Recovery Girl had seen a lot in her tenure at UA.
She had reset compound fractures with a kiss, stitched boys back together after they'd put their bodies through things no licensing board would sanction, and once, memorably, reversed a situation involving Present Mic and a vending machine.
She had a filing cabinet full of extraordinary cases.
She opened a new drawer for this one.
"Well, there's something you don't see everyday."
Her nutter was loud enough to reach their ears. "What? Is something wrong?" Aizawa frowned.
"That depends though on how you define the word wrong." She turned around and handed over the test results. "The last time you were in my office, you cellular vitality was already abnormal enough to constitute as a quirk of its own. I wrote a three-page addendum in your file because the standard health assessment form didn't have a field for." The woman looked at him. "But I didn't think too much of it with the details of your quirk. After all, it's already shown itself capable of keeping you from deaths door back then."
Recovery girl walked toward Eri, perched on the adjacent bed with her legs dangling over the edge. She rubbed a hand over her head softly with maternal affection. "How are you dear?"
Eri, who has spent a considerable amount of time with her, hummed softly. "I'm fine granny chiyo."
"What a good girl." The old woman smiled before turning back to Yuta. "What's in front of me now, .... Is frankly outrageous."
"Huh?"
"You heard me." Recovery girl tapped her cane. "Your previous baseline for cellular regeneration was already—to put it bluntly—obscene. But it seems that since your... Incident at sea, your body has rewritten its own rules. Here I thought you having triple the regular amount of human cells back then was already absurd."
"Is that good or bad?"
"It's neither, and it's both," Recovery Girl huffed, pulling up a side-by-side comparison of Yuta's bloodwork from the Sports Festival and his current sample. "It's just... highly irregular, even by UA standards."
She pointed her cane at the screen, where the green lines representing his cell activity were practically vibrating. "There are very few quirks that allow for healing like mine. At least in Japan. Likewise it's the same for pure regenerative ones like the Nomu at USJ. Most are simply brought about due to an enhancement in physique common among mutant types, but even those only allow accelerated healing for broken bones or torn tissue. Regrowing a finger isn't common, much less a limb."
Recovery girl looked straight at Yuta. "Which is why I was surprised when I received your report two months ago from Machida General Hospital. However, even then, what you lost was 60% total of your body tissue and fluid. Not your bones or vital organs."
"You mean that run in with the Yakuza he had."
Yuta was stunned. That was when he saved Eri from Overhaul. Well, come to think of it, while the image he saw of himself was basically a badly mangled corpse, his skeletal structure was still intact.
According to the doctor back then, his quirk had hung on to every vital organ required and preserved his general skeletal structure while giving up the rest to resist Overhaul's power. 'Hold on ... The skeleton.'
"Yes." Recovery girl affirmed. "Usually, when someone with a healing quirk gets hurt, their body uses up energy to fix the damage. The rate at which the energy is consumed and the level of the regeneration differs but it's all the same. You get tired, you eat a big meal, and you move on." She explained.
"However, unless your quirk is special, the human body doesn't have the capability to regenerate bone density or complex nerve endings once they've been completely vaporized. The energy required is beyond what the body can produce and the body doesn't have an automatic building blueprint beyond simple Mitosis. Too much of it would usually result in cellular senescence—the body simply giving up and aging decades in a matter of minutes that is."
Her words sent a chill down Yuta's spine.
"However, your body isn't just fixing damage anymore. It's like your cells have forgotten how to stop working. You're producing new cells at a rate that would normally cause a massive internal collapse, but your quirk is somehow organizing them into perfectly functional tissue before they can even crowd each other out without any need for thought on your part. Which is why I'm surprised. To be like this for a week and live is a first even for me. But like I said, I haven't encountered pure regeneration quirks before so I can't decide if this is normal for you or something to be worried about."
".."
"However, you're currently doing fine so it shouldn't be too much to worry about. You should be fine with some rest."
Yuta's eyes twitched as she turned over to the cabinet and pulled out a tray of hyper-caloric recovery gummies—the industrial-strength ones she usually reserved for All Might after a particularly grueling month.
"Physically, you're cleared. There's no point in me kissing you because your body is already doing the work five times faster than my quirk could ever manage. My prescription for you would be three days of sleep and a buffet that never ends."
Tossing those over, she turned to Eri once again.
"Take good care of him, ok?" Eri, from her perch on the adjacent bed, nodded solemnly in agreement before hopping over to Yuta's side.
Recovery girl watched with a sigh. "You have a remarkable constitution, child. More remarkable than the last time I said that and that was already saying something." She began annotating his file without further ceremony.
"Don't waste it being stupid."
"I'll do my best."
"You'll do better than your best." Bonk. The cane tapped the counter once for emphasis. "Out. Both of you. Take the girl. Let her get some breakfast, she looks like she hasn't eaten properly since six this morning."
Eri immediately looked guilty, which confirmed it. Aizawa fell into step beside Yuta in the corridor outside.
For a stretch, neither of them said anything. The hallway was empty—the rest of the faculty wing was operating on skeleton crew, most of the staff either still fielding communications or sleeping in shifts.
Eri walked between them, one hand loosely holding the hem of Yuta's hoodie
"Her findings," Aizawa said eventually.
"I know what you're going to say."
"Then I won't say it." Aizawa glanced at him sideways. "Does it concern you?"
Yuta was quiet for a moment. "Not right now."
"Fair enough." Aizawa stopped at the fork in the path. To the left lay the dorms, where 1-A was currently planning a rebellion of streamers and cake. To the right was the administrative block, where the future of the country was being bartered for over cold tea.
"Go to the dorms, Akutami," Aizawa said, his tone softening. "Eat something that isn't a recovery gummy. Sleep. Nezu is going to handle the broadcast. As for tomorrow .." he turned to the left and began walking.
"Tomorrow's another day. Rest up for it."
Yuta's face was expressionless. "Sensei." He paused. Aizawa stopped. "Yes?"
"What's happening tomorrow?" Yuta asked looking into the distance. The underground hero went silent. Seconds elapsed. Until ... "Hell's probably coming loose." He uttered, hands in his pockets as he resumed walking. "Get some rest. That's an order."
His back gradually disappeared into the distance. "Hell," Yuta whispered to himself. Eri tightened her grip on his hand, looking up at him with wide, curious eyes. Yuta offered her a smile. "Let's go home, snowball."
_
[DETNERAT COMPANY HEADQUARTERS – NAGOYA – 10:54 AM]
The executive floor of Detnerat's main building had floor-to-ceiling windows facing east.
On a clear morning, you could see the Nagoya skyline dissolve into the flat agricultural sprawl beyond it. Today, the horizon in the direction of Tokyo was still faintly brown, a smear of particulate and dispersed smoke.
'Hmm, prison breaks.'
Rikiya Yotsubashi had been standing at those windows for eleven minutes.
He was not a man who stood still for eleven minutes. His aide, Katsukame, understood this and had accordingly said nothing since entering the room.
On the long table behind them, eight screens were running simultaneously. Casualty estimates from the NPA. Prison break tallies — six facilities confirmed, a seventh under investigation.
The HPSC's emergency governance notice, a single page of bureaucratic language that amounted to 'we are currently non-functional, please wait'.
Footage from the eastern Tokyo crater, looped. And there, on the rightmost screen, the still image the networks kept returning to. Two figures at the edge of a battlefield. One gaunt, one young and a fist raised by the former.
Yotsubashi finally turned from the window.
"Play the Commission broadcast again," he said. "From the beginning."
Katsukame reached across and tapped the screen.
The familiar video of the HPSC conference one was displayed once again. The mahogany table. The strobes.
"Good morning, Japan." Yotsubashi watched it without expression. He had already watched it four times.
The broadcast ran its length. Endeavor on the floor. The wall coming apart. The golden blur and the static roar of the word "DETROIT" ... before cutting off. He reached out and paused it.
"Skeptic."
From the corner of the room, a lanky man with long hair covering his eyes looked up from a laptop. He had been there the entire time.
"The student," Yotsubashi said.
Skeptic's fingers hadn't stopped moving on the keys. "Already on it." He turned the laptop to show a compilation he had been building since six that morning. Broadcast footage, timestamped. Traffic camera intercepts from three separate wards. A partial facial recognition match from a UA sports festival broadcast weeks prior. A medical record flag from Machida General Hospital, the discharge date noted.
"Akutami Yuta," Skeptic said. "First year, General Studies. Transferred to Hero Course after the Sports Festival. Listed deceased following the Yamanote Line incident approximately two and a half weeks ago." He paused. "Evidently not."
Yotsubashi looked at the compilation.
"Quirk assessment?"
"Incomplete. Festival footage shows mid-range combat application. Last night's footage shows—" Skeptic scrolled to the Nomu burial, the earth swallowing sixty bodies in under four seconds. "—something else."
"Age?"
"Sixteen." The room was quiet for a moment.
"The hero system lost forty of its best last night. Most actually in the top forty." Yotsubashi said, a slight smile forming on his lips as he walked to the desk. "All Might is in a hospital bed. The Commission is a hole in the Tokyo skyline." He took out a glass and poured a bottle of champagne into it. "And the only person standing at the end of it is a first-year student who was supposedly dead."
Katsukame adjusted his posture. "Sir. In terms of the public statement .... Miyashita's office has been calling since seven. The government wants a position from us by ...."
"They want to know which way we're leaning," Yotsubashi said.
"Yes sir."
"Tell Miyashita's office we're consulting our legal team regarding the implications for quirk-capable citizens currently employed in hero support infrastructure." He picked up his jacket from the chair back. "That will keep them occupied until I decide what I actually want to say."
He buttoned it.
"What I find interesting," he continued, not particularly to either of them, "is not what happened last night. The Commission's failure has been forty years in the making. A monopoly on sanctioned power, enforced through legislation, producing exactly this — one man as the ceiling of an entire society." He looked at the frozen image on the rightmost screen. All Might's fist. "Remove the ceiling and everything underneath it suddenly has room."
He picked up his phone.
"Everything," he said, "and everyone."
He walked toward the door, pausing at the threshold.
"Skeptic. Keep building the file on the student. I want to understand him before anyone else does."
The door closed behind him.
Skeptic turned back to his screen. Added a new folder. Labeled it.
AKUTAMI, Y. — ONGOING.