The courtyard had sunlight.
After the maintenance corridors the sunlight was a specific quality — too much information, too many angles, the transition from a space where every variable was known to a space where every variable was open. He squinted on the first step out and that was a half-second he didn't have.
He stopped.
Not because stopping was the correct tactic — it wasn't, running was the correct tactic, the gate was seventy meters ahead through a gap between two buildings that had zero cover and ninety meters of completely exposed approach. But running was what Aizawa had been shaping him toward this entire chase, and running now meant the scarf was already calculating the intercept angle for a moving target at the speed Yami could sustain at two percent OFA.
He turned around.
Aizawa came through the maintenance door fourteen seconds later, which was fourteen seconds of Yami standing in the courtyard not running, which was fourteen seconds that Aizawa had used to recalculate because the expected behavior wasn't occurring. The scarf was held differently when he emerged — not in throw configuration, in observation configuration, the loops contained, the readiness present but the specificity of targeting not yet deployed.
The Erasure locked onto him. Fragment: offline. OFA: diminished.
"You wanted this matchup," Yami said, "because you think I'm hiding something."
Aizawa's expression didn't change. He waited.
"You're right. I am."
The eyes stayed open. The scarf stayed in observation configuration. Aizawa was processing the information-delivery problem — a student voluntarily offering information during an exam was either genuine, tactical, or both, and the distinction mattered for different reasons.
"The enhancement I registered with isn't the full capability," Yami said. "The softball throw at the AP test — I was running at a fraction of what I can do. My combat training isn't limited to UA's curriculum. I've trained with outside resources since before the entrance exam."
Fifteen seconds in. Aizawa's eyes had the quality they had when he was maintaining Erasure under extended use — the deliberate quality of someone compensating for the discomfort that extended open-eye contact produced, the specific resolution that was a different thing from not feeling it.
"At the Sports Festival I was still below what my actual output looks like." Twenty-one seconds. "At Hosu I was still holding back." Twenty-three. "I don't do this to deceive anyone. I do it because the honest answer is complicated in ways that I don't have a framework to explain to people who are going to file reports about it."
Twenty-eight seconds.
Aizawa's eyes watered at the corners — the specific response of mucosal tissue being asked to function without the relief mechanism that the blink provided, the accumulated strain of nearly thirty continuous seconds of Erasure against a target who had been running for eleven minutes prior. The moisture was visible from seven meters.
He blinked.
The OFA came back at the frequency it ran when nothing was suppressing it — four percent, the familiar functional hum of a capability that had been present for eight months and was now returned from absence, and the return felt like blood flow to a numb limb: sudden, present, slightly too much information all at once.
He went left — not toward the gate, toward the building at the courtyard's left edge, the one that created a sightline break between his current position and the gate approach. Lateral movement, not direct. Aizawa would expect direct.
The recovery blink lasted 0.8 seconds. He heard the scarf deploy — the specific sound of the hardened fabric at extension speed — and he was already past the corner by the time the trajectory would have intersected.
Aizawa caught his eye around the corner for 0.4 seconds. Fragment off. OFA dropped. He kept going — around the building's next corner, second sightline break, the fragment bouncing back and going dark in rhythm with the geometry of his route. Not running blind. Running through the structure of what he'd mapped, the building as tool rather than obstacle, the sightline interruptions as the mechanism.
The gate was twenty meters from the building's far corner.
He came around the corner at four percent OFA and covered the twenty meters at a speed that left him at the gate with both hands on the metal before the thought I might not make it had finished forming.
The buzzer: flat, electronic, functional.
Behind him, from eleven meters away: the sound of a capture scarf being retracted mid-throw.
He sat down on the far side of the gate with his back against the metal and breathed. Not because he was exhausted — the physical output had been significant but not depleting, two percent OFA for eleven minutes and four percent for the last thirty seconds. He breathed because the survival of something that couldn't be solved with dying required a different kind of processing than the survival of something that could, and the processing needed a moment.
The ambient exam sounds continued from elsewhere in the complex — the distant noise of Bakugo and Todoroki's arena, which probably sounded like a weather event from outside.
He heard Aizawa's footsteps on the other side of the gate stop.
A pause.
"You fight like someone who's read about fighting instead of someone who's done it." Aizawa's voice was the flat professional tone it used for assessment delivery. "That hasn't changed." Another pause, the quality of someone who was going to say a second thing and was deciding on its framing. "Your evasion was acceptable."
He looked at the gate's reverse side — the metal, the latch mechanism, the hinge. The word acceptable from Aizawa occupied a specific register that communicated more than its dictionary definition.
"I'm told my instinct development needs work," Yami said.
A pause. "Gran Torino."
"Three days."
The silence on the other side of the gate had the quality of Aizawa doing the math on how a student had acquired Gran Torino's contact information and what it meant that the old man had provided it.
"Enhanced monitoring report will be updated," Aizawa said, which was the professional way to communicate this conversation happened and it's going in the file. "Recovery Girl on Friday."
Footsteps moving away.
He sat against the gate for ninety more seconds and let the relief be what it was — not satisfaction, not victory, the specific texture of having survived something that required you to use everything you had and finding that everything you had was just barely sufficient.
[Combat XP: +180. Total: 2,840/3,000]
Close, he noted.
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