I turned twelve in March and the world gave me a gift I hadn't asked for, which was my first real look at what a villain could do when they were serious about it.
Not local this time. National news. A villain called Collapse whose quirk allowed him to destabilize the molecular cohesion of solid structures, essentially turning load-bearing matter into powder at will, had taken down a six-story apartment building in Nagoya. Forty-one confirmed dead by the end of the first day. Rescue heroes working through rubble for survivors. The kind of footage that the news channels play on a loop with a banner across the bottom and a number that keeps getting updated in the wrong direction.
I watched it for two hours. Then I turned it off and sat in the quiet and did the thing I had learned to do, which was feel what I actually felt before I decided what to think about it.
Grief was in there, which surprised me slightly. Distant and structural rather than personal, the grief you feel for strangers when the scale of what happened to them is big enough to demand it. Underneath that, the anger, cleaner and more familiar, about the specific failures of process and prevention that had made this possible. Collapse had a record. He had been released fourteen months ago after serving two thirds of a sentence for a previous structural attack that had injured nine people.
Fourteen months. Forty-one dead.
I sat with that arithmetic for a long time.
Then I went to bed and in the morning I trained harder than I had trained the day before, which was what I always did when the anger had nowhere else to go.
---
Twelve felt different from eleven in ways I had not anticipated.
The body was changing, which I observed with the detachment of someone reading a field report about a vehicle they depended on. Taller. Marginally broader. The lean quality I had always had was sharpening into something more deliberate-looking, though that was partly the training and partly just the way I was built. My energy reserves had grown again, noticeably, the coal in the chest burning hotter and with more available depth to it.
I ran the numbers with the honest part of my brain. At current growth rate, factoring in the training acceleration I was planning for the next two years before UA, I would walk into that entrance exam with something close to low-tier pro hero physical capability, reinforcement-wise, and a ranged cutting technique that nobody in that exam would be able to see coming or account for. Not Sukuna at his peak. Not close to Sukuna at his peak. But a genuine weapon in a world that measured threats in quirk power, and cursed energy did not register as a quirk.
That asymmetry was the most important tactical advantage I had and I intended to protect it absolutely.
---
Takeda-sensei moved on in April, transferred to another school for reasons the administration explained vaguely to the class and that I assumed were bureaucratic rather than anything interesting. Her replacement was a man named Oshiro-sensei who was competent and dull in equal measure and who assigned the extra work openly as a distinction rather than quietly as a matter of course, which meant I had to sit with being pointed at as the smart one in a way I found mildly tedious.
I was not the smart one. I was a twenty-two-year-old university student in a twelve-year-old's body who had access to memories from a previous life. This was not intelligence. It was a filing advantage. There is a difference, and I was honest with myself about it because being honest with yourself about the actual sources of your capabilities is the only way to accurately assess your real limits.
What I was, genuinely, was patient and systematic and very good at focusing on things that mattered while ignoring things that didn't. That part was real. That part was mine.
Oshiro-sensei assigned us a project on hero history in May. I wrote mine on the civilian casualty rate during villain incidents over the past two decades, broken down by whether the primary responding heroes had opted for containment or elimination. The data was public. The conclusion it led to was not one most twelve-year-olds were inclined to draw.
Oshiro-sensei gave me a good grade and a note at the bottom that said "Interesting perspective, though perhaps somewhat cynical for the genre."
I read that note twice and appreciated it more than he probably intended.
---
The training in the months after my birthday moved into a new phase that I had been building toward without announcing it even to myself.
I started working on Cleave.
The distinction between Dismantle and Cleave, as I understood it from having watched Sukuna use both in a world where I was now responsible for recreating them from scratch, was fundamentally one of targeting. Dismantle was indiscriminate, a fixed output, it cut what it touched. Cleave was adaptive, it scaled its force and depth to the durability of the target, reading the composition of what it was cutting and calibrating the output accordingly. Against something very hard it was much more powerful than Dismantle. Against something soft the difference was less meaningful.
The mechanism that interested me was the reading. The way Cleave required the energy to assess before it acted. Not a passive scan, an active one, the technique reaching out and taking in information about the target and using that information to shape itself.
I didn't know how to do that yet. I knew conceptually that it was what I was aiming for. The gap between the concept and the execution was going to be wide and I settled into the beginning of it with the particular kind of patience you need for work where there is no visible progress for a long stretch and then suddenly there is.
The first two months produced nothing useful. I produced Dismantle, reliably and cleanly, and occasionally something that felt like it was trying to be something else and then wasn't. I noted the attempts that almost worked and tried to understand the quality that distinguished them. There was something in the initiation, a moment just before the energy left the body where it paused in a way that Dismantle did not, a half-breath of assessment.
I could feel the shape of what I was looking for. I couldn't reliably produce it yet.
That was fine. I had time. I kept working.
---
In July, Daichi turned nine.
The orphanage did the cake and the secondhand gift and the small ritual of it, and I watched from my usual position of social adjacency and noticed that Daichi had stopped keeping the floating perimeter of possessions around him constantly. The pencil case was in his bag now. The stuffed bear was on his shelf rather than orbiting him. He had made two friends from the newer intakes and was playing with them in the yard in the way that children play when they have finally decided that the environment is probably not going to hurt them.
I noted this with something that was not exactly warmth but was in the neighbourhood of it. Progress. Adaptation. The kid had landed in a bad situation and was doing the work of surviving it with the tools available to him.
I respected that in a general, impersonal way.
I also noted that Kenta had not circled him again since the intervention sixteen months ago. I had not spoken to Kenta since that day. He had not spoken to me. We existed in the same space with the polite mutual avoidance of two people who have each taken the other's measure and reached a satisfactory conclusion.
This was the correct outcome and I was satisfied with it.
---
Late July, hot and slow, the city sitting under the particular heavy air of summer that made everything feel like it was moving through something thicker than usual.
I was on the roof.
Getting onto the roof of the orphanage was not technically permitted but the roof access door had a latch that did not fully catch unless you pulled it firmly after you, and three weeks of observation had confirmed that nobody checked it in the hour before lights-out. I had been using it for two months. The roof was flat, pebbled, with a low retaining wall around the edge, and from it you could see four blocks in every direction including the street where the villain had killed three people when I was ten.
I sat with my back against the water tower housing and ran energy through my legs and looked at the city and thought.
The lights were coming on as the sun went down, the city transitioning through its gears from day to evening. Hero agency logos visible on two buildings from here. A police drone doing a slow circuit three streets over, standard patrol pattern. Ordinary evening. Nothing bad happening right now in my sightline.
Right now.
I thought about Collapse, still in detention awaiting trial. I thought about the villain from four blocks away, also awaiting process. I thought about all the things I knew were coming in this world, years from now, the names and the methods and the body counts attached to them, the League of Villains and what they were capable of and what they intended and what the hero system was not going to be able to do about them.
I was twelve. I was not ready. This was not pessimism, it was accuracy. The gap between what I was now and what those threats required was real and I was not going to pretend otherwise.
But I was going to close it.
The thing in my chest sat with that thought and said nothing, which was its version of agreement.
I watched the city finish going dark and then I went back through the roof door, pulling it carefully behind me until I heard the latch catch, and I went to bed and slept cleanly and woke up before dawn to train.
Twelve years old. The entrance exams were two and a half years away.
I had work to do.