Attention fragmentation occurred again three weeks later.
This time it lasted four seconds.
Mineta was performing the usual exercise—thirteen spheres distributed in the garden, lateral movement, divided attention—when his brain did the same strange thing it had done the first time: it split awareness into two distinct zones with a clarity that unified attention never produced.
This time he didn't stop.
He kept moving, breathing in a controlled way, trying not to think too much about what was happening because the first time he had tried to analyze it in real time, he had collapsed immediately. Four seconds. Five. And then it passed, as smoothly as it had arrived, and attention returned to its usual configuration.
He stood in the center of the garden with his hands slightly trembling—not from physical exertion, but from the sustained concentration required to avoid interfering with the process.
Twice, he thought. It's not statistical noise.
He went inside, opened his notebook, recorded the data with clinical precision, and then allowed himself a moment of something that wasn't exactly celebration but resembled it closely.
The difference between the two occurrences was instructive. The first had been completely spontaneous, without any identifiable special conditions. The second had occurred after a particularly intense dojo session in which Hayashi had worked specifically on the tactile awareness of Chi Sao for forty continuous minutes, and then Mineta had done the quirk exercise immediately upon arriving home, without the usual rest interval.
The elevated attention state from Chi Sao, maintained without pause, seems to be the trigger, he wrote. Fragmentation doesn't occur from a normal attention state. It requires that the substrate is already "hot."
Below:
Experiment for next week: deliberately replicate the exact conditions of tonight. See if fragmentation occurs on demand or remains spontaneous even under favorable conditions.
The experiment took four attempts to produce results.
The first failed because the Chi Sao session hadn't been intense enough; Hayashi had a new student that day and attention had been divided. The second failed for reasons Mineta couldn't precisely identify, probably accumulated fatigue. The third produced something that might have been the start of fragmentation but collapsed in less than a second before stabilizing.
The fourth worked.
Eight seconds this time. The northern zone of the garden with seven spheres and the southern zone with six, each with its own clarity, its own resolution, like having two simultaneous focal points instead of one trying to cover everything.
And during those eight seconds, something else: the vague but present sensation that he could move the spheres in the northern zone without degrading attention in the southern zone.
He didn't try. He didn't want to overload the system while still learning his limits. But the possibility was there, perceptible as the outline of something that still had no defined form.
He recorded everything with his usual meticulousness and then stared at the dark garden for a while, thinking.
The quirk was still the same quirk. The spheres were still spheres. Nothing had changed in terms of what Pop Off fundamentally did. But the way he interacted with the quirk was changing in ways the canon had never shown, because the original Mineta never had reason to explore that direction.
It's not the quirk that has limits, he finally wrote. I am the one who has them. The quirk is what the user can handle. Nothing more, nothing less.
He underlined that line.
It was an observation that applied to almost every quirk he knew from canon, when thought about carefully. Todoroki with fire. Bakugo with managing heat in his body. Even Deku with One For All, which was basically the story of a user learning not to destroy himself with his own power.
The limit was always the user.
Which meant the relevant work was always on the user.
Two weeks after consolidating attention fragmentation as a reproducible technique under favorable conditions, the real world decided to make an unannounced appearance.
It was a Thursday afternoon, rush hour, and Mineta was returning from the dojo with his backpack on his shoulder and the forearm muscles still warm from a particularly demanding Chi Sao session. Hayashi had introduced a variation that week that involved active resistance instead of passive response, requiring considerably greater sustained concentration than usual.
He was, in other words, in exactly the elevated attention state that the past weeks of experimentation had identified as favorable for fragmentation.
He wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking about having something hot for dinner and reviewing his notes on neuroplasticity that he had left unfinished that morning.
The problem occurred on Nishida Street, three blocks from the dojo.
There was a narrow alley between two commercial buildings that Mineta had used as a shortcut for months. It was usually empty at that hour. That afternoon it wasn't.
Three boys, all clearly older than him, probably fourteen or fifteen, were in the alley with an energy Mineta identified in about two seconds as problematic. They weren't just standing there. There was a visible power dynamic in their spatial arrangement: two flanking the third, who was clearly uncomfortable holding his backpack to his chest as if expecting it to be taken.
Mineta stopped at the entrance to the alley.
The three looked at him.
The one who seemed to take the lead had shaved sides and an expression combining boredom and hostility in equal measure. His quirk was visible: the palms of his hands had a rough, orange texture suggesting something related to heat or friction.
"— Look," said the shaved one, looking at Mineta as one would regard a minor obstacle. "— The dwarf with balls on his head. What do you want?"
Mineta assessed the situation with the speed that nine months of training had begun to install in him as habit.
The boy with the backpack wasn't injured but was scared. The two flanking him wanted something from him, probably money or the contents of the backpack. The third, somewhat apart with hands in pockets, was the least predictable element.
The logical decision was to turn around, take another route, and not get involved in a situation that wasn't his problem.
Mineta knew the logical decision.
He also knew that the boy with the backpack had exactly the expression he would have had if he had arrived in this world unprepared and encountered three people wanting to do something to him.
This is a problem, he thought, with the resignation of someone who knows he has already made the decision even if he hasn't communicated it to himself yet.
"— I'm taking the shortcut," he replied, in a deliberately neutral tone. "— Going straight."
The shaved one raised an eyebrow.
"— The shortcut is taken."
"— I see." Mineta didn't move. "— I also see that this boy wants to leave, and you're not letting him."
The silence that followed had that particular quality of moments just before something changes direction.
The shaved one looked at him for a second, calibrating, and then smiled in a way that was not pleasant at all.
"— You're either very brave or very stupid."
"— Both options seem better to me than ignoring what's happening here."
It wasn't heroism. It was a pragmatic assessment: the boy with the backpack needed someone to change the dynamics of the situation, and Mineta was the only available candidate. There was no one else in the alley. The main street was far enough away that pedestrians didn't have a direct line of sight.
The shaved one exchanged a glance with the other flanker, then took two steps toward Mineta with the energy of someone who has decided the conversation is over.
Fine, thought Mineta. Let's see how useful nine months of learning really is.
The first thing he noticed was that his Chi Sao attention state was still active.
He hadn't planned it. It was a timing coincidence—the recent dojo session and the mental state he had maintained during the walk—but it was a real advantage. The alley space was clearer in his perception than usual, the three bodies distributed with a presence beyond simple vision.
The shaved one came at him with a direct push to the chest, probably expecting Mineta to fall backward or step aside.
Mineta did neither.
Hayashi had spent months teaching him that a direct push is energy that can be redirected. He slightly rotated on his right foot, let the push's momentum pass to the side, and used his left hand to add a small redirection that caused the boy to lose balance forward instead of Mineta losing balance backward.
It wasn't clean. It wasn't the elegant, fluid movement Hayashi executed in the dojo. It was functional and clumsy and required more effort than it should have, but it worked.
The shaved one stabilized and turned with an expression that had shifted from hostility to something more serious.
"— That's your quirk," said Mineta, pointing to the orange palms with a nod. "— Heat from friction?"
"— And why do you care?"
"— I care about knowing whether you're going to use it or if this stays at pushing."
It was a question designed to make the other think about consequences before acting. The shaved one hesitated, which was useful information. He probably didn't want to escalate to quirk use, because the legal consequences of using a quirk in a street fight as a minor were considerably worse than a physical altercation without powers.
The second, who had been silent until now, decided it was his turn.
He was shorter than the shaved one but broader, with the compact solidity of someone with natural physical strength. He moved toward Mineta's left flank at a speed Mineta hadn't fully anticipated.
What he did anticipate, thanks to the active attention state, was the direction.
Not the exact timing. Not enough margin to execute something clean. But enough that when the grab came, it reached the arm instead of the neck, which was clearly the target.
A grab on the arm was manageable. Hayashi had devoted several sessions to working with grabs, specifically for situations where someone stronger tries to immobilize using mass.
The response wasn't force against force. It was breaking the structure of the grab before it consolidated.
He rotated the arm inward with a specific movement he had practiced enough times for his body to execute it before the brain finished thinking it through, and the grab opened.
It wasn't enough to create distance but was enough for the second boy to readjust, giving roughly a second of space.
A second was little. But it was something.
He launched two spheres.
Not as an attack. As an obstacle: one on the ground in front of the shaved one, another on the wall near the second. The sticky spheres on the ground weren't lethal but were considerably more annoying than they appeared if you stepped on one unexpectedly, and the one on the wall near the second created a momentary distraction sufficient for Mineta to create lateral distance.
The shaved one stepped on the ground sphere, felt the unexpected stickiness, and the instinctive reaction to look down was exactly what Mineta needed to create lateral space.
Three steps toward the center of the alley. Repositioning. Space regained.
The two now looked at him with a different expression. Not fear, exactly, but the visible recalibration of someone who had expected one thing and found another.
The third, who had remained apart with hands in pockets the whole time, spoke for the first time.
"— Hey. Enough already." His voice was calmer than the other two. "— It's not worth it."
The shaved one looked at him.
"— What?"
"— It's not worth it." The third nodded toward the boy with the backpack. "— Leave him."
There was a moment of tension that Mineta held without moving, evaluating, hands in a low guard position that was not aggressive but not careless either.
The shaved one looked at Mineta one more second. Then spat on the ground, with the energy of someone who wants the last gesture to be theirs, and left. The second followed without saying a word. The third paused briefly, looked at Mineta with a hard-to-read expression, and also left.
The alley fell silent.
Mineta lowered his hands slowly and exhaled the air he hadn't realized he was holding.
The boy with the backpack was named Tanaka Riku.
Twelve years old, same grade as Mineta though at a different school, curly hair and an expression that, now that the danger had passed, was half relief and half the particular discomfort of someone who needed rescuing and doesn't exactly know how to process it.
"— Thanks," he said, voice still slightly trembling.
"— You're welcome." Mineta picked up his spheres from the ground and wall. The one on the ground had several grains of sand stuck, which took a moment to clean. "— Are you okay?"
"— Yeah. They just wanted money." Tanaka looked toward the alley exit with an expression suggesting he would use a different route for a while. "— How did you do that? The arm movement."
"— Martial arts. I've been learning for a few months."
"— With that quirk?"
"— The quirk helps. Martial arts too."
Tanaka processed that information.
"— The sticky spheres on the ground were the best. The shaved guy almost fell."
"— That was the idea."
A brief pause. Tanaka adjusted his backpack on his shoulder with the unconscious gesture of someone checking they still have what they had before.
"— Well. Thanks. Really."
"— Go via the main street," said Mineta. "— Just in case."
Tanaka nodded and left to the left, toward the main street. Mineta watched until he turned the corner, then picked up his own backpack from the ground where he had left it at the start of the altercation, and continued through the alley in the opposite direction.
The walk home was silent, processing.
That night, the notebook received a different entry than usual.
No training data. No hypotheses about the quirk or observations on the integrated protocol. It was more like a post-action analysis, the kind of record someone keeps when they want to understand what worked and what didn't.
What worked: active Chi Sao attention state. Redirection of the push. Breaking the grab. Use of spheres as obstacles rather than direct projectiles.
What didn't work: anticipation of the second was partial, not complete. Repositioning after the grab was slower than it should be. Lost line of sight of the third for too long.
What I learned: dojo training works in real conditions. Not perfectly. Far from perfectly. But it works.
Quirk in combination with physical combat is more effective than either alone. Spheres as terrain control, not direct attack, have value the canon never fully exploited.
A pause. Then:
I also learned that I don't like fighting.
Not in the sense of being cowardly or preferring to avoid conflict always. But in the sense that during those two or three minutes in the alley there were too many uncontrolled variables that dojo training doesn't fully replicate. Hayashi attacks with real intent but with control. The alley boys attacked with real intent without control.
The difference is small technically and huge subjectively.
I need more of that. Not street fights, but situations where variables aren't controlled. Dojo training is necessary but not sufficient.
He closed the notebook.
There was one more observation he hadn't written, a mental note about the alley that he didn't know exactly where to place in the scheme of his notes.
At the moment of highest tension, when the second boy tried the grab and attention was at its peak, there was something that wasn't exactly the garden's attention fragmentation but resembled it. A momentary clarity of the entire alley space, all bodies in it with their positions and movement vectors, lasting only a second but enough for the grab response to arrive before conscious analysis processed it.
Not in the garden. Not in the dojo.
In a real situation, with real stress, with real consequences.
The brain activates survival responses, he had written months earlier. Quirks work the same.
The quirk hadn't evolved. Not even close. But something in the alley had worked in a way that the garden and tatami still didn't consistently produce.
Real stress changes something, he thought before falling asleep. I don't yet know if that's good or dangerous.
Probably both.
End of Episode 8.