---
Ren woke up at 6:12 AM to the smell of miso soup and the sound of his mother humming something off-key in the kitchen.
Ren flexed his arms, feeling the cursed energy, it was still there it was faint but undeniably there.
"So last night wasn't a fever dream."
He lay in bed for another minute, letting the two sets of memories settle.
The teacher's life didn't feel like a foreign object anymore. It had integrated itself overnight the way a bruise fades into skin, still tender if he pressed on it but it was part of him now. He could recall the man's favourite book (Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki), his coffee order (black, no sugar, too tired to care), the exact shade of fluorescent green in the CPS office where he'd filed the first report. Details that had no business being in a fourteen-year-old's head but lived there comfortably anyway.
He got up, stretched, groaned a bit and went downstairs.
His mom was at the stove in her work clothes, apron over the top, moving between three pots with the practised efficiency of someone who could cook a full breakfast in twenty minutes and still have time to worry about whether anyone was actually going to eat it. Saturday meant the clinic was open half-day, so she'd be gone by eight and back by one.
"Morning, baby."
"Morning."
She turned and looked at him properly, the way she did every morning, like she was running a quick diagnostic. Eyes clear? Check. Standing upright? Check. Not visibly dying? Check. Satisfied, she turned back to the stove.
"Sit. It's almost ready."
He sat. She brought over rice, miso, grilled fish, pickled vegetables, and a rolled omelette that was still faintly steaming because she'd held it for exactly the right number of seconds before plating. The woman was incapable of serving food at the wrong temperature. It was physically impossible for her.
"You look tired," she said, sitting down across from him.
"I'm fine."
"You always say that. You said that when you broke your arm in Year 5 and it was literally hanging at an angle."
"And it healed in three hours."
"That's not the point, Ren." She propped her chin on her hand and watched him eat. "Did you sleep okay?"
"Yeah, just stayed up too late."
"Doing what?"
"Thinking."
"About hero school?"
"Among other things."
She smiled at that. The soft one, the one that made the corners of her eyes crinkle in a way that reminded him she'd been genuinely pretty when she was younger and was still pretty now, just in the way that mothers are pretty when they're not trying to be. She reached across the table and brushed a bit of hair off his forehead. He let her do it.
"Your dad left early. Something about a meeting with a claims adjuster who keeps rejecting everything." She rolled her eyes. "He took the last of the coffee. I told him I'd forgive him if he brought home groceries but I give it a fifty-fifty chance he actually remembers."
"Twenty-eighty."
"You're probably right." She laughed. "Are you going out today?"
"Maybe later. I might study for a bit first."
"Study? On a Saturday?"
"I know. Don't get used to it."
She reached across and squeezed his hand once. "I'm proud of you, you know. For the hero school thing. I know I was asking a lot of questions yesterday, but I want you to know that. Whatever you decide, I'm behind you."
"I know, Mom."
"Good. Eat your fish."
He ate his fish.
She left at quarter to eight, kissing the top of his head on the way out even though she had to go up on her toes to reach now. He heard the front door close, her car start, and then the house was quiet.
Ren stood in the middle of his bedroom and closed his eyes.
The cursed energy was there. Faint, like a second bloodstream running parallel to his real one. He tried to focus on it, to feel where it pooled and where it moved. It wasn't like a quirk. His regeneration was passive, always on, something his body just did without being asked.
Cursed energy was different it required direction. It sat there waiting for him to do something with it, and when he didn't, it just circled sluggishly through him like water in a pipe with no outlet.
He tried pushing it into his right hand. Nothing happened for about ten seconds. Then, faintly, a warmth gathered in his palm like pressure, like the air around his hand had gotten slightly heavier.
He held it for maybe five seconds before it slipped away.
Okay.
So he could move it, but holding it anywhere took conscious effort and he wasn't very good at it. Noted.
He was about to try again when something clicked in his head.
A chunk of understanding that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago, settling into his brain the way the teacher's memories had settled overnight. Decree. His cursed technique.
Not the full picture. A fragment. But clearer than last night.
He could assign significance to things within his direct perception.
That was the core of it. Not just "this matters" or "this doesn't," but a gradient. A scale. He could look at something and push his judgment of it in either direction: more significant or less significant. And his cursed energy would enforce that judgment on reality, just a little, just enough to nudge things.
Significance up meant amplification. A punch he truly believed was important would land harder. A wound he deemed critical would worsen.
Not by much right now, not at his level, but the potential was there.
Significance down meant reduction. An attack he genuinely dismissed as trivial would lose a fraction of its impact. Pain he deemed irrelevant would dull.
But the key word was genuinely.
He couldn't lie to his own technique. If he looked at a truck speeding toward him and tried to decree it as insignificant, his cursed energy would drain trying to enforce a judgment his subconscious knew was bullshit.
The technique rewarded honest assessment and punished delusion. The more accurate his read on something, the cheaper it was to push. The more he was lying to himself, the more it cost.
And when his confidence broke, when he was proven wrong or mentally shaken, the whole thing flipped. His judgments would invert without his permission. Things he'd dismissed would suddenly feel overwhelming. Things he'd amplified would crumble. Ego Collapse.
He flexed his hand. Looked at the pen sitting on his desk. Thought: *that pen is important.*
The pen didn't move. Nothing visible happened. But when he picked it up, it felt slightly heavier than it should. Denser. Like it had gained a gram or two of weight that existed nowhere except in his perception and, apparently, reality.
He put it down and thought: *that pen doesn't matter.*
Picked it up again. Lighter. Almost hollow-feeling. Like the plastic had thinned.
He tried it a third time.
Nothing. The cursed energy sputtered and the pen was just a pen. He was already running low from the first two attempts.
"Okay," he said to nobody. "It was useful and unreliable at the same time what a Great combination."
He sat on the edge of his bed and waited. His cursed energy was refilling, and it was happening noticeably faster than he expected. Not instant, but the trickle was steady, and he could feel his regeneration quirk working alongside it. Like the quirk couldn't tell the difference between physical damage and cursed energy depletion, so it was just repairing both at the same rate.
That was interesting. That was very interesting.
After about fifteen minutes he felt close to full, or at least close to whatever his current "full" was, which wasn't much. Time to try the main event.
He stood up. Closed his eyes. Reached for the Domain Expansion the same way he'd reached for the cursed energy in his hand, except this was different. This wasn't pushing energy somewhere. This was opening something that was already built, already complete, already waiting. Like finding a door in his mind that had always been there and putting his hand on the handle.
He pushed.
The room disappeared.
It didn't fade or dissolve. One frame it was his bedroom with the water-stained ceiling and the desk covered in crap and the poster of Crimson Riot on the wall that he'd had since he was ten. The next frame it was a courtroom.
Not a big one. Compact, almost intimate, surrounded by guillotines that lined the walls like spectators. Two podiums faced each other across a polished wooden floor. The lighting was sourceless, even and cool, the kind of light that didn't cast shadows. Everything was immaculate. Every surface was clean, every angle precise. This was a space built by someone who believed in order.
Ren was standing behind one of the podiums. The prosecution's side.
And floating behind him, enormous and silent, was Judgeman.
He turned around slowly. The shikigami was exactly what the teacher's memories of JJK had described. A massive black body with three stubbed points for limbs, two arms each holding a scale, and a white face with eyes stitched shut. Lady Justice, blind and absolute.
"Uh," Ren said. "Hey."
Judgeman didn't respond.
"Can you talk?"
Nothing.
Ren looked around the courtroom. The other podium was empty. No defendant. The domain's trial system couldn't activate without someone to put on trial. He remembered that much from the teacher's memories of the manga. Judgeman knew everything about everyone inside the domain, but there was nobody else inside the domain. No evidence to present, no arguments to make, no verdict to deliver. Just Ren standing in a dead courtroom with a floating judge that had nobody to judge.
He could feel the cursed energy draining. Like a tap left running. The domain was burning fuel just by existing. He had minutes at best.
He used them to look around. To feel the space. The courtroom had rules baked into it that he could sense but not fully articulate. No violence allowed inside. Both parties get one statement. The defendant chooses: silence, confession, or denial. Then the prosecution rebuts. Then Judgeman delivers its verdict. Guilty or not guilty. If guilty, Judgeman confiscates something from the defendant, either their cursed technique or their cursed energy.
But how would that work in a world filled with quirks, if i had to assume it would consider quirks as cursed techniques?
But the details of how to actually prosecute, how to construct an argument, what constituted valid evidence versus circumstantial garbage, how to handle a denial versus a confession versus silence, what legal principles to leverage, how to use the evidence Judgeman provided without knowing what was in it until the trial began... all of that was blank. He had the courtroom. He had the judge. He had the podium. He did not have a law degree.
Higuruma had spent decades mastering Japanese criminal law before awakening this domain. The courtroom had made sense to him because his entire career was one long preparation for exactly this. Ren was a kid who thought "objection" was something lawyers yelled in movies.
The drain was getting worse. He could feel the bottom of his cursed energy reservoir approaching fast.
He dropped the domain.
The courtroom vanished. His bedroom reappeared. Ren's legs gave out immediately and he sat down hard on the bed, breathing like he'd just sprinted a mile. His head was pounding and his hands were shaking and every muscle in his body felt like it had been wrung out. The domain had eaten almost everything he had.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling.
His regeneration was already working. He could feel the cursed energy trickling back in, slow but consistent, his quirk treating the depletion like a wound that needed healing. Give it twenty, thirty minutes and he'd be back to full. Faster than anyone without his quirk would recover. That was his edge.
But getting back up didn't mean anything if he didn't know what he was doing once he was standing.
Higuruma was a genius. A legal prodigy who was told he should become a judge before he even graduated law school. His intelligence was compared to Gojo Satoru's. He had looked at his Domain Expansion, reverse-engineered barrier techniques from it, and taught himself cursed energy manipulation from scratch in twelve days.
Ren was not Higuruma. He was a fourteen-year-old with decent grades and strong opinions. If he wanted to use this domain for anything other than a fancy light show, he needed to learn law. Actual law. Japanese criminal procedure, burden of proof, rules of evidence, argumentation structure.
He needed to become, on some level, a lawyer.
"This is going to suck, ASS" he said to the ceiling.
The ceiling didn't disagree.
---
Twenty-five minutes later, his cursed energy was full and he was sitting at his desk with his laptop open, three tabs deep into Japanese criminal procedure, and already regretting every life choice that had led him here.
The first thing he looked up was the basics. How a Japanese criminal trial actually worked. And the first thing that hit him was the conviction rate.
Ninety-nine percent.
In Japan, once a prosecutor decided to bring a case to trial, the defendant was found guilty ninety-nine percent of the time. Not because the system was fair. Because prosecutors had total discretion over which cases to pursue, and they only pursued cases they were essentially guaranteed to win. Out of all criminal cases, only about eight percent were formally prosecuted. The rest were dropped, deferred, or settled through summary proceedings. The ones that made it to trial were the ones where the evidence was so overwhelming that acquittal was practically impossible.
Which meant the system Higuruma had built his entire career fighting against, the system that had broken him, was one where the prosecution won by default. Where defending the accused was less about winning and more about losing slowly. Where being found not guilty was so rare that it made national news.
And Ren's domain put him on the prosecution side.
He let that sink in for a second. In Higuruma's courtroom, he was the prosecutor. Judgeman was the judge. The person trapped in his domain was the defendant. And in a system modeled after Japanese criminal law, the prosecution's conviction rate was ninety-nine percent.
That was terrifying. For whoever he used it on.
But only if he actually knew how to prosecute.
He started reading about burden of proof. In Japanese criminal law, the burden sat entirely on the prosecution. The prosecutor had to prove guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt," a standard borrowed from Anglo-American legal tradition. The defendant didn't have to prove innocence. They didn't have to prove anything. They just had to create enough doubt in the prosecution's case to earn an acquittal.
Which meant inside the domain, Ren had to present a case strong enough that Judgeman had no reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt. If the defendant could poke holes in his argument, if they could introduce doubt, they could walk.
So he needed to understand what constituted valid evidence. What was admissible and what wasn't. How to structure an argument so that each claim built on the last with no gaps. How to anticipate a defendant's denial and prepare a rebuttal that closed every exit.
He pulled up a page on logical fallacies. If he was going to argue cases, he needed to know what bad arguments looked like so he could avoid making them and identify them when his opponents tried.
Ad hominem: attacking the person instead of their argument. Useless in a domain where Judgeman only cared about evidence. Straw man: misrepresenting someone's position to make it easier to attack. Dangerous because if Judgeman caught him doing it, it might count against his credibility. Appeal to authority: "this is true because someone important said so." Meaningless in a courtroom where evidence was all that mattered. Circular reasoning: "this is true because it's true." The fastest way to lose.
Then there was the structure of a legal argument itself. He found a breakdown of how Japanese prosecutors typically built their cases:
Opening statement establishing the charge. Presentation of physical evidence. Witness testimony and cross-examination. Establishing motive and opportunity. Connecting the evidence to the specific elements of the crime. Closing argument tying everything together.
But Higuruma's domain didn't work exactly like a real trial. It was compressed. Simplified. The defendant got one chance to respond: silence, confession, or denial. Then the prosecution got one rebuttal. Then Judgeman delivered the verdict. No witnesses. No cross-examination. No lengthy proceedings. Just two statements and a judgment.
Which meant his opening argument had to be airtight from the start. He didn't get to build a case slowly. He had to present the whole thing in one shot and make it stick.
He started reading about how to structure a deductive argument. Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. If the major premise was true and the minor premise was true, the conclusion had to follow logically. That was the skeleton. Everything else, the evidence, the reasoning, the rebuttal, was just putting meat on the bones.
An hour in and his head was swimming. Criminal procedure was dense, layered, and every rule had exceptions to its exceptions. The more he read, the more he realized how deep the rabbit hole went.
He wasn't just learning a skill. He was trying to compress years of legal education into something usable. A real lawyer spent six years in undergrad and law school before sitting the bar exam, and even then most of them barely understood the system they worked in.
He didn't need to pass the bar. He needed to win arguments inside a cursed domain against people who probably had no legal training either. That lowered the bar significantly. But it didn't remove it entirely. Judgeman was the judge, and Judgeman didn't care how old he was or how new he was to this. Evidence was evidence. Logic was logic. A bad argument was a bad argument regardless of who made it.
He kept reading. Hearsay rules: in Japanese courts, statements made outside of trial were generally inadmissible. Did that apply inside the domain? He didn't know. The concept of "actus reus" and "mens rea": the guilty act and the guilty mind. To convict someone of a crime, you typically had to prove both that they did the thing and that they intended to do the thing. Proving action without intent wasn't enough, and proving intent without action wasn't enough either.
How did that translate inside the domain? When Judgeman put someone on trial, what exactly was the charge? Was it a specific crime? A general accusation? Did Ren get to choose what to prosecute them for, or did Judgeman decide?
The teacher's memories of JJK were helpful here but incomplete. He remembered that Higuruma had used the domain against Yuji Itadori and prosecuted him for the Shibuya Incident. Judgeman had provided evidence. Higuruma had argued. Yuji had been found guilty and lost his cursed energy. But the specifics of how Higuruma had structured his argument, exactly what he'd said, the precise legal reasoning he'd used, that was fuzzy. The teacher hadn't memorized the manga panel by panel.
Two hours in. He'd filled half a notebook with scrawled notes. His handwriting had gotten progressively worse as his patience wore down. The last entry was just the word "PRECEDENT???" with three underlines and a drawing of a stick figure hanging itself.
Criminal law was a nightmare. Every answer generated three more questions. Every concept connected to four others. It was like trying to learn a language by reading the dictionary, technically possible but practically insane.
Three hours in. He closed the laptop, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling.
His stomach growled. He'd been so locked in that he'd forgotten to eat since breakfast. He went downstairs, made himself rice with leftover tamagoyaki from the fridge, and ate standing up at the kitchen counter because sitting at the table felt too much like sitting at his desk and he needed to not be sitting at a desk for five minutes.
His phone buzzed. He pulled it out.
**Isaac:** *bro gym today??? leg day im tryna hit PRs come spot me*
Isaac Lindqvist. Six foot even, blond, Swedish by blood and Musutafu by postcode. His family had moved to Japan when he was nine and he'd picked up Japanese fast enough that he only slipped into English when he was excited, tired, or mid-set on a heavy squat. He went to Aldera because his parents lived in the district, but he had zero interest in being a hero. His plan, and he'd had this plan since he was eleven, was to become a conditioning coach for pro heroes. Not a sidekick, not support staff, an actual sports scientist specializing in quirk-enhanced athletics. He read training journals for fun. He corrected people's squat form unprompted. He'd once given a fifteen-minute lecture on the importance of hip flexor mobility to a group of third-years who had not asked.
Ren liked him. Isaac was one of maybe three people at Aldera whose company he could tolerate for extended periods, and the only one who'd never once tried to talk to him about Bakugo or Midoriya or hero rankings.
He looked at the text. Looked at his notebook upstairs full of legal theory. Looked at the text again.
**Ren:** *cant today. studying*
**Isaac:** *studying??? its saturday???*
**Isaac:** *who are you and what have you done with ren*
**Ren:** *looking into some stuff for hero school prep*
**Isaac:** *oh shit you're actually doing it nice nice but bro you need to train too if you're going UA. the entrance exam is physical. come hit legs at least*
Ren put the phone down and went back upstairs. Opened the laptop. Read another two paragraphs about the rules governing circumstantial evidence in Japanese courts. Closed the laptop. Opened his phone. Scrolled through social media for ten minutes. Looked at his notebook. Looked at the ceiling. Picked up his phone.
**Ren:** *what time*
**Isaac:** *LETS GO. 30 mins? ill meet you there*
**Ren:** *fine*
---
Iron House Gym was a twenty-minute walk from Ren's place, wedged between a konbini and a ramen shop in a strip mall that had seen better decades. It wasn't fancy. The equipment was old, the mirrors had a yellowish tint, and the AC hadn't worked properly since before Ren started going there. But it was cheap, it was never crowded on Saturdays, and the owner didn't care if you dropped weights as long as you wiped down the bench after.
Isaac was already there when Ren arrived, warming up with bodyweight squats and talking to nobody in particular about how most people neglected their tibialis anterior. He was in a cut-off tank that said STRETCH FIRST OR DIE EVENTUALLY, which he'd had custom-printed.
"Ren! Big man!" He clapped him on the shoulder, which required him to reach up. "You look tired."
"Everyone keeps saying that."
"Because you look tired. Did you sleep?"
"Enough."
"Enough isn't optimal. You need seven to nine hours for proper recovery. Your growth hormone peaks during deep sleep, and without adequate—"
"Isaac."
"Right. Gym first, lecture later." He grinned. "What are we hitting?"
"You said legs."
"I said legs. You warming up or just going straight in like a psycho?"
"I'll warm up."
"That's growth. I'm proud of you. Genuinely. Six months ago you would've loaded 200 kilos cold and told me to stop talking."
That was true. Ren had been lifting since he was twelve, which was young, but his quirk made it possible in a way it wouldn't have been for anyone else. Normal kids who lifted heavy at twelve risked growth plate damage, joint problems, all the things that made parents and doctors nervous. Ren's body repaired itself so fast that he could train with an intensity that would've hospitalised a normal teenager. Micro-tears in muscle fibres healed in minutes instead of days. Bone stress fractures resolved in hours. He could do six sessions a week at volumes that would break an adult powerlifter and wake up the next morning feeling like he hadn't trained at all.
Isaac, to his credit, had been the one to point out that being able to recover from anything didn't mean his technique should be sloppy. "Your quirk fixes damage," he'd said. "It doesn't fix bad motor patterns. You'll be strong and move like shit if you don't learn properly." That was the day Ren had decided Isaac was worth keeping around.
They warmed up. Dynamic stretches, hip circles, glute activation, the whole routine Isaac had put together for him. Isaac was fanatical about warm-ups. He believed, with the fervour of a religious convert, that most training injuries were caused by insufficient preparation and that anyone who skipped warming up deserved whatever happened to them.
Squats first. Ren worked up through the sets, 60, 100, 140, 180. Isaac spotted him, watching his form with the focused intensity of a surgeon.
"Knees out. Out. There you go. Brace harder at the top. Good."
Working set: 320 kilograms. Ren unracked it, walked it out, and sank to depth. The bar bent across his back. His legs shook at the bottom. He drove up, grinding through the sticking point, and racked it.
"Clean," Isaac said. "Little bit of forward lean out of the hole but your bracing held. How'd that feel?"
"Heavy."
"That's because it's 320 kilos, Ren. It's supposed to feel heavy. Alright, bench next?"
They moved to the bench press. Ren's bench had always been his weakest lift relative to the other two, which still put it at a number that made most adults in the gym do a double take. He worked up to 250 kilograms, paused it on his chest for a full second, and pressed it. Lockout was smooth.
"Your arch is better," Isaac said. "You've been working on thoracic extension."
"You told me to."
"I tell you a lot of things. You usually ignore seventy percent of them."
"I listen to the thirty percent that makes sense."
"All of it makes sense!"
Deadlifts last. Conventional stance. Ren chalked his hands, set his feet, gripped the bar, and pulled 350 kilograms off the floor. The bar came up smooth until it hit his knees, then grinded. He locked out at the top, held it for a second, and dropped it.
"Hitching," Isaac said. "Your lockout is slow because you're losing upper back tightness. We need to add some heavy rows to your programming."
"Sure."
"I'm serious. Your erectors are doing too much work because your lats aren't holding position. If you fix that, you're pulling 270 easy."
"Isaac."
"Yeah?"
"That was a PR. Can I have five seconds before you start coaching?"
Isaac blinked. Then he laughed, loud and bright, the kind of laugh that made other people in the gym look over. "Fair fair. That was sick, actually. 350 at fourteen. You know most grown adults can't pull that, right?"
"Most grown adults don't have a quirk that makes their body repair itself before the next set."
"True. But quirk or not, you still have to move the weight. The bar doesn't care about your healing factor." He paused. "You're seriously doing the hero school thing?"
"Yeah."
"UA?"
"Probably."
"Their entrance exam is in like eleven months. The physical component is combat-oriented, robot destruction. Your raw strength is more than enough but you need to work on explosive power and conditioning. You're strong but you gas out fast. If we add some HIIT intervals and plyometric work—"
"Isaac."
"Sorry. But seriously, let me write you a program. A real one. Periodized. If you're going for UA, you should train like it."
Ren looked at him. Isaac's face was open and genuine in that way that he had, the Swedish-kid-who-never-learned-to-hide-his-enthusiasm thing that made him impossible to dislike even when he was being annoying.
"Yeah," Ren said. "Write me the program."
Isaac's face lit up like Christmas had come early. "Yes! Okay. Okay. I'll have something for you by Monday. We're going to peak you for that entrance exam. You're going to be a monster."
"I'm already a monster."
"You're a monster with bad hip mobility and a weak lockout. We're going to make you a *complete* monster."
---
Ren walked home as the sun was going down, gym bag over his shoulder, legs pleasantly sore in a way that would last maybe thirty minutes before his quirk erased it entirely.
He thought about the domain. About Judgeman floating silent in a courtroom with nobody to try. About the notebook upstairs full of half-understood legal theory. About Decree, sitting in his skull like a loaded weapon with no safety and no instruction manual. About the dead teacher's memories and the girl who never got justice and the system that had killed a man for trying to do the right thing.
He had eleven months until the entrance exam. Eleven months to learn law, master his cursed energy, figure out Decree, and turn a courtroom he couldn't navigate into a weapon. All while going to school, training for the physical exam, and pretending to be a normal fourteen-year-old.
His phone buzzed.
**Isaac:** *monday 6am. don't be late. and STRETCH TONIGHT.*
Ren typed back: *yes coach.*
He let himself into the house. His dad's shoes were by the door, which meant he was home. His mom's coat was on the hook, which meant she was back from the clinic. He could hear them talking quietly in the kitchen, the kind of low comfortable conversation that married people had when they thought nobody was listening.
He went upstairs. Sat at his desk. Opened the notebook.
*Beyond a reasonable doubt.*
He had a lot of work to do.
---
Don't expect another chapter anytime soon, just had another in stock.