Here is today's chapter.
Enjoy
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True to our unnaturally resilient biology—a blend of immortal adaptation and divine soul-stuff—Recovery Girl discharged us two days later with a stern warning and a look of profound scientific curiosity.
"Your cellular regeneration is… incredible," she'd muttered, peering at our latest scans. "But it's stable. Just don't make a habit of fighting bio-engineered super-weapons."
Akihime welcomed us home with a silence more potent than any tears. She simply hugged us, long and tight, her face buried in our hair. The mansion felt different—not just a house, but a sanctuary we had fought to return to. That night, the weight of what we'd done, the feel of the Nomu's fist, the scent of charred flesh and ozone, lingered. But so did the memory of All Might's gratitude, and Momo's food in the sterile hospital room. The scales, for now, felt balanced.
Monday arrived with the jarring normalcy of a school bell. Stepping into Class 1-A was like walking into a charged field. The air hummed with unspoken words, sidelong glances, and a newfound, fragile unity forged in fire and fear.
Aizawa, mummified in bandages but upright in his sleeping bag at the podium, was a living testament to that fight. His voice was as dry as ever, but his single visible eye held a different weight as it swept over the class, pausing on Nozomi and me.
"You've experienced a taste of the real world," he began, no preamble. "The threat is real. Your training can no longer be theoretical. In two weeks, U.A. will hold its annual Sports Festival."
A buzz of excitement immediately cut through the somber mood.
"It's one of Japan's biggest events," Aizawa continued, silencing them with a glance. "Every hero agency in the country will be watching. For aspiring heroes, it's the prime opportunity to get scouted. For you, it's also a chance to make a statement. To show the world that U.A.'s foundation wasn't shaken by a villain's attack. That we stand stronger."
His gaze turned sharp. "Your performance will dictate your future. Do not waste this opportunity. The training you do in the next fourteen days will be critical."
The class was electric with nervous energy.
As the lunch bell rang, the hallway outside became a siege. Students from General Studies, Support, and Business crowded the door, a wall of staring eyes.
"So this is the precious hero course that got ambushed," sneered a blonde boy with a smirk—Neito Monoma from Class 1-B. "Don't get too comfortable at the top. Your trauma doesn't grant you permanent privilege."
Beside him, a severe-looking girl with orange hair and a penetrating gaze—Itsuka Kendo—smacked him sharply on the back of the head. "Ignore him. He's allergic to good manners. But he's not entirely wrong. Everyone will be gunning for you. Be ready for it." Her tone wasn't hostile, but a straightforward warning from one leader to another.
The scrum of spectators parted only when Bakugo detonated it. "OUT OF MY WAY, YOU DAMN LOOKY-LOOS!" he roared, blasting a path through with sheer auditory violence. "WE'RE NOT A ZOO EXHIBIT!"
It was Kirishima who broke it. He slammed his tray down, his sharp-toothed grin looking more determined than usual. "Alright! Aizawa-sensei's right! We gotta get stronger! Way stronger! We can't just rely on our usual training!"
"Indeed!" Iida chopped his hand. "A regimented, intensive schedule is required! We must identify our weaknesses from the USJ and eliminate them!"
Uraraka nodded, fists clenched. "I barely got to use my quirk effectively. I need more combat mobility."
"My control is still… inefficient," Midoriya muttered, looking at his hands.
One by one, the class voiced their frustrations, their fears of being left behind, their burning need to improve. The USJ had exposed every flaw. Then, all eyes slowly, inevitably, turned to the end of the table where Nozomi and I sat, quietly eating.
Momo was the one who gave voice to the silent question hanging in the air. She took a deep breath, her cheeks faintly pink. "Hiro. Nozomi. Your… resources. Your analytical capabilities. What you did for Midoriya…" She looked around at the determined faces of her classmates, then back to us, her gaze firming. "Would you… Would you consider helping us? All of us? For the Sports Festival."
The cafeteria noise seemed to fade. Every member of Class 1-A was looking at us, hope and desperate resolve in their eyes. Even Todoroki watched with silent intensity. Bakugo scowled fiercely out the window, but he didn't object.
Nozomi and I shared a look. A silent conversation passed between us in an instant.
I turned back to the waiting class. "The estate. After school. Today. Don't be late. I will send the location to you all."
The Kirigaya estate had never seen such a… colorful invasion. Twenty teenagers in U.A. uniforms trailed behind Nozomi and me, their awe at the mansion's scale turning to stunned disbelief as the hidden lab door hissed open.
The reactions were priceless. Kaminari short-circuited for a full three seconds. Jiro's earlobes twitched at the harmonic hum of the Soul-Flux core.
"WHAT IS THIS PLACE?!" Kaminari shrieked, staring at the floating holograms and crystalline data-orbs.
"Such manly technology!" Kirishima gasped, his eyes wide.
"Welcome to the workshop," Nozomi announced, her voice cutting through the awe. "For the next twelve days, consider this your tactical headquarters. E.V.E., initiate the Crucible Protocol."
The AI materialized. "Welcome. Initiating comprehensive biometric and quirk-function analysis." Soft scans washed over the students, and instantly, personalized holograms blossomed around each, detailing physical imbalances, quirk energy fluctuations, and tactical errors lifted straight from USJ footage.
"This… this is incredible," Mina breathed, watching complex molecular formulas for optimal lipid conversion scroll beside her data.
"It has identified the torque inefficiency in my engines' secondary exhaust!" Iida exclaimed, fascinated.
"Your training is threefold," I explained. "First, personalized conditioning to crush your weaknesses. Second, tactical immersion—we will break down every past festival and simulate your likely opponents. Third," I gestured as the central floor morphed into a multi-zone battlefield, "applied adaptive sparring. You will learn to fight, and to think."
The following days were a relentless, beautiful symphony of controlled chaos. E.V.E. became a merciless but perfect coach. It created oscillating platforms for Ashido to practice acid-trajectory on unstable footing. It generated sonic disturbances to challenge Jiro's focus. It ran Bakugo through scenarios where brute force created more problems than it solved, forcing him to calculate blast radii and angles.
Nozomi presided over strategy sessions, dissecting their USJ performances with surgical precision. "Sero," she'd say, freezing a frame where his tape was cut. "Your binding is linear. Predictable. You need misdirection. Flick your wrist here to create a decoy strand before the real capture." She worked with Koda on silent, strategic animal placement and with Shoji on using his duplicated senses for 360-degree battlefield awareness.
I drilled the close-combat fighters, refining Ojiro's fluidity, honing Tokoyami's control in light-dimming simulations, and working with Sato on managing his sugar crashes. Momo was invaluable, using her creation to materialize the specific training apparatuses E.V.E. designed on the fly.
"Tch. They don't miss a damn thing." Bakugo grumbled but still followed orders.
Midoriya's progress was the most visually rewarding. In a shielded sector of the lab, sensors mapped the exact tremor of his muscles as he maintained a stable 5% output. "The frame is holding," I'd tell him, and the relieved, triumphant grin he'd flash was worth the effort.
Outside the estate walls, the world was watching. The days leading up to the festival saw a media frenzy. News vans, like metal sharks, circled U.A.'s gates. Reporters shouted questions over each other, lenses zooming in on any student who entered or exited.
"Can U.A. guarantee student safety after the USJ?"
"Is the Sports Festival a reckless display in the wake of a terrorist attack?"
"Are the students, particularly the first-years, truly prepared for this level of scrutiny?"
The school's security, now a small army of pro-heroes and advanced drones, held the line. The siege of cameras only reinforced Aizawa's point: this wasn't just a tournament. It was a message. And we were the ones who would have to deliver it.
On the final two days before the festival, we called a halt to the general training. The class had improved in leaps and bounds. Now, we focused on the one with the steepest uphill battle: Toru Hagakure.
In the lab, she was a nervous, floating gym uniform. "I… I just don't see how I can compete," her voice wavered from near the holographic podium. "Everyone can make flashy attacks or strong defenses. I just… disappear. In a straight fight, in most of the games… I'm at a huge disadvantage."
"Your quirk isn't a disadvantage, Hagakure," Nozomi said, her tone matter-of-fact. "It's a paradigm shift. Everyone else fights in three dimensions. You have the potential to fight in four. They have to perceive to react. You remove that step."
We devoted the lab's full resources to her. E.V.E. ran thousands of simulations. The goal wasn't to make her visible, but to weaponize her invisibility in new ways.
"Light-bending is your base," I explained, bringing up refractive models. "What if you focused it, not across your whole body, but through a single fingertip? A pinpoint lens to concentrate sunlight into a blinding laser?"
We had her practice in a controlled beam of light, focusing until she could singe a designated spot on a target dummy.
"What about passive detection?" Momo suggested studying the energy readings. "Your body still refracts light. With enough sensitivity, you could learn to 'see' the disturbances you create in light particles around you, giving you a unique spatial awareness even with your eyes closed."
But we also tackled the core of her anxiety: being seen. "For the presentation rounds," Nozomi said, "you don't have to be invisible." She called up schematics for a delicate, polymer-based film derived from cuttlefish skin and advanced optics. "Momo can create this. It's a light-guiding mesh. It won't make you fully visible, but it will outline your form in a shimmering, prismatic silhouette. You can control its intensity. You can choose when to be a ghost, and when to be a specter."
Toru practiced for hours, first creating painful but precise light-daggers from her fingers, then learning to feel the "texture" of light around her, and finally, wearing the shimmering outline Momo created for her. For the first time, her classmates could see the excited, determined bounce in her step.
On the final evening, the full class reconvened in the lab. They weren't the same students who had walked in two weeks ago. They stood taller, their eyes sharper, their movements more assured. They were a unit.
"Remember," I said, my voice calm in the humming quiet. "The festival isn't about beating the person next to you. It's about showing the world the mettle of the class that faced a League of Villains and didn't break. Show them the future is adaptable, intelligent, and unafraid."
Nozomi stood beside me, a sharp, proud smile on her lips. "You've been tempered. Now go out there and break every single expectation they have."
There were no loud cheers. Just twenty-one firm, synchronized nods. The fear was gone, transformed into a honed edge.
As they left, a final, silent thank you in their eyes, the lab returned to its baseline hum. The central screen, which had displayed countless simulations and diagnostics, now showed a single, pulsing line of text.
<< U.A. SPORTS FESTIVAL: COMMENCES IN 14 HOURS >>
The calm before the storm had ended. The world's brightest stage was lit.
Tomorrow, the crucible awaited. And Class 1-A was forged, ready, and waiting.
Midoriya Izuku's Apartment – That Evening
The weight of the last two weeks—the grueling, exhilarating, impossible training at the Kirigaya estate—felt both immense and feather-light as Izuku shuffled through his apartment door. His body ached with a deep, satisfying fatigue, the kind that spoke of progress, not destruction.
"I'm home," he called, his voice raspy.
"Izuku!" Inko Midoriya was at the door in a flurry of anxious maternal energy, her eyes scanning him for new bandages, fresh bruises. Finding none, her worry melted into relief, then into a soft, curious pride. "How was… the training?"
"It was… incredible, Mom," he breathed, dropping his bag. He didn't have the words. How could he describe the vast, humming lab that felt like the bridge of a starship? The AI that mapped his quirks' every tremor? The feeling of his classmates, united and striving? "They… Kirigaya and his sister… they have this place. And they're helping everyone. Not just me."
He followed her into the small, warm kitchen, where the smell of simmering katsudon filled the air. As she served dinner, the words tumbled out. He spoke of force-dispersion models and tactical algorithms, of E.V.E.'s cold analysis and Nozomi's sharp insights. He talked about Uraraka learning to pivot in mid-air, and Iida optimizing his Recipro Burst timing.
Inko listened, her eyes wide, her hands pausing over the dishes. She wasn't just hearing about training; she was hearing her son talk about strategy, about teamwork, about confidence. The frantic, self-sacrificial edge she was so used to hearing was tempered by something new: analytical calm.
"And… your arm?" she asked gently, the eternal question.
Izuku held up his right hand. It was steady. He focused, and a faint, green-white crackle of energy danced over his skin, contained, controlled. "Five percent. Stable. They called it… reinforcing the frame." He smiled, a real, unburdened smile. "I used it to help at the USJ, Mom. And I didn't break."
Tears welled in Inko's eyes, but they were different from the tears of fear he was used to. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand, the one dancing with harmless, controlled power. "Oh, Izuku. I'm so glad." Her voice was thick with emotion. "These… Kirigaya children. They sound like good friends."
Friends. The word echoed in Izuku's mind as he helped clear the table. It felt… right. He looked at the notebook already open on his desk, filled with new, complex diagrams from the lab. For the first time, the path forward wasn't a cliff he had to shatter himself climbing. It was a road he was helping to build, with others walking beside him.
Todoroki Shoto's Residence – Later That Night
The Todoroki estate was a monument of cold, silent space. Shoto stood in his sparse room, looking out at the meticulously maintained rock garden. The memory of the Kirigayas' lab—a place of such vibrant, chaotic, shared pursuit of strength—was a stark contrast to the isolated, frigid regimen of his childhood.
His left side tingled, not with cold, but with a strange, unfamiliar warmth. It wasn't the fire he refused to use. It was the residual memory of the Amaterasu Bloom—Nozomi's divine, golden incineration that had scarred the Nomu. It was a heat of creation, of protection, not just destruction.
He thought of the training. Of how Hiro had broken down opponents not with overwhelming power first, but with pinpoint analysis. Of how the lab's technology offered not just harder hits, but smarter solutions.
Aizawa's words echoed. 'It's a chance to make a statement.'
For so long, Shoto's statement was going to be one of defiance, using only his right side, a monument to his father's failure. Now, he saw a different stage. The Sports Festival wasn't just about rejecting Endeavor. It was about defining Shoto.
His hand clenched at his side. The ice forming on his right fingertips met a faint wisp of steam from his left. The contradiction no longer felt like a war. It felt, for the first time, like a possibility.
Musutafu – Night
Across the city, the lights of U.A. shone like a beacon. In the Kirigaya estate, the lab was dark and quiet, systems on low-power standby. In a dozen homes and apartments, twenty students dreamed of obstacle courses and one-on-one bouts, their bodies tired but their minds alight with strategy and hope.
The media siege outside U.A.'s walls had finally lessened to a watchful ring of parked vans. The night was clear and still, holding its breath.
In a small apartment, a green-haired boy slept soundly, a notebook open on his chest. In a cold, vast house, a bi-colored boy stared at the ceiling, a silent resolve crystallizing in his heart. And in a hidden lab beneath a mansion, the tools for the next day's spectacle rested, ready.
The foundation had been laid. The pieces were in place.
All that remained was the dawn and the roar of the crowd.
<< U.A. SPORTS FESTIVAL: COMMENCES AT 0900 >>
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This is a short chapter of about 2k words in preparation for the sports festival. The next three or four chapters will be about the sports tournament. So, stay tuned and leave a review to help me write my book better, and don't forget to drop the power stones.
Peace out.