The letter became a door the moment the gate decided to recognize it.
U.A. High rose out of morning like an opinion that had earned its confidence. Glass and steel did polite geometry; banners held themselves at attention without wind; the security line moved with the efficiency of institutions that have practiced saying welcome without saying anyone.
Renya arrived early enough to avoid the performance of punctuality and late enough to be part of a crowd—students in neat uniforms, in not-so-neat uniforms, in no uniform at all; parents rehearsing the art of letting go; a handful of observers pretending to be alumni or landscaping.
"Square," he said softly, and the shadow stitched itself into a palm-wide frame inside his mind and just behind his heel, corners exact. The Veil slid into place over his clothes like a truth he'd ironed—sheen restrained, edges neat, nothing for cameras to turn into a slogan.
Aki walked beside him to the perimeter where siblings had to become faith. The scarf she'd chosen made her look like someone who wins small arguments with weather. "Drink water," she ordered. "Answer exactly the question being asked. Don't make up extra ones to show off."
"Yes," he said.
"And—" she hesitated, the kind of pause where honesty gets dressed—"if you start to glow in the way only I can see, breathe. Don't protect me with your face."
"I will protect you with my boring answers," he said.
"That's love," she decided. "Go."
He stepped into the line. Her fingers caught his sleeve—not to pull, only to confirm. "You come home," she said.
"Yes," he repeated, because vows want repetition.
He moved forward with the current. Cameras whispered their appetites; teachers stood like gatekeepers who had learned subtlety; drones did quiet math overhead. At the far end of the walk, a familiar posture borrowed a patch of shade under an administrative canopy—coat, stillness, eyes that listened. Kurobane had no reason to be at a school's entrance exam; the Commission had found him one. He did not signal. He did not need to. Recognition is also a language.
Renya didn't look long. The gate asked for attention.
Inside, U.A. was less a building than a choreography. Volunteers pointed, signs clarified, security checkpoints asked for the exact amount of cooperation required by the idea of safety. The written test would be first—because you start by measuring what can be recorded—then Present Mic's stadium-scale briefing—because theater greases gears—then the practical—because the world still believed in evidence.
Students sorted themselves into nervous, confident, and both. He followed the arrows to a lecture hall that felt like a plane hangar that had chosen to study philosophy. Desks waited; screens hummed; proctors wore the expression of civic patience.
The test arrived without preamble. Numbers and logic that didn't insult. Ethics that tried to ask something harder than What would a camera like? Case studies with witnesses and without. He wrote what he believed, not what would trend. Document when you decline to escalate.Choose the choice that preserves tomorrow.Make safety beautiful. The phrases didn't feel like slogans in ink. They felt like receipts.
Halfway through, a question asked whether it is acceptable to lie in a report to protect a teammate who acted correctly but disastrously. He did not need to weigh it long. You do not lie. You document context. You accept blame that belongs to command decisions. You protect dignity without erasing fact. He underlined nothing.
When pencils stopped, the room exhaled. A boy with unruly green hair—eyes carrying the weight of a thousand notes—clutched his paper like a talisman. A blond with angles for posture and a glance like a lit match smirked as if the test had been a conversation too slow to enjoy. Somewhere behind, a girl with a short bob tucked a pen behind her ear and smiled at no one in particular as if to keep the room honest.
"Collect," a proctor said. The test left his hands without attachment.
He rose with the herd and let the hall release them into the wider machine.
Present Mic's voice could have powered a small city if optimism paid in volts.
"GOOD MORNING, FUTURE HEROES!" boomed the stadium. Lights rehearsed color; screens rehearsed diagrams; a hundred quirks restlessly auditioned inside bodies that had agreed to sit still long enough to hear instructions. "We got BATTLEFIELDS! We got ROBOTS! We got POINTS! We got RULES!"
The rules appeared on screens the size of sincerity. Eliminate faux villains. Rescue where possible. Points awarded for efficiency, judgment, teamwork. Minus points for reckless collateral. A zero-point behemoth flashed once—warning, not invitation.
Renya let the noise pass through him. The shadow pressed the square—so many quirks, attention insisted, so much fuel. He pressed back with breath. Guard, not show. Observe, not feed. It settled, interested instead of hungry.
The crowd rippled when a hand went up near the front: the green-haired boy, voice small but steady. "Um… there's four types of robots, right? The pamphlet shows three."
Respect flickered around the answer he got and didn't get. Present Mic laughed it off with the self-protective finesse of a veteran MC. "GOTTA KEEP SOME SURPRISES! THAT'S LIFE, KID!"
The hall laughed because someone had to. Renya didn't. Surprise was a tool. He intended to decide who owned it.
Assignments flashed. Battle Center C. He filed into a corridor with the others—a short boy with engines in his ankles lecturing posture by example, a lanky kid with pink skin and a grin like graffiti, a tall girl with hair in a high ponytail that looked like competence, a freckled boy breathing too much and trying to breathe less.
They stood behind steel doors that thought they were teeth. Present Mic's voice rolled again: "DON'T WAIT FOR A SIGNAL! REAL BATTLES START WHEN THE DOOR OPENS!"
The door opened. People waited.
Renya didn't.
He jogged out, not first, not last—early enough to own angles. He did not sprint. He chose pace like a policy: quick enough to reach, slow enough to read. The arena was an imitation city that had been taught to fall apart safely. Fake buildings, real lacerations waiting. Robots already moving, sizes 1–3, points printed in their joints if you knew where to look.
"Square," he said under breath. It appeared exactly where he needed it: a boundary around impulse.
The first two pointers came as if to be polite—two small bots with rotary jaws, simulated hazard. A green-haired candidate tripped; a pink girl laughed and spun a solution; engines roared past and took a clean, legal line.
Renya's shadow sent a thin ribbon along the ground—no flare, no drama—hooked a bot's wheel for half a rotation, just long enough to misalign balance. He stepped in with a practice blade that wasn't a blade—U.A. didn't allow metal—just dense polymer, legal and dull. Two strikes: one to interrupt the sensor; one to depress the off switch accessible by those who had studied the diagrams in the pamphlet as if it had secrets. The bot died without theater. Three points. He did not look around to see who noticed.
Another bot lumbered into a narrow lane toward a girl juggling two at once; he tagged its ankle with shadow for half a breath—trip—and let her finish it so the camera would attribute victory where it would do the most good. Points bled in directions that still measured up as safe tomorrow.
The shadow felt the rising hum of the arena—hundreds of quirks inventing resonance, fear and exhilaration learning to share a throat. It pressed the square again, not to leave—to extend. He allowed a thread. Not a weapon. A line that made footing honest where dust had been thrown by something loud. He passed a boy whose hands were shaking and gave him stable ground. The boy did not see him; he saw himself not falling. Perfect.
A siren blared somewhere left. A field medic team ran—actors in yellow vests trained to turn simulation into practice. He adjusted course away from crowds because accidents like to be watched.
"Two on your six!" someone yelled behind him—engines boy, engines finally earning their optimism. Renya pivoted, let momentum become grace, took one bot's sensor with a legal strike, ducked under another and used a shadow-thread to tug its weight into a miscalculation. "Thanks!" the boy shouted, already gone, his gratitude efficient. Renya didn't answer. Noise wastes air.
He accumulated points the way quiet accumulates trust.
In the second block, a panel had collapsed across a path; under it, a student curled with their hands over their head—the kind of panic that makes self-protection look like a target. Renya could have lifted the panel with a show. He didn't. He used three small moves: a wedge of shadow slid under the lowest edge and held, he shifted his weight to make fulcrum happen, he looked the student in the face and lied politely with a voice that replaced adrenaline. "Up. Now. You're fine." They were, because belief sometimes needs a stranger to become law. The panel clanged to the side with less noise than fear had predicted.
He moved on. He did not record gratitude. That was for other narratives.
Time thinned the herd. The enthusiastic had spent themselves; the frightened had found where they fit. The arena's algorithm adjusted, sensing how many points had been earned, how many injuries the field medics had prevented, how many boasts had turned into statistics.
The ground trembled then, as it must. The zero-pointer arrived.
A shadow steeped over a false skyline, too big to be interesting, wheels the size of arithmetic mistakes. The 0-POINT robot's chest glowed a polite hazard red. It lifted one segmented foot and promised an accident in the language of theaters.
Screams went up because at least one person needed the catharsis; orders went up that sounded like advice. "It's zero points!" someone bellowed. "Run!" Engines boy gathered a cluster and vector-corrected them down a wider street like a living traffic arrow. A blond detonated enthusiasm and sent language unsuited for broadcasts into the air. The green-haired boy froze—not out of fear, but calculation so dense it looked like panic.
The shadow inside Renya strained, not toward the 0-pointer—toward focus a block over where someone had fallen and couldn't get up. He ran there. The camera wanted the robot; he wanted the decision.
A slab had slid off a simulated facade and pinned a student's ankle at an angle that could be acted without props. The student's eyes held the look of someone who had just learned pain has secrets. "I can't move," they said, not needing to.
Renya didn't waste words. He put the square around impulse, set threads where physics had left purchase, and aligned. Not force. Geometry. Weight found a detour; pain didn't. "On three," he said. "One." He lifted on one; they moved on one. Surprise doesn't give fear time to argue. He wrapped the shadow around the leg, not to squeeze, to hold. Pressure points agreed. The student breathed. "Go," he said, and passed them into the hands of medics who had arrived because competence is contagious.
He looked up toward the thunder and saw a green figure run toward it—mid-air punch that didn't have permission from gravity; a boy making a choice that wrote history on bones. The strike landed with an honesty that turned flesh into declaration. The zero-pointer blinked, teetered; U.A.'s tolerant physics did the rest. The boy fell like a prayer someone had to catch.
Renya made the wrong choice for anonymity and the right one for himself. He didn't leap; he went low. Shadow ran, thin as ink on glass, under the area where the boy would collide with cruelty. He didn't catch. He slowed. The ground became a cushion pretending to be air. Impact translated into ache instead of aftermath. Uraraka—the bob-haired girl he'd noted—arrived with a hand and a word; gravity took a holiday. Between them, the landing became a conversation; the camera misattributed mercy to pink zero-gravity and that was correct. He reduced himself to a rumor of help.
The boy's eyes were wet with something purer than fear and more expensive than relief. "Thank you," he said to the sky. He would never know who else had insisted the sky be kind.
Renya jogged away before gratitude could do damage. His breath stayed even. The shadow hummed, pleased to have guarded without applause.
A buzzer cut the city. "EXAM OVER!" Present Mic sang, joy riding cachet.
Robots went dead. Students sagged. Medics measured. Proctors wrote. U.A. exhaled.
After, the campus became hospitality again—water, benches, a line of vending machines that felt like gold. Students talked about points because the world likes numbers. Did you see that zero-pointer?!I fried twelve threes!My lasers were so tasteful. A boy in glasses lectured probability to people who remembered to nod. The green-haired boy limped in a circle waiting for the world to finish being dizzy; the bob-haired girl fussed without calling it fussing; the blond with the matches for eyes smoldered at nothing.
Renya found a bench that didn't require anyone else's story and sat. The square in his mind cooled. The shadow adjusted politely under his boots as if offering a more honest version of ground.
Across the lawn, Kurobane stood just inside a bureaucratic shadow, speaking to no one, listening to everything. He was not a proctor; he was a permission slip dressed as oversight. Their eyes met once over a space that pretended to be trees.
Kurobane touched the edge of his coat, the smallest gesture that could hold meaning. We saw what you didn't show. Renya raised the bottle of water by a centimeter. Good.
A student dropped coins near a vending machine and apologized to the ground. Renya stood, retrieved two, returned them, witnessed the nod, resumed being a thing the camera did not prefer.
Time restarted. The arena thanked everyone with a polite alarm tone that meant leave.
The gate looked different from the inside.
Aki waited in the swirl beyond security—half prayer, half posture. She saw him from a distance because eyes learn you when they are practicing survival. Her smile arrived and then made room for analysis.
"You didn't break," she said as greeting.
"No," he said.
"You didn't hide," she ventured.
"Also no," he confessed.
"What did you do."
"Numbers," he said. "Angles. Tomorrow."
She pretended to accept that and actually did. "Good," she declared for both of them.
They walked away from the most prestigious door in the country as if headed to a grocery store, because the world still required dinner.
Behind them, U.A. did its rightful magic on files and footage. Glory found a name destined to trip over its own determination and fall into legend only to climb out again; points distributed themselves across spreadsheets with the fairness of a machine taught ethics by bored saints. Renya's line read like a paradox: high score without spectacle; assists with no ownership; errors none; identity non-critical.
He preferred it that way.
Kurobane filed an observation the system would call "thin" and he would call "useful."
Subject: Kurotsuki, Renya.Exam Behavior: Non-escalatory eliminations; micro-assists; covert kinetic dampening at high-impact event (unattributed publicly); priority to rescue over points when needed.Shadow Signature: Nominal; controlled threads; no theatrical discharge under crowd resonance.Ethics Index: Selects task over attachment; preserves dignity as first order effect.Recommendation: Delay registration demand; proceed with mentorship; monitor post-exam public narrative.
He added a personal line the Commission would not want: He chose properly with witnesses present. That matters more than his score. Then he closed the file and did not wonder why his hands were steady.
Night made the apartment credible again.
Aki peeled an orange like a declaration and put half in his hand. "When will we know."
"Soon," he said. Waiting had stopped costing him much; he had prepaid during other lives.
She leaned back in her chair, eyes on the ceiling where the portrait rested with tape that would not harm paint. "If they ask you to be on camera, be boring."
"I intend to," he said.
She pointed at the floor. The shadow, unbidden, had extended the smallest square under her feet, brightening like acknowledgment.
"It said welcome home," she announced.
"It is learning manners," he said.
"It learned them from you," she replied, and only after she said it did she realize the price the compliment extracted.
They didn't talk about that cost. They ate orange and budget and quiet, and let the day be exactly as big as the table.
When the dishes were away and the city had decided to dim itself, he sat cross-legged on the floor, ankles touching the shadow's boundary. The Veil went soft. The breath threaded.
"You kept your promise," he told the second thing. "You guarded. You chose properly. We will do it again."
It brightened and dimmed like a nod.
He thought of the green-haired boy's punch, the way faith manifests as physics when courage decides to stop asking permission. He thought of the girl who took gravity away with a hand like a blessing. He thought of engines and laser grins and glass eyes that wanted too much. He thought of the Commission's scheduled cruelty and the person inside it who would try to dull the edges where he could.
He did not think of fate. Fate is just a report written by people who didn't want to admit someone chose.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we return to work."
The room agreed. The world adjusted. The letter on the table stopped being a door and returned to being paper because tomorrow would need a different door.
Across town, a man in a dark coat stood at a bridge and listened to the city not congratulate itself for a day without disasters. He smiled for no one and walked home.
Between masks and mirrors, U.A. had offered him a stage; he had made it a room. The shadows approved.