The training schedule pinned to his apartment wall had been updated three times in the last week — the revision marks visible in the corner where he'd crossed out the previous version without removing the original, a palimpsest of planning that documented every recalculation since the exam.
The camping supplies from yesterday's shopping trip were stacked by the door in two bags. The pillow he'd bought — soft, too expensive for a camping pillow, priced for people who had more money than he did and who he'd decided to temporarily be — was on top of one of the bags.
He sat at his desk with his laptop open to the system's interface and did the accounting.
Level 2. Four deaths. Two fragments, both tested and mapped. One skill, purchased in April. The stat pool from Stain's kill had been allocated: STR at sixteen, AGI at fifteen, DUR at fifteen, WIL at thirteen. The numbers had the quality of a resource that had been spent toward specific objectives and had produced specific results, which was the best thing a resource could do.
Six SP remaining.
He pulled up the skill tree's visible section and examined it with the specific attention he gave it every few weeks — looking for changes, for newly visible nodes, for anything that hadn't been available last time. The tree's structure was not static; nodes appeared when adjacent requirements were met, and the purchased Quick Recovery node had opened three adjacent positions.
Threat Assessment Level 1 was the most practical of the three. 50% accuracy power tier estimation on observed individuals, passive activation. It cost four SP. The accuracy was low enough that it wasn't a tactical tool in its own right, but it was the prerequisite for Lethal Read, which was, and which cost twelve SP that he didn't have yet.
He purchased it.
[Skill Acquired: Threat Assessment Lv.1 — Passive. Power tier estimation (50% accuracy) on observed targets. Range: line of sight. Activation: automatic.]
The activation was immediate — a very faint overlay in his peripheral vision, not visually intrusive, more the quality of a background noise he'd suddenly become aware had always been present. He looked at his own hands and got: self — which was accurate and useless. He looked at the apartment wall and got nothing. He looked at the window and at the street below and at the passerby walking their dog and got: low. Low. Low.
Civilians. Accurate.
Two SP remaining. Saved toward the next purchase.
The mall had the June Saturday energy of a place that was full of people who had finished a significant obligation — school semester, work sprint, some accumulated pressure — and were processing the release of it in the specific way that consumerism accommodated. The food court smelled like four different cuisines simultaneously, which was the smell of a functional mall.
He found his section of the class at the camping goods floor, which Kirishima had apparently scouted in advance because he was already holding two sleeping bags in the specific pose of someone who had been having an opinion for several minutes.
"This one's rated to negative five degrees," Kirishima said, presenting it. "And this one's rated to negative ten but it's twice the weight. My bag's already at the limit—"
"Negative five is fine," Kaminari said. "We're going to a forest in July. We're not going to need negative ten."
"But what if—"
"It's going to be hot," Kaminari said. "I'm going to be the only one in shorts and you're going to be the one sweating in a negative ten bag."
Yami moved past them toward the section with single-person tents and felt the new skill's peripheral overlay tag both of them automatically: moderate. Moderate. He filed this and kept moving.
Momo had a handwritten list — on a notepad that was the same brand as the notepad from the roof, he'd learned she bought them in bulk — and was working through the camping section with the economy of someone who had prepared, which she had. Jiro was beside her making comments about specific items that informed Momo's decisions without disrupting the list's structure. The tag: moderate-high. Moderate.
He found the pillow section.
The camping pillow costs too much, he thought, looking at the price tag. Then he thought about the Forest Training Camp and what he knew was waiting at the end of the first night and bought it anyway. Small comforts made a measurable difference when you knew what was coming.
He was putting it in his basket when the overlay tagged something across the mall's central atrium.
Not moderate. Not high.
Low.
He looked up.
Green hair. A figure in civilian clothes at the bookstore across the atrium, carrying two notebooks under one arm and a container of protein powder under the other. The quality of movement that he recognized from the pull-up bar through the window and the Sports Festival and the Dagobah beach back when the beach had been Yami's territory and Deku had been the figure in the distance getting incrementally less distant.
Low, the overlay said again, patient and precise and accurate.
Quirkless. No power tier because there was no power to tier. The system's version of what UA's entrance exam had calculated and what the Pro Hero Commission had filed and what Midoriya Izuku had been told by every diagnostic tool in existence.
Yami looked at the overlay.
Then at Deku, who was reading the back of a notebook — not a hero analysis notebook, one of the blank ones they sold in stacks, the kind he'd use for notes — with the focused attention he brought to everything.
Then at his own hands, where the OFA was present at its resting hum, available, the inheritance of a choice made seven months ago on a beach by a man who had looked at two people and chosen.
Low.
He put the camping pillow in his basket and moved away from the railing before Deku could look up and see him looking.
Bakugo was in the workout gear section three aisles over. The overlay: high. Todoroki, visible from the escalator: high. The rest of the class distributed through the floor at moderate with the occasional moderate-high that probably correlated with training investment.
The information was not surprising. The confirmation was the point.
He paid for his camping supplies at the register and stood outside the mall with his bags waiting for the rest of the class to finish, and the afternoon had the quality of an afternoon that was two weeks before something significant — the specific density of ordinary days when you knew they were temporary.
That evening he pinned the Training Camp dates to his apartment wall in the space beside the newspaper he'd found in October, the first artifact of this world's calendar that he'd claimed as orientation reference. The newspaper's date was eight months ago. The distance between that date and today was visible in the layering of papers on the wall — the grocery lists, the training schedules, the bus route to Dagobah, the exam study notes.
He circled the night of the third day with a red marker.
Then he looked at the circle and put a question mark inside it instead of the certainty he'd initially intended, because certainty was what you had before forty-five seconds with Bakugo at the Battle Trial and before the USJ's flood zone becoming a collapse zone and before Todoroki declaring rivalry with the wrong person and before Iida ignoring a text message.
The League knew about him. He'd confirmed this from the outline's closing note — Shigaraki had added his photo to a planning board in Kamino, which was the League's version of this person is interesting. Somewhere in that bar with its peeling ceiling and its ambient villain-ideation energy, Yami's face from the Sports Festival footage and the viral USJ clip was sitting in a folder next to a question that he could probably reconstruct: what is the boy who dies and comes back, and is he an obstacle or an opportunity?
He didn't know which category they'd put him in.
He looked at the question mark in the circle.
The Training Camp would answer that.
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