The two weeks before the Festival had that particular quality of periods where the most important work happens in silence.
Not in class, which continued as usual. Not in the hallways, where the lives of twenty students proceeded with all the usual noise and motion. But in the margins: in the hours before and after official schedules, in the spaces each person found or created to do what they needed to do without anyone watching.
Mineta noticed it in the small details.
Midoriya arrived in class with his notebook already open and filled with notes that hadn't been there the day before. Kirishima had tiny new marks on his knuckles, appearing and disappearing depending on the day. Ashido sometimes arrived with her hair damp in a way that didn't correspond to the time she would have left home under normal circumstances. Tokoyami kept Dark Shadow more contained than usual, with the quality of someone who had been working hard and rested between sessions.
Each with their own methodology. Each with their own space.
What happened in those spaces belonged to them.
What Mineta knew of his own space was this:
The dojo, every morning before class. Base work agreed with Hayashi, without the Resin Protocol, just the body and the fundamentals of the three styles at an intensity high enough to keep the system active without pushing it where it couldn't go yet.
It was frustrating in the very specific way that it is frustrating to know what you want to do but not be able to do it yet.
He managed it with his usual logic.
On the fourth day of the first week, after finishing the session, Hayashi asked how the nervous system felt.
— Functional — said Mineta.
— No symptoms?
— No visible symptoms. There's something at the threshold of the most demanding movements that isn't fully clear yet.
Hayashi nodded with the tone of someone who already knew but wanted to hear it spoken aloud.
— Good. What you're describing is the nervous system finishing mapping the new routes the Resin Protocol opened. It's a process. It cannot be rushed.
— How much longer?
— Less than before — said Hayashi, his way of saying the question had no more precise answer than that.
Mineta accepted it and kept working.
What Mineta knew of other people's spaces was fragmentary, observed at the margins without actively seeking it.
Midoriya in the training yard after class, working his right arm with small, controlled rehabilitation movements, with the concentration of someone learning to use something that had been broken. Alone. No audience. That quality of work that doesn't need to be seen to be real.
Mineta passed by once, saw it, and kept walking.
Kirishima and Bakugo in the side yard, training together with coordination that didn't require words because it had been developing long enough to not need them. Kirishima hardening and receiving. Bakugo adjusting angles and power. Both using each other as references for what they needed to overcome.
Mineta watched from the hallway window for thirty seconds, then moved on.
Todoroki in the farthest corner of campus, where walls could absorb the ice without affecting main structures, working his right side to limits that looked considerable from a distance while the left side remained completely inactive.
That will be solved at the Festival, Mineta thought every time he saw him. Not before.
The scene with Yaoyorozu happened on the seventh day, a Thursday in the first week, when Mineta left the classroom after class and found the door slightly ajar.
It wasn't unusual. Classroom doors often stayed ajar when someone left without checking. What was unusual was the sound coming from inside.
Not words. Not the pen on the notebook that was Yaoyorozu's usual background noise. Something different, with the quality of something starting, stopping, and starting again, like someone attempting the same thing several times without completing it.
Mineta pushed the door slightly.
Yaoyorozu was standing by her desk, still in her UA uniform though most of the class had changed. Her hand was extended over the desk, and her expression of concentration was different from usual: tenser, with something underneath more like frustration than any other state Mineta had seen from her.
On the desk, half-formed, was what might have been a simple object: a ten-centimeter metal cube if the creation process had completed. It hadn't. It was halfway, recognizable but unfinished, like something that stopped before becoming what it intended to be.
Yaoyorozu glanced at it for a second.
Then she reabsorbed it.
Closed her eyes.
Extended her hand again.
And stopped.
Mineta pushed the door just enough to enter silently. Yaoyorozu didn't hear him—or if she did, she didn't process it because all her attention was on her extended hand and what wasn't working.
— How many times have you tried? — asked Mineta.
Yaoyorozu turned.
It wasn't a startle. It was the reaction of someone so focused that her immediate environment had temporarily ceased to exist and suddenly returned.
— Mineta-kun.
— How many times?
Yaoyorozu looked at the desk. Then at Mineta. Then back at the desk, as if deciding whether to answer honestly—and concluding she probably should.
— Sixteen — she said.
Mineta entered the classroom and closed the door behind him.
— What are you trying to do?
— Create an object under simulated pressure. — Yaoyorozu lowered her hand. — My quirk works perfectly under normal conditions. I know exactly how it works. I know the molecular composition of thousands of materials. I know the steps of the process. — A pause. — But at the USJ, when I needed to create something quickly with the villain present, it took longer than it should. And in the first month battle training, when Kaminari and you planned the trap, it took less because I had time to prepare mentally beforehand.
— The difference is prior preparation — said Mineta.
— Yes. And at the Festival I won't have prior preparation. I'll have what I have at the moment. — Yaoyorozu looked at her hand. — So I'm trying to learn to create without prior preparation. Without having thought about the object in advance. Reacting.
It was a precise diagnosis of a real problem, stated honestly by someone who had identified exactly where the fault lay and had no interest in presenting it more favorably.
Mineta processed it.
— The problem isn't preparation — he finally said.
Yaoyorozu looked at him.
— It isn't?
— Preparation is a symptom. The problem is that you trust the creation process more than the decision of what to create.
Yaoyorozu didn't answer immediately. Instead, she looked at him like someone who had received unexpected information and was checking if it fit with what she already knew.
— Explain — she said finally, genuinely asking for more.
— When you create with prior preparation — said Mineta — the decision of what to create is already made. You just execute the process. That works because the process is what you dominate. — Pause. — When you create without preparation, decision and execution must occur simultaneously. And your brain, used to decision first and execution after, blocks because the order isn't what it expects.
Yaoyorozu processed that.
— What you're describing — she said slowly — isn't that the quirk is too slow. It's that the decision is too slow.
— Yes.
— Then practicing rapid creation won't solve the problem if what I need is rapid decision-making.
— Yes.
Yaoyorozu looked at the desk, as if she had just reframed a problem she had been looking at from the wrong angle for so long it had felt like the only angle.
— Then — she said — how do you practice rapid decision-making?
— By limiting options — said Mineta. — If you have a thousand materials under high pressure, the brain tries to evaluate all options before deciding. With three, the decision is faster because the evaluation space is smaller.
— And how do I limit my options in real combat if I don't know in advance what I'll need?
— You don't limit quirk options. You limit decision categories. — Mineta thought carefully how to phrase it practically rather than abstractly. — Instead of thinking what object to create, you first think what the object needs to do. Defense, distraction, restriction, tool. Four categories. Within each, the quirk can improvise the specific object faster than evaluating all possibilities from scratch.
Yaoyorozu listened with full attention, no longer just verification but active integration.
— You've thought about this before — she said.
— I've thought about versions of this problem with my own quirk — said Mineta. — The solution isn't identical, but the structure of the problem is.
Yaoyorozu looked at her hand.
Then closed her eyes.
When she opened them and extended her hand, the object on the desk wasn't the metal cube she had tried sixteen times. It was a simple flat metal plate about twenty centimeters wide. Unpretentious. Functional.
It took less than half the time the cube would have taken.
Yaoyorozu looked at it for a second.
— Defense — she said, mostly to herself. — That's what I needed it to do. Physical protection. The specific object didn't matter.
— The specific object never matters as much as what it has to do — said Mineta.
Yaoyorozu reabsorbed the plate.
Closed her eyes again.
This time the object appeared even faster: a short thirty-centimeter nylon rope. Restriction.
She opened her eyes.
And then something happened Mineta hadn't fully expected: Yaoyorozu let out a sigh, not relief, but something more complicated, the quality of someone who has been carrying a weight and suddenly discovers the weight feels different than before.
— I've been trying for weeks — she said, quieter than usual — to understand why at the USJ it took me longer than it should. I thought it was fear. That under real pressure the quirk failed somehow it doesn't in training.
— The quirk didn't fail — said Mineta.
— No. — Yaoyorozu looked at the rope in her hand. — But I feel like I did.
It was an honest statement, not seeking a specific answer. Simply naming something real.
Mineta thought of how to respond usefully rather than just comfortingly.
— At the USJ — he said — you made decisions under conditions no one else in this class had experienced. The decisions you made were functional. The result was that we all got out. — Pause. — What you describe as "failing" is your own standard applied to conditions that standard didn't account for.
Yaoyorozu looked at him.
— That doesn't mean the standard is wrong — added Mineta. — It means training has to reach the standard. Which is different.
Silence.
Yaoyorozu reabsorbed the rope.
— Okay — she said finally, with the voice of someone who processed something and reached a conclusion to act on. — Four categories. I'll work from there.
— It's a starting point — said Mineta.
— Yes. — Pause. — Thank you.
— It's information — said Mineta. — Do something useful with it.
He grabbed his bag and left the classroom.
The reporters arrived on the ninth day.
Mineta knew before seeing them because UA campus had that morning a subtle, hard-to-name quality: security heroes in unusual positions and staff moving with tension suggesting something was happening or had just happened.
He confirmed it when he reached the main hallway and saw several classmates looking through windows at the outer yard, expressions ranging from Uraraka's curiosity to Bakugo's irritation, with Todoroki evaluating quietly.
Below, in the yard, cameras.
Not one or two. A group, with reporters and operators and that live-broadcast equipment that changes any space into something different from before they arrived.
— How did they get in? — asked Mineta, to no one in particular.
— Don't know yet — said Midoriya, concentrated on real-time analysis as usual.
— Someone from staff let them in — said Jirou, eyes on the yard. — Or they found a poorly secured entry. UA security is still under review after the USJ.
— Are they trying to talk to students? — asked Uraraka.
— They're trying to film what they can — said Jirou. — Look at the cameras. Not interviews. Footage.
Mineta looked at the yard.
Jirou was right. The cameras weren't aimed at anyone in particular but at buildings, training areas visible from the yard, anything that could become content showing how UA students live after the USJ.
— The Festival is in two weeks — said Mineta.
— Yes — said Midoriya. — And everyone wants to know who we are before it starts.
Iida appeared, posture of someone informed and already having decided what to do.
— No one goes to the yard — he said, still calibrating his voice but clear in authority. — Yaoyorozu-san contacted administration. Security staff are removing them.
— How long will it take? — asked Ashido.
— Don't know. Meanwhile, no unauthorized footage.
Bakugo, at the window, looked at the yard a moment longer.
— Let them look — he said, in his usual tone. — Doesn't change anything.
He walked away toward the classroom.
Mineta watched him go.
For Bakugo, the answer to being watched is always the same, he thought. Doesn't matter who's looking if you know what you're doing.
There was something in that smarter than it sounded.
The reporters were removed in about twenty minutes. Administration issued a memorandum about reviewing perimeter security, meaning someone was about to have an uncomfortable conversation.
Classes continued as if nothing had happened.
Because what mattered wasn't that they had entered. It was what the students themselves were doing, regardless of observers.
The second week arrived with something the first had not: speed.
Not that the training was faster, but that the body had found its rhythm and could push within the limits that rhythm allowed.
The ribs had stopped protesting. The nervous system had that quality of being recovered enough to distinguish normal effort from overexertion.
Hayashi noticed.
— This week we'll add reaction-speed work — he said at the first session of week two. — Nothing requiring the Resin Protocol. But the body needs to move in the range it will need for the Festival.
— When do we start Resin Protocol control?
Hayashi looked at him as if he had been waiting for the question.
— Not this week. Next.
— That gives me one week of control training before the Festival.
— Yes.
— It's tight.
— It is what it is. — Pause. — But the body will be in better shape for that week of control than if we had started earlier. That's the point.
Mineta processed it and accepted the logic, though he didn't like the schedule.
It was in the last session of the second week that Hayashi said what Mineta had been waiting for.
— Tomorrow we start the Resin Protocol.
Mineta nodded.
— How do we do it?
— Slowly. Very slowly. Partial activation first. One body area at a time. No combat until distribution is consistent.
— How much time do we have?
— One week before the Festival. — Hayashi gave that look of his. — Not enough to fully master it. Enough to start knowing how it works when you decide it works, instead of waiting for it to decide on its own.
Honest. Honesty was more useful than optimism at that moment.
— Understood — said Mineta.
That night, in his notebook:
Two weeks of base work complete. Tomorrow begins Resin Protocol control training. One week before the Festival.
What happened in these two weeks:
Midoriya working his arm alone after class. Kirishima and Bakugo calibrating against each other. Todoroki in the far campus area with left side inactive. Everyone with their space. Everyone with their method.
Yaoyorozu. Sixteen failed attempts to create under simulated pressure. The problem wasn't the quirk. It was decision speed. What she needed were categories, not open options. Defense, distraction, restriction, tool. Four categories. Within each, the quirk can improvise. The metal plate took half the cube's time. The rope even less.
What she said afterward: she had been thinking for weeks that at the USJ her quirk had failed. That she felt she had failed. What it really was: her own standard applied to conditions that standard didn't account for. The standard isn't wrong. Training has to reach it.
There's something about how Yaoyorozu processes her own failures that's different from most. She doesn't avoid them. She faces them. And then she works.
It's an uncommon quality.
Reporters entered campus on the ninth day. Wanted images for the Festival. Removed in twenty minutes. Bakugo said it doesn't matter who watches if you know what you're doing. He was right, even if phrasing it that way makes agreement in public difficult.
Festival in one week. The work no one sees has already happened.
That's always a sufficient starting point.
He closed his notebook.
Outside, the neighborhood was quiet. The piano from the building across played.
Mineta listened to it until the end.
End of Episode 23.