The Dagobah Municipal Beach was where dreams went to rust.
It was a labyrinth of discarded water heaters, car frames, and mountains of salt-crusted plastic. A few hundred yards down the coast, I could see a flash of green hair and a familiar, scrawny figure hauling a refrigerator through the sand. Even from here, the shadow of a lean blonde man appeared over him.
All Might was building a vessel.
I turned away from the spectacle. I didn't need a mentor who glowed with the sun. I had Genji, who currently smelled like cheap sake and was poking me in the kidney with a bamboo pole.
"Focus, brat," Genji rasped. "You're watching that scrawny brat again. You want a cape? I can find you a dirty tarp in that pile over there."
"I'm not looking at the cape," I grunted, my legs trembling in a horse stance that I'd been holding for forty minutes. "I'm looking at the technique. He's pulling with his lower back. He's going to have a hernia before he's fifteen."
"Let him have his hernia," Genji dismissed, gesturing toward a massive, rusted hull of a beached fishing trawler. It was partially buried in the sand, a tomb of iron weighing several tons. "This is your world today, Ren. Move it."
I looked at the ship. Then I looked at my hands. "You want me to... what? Air-blast it?"
"Air is for birds," Genji spat. "You've spent three years dancing around the dirt. Now, you're going to speak its language. Earth isn't just the ground under your boots. It's the iron in that hull. It's the salt in the sand. It's the stubbornness of things that do not want to be moved."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping the playful edge. "The problem with you, Ren, is that you still think like a Guest. You're light. You're fast. You're afraid of the impact. But Earth? Earth is the impact."
"Stand in front of it," he commanded. "No dodging. No yielding. If that ship falls, you catch it with your soul, or you let it crush you."
I walked to the prow of the trawler. The iron was cold, flaking with rust that stained my palms orange. I pressed my forehead against the metal.
I breathed.
Diaphragm down. Center of gravity locked.
I pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed harder, my sneakers sliding backward into the loose sand. The ship didn't even groan.
"You're pushing with your muscles!" Genji shouted from behind me. "Muscle is just meat! Reach deeper! Find the iron in your own blood and match it to the iron in that hull!"
I closed my eyes. I stopped trying to move the ship and started trying to be the ship.
I felt the immense weight of it—the thousands of pounds of pressure pushing down into the earth. I followed that pressure. I let my awareness sink through the soles of my feet, past the sand, down until I hit the solid bedrock of the Japanese coastline.
Then, I tried to pull the energy up.
It felt like swallowing liquid lead.
A sharp, stabbing pain ignited behind my eyes. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. A warm trickle of blood escaped my left nostril, dripping onto the rusted metal.
It's too heavy, my mind screamed. You're a fourteen-year-old boy. Stop.
"Don't you dare yield!" Genji's voice was a whip-crack. "Pain is just the earth's way of saying hello! Demand the space, Ren! This is your world! Tell it to move!"
I roared—a raw, guttural sound that didn't belong to a child. I stopped being Ren Takeda. I became a pillar. I became the bedrock.
I didn't push the ship. I shifted the world beneath it.
CRACK.
The sound was like a gunshot. A massive fissure ripped through the sand beneath the trawler. The iron hull didn't just slide; it groaned as the very earth rose up in a jagged spike, tilting the multi-ton vessel upward.
The feedback hit me like a physical blow. My vision went white. My muscles felt like they were being shredded from the bone.
[ATTUNEMENT CRITICAL: EARTH REACHES 25%] [CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH: THE UNYIELDING WILL] [Trait Unlocked: Rooted Stance — As long as your feet touch the earth, you cannot be moved by external force.]
I collapsed into the sand, my chest heaving. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the distant sound of waves and the sharp ping of cooling metal.
The ship had moved. It sat three feet higher than it had a moment ago, perched on a new pedestal of stone and compacted sand.
Genji walked up to me, his shadow falling over my shaking form. He didn't offer a hand to help me up. Instead, he handed me a dirty towel.
"Wipe your nose, brat," he said, though his voice was softer than I'd ever heard it. "You looked less like a dancing bird and more like a man today."
I wiped the blood from my face, looking at my hands. They were trembling, but they felt... solid. For the first time in two lives, I didn't feel like a passenger in my own body.
A few hundred yards away, the blonde giant—All Might—paused. He turned his head, his sharp blue eyes scanning the junk piles toward our direction. He had felt the vibration.
Beside him, Midoriya was staring at the horizon, oblivious, gasping for air as he clutched a piece of scrap metal.
I didn't wait for them to see me. I stood up, my legs feeling like lead pipes, and turned my back on the Symbol of Peace.
I had my own mountain to climb.