Chapter 3: Weight
I turned ten in March.
The orphanage did birthdays with cake and a small budget for a gift, something practical usually, socks or a notebook or once, memorably, a handheld puzzle game that the staff had clearly bought secondhand and that worked fine except for a horizontal line of dead pixels through the middle of the screen. I didn't mind. I liked the puzzle game. I played it until the battery connector gave out and then I took it apart to see how it was built, which is the kind of thing you do when you have too much time and not enough stimulation and a brain that has already completed most of the assigned reading for the week.
The cake that year was chocolate. I ate my slice and watched the yard and thought about the fact that Izuku Midoriya was also ten years old somewhere in this city, probably eating birthday cake of his own at some point in the spring, probably already showing the particular shape of what he was going to become. Earnest. Relentless. The kind of person who runs toward danger on pure instinct and only checks the math afterward.
I liked him, in the abstract way you like a character. I was going to have to figure out how to like him in the actual way, when the time came.
That was a problem for later. The problem for now was the training.
At ten the body started being more cooperative.
This is not a small thing. There is a real and frustrating gap between what you understand intellectually and what the physical machinery is capable of executing, and for the first several years of my life that gap had been the primary limiting factor. My control was technically sound but the output was low because there was only so much a child's body could generate and sustain. I had worked with what I had. Now what I had was getting meaningfully bigger.
Full-body reinforcement for fifteen minutes, clean and stable. Twenty if I pushed and accepted the cost, which was a fatigue that sat in my bones rather than my muscles, the specific tiredness of having run the energy too long and too hard. I knew what the cost was and I budgeted for it honestly. No point lying to yourself about your own limits.
What I was working toward, with the focus of someone who has spent years mapping a route, was Dismantle.
In JJK terms, Dismantle was Sukuna's basic slashing output, cursed energy projected outward and shaped into a cutting force. Ranged. Invisible to anyone who couldn't perceive cursed energy, which in this world was nobody but me. In a world of quirks it would read as something adjacent to a slicing wind attack, which fit neatly inside the cover story of super strength and enhanced endurance that I intended to register when the time came for quirk registration.
The mechanics, as I understood them from years of watching and reading, were not complicated in principle. You took the energy, you pushed it outward rather than inward, and you gave it direction and intent. The shape of the cut came from the will behind it.
In practice, sitting cross-legged on my bed at ten years old at two in the morning with everyone else asleep, the first time I tried to push the energy outward it went nowhere interesting and I spent the next twenty minutes with a headache that felt like someone had tightened a bolt behind my left eye.
I lay on my back in the dark and breathed through it.
"Okay," I said to the ceiling, very quietly. "That was instructive."
I tried again the next night. And the night after that.
Three weeks in, something moved.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that would have impressed anyone. I was sitting with my arm extended, palm out, pushing the energy toward the wall with as much directed intention as I could manage, and there was a sound, barely audible, like a single thread being pulled from fabric, and a thin white line appeared in the plaster about two inches long and as fine as a hair.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I got up and pressed my thumb against it. Real. An actual cut in an actual wall. Not a crack, not a structural flaw, a clean straight line made by something that had come from me.
I sat back down on the bed and put my face in my hands, not from distress but from the particular overwhelming quality of something you've been working toward for years finally being real.
"Okay," I said into my palms.
The warmth in my chest, which was not small anymore, which had been growing with the same patient consistency as the rest of me, pulsed once like it was agreeing.
I spent the next hour filling the cut with toothpaste from my bathroom kit and smoothing it over with a wet finger until it was invisible. The last thing I needed was a staff member noticing unexplained damage in a ten-year-old's room and asking questions that I would have to lie through carefully.
I was good at lying. I had been practicing that too.
The winter I was ten, a villain killed three people four blocks from the orphanage.
Not a big event, by the standards of what this world was capable of. No catastrophic quirk, no mass casualties, no All Might showing up to resolve things in a way that made the evening news feel like a sports broadcast. A man with a disorientation quirk who had robbed a convenience store and, when cornered by two heroes and a police response, had panicked or decided or both, and three people who had been standing in the wrong piece of street at the wrong moment had died for it.
I found out from the news, same as everyone.
I watched the footage, which was limited because it had happened fast, and I sat with a specific feeling that I identified carefully and honestly before I let myself move on from it.
Anger.
Not grief. I hadn't known those people. Not fear, exactly, though the proximity registered on some animal level. Just a clean, sharp anger at the particular calculus that had produced this outcome, the villain cycling through a system that kept releasing him, the heroes arriving too late and with too many constraints on what they were allowed to do, the three people in the wrong piece of street paying the cost of everyone else's process.
This was the world. I had known this intellectually since I was old enough to form sentences. Here it was in physical, local, undeniable form.
I turned off the television and went to bed and did not sleep for a long time.
What I thought about, in the dark, was not the three dead people specifically. It was the shape of the thing. The way villain activity in this world operated as a persistent tax on civilians, with heroes functioning as the collection agency rather than the prevention. I had watched enough of the series to have developed opinions about the hero system that were not exactly charitable. Living inside it was clarifying those opinions into something sharper and more personal.
Heroes let people die because the alternative, the actual elimination of the threat rather than the containment of it, violated the rules they operated under.
I did not operate under those rules.
I was ten. I couldn't do anything yet about the gap between what I understood and what I was capable of. But I filed it away in the place I kept the things I intended to eventually act on, and I noted that the file was getting heavy.
Spring came and I turned ten and a half, which is not a real age but felt like one because the training had crossed a threshold.
Dismantle was unreliable but repeatable. I could produce a clean cut roughly six times out of ten attempts, with a range of about four feet and a force that would have been meaningfully damaging to unprotected skin. The other four out of ten produced either nothing or the headache, and I was working on understanding what separated the successful attempts from the failures. It was concentration, mostly, and a specific quality of intention that I could achieve consistently when I was calm and inconsistently when I was tired or distracted.
I made a log. Not written down anywhere, nothing that could be found, just a mental record of each session. What conditions produced what results. Where the failure modes were. What the energy felt like in the moment before a successful cut versus a failed one.
This is how you get better at something. You pay attention to what works and you do more of it, and you pay attention to what fails and you understand why, and you do this every day without exception until the ratio shifts.
I was patient. I had always been patient. Whatever I had been in my previous life, twenty-two years of existence followed by an abrupt reset had given me the thing that most people my age in this world lacked completely, which was an actual sense of how long things take and why that is not a reason to stop.
Outside, spring made the yard look briefly like it was trying to be something nicer. I sat in the sunlight with a book and moved energy through my hands in patterns no one could see, small and precise and getting better every day, and I thought about UA entrance exams that were still four years away and about a boy in another part of this city who was running through his own city doing his own work and had no idea I existed yet.
Neither of us knew what we were going to be to each other.
I thought I had a reasonable idea. Friend, eventually. A genuine one, which was a word I used carefully and meant when I used it.
I looked forward to it in the distant way you look forward to a good part of a book you're reading slowly on purpose, knowing it's coming, not rushing toward it.
There was plenty to do in the meantime.