U.A. made routine look like a virtue someone had ironed.
Attendance rolled through the classroom like a tide that respected desks. The windows cut the morning into obedient rectangles. On the board, a problem about force resolved itself with the dignity math wears when people stop arguing and start calculating.
Renya matched the pace. The square tucked itself behind his heel the way a good rule waits—present without petition. The Veil lay flat, not glossy, as if humility had become texture.
Names took their places. Yaoyorozu arranged pens into a small parliament. Iida tried to rescue posture from fatigue. Kaminari spun a pen and pretended it was talent. Sero taped a joke to the edge of his desk and dared anyone to remove it. Uraraka looked out the window as if the sky might sell discounts on hope. Bakugou opened his book like a problem he meant to insult into solving itself. Midoriya wrote until the page looked like a negotiation between hunger and hands.
The lesson answered to itself. The room breathed. The world pretended to be simple.
At the edges of that politeness, the shadow noticed something new.
Not a tug. Not a command. Ambient weight. Where people gathered, emotion pooled. Where nerves ran fast, the air went thin; where focus sharpened, corners brightened; where pride flared and dimmed, color passed; where kindness sat quietly with patience, warmth looked for a word.
He'd felt such currents before—crowds make weather. Today it was closer. The square hummed once, faint, near the ribs rather than the floor.
No, he thought, before the impulse finished its sentence. The hum settled. But now he knew it existed.
Aizawa called on him twice—once to correct a vector diagram, once to refuse a shortcut in an ethics case that wanted a camera more than a conclusion. He answered without decorating the answers. The teacher registered present on a level rollbooks don't measure.
At break, Yaoyorozu approached with a notebook and a question disguised as an apology. "Kurotsuki," she said, tone bright enough to be honest, "if I gave you three different materials and a square meter of room, how would you—"
"Make the room safe, not clever," he finished, because she'd asked him for him. "One layer that absorbs attention, not impact. One that translates weight into surface. One that gives people permission to stand."
She wrote permission to stand as if it were a formula.
Kaminari leaned over her shoulder. "This is why we keep him around," he announced. "He makes the boring sound sexy."
"I make the boring function," Renya said. "Sexy is a budget item."
Mina slid in sideways. "We are underfunded and overambitious," she said. "Anyway, spar later? Nonlethal, high style."
"Low style," he said. "Yes."
Across the aisle, Bakugou made a face at the word permission and went back to pretending not to listen.
The bell returned them to obedience. They complied.
The gym had been rearranged into a pattern he liked—obstacles that admitted to being obstacles; lines that made sense; tape with purpose. Aizawa stood near the entrance like a warning that had done its paperwork. Present Mic's voice came from nowhere and everywhere, modulated down to welcome instead of wake up.
"Rotation drills," Aizawa said. "Two-minute scenarios, thirty seconds reset. You don't need a plan—yet. You need to see."
They ran it. Boxes, ladders, low rails. Partners switched every chime. Uraraka floated a weight then put it back like a promise she didn't intend to break. Ojiro's tail drew lines neat as rulers. Kaminari learned (again) that wattage without aim is just a tantrum. Sero mapped angles with tape's dead sincerity. Tokoyami held a conversation with the piece of night that lived under his ribs and kept it civil. Yaoyorozu built a small ladder that understood the value of humility and moved on.
Renya kept his pace surgical. He took the corner that punished haste with shin-level insults. He stepped across a mat that punished ego with traction. At one station, bakugou's orbit intersected his—blast controlled, posture violent with competence. They passed without touching, gravity choosing not to argue.
The hum returned. Not the thrill of movement—he refused that. The other thing: ambient want. Nerves. Pride. Embarrassment. A minor sadness from a student who had read a message on their phone and didn't know where to set it down. He felt it the way a spider feels thread.
"Not yours," he told the second thing.
The square obeyed. The hum stepped back. The air decided to be air. He finished the rotation with numbers that meant useful and boring, which was the metric that let him sleep.
Aizawa's eyes were line breaks. He didn't say good. He said, "Again."
They did it until breath looked like work instead of performance. They left the gym tired and proud enough to be tolerable. Aizawa dismissed them with a grunt that let them keep both.
The cafeteria was louder than ethics and kinder than training. Trays carried logic: rice, miso, vegetables, the admission that sugar had a job. Friends sorted themselves into shapes that wouldn't survive forever but mattered now.
He sat near but not at a table where the noise didn't need him. Midoriya tried to explain something about air pressure to Uraraka with a salt shaker and an optimism that would annoy anyone who didn't know how expensive optimism is. Yaoyorozu made a napkin accept a fold that turned it into a principled demonstration of levers. Iida cried at a video of a dog being reunited with its person, then pretended he'd gotten miso in his eye. Mina recruited Kaminari to help her decide if pink curry was art or a hate crime; he volunteered to be a martyr either way.
He ate the way you eat when food is agreement. Halfway through, the hum arrived again—hunger, but not his stomach's. Elsewhere. A pair of first-years at the next table argued warmly about whether heroes should brand themselves. A third, quiet, nodded too much and smiled too quickly—pleasing without being asked. The air near them felt like a small deficit.
The square pressed. Not much. Just attention. It wanted to smooth the corner; it wanted to be helpful.
"No," he thought. "We are not a tool for moods."
It dimmed. The deficit remained—not his to fix. He chewed, swallowed, let patience be a type of feeding too.
"You look like you just told a cat not to sit on paper," Yaoyorozu said as she passed, tray in hand, tone curious but not prying.
"Paper belongs to the table," he said.
"Cats disagree," she said.
"They're persuasive," he admitted.
She nodded, satisfied that he had remembered the problem's true nature, and rejoined her argument about branding, where she made ethics appealing enough to market.
He finished, returned the tray with the guilty neatness of someone who likes order because it harms fewer things, and walked out into weather that had chosen indecision.
Afternoons at U.A. specialize in pretending they are evenings. The light changes color without asking for applause. Students leave November footprints in months that don't belong to them. The campus becomes a study in the geometry of leaving: straight lines for urgency, diagonals for flirtation, curves for people who aren't done with a conversation.
He took the long curve past the fountain and did what he'd learned yesterday: check the perimeter for the kind of attention that doesn't think of itself as a person. One woman at a bench whose shoes didn't agree with her coat; two men discussing nothing near a bike rack with patience no bikes require; a student he didn't recognize taking photos of nothing in particular with a camera expensive enough to be interested. Commission fingerprints, careful and plausible.
Kurobane was nowhere visible. That meant he was present.
He didn't change his route. He didn't look long. He walked the way stones walk in rivers—by simply being allowed.
The store needed him to be exactly one person: the one who gave change and remembered where the batteries had moved to. It was good work. The square learned to be tile.
Natsume stocked a shelf with a rhythm that would shame metronomes. "Commission men again?" she asked, not looking up.
"Probably," he said.
"They buy crackers like guilt," she observed. "Then they leave."
"Salted or unsalted?"
"Unsalted," she said, unimpressed.
Customers arrived with errands pretending to be stories. A boy wanted pencils that wouldn't betray him. A grandmother asked if the lottery tickets preferred her and apologized for asking. A woman with red eyes chose tissues with the TV tie-in cartoon and laughed at herself for it; he honored her by not noticing.
At eight, Aki texted home? He replied one hour and curry warmed? She sent a picture of a spoon making an argument. He typed convinced and kept the bell under his palm for the pleasure of the sound.
The hum arrived between customers. Thin at first, then steady like a muscle asked to hold a pose. Not hunger for attention—appetite for relief. It flowed under the door with the conditioned air and sat near the endcap of laundry soap. He looked, not with eyes. A man stood there, early thirties, jacket the kind that expects rain, a face whose edges looked sanded down. He held a bottle without reading it.
"Stains," the man said to no one.
"Enzymes," Renya said, because sometimes answers should be smaller than problems. He took the bottle, swapped it for one an aisle over without color and with a promise written in small, honest letters, and returned it. "This one does the job and keeps its mouth shut."
The man looked. Relief took some of the weight off his posture. He nodded and put it in a basket with dignity. The hum lost height.
The square brightened—a reflex, eager to be helpful.
"Thank you," he told it. "No."
It cooled. He rang up the purchase, told the man how to pre-treat a ghost of wine, and watched him leave taller by a centimeter.
That should have been the end of it.
At the edge of the counter, a woman's hand hovered, empty. She hadn't chosen anything. He recognized the posture: people set hands like that when their day has too many parts to carry and none of them fit pockets.
"Can I help you find something?" he asked.
She startled, then produced a laugh that apologized for existing. "Directions, maybe."
He gave them, small and precise. She left, made the wrong turn, then the right one, waved back as if he had been kind enough to justify hope. He didn't check whether the square had brightened. He knew. He told it guard rather than answer, and it listened.
At closing, Natsume counted the till with the speed of someone who has made peace with numbers and their refusal to tell comforting lies. "You going to be famous?" she asked.
"I intend to be difficult to monetize," he said.
She nodded. "Best kind of famous."
He flipped the sign. The bell agreed.
Home has a sound. It met him at the door.
Aki had set the table like an argument she planned to win—bowls, chopsticks, water, folded napkins that had seen worse. The scarf on the chairback had decided to be domestic rather than poetic. The portrait leaned where it had leaned before, its truth patient.
He removed his shoes and let the day settle on the mat. The square under the table was already bright—two arcs this time, not one, a shape that had decided it could practice joy without permission.
"You're late," she said, which is what you say when the soup has judged you.
"I'm precisely late," he said.
She slid a bowl toward him with the ferocity love uses when it refuses to be embarrassed. They ate like people who knew what food costs.
Halfway through, she looked at the floor. "It hummed," she said.
"When?" he asked.
"Twice. Once when I dropped a glass. Once when I almost texted you something I didn't need to say."
"What did you not say?"
"That I'm proud of you," she said, not looking up. "I'll say it to your face."
He sat with that the way you sit with weather on days you don't deserve it.
"Twice, then," he said. "What did you do?"
"I ignored the first," she said. "And the second… I told it 'later,' and it stopped. Like it could learn time."
"It can," he said. "It is."
She nodded. "It's not hungry. It's… greedy for usefulness."
"That is my fault," he said.
"That is your curriculum," she corrected. "We'll teach it boredom too."
They cleaned up with the domestic grace of people who have decided drying a bowl is an act of civil service. When the table gleamed, she propped her chin on her fist. "Midoriya likes you," she said.
"He likes what he thinks my rules are," he said.
"He likes that you have any," she said. "It's brave, in his way."
"Bravery that doesn't insist on applause tends to survive," he said.
She smiled. "I like when you pretend to be cynical and fail." Then, serious: "Commission?"
"In the grass," he said. "Shoes wrong color. Crackers unsalted."
"Ew," she said, which covered policy and breakfast.
They put the evening away. The square brightened under her toes when she stood and faded when she left, like tide obeying. He sat with ankles on the edge and let breath count.
The hum returned, softer. Not the city's. His. He realized it slowly, the way one realizes a room has begun to tilt. It wasn't appetite. It was a habit looking for a job.
He put his hand on the floor. "We are not needed," he said. "Practice meaning it."
The hum paused. Then—almost shy—it did.
Across town, Kurobane adjusted to a desk that refused to learn ergonomics and read a memo that pretended to be polite. Additional observers will integrate as support staff. He translated: We plan to be near your subject in a way that insults the word 'near'.
He stood, because sitting makes certain sentences easier to accept. He walked to a window and let the building's reflection pretend to be a view. In the glass, a coat. In the room, the knowledge that several other coats now owned keycard access to spaces near classrooms and gyms and benches.
He wrote in his ledger a line no one else would be able to interpret out of context: Silence in the feed today. Non-events proliferate. Hunger signature faint but consistent.
He wondered whether hunger belonged to the boy or to the organization measuring him.
He closed the ledger. He went home by a route that proved nothing and felt intentional.
He did not text. The restraint tasted like a virtue he'd borrowed.
Night opened its slow umbrella. The city agreed to be lower case. A train sang to itself in the distance. The apartment kept its shape as if proud of having learned manners.
He turned the lights off until only the window held a small neon dissertation. The square on the floor held its line. He sat cross-legged and let posture become permission. The shadow brightened and dimmed on the smallest unit of patience.
"You will feel other people before they feel themselves," he said. "That is not an invitation."
The brightness held steady. Not apology. Attention.
"Guard," he said, the word a house they both lived in. "Don't feed. Don't fix. Don't learn greed."
It made the crescent—the joy-shape—it had discovered and did not move beyond it.
He didn't sleep so much as let day leave. The door remembered to be a door.
And then—because calm is just the absence of declarations—he dreamed. Not the old world; not blades and altars and the arithmetic of power taken. He dreamed a classroom. Desks. Chalk. A boy raising his hand to say something kind about someone else. He dreamed the hum that arrived when fifteen people wanted to pass a test and a sixteenth wanted to make sure they did. He dreamed the square under every desk, patient. Earn permission. He dreamed the word tribute, but it was made of time.
He woke with the taste of it in his mouth and refused to perform the shiver the memory wanted.
Aki stood in the doorway with a blanket she had brought without making a ceremony. "Go to bed," she said.
"I am in bed," he said.
She draped the blanket anyway. "Then turn the page."
He did. The apartment approved.
The next day gave him school again: lines, stairs, a hallway that decided to smell like pencil shavings and ambition. He stepped around an argument and let its owners keep it. He held a door for Yaoyorozu without earning a debt. He told Kaminari to point the other way only once. He nodded at Bakugou and refused the bait of a scowl. He answered Aizawa exactly as much as the question asked and no more. He did the work of being a student, which is just professionalism with adolescence breathing on it.
At lunch, a new face appeared near the faculty doors—support staff, by the lanyard. Too new. Eyes practiced at watching. Shoes were the right color this time. Crackers probably salted. Kurobane's handwriting over someone else's caution.
Renya didn't change his trajectory. He changed the square—half-step closer to Aizawa when the teacher passed down the hall. Not protection. Permission to share air.
Aizawa glanced once, reading that language without admitting he spoke it. "Training this afternoon," he said. "Speed drills. No decisions. You'll hate it."
"Good," Renya said.
Aizawa's mouth almost smiled. "Good."
He hated it. He did it. He went home with the kind of tired that makes people civilized.
Aki had a list on the wall: Eat / Sleep / Be Boring. She checked Be Boring with a flourish and said, "Hero."
"Clerk," he said.
"Brother," she corrected, and that ended the debate.
They ate noodles that had learned to behave in broth. The shadow approached the edge of the table and decided it liked gravity this week. They made plans for tomorrow not bigger than tomorrow. Kurobane didn't knock. The Commission didn't call. Aizawa didn't send a riddle disguised as a reminder.
Silence discovered that it could be a participant.
Renya stood by the window toward midnight and let the city draw a graph of his heartbeat on the glass. The square held. The hum slept.
He thought: If the old world asked for blood, this one asks for attention. He thought: The price is less dramatic and more relentless. He thought the word sacrifice and allowed it to mean choosing what not to use.
A siren practiced two streets over and apologized by ending. A neighbor's TV whispered agreement with a sitcom that had never saved anyone. Somewhere on campus, a sensor logged that no one had destroyed anything worth reporting.
He exhaled and let the breath become a period.
Silence was never safety. It was just the longest inhale before the fall.