion. He made room for the feeling rather than shape it into words.
"You're feeding them," it seemed to say—not in language, but in the recognition that predators and teachers share a toolkit.
"A hunter starves without faith in his prey," he answered, and the line felt uncomfortably like a motto. He filed the discomfort with the other honest things he could not afford to dislike. The charm assembled from the tracker hummed once to prove it had learned its job.
Morning would do its work. Kurobane would read what was meant to be read. Rumors would arrange themselves along the lines he had drawn and call the arrangement organic as if anyone still believed anything grew without irrigation.
He stood at the window and let the city write itself in light and reflection. His reflection watched back and did not blink.
The difference between a mask and a mirror, he thought, is who blinks first.
He did not.
He lay down. The veil stayed on. Intention stayed visible, even with his eyes closed.
Six months remained before U.A. opened its doors with the confidence of institutions that mistake tradition for permanence. He would arrive wearing a face the world would praise for being easy to grade. Behind it, hunger would wait, well-mannered and patient, sharpening itself on the edges of admiration.
Two hunters peered at each other across a city that preferred not to know. One wore a suit; one wore shadow. Both told themselves they were protecting something worth the work.
For now, Renya slept. The charm hummed once, approving of the quiet. The porcelain bowl reflected nothing at all.
Outside, a drone practiced hovering and then remembered to be useful elsewhere. Somewhere, Kurobane turned off a light and let darkness reclaim its job. Aki dreamed of a school trip she would attend because someone had paid the fee before the future could complain.
Echoes moved under light. The city did not notice yet. It would. It always did.