The city woke up to a new vocabulary.
Not the verbs—they had already settled into fridges, dashboards, and wrists. This was different: edicts. A crowd of think tanks and consultancy studios released glossy PDFs overnight—Field Ethics for Busy Heroes, Decision Hygiene, Community Triage—each a neat distillation of mess into flowcharts. The Commission hadn't endorsed them; it hadn't needed to. Markets endorse themselves.
By noon, anchors held up laminated cards. "Remember: ask, look, act, check, own, repair—now with convenient thresholds!" One card showed a yardstick under the words Harm Within Reach. The yardstick made the city itch.
Renya read the most popular booklet at a café that refused to learn his name. He appreciated that about cafés. The booklet's diagrams were elegant, the kind of elegant that means someone had starved doubt out of them.
Aizawa dropped into the opposite chair. "How bad?"
"They made clarity into a brand," Renya said. "And brands hate apology."
Aizawa pushed a folded broadsheet across the table. Headline: Hero Fined for Failing to File Repair Log. Small print: a private security firm, not a hero; a busy street, a broken fruit stand, a clerk who now had a viral video and no shift.
"Borrowed authority," Renya murmured.
"Sold authority," Aizawa corrected.
They walked back to U.A. against a current of posters advertising Two-Hour Moral Certification. Renya stopped at one and read the fine print: Satisfies insurer requirements. There it was, the hinge where good intentions become receipts.
In the teachers' room, Nezu had set up a whiteboard like a courthouse. "Proposal," he said brightly. "We issue Notices of Misuse. Short, readable, boring. For every flowchart that fakes certainty, we publish a paragraph that returns doubt to the room."
"Name them?" Aizawa asked.
"No," Nezu said. "We name patterns. Naming people turns patience into blood sport."
Renya drew a line down the board. On the left he wrote Edict. On the right, Edge. Under Edict he wrote: Static, sells, shames. Under Edge: Moving boundary, context, proximity. He stepped back.
"We'll be accused of vagueness," Aizawa said.
Renya capped the pen. "Good. Vagueness is how humans live together without breaking."
Elective 4B met in a room that had learned to breathe. The chairs formed a circle by habit. A second circle formed along the wall—observers from another school, a precinct, a neighborhood watch group. The verbs had become tourist attractions.
Renya began without preface. "Hands."
The students lifted them. He walked the circle, palms up. "What are they for?"
"Lifting," Kirishima said.
"Stopping," Yaoyorozu said.
"Carrying," Uraraka said.
"Leaving alone," Hoshi said.
"Correct," Renya said. "Hands are how you cross edges. Today we practice seeing the edge before you cross."
He set up stations: doorways, rails, bags on chairs, a stroller no one would touch without asking. He assigned roles: rescuer, witness, obstacle, owner. The room looked ridiculous: future heroes practicing the boring choreography of gentleness.
A boy from General Studies bumped a chair with his knee and apologized to the chair. The room laughed, then stopped when Renya said, "Keep that. Furniture remembers."
They rotated. They learned to ask a stranger, "Do you want help?" and to accept "No" like a law. They learned to say, "I'm here," instead of, "Let me." They learned to own their hurry and lay it down.
At the final station, a student faced a mirror (the cheap kind, the kind that doesn't pretend) and rehearsed, "I was wrong." The sentence fit better on the second try.
After, a precinct captain approached Renya. "I thought this would be fluff," she said. "It's muscle."
"Edges are muscle," he said. "Edicts are furniture. Useful until they fall on you."
She laughed, the way professionals laugh when they recognize their own job done by someone else.
Quiet Rooms posted a notice: Misuse Watch. Aki wrote the first entry: If a form demands a "repair" before the harmed person has been asked what repair means, that form isn't ethics. It's PR. The comment thread stayed respectful. A small miracle.
Natsume leaned over the counter. "People keep asking for a one-page guide."
Aki scribbled: If you'd be proud to post it, send a message. If you'd rather tell a person privately, do that. She taped it to the door. Few guides need the internet.
A woman stepped in, hair damp from weather that hadn't committed. "Is the seating free?"
"Yes," Aki said. "The tea, too."
The woman sat and cried quietly over a phone. Eventually she asked, "How do I make them apologize?"
"You don't," Aki said. "You make yourself safe. Then you ask. Then you leave room for them to become a person."
"That's not satisfying," the woman said.
"It's survivable," Aki said.
The woman drank the tea and stayed. Chairs are edgeless edicts: they order the body into rest without decree.
Overturn uploaded nothing that week. The city felt like an argument with its loudest guest out of town. Markets tried to fill the silence with handbooks. People resisted with boredom.
At night, Renya walked the roofline. The Veil hung loose over his shoulders. He remembered a different world where edicts were stone and edges were swords. He remembered how clean it felt to follow rules that could kill without apology.
He preferred this mess.
Aizawa joined him. "You look like a man deciding to continue."
"I am," Renya said.
"Good," Aizawa said. "I scheduled you for a joint forum with Shiketsu and two precincts."
"You're trying to make me a syllabus."
"Too late," Aizawa said. "You're already homework."
They stood, edges unguarded, edicts irrelevant, the city below an uneven sentence still learning where to put its commas.
The first Notice of Misuse published at dawn. It wasn't mean. It wasn't loud. It was just precise:
Misuse 01: "Thresholds"If your chart assigns numbers to pain, it will be used to discount the pain that doesn't fit. Thresholds belong in physics, not apologies. Replace with: ask the person first.— U.A. Pedagogy Notes / Public
A thousand professionals exhaled in relief. A hundred vendors cursed. A few adjusted their PDFs. The city didn't change. The city changed.
By afternoon, someone had graffitied ASK FIRST on a footbridge. Someone else had chalked I WAS WRONG under it and didn't sign.
Renya passed both and decided this was the kind of graffiti a city deserves.