The thing about a technique that requires you to read your target before it acts is that you cannot practice it on things that do not resist.
I had spent four months attempting Cleave against the fence posts, the wall of the equipment shed, the concrete of the retaining wall on the roof, and what I kept producing was Dismantle with an identity crisis. The energy went out and it cut and the cut was clean and it was not what I was trying to do. The difference I was reaching for, the adaptive assessment, the technique calibrating itself to what it was hitting rather than delivering a fixed output, kept not happening.
I sat on the roof in September, twelve and a half, and interrogated the problem honestly.
The issue was not control. My control was good now, genuinely good, the kind that had moved from deliberate to habitual in the way that competence does when you have put enough hours into something. The issue was not intent. I knew what I wanted the energy to do. The issue was that Cleave, as I understood it, required the technique to do something I had never asked energy to do before, which was to go out and come back changed. Not a projection. A conversation between the energy and the target, brief and violent and informative.
I could not figure out how to make the energy ask a question.
This was the formulation I kept arriving at, which sounded faintly ridiculous but was the most accurate description I had. Dismantle said here is a cut. Cleave said what are you and here is the appropriate cut for what you are. The first was a statement. The second was a statement that began with a question, compressed into a single motion.
I sat with that and thought about it for a long time.
Then I thought about the alley.
In the alley I had not used Dismantle. I had thought I was using Dismantle, but sitting with the memory carefully and honestly I could identify something that had happened in the half-second before the energy left my body that had not happened in training. A read. Not a deliberate one. An automatic one, driven by the fact that the situation was real and the stone skin was a genuine variable and some part of me had assessed the target before committing to the output.
Emergency had produced instinctively what months of deliberate practice had not.
I thought about that for a week. I ran training sessions where I tried to replicate the internal state of the alley, the real-stakes quality, the genuine need to know what I was hitting before I hit it. This produced nothing useful because I was on a rooftop alone in the dark and there was no actual stake and my nervous system knew the difference between performance and reality and declined to be fooled.
What I eventually arrived at, through a process that was more intuitive than technical, was that the question Cleave asked was not separate from the output. It was the leading edge of the output. The energy went out already asking, and the answer shaped what followed so quickly it appeared simultaneous.
The way to train it was not to try to make the energy ask before it moved. The way to train it was to push the energy out already open, already receptive, already shaped by intent to receive information rather than only to deliver force.
I tried this against the roof's retaining wall on a Tuesday evening in October.
The cut was different.
Not dramatically different. Not visibly different to anyone watching. But I felt it, in the energy itself, a quality of response rather than pure projection, the technique arriving at the wall and finding it and calibrating in the fraction of a second between contact and completion. The cut was deeper than Dismantle would have produced against that surface. Calibrated deeper.
I put my hand against the wall and felt the cut with my fingertip.
I went to bed and slept better than I had in weeks.
Cleave took another three months to become reliable. I did not rush it. I had learned from Dismantle that rushing the reliability phase produced techniques that worked most of the time and failed at the worst times, and a technique that failed at the worst times was a liability wearing the costume of an asset.
By December, twelve years old and three quarters, I had Cleave at roughly eighty percent on varied surfaces. The concrete of the rooftop, the wood of the fence, the metal of the drainpipe I had felt guilty about cutting and had then felt rational about because I could produce a plausible story about environmental wear. Each surface produced a different response in the energy. I was cataloguing them, building a library.
What I was building, underneath the technique itself, was an understanding of how Sukuna's toolkit was actually structured. Not the surface level, the named techniques with their visual signatures and their dramatic deployment in the series. The underlying logic. The way each technique was not a separate thing but a facet of the same fundamental capacity, shaped by intention and application.
Dismantle and Cleave were the same energy doing two different things because two different things were being asked of it. The asking was the technique. The energy itself was the constant.
This meant the ceiling of what I could eventually do was much higher than the named techniques suggested, because the named techniques were just what Sukuna had specifically developed and chosen to use. They were not a complete map of the possible. They were points on a map that had much more territory than the points indicated.
I sat with this understanding and found it genuinely exciting in a way I did not often feel about things. The clean intellectual excitement of a large and real possibility.
I kept building.
January, age thirteen approaching.
The orphanage in winter had its own texture, the heating system that worked unevenly and left some rooms colder than others, the way the light was different, lower and earlier-ending, the general quality of everyone spending more time inside. I did not mind winter. I had always been internally warm, literally, in the way of someone with a small fire burning steadily in the center of their chest, and the cold air felt clarifying rather than miserable.
I had been thinking about the vigilante question more seriously.
Not the operational questions, I had a rough architecture for those and would refine them closer to the time. The question I was sitting with was the one that preceded operations, which was: what kind of presence did I want Sukuna to be in this world.
Not a hero. Obviously not a hero. Heroes operated within a framework that I found structurally contemptible, not because the individuals were contemptible, I knew better than that, but because the framework produced outcomes that the individuals were then not permitted to correct. All Might was genuinely remarkable. Endeavor was genuinely powerful and also genuinely terrible in ways the public did not yet fully know. The average pro hero was doing something real and necessary and was simultaneously a cog in a machine that processed criminals through a revolving door and called it justice.
Not a villain. The word itself was insufficient for what the villains in this world were, and regardless of semantics, I had no interest in the kind of power that required you to destroy the existing order to demonstrate it. The existing order would eventually collapse under its own accumulated failures. I did not need to push it.
What I wanted to be was a fact. A thing that existed in this world that operated by different rules and demonstrated that by the consistency and completeness of its results. Sukuna would not contain. Sukuna would not arrest. Sukuna would not hand anyone to a system that would release them in fourteen months to produce forty-one more bodies.
Sukuna would conclude things.
The word villain would get attached to that. I knew it would. I had no particular feeling about the word. Words are applied by the people doing the applying and reflect their categories more than they reflect the thing being named. The hero system would call me a villain because I operated outside their authority and because I killed and because those two things were the definition of villain within their framework.
Their framework was not my framework.
I was fine.
March. Thirteen.
The cake was vanilla this year. I ate it and watched the yard and thought, as I always did on this day, about Izuku Midoriya turning thirteen somewhere in this city.
I had thought about him more this year than in previous years, not out of sentimentality but out of the practical awareness that the timeline was beginning to compress. Three and a half years until UA. Midoriya at thirteen was quirkless and would remain quirkless until the encounter with All Might that I could date with reasonable precision. He was running, somewhere in this city. Training with the desperate, slightly unhinged commitment of someone who had decided that the reasonable answer was wrong and was going to prove it through sheer force of will.
I respected that. I had always respected it even watching it from the outside as a story.
In person it was going to be something else. I would have to manage myself carefully around that quality of his, the way it pulled at something, the gravitational field of that kind of conviction. I was not going to be swept up in anyone's mission. My mission was mine. But I could feel, even in the abstract, that Midoriya was going to be the kind of person who made you want to be better than your plans accounted for.
That was useful information. I filed it.
The other person I thought about on my birthday, every year, was my mother. Not with grief, I had never met her, she was a fact about my origin more than a person in my experience. But with a kind of acknowledgment. She had existed. She had died in the process of my existing. That was worth a moment, annually, of honest recognition.
I gave it the moment. Then I ate the rest of my cake.
Thirteen. Three and a half years. An enormous amount of work.
The fire in my chest burned steady and warm and when I pressed my hand against my sternum and felt it, it felt like it was exactly where it was supposed to be.
I was ready to begin the next part.