Three months.
Mineta was sitting on the edge of his bed at seven in the morning on a Tuesday that was indistinguishable from any other Tuesday, staring at the page in his notebook where he tracked his progress with the expression of someone who had done the calculations three times, hoping the result would change.
It hadn't.
The page was objective and completely indifferent to his expectations:
Height: 111 cm. (+3 cm in three months)
Consecutive push-ups: 23. (+23 from zero)
Continuous running: 8 blocks without stopping.
Spheres before noticeable fatigue: 19. (+7 since the beginning)
Passive spatial awareness: consistent up to 4 spheres simultaneously. Inconsistent between 4 and 8.
Wing Chun: basic fundamentals assimilated. Chi Sao at functional beginner level.
Muay Thai: basic clinch work. Knees and elbows technically recognizable.
BJJ: proper breakfalls. Basic ground positions. Guard and mount recognizable.
It was real progress. He knew that. Hayashi had told him directly the previous week, in that way of giving compliments that sounded almost like clinical observations:
"For three months and no prior base, the progress is solid. Not spectacular. Solid."
But there was a problem that no solid progress could solve.
One hundred and eleven centimeters.
He closed the notebook with more force than strictly necessary.
The problem wasn't the height itself—or not only that. It was what height represented in terms of potential ceiling.
He had spent weeks avoiding that internal conversation. The excuse had been daily training, routine, not having time to stop and think about what he couldn't change in the short term. Now, with three months of real data in front of him, there was no way to keep avoiding it.
He knew the canon. He knew exactly how far the original Mineta had gone with this body and this quirk. And even though he wasn't the original Mineta in any way that mattered, he was still inhabiting the same body, with the same quirk, and the same fundamental physical limitations.
Pop Off was a support and area-control quirk. Useful, versatile within its limits, but with a ceiling that in canon had been more than evident. Even with all the training in the world, even with martial arts, even with the spatial awareness he was developing, there were situations where that ceiling would matter decisively.
And he knew exactly what kind of situations awaited in the coming years.
War doesn't wait for you to be ready, he thought. War arrives when it arrives.
He stood up, went to the kitchen, prepared breakfast with the automatic movements of someone who had been following the same routine for months, and stood by the window while eating.
Gray morning. Neighbors walking to work with umbrellas just in case, even though it wasn't raining yet. An eight-year-old kid arguing with his mother about something impossible to hear from here. The normal life of a normal Japanese neighborhood, completely unaware of his problems.
I need more.
It was a simple and completely obvious conclusion that had been forming for weeks and was now there, immovable.
He washed the plate, left the cup in the sink, and went to get his laptop.
He started where he always started when he needed clarity: looking for information.
The topic was quirks. Specifically, quirk evolution.
It wasn't common—that much he knew from canon. But it existed. There were documented cases of quirks that had qualitatively changed under certain conditions, usually situations of extreme stress or immediate danger. Kirishima was the clearest example he remembered: a real crisis moment, the body responding beyond its usual limits, and the quirk adapting to meet the need.
He searched research databases, specialized forums, publicly accessible academic articles. The information was fragmented and often contradictory, as is common with phenomena science doesn't fully understand yet, but the patterns were recognizable if you knew what to look for.
Cases of quirk evolution almost always shared three elements. First, extreme pressure, physical or emotional. Second, a user who had already pushed their quirk to its limit consistently before the evolution moment, as if the body needed to know exactly where the ceiling was before breaking through it. Third—and this was the most interesting—a clear functional necessity: quirks didn't evolve randomly, they evolved toward something the user needed in that specific moment.
The brain, he wrote in the notebook while reading. The brain knows what the body needs before the user consciously articulates it. In extreme danger, the brain activates survival responses normally locked away. Quirks work the same way.
That wasn't an original hypothesis. There were papers saying exactly that, with more scientific rigor and less practical certainty. But what Mineta started developing from there was his own, or at least a connection those papers didn't make explicitly.
If the brain was the engine of the quirk, and if the brain limited the quirk because the user lacked the level needed to handle its full form, then the relevant question wasn't how do I provoke an extreme danger situation to force evolution? but how do I prepare the brain so the threshold of what it considers manageable is higher?
He leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling.
Physical training expands the body's limits. Quirk training expands the quirk's limits. Is there a way to specifically train the cerebral threshold that defines how far the quirk can go?
He didn't have an answer yet. But the question was good.
The second part of the theory came that same afternoon, during his dojo session.
Hayashi was teaching him a variation of Pak Sao when he made a casual comment that Mineta immediately archived under the mental label important:
— Wing Chun has a philosophy that's often misunderstood. — Hayashi executed the movement with a fluidity that made it seem trivial. — People see the short strikes and think it's a limited style. But the real philosophy is different: Wing Chun starts from the premise that energy is already in the body, distributed inefficiently. The job isn't to add more energy. It's to channel what already exists directly, without loss.
Mineta executed the movement. Hayashi corrected him slightly.
— Most styles work with isolated muscle groups — Hayashi continued. — Wing Chun works with chains. Force starts in the ground, goes up the legs, passes through the core, reaches the arm as the final destination of everything before it. A properly executed strike contains the force of the entire body, even if from the outside it looks small.
The energy is already in the body. The job is to channel it.
Mineta kept practicing, but part of his brain was somewhere else entirely.
His quirk came from his hair. Specifically from his head, where the spheres concentrated. But hair could potentially cover the whole body, or at least it could if the quirk weren't limited to manifesting only on the head.
Why only the head?
It was a question he'd had from the beginning but had never answered satisfactorily. The obvious answer was because that's how the quirk works, which wasn't an answer at all, just a tautology. The more interesting answer, the one his theory was starting to suggest, was that the quirk wasn't intrinsically limited to the head. It was limited to the head because that was where the brain had established the connection—the channel through which the quirk's energy naturally flowed.
Like Wing Chun and the force chain. The strike ends in the hand not because the hand is the only place capable of striking, but because it's where the chain naturally converges.
What if there were more convergence points?
He wrote for almost an hour that night. The ideas came with that particular speed they have when they've been forming under the surface and finally find an outlet.
Preliminary theory on quirk expansion:
1. Pop Off is limited to the head by cerebral habit, not physical impossibility. The spheres are hair. Hair can grow all over the body.
2. If the quirk can propagate to other body points, the material state of the spheres might vary depending on the origin area. Bone density varies across the human body. Muscles have different properties in different zones. Does the quirk produce spheres with different properties depending on the origin point?
3. To reach that, first expand the current channel. Make the brain accept more connection points. That requires pushing the quirk to its limit consistently, with enough control to avoid damage, until the brain recalibrates what it considers normal operating range.
4. Evolution forced by extreme danger is a shortcut the brain uses when it has no other option. Systematic training is the long path that reaches the same place without relying on almost dying in the process.
He underlined the last line.
Below it, in smaller letters:
This could be completely wrong. There's no way to know if it works until I try. But the logic is coherent and doesn't contradict anything I've found in quirk literature.
First practical step: consistently push the quirk to ninety percent of the current limit during training instead of the seventy percent I've stayed at out of caution. See what happens.
What happened over the following weeks was painful, instructive, and occasionally spectacular in the most literal sense of the word.
Pushing the quirk to ninety percent of the limit consistently meant working in a range where the blood vessels in his eyes started protesting regularly. Not to the point of bleeding—he avoided that carefully—but to the point where the pressure was obvious and the body sent unmistakable signals that he was at the edge of comfort.
It was far beyond uncomfortable.
But it produced results.
At the end of the fourth week with the new protocol, his limit before noticeable fatigue rose from nineteen spheres to twenty-three. Passive spatial awareness, which had stagnated at four simultaneous spheres, jumped to six with a consistency it hadn't had before. And something else, something he hadn't anticipated: the regeneration speed of spheres after intensive use improved notably, as if the body had decided to adapt to the increased demand by optimizing recovery.
The body responds to demand, he wrote. Not to comfort.
He also wrote, honestly:
Frequent headaches. Don't overdo it. The goal is the sustainable limit, not the absolute limit.
Hayashi noticed the change three weeks after he started the new protocol.
He didn't say anything during the session. He waited until the end, when Mineta was packing his bag, and then spoke with that way of introducing important topics as if they were casual observations:
— Your reaction times have improved faster than I'd expect at this point in your training.
Mineta stopped.
— Really?
— Chi Sao last week. You responded twice before I completed the movement. That's not muscle speed—you're still at the same level there. That's anticipation. — Hayashi looked at him with that concentrated attention. — What are you doing differently outside the dojo?
Mineta considered the question.
— Training perception — he said finally. — Trying to process spatial information more actively.
— With your quirk?
— Related to the quirk. Yes.
Hayashi nodded slowly, as if that confirmed something he had been considering.
— Quirks and physical combat aren't separate categories. — His voice carried the tone of someone who had reached that conclusion long ago and no longer needed to defend it. — The best heroes I've seen train here eventually understood that. The ones who took longer were the ones who treated them as unrelated. — A pause. — I'm not telling you to integrate your quirk into training here. It's not time yet. I'm telling you that what you're doing makes sense, and that you should notice that.
— I notice — Mineta said.
Hayashi nodded once and moved on to his next student without further ceremony.
Mineta left the dojo with the feeling that he had just received, wrapped in the most Spartan prose possible, something that looked a lot like a meaningful compliment.
That night, last page of the month in the notebook:
Three months and a bit. 111 cm. 23 push-ups. 23 spheres before fatigue. Spatial awareness up to 6 simultaneous.
The theory on quirk expansion has enough preliminary evidence to continue. The body responds. The quirk responds.
What doesn't respond yet is height.
A pause. Then:
Although three centimeters in three months isn't bad for someone who had none ninety days ago.
He closed the notebook.
Outside, someone was playing piano in the building across the street. A slow, somewhat clumsy melody, clearly a student practicing. The same four notes over and over, with corrections, with patience, with that particular consistency of someone who knows the only way to improve is to keep going.
Mineta turned off the light and listened to the four notes repeat in the darkness for a while.
Something is something, he thought.
And this time, he almost believed it.
End of Episode 5.