U.A. rearranged its confidence into a stage.
A temporary gallery of scaffolds and rails rose along the training grounds, turned into bleachers by the logic of maintenance budgets and ambition. Posters went up—not names, just sections: CONTROL, RESCUE, PRECISION, PACE. Proctors moved like ants with clipboards. Cameras perched on tripods with the hunger of birds.
"Demonstration day," Present Mic announced at a humane volume, for once. "Pre-festival showcase! Controlled audience: faculty, a handful of support students, and the class ahead of you, because peer pressure is free."
Aizawa stood off to the side, capture scarf draped with the informality of a warning not yet in use. He looked at the rails, then at the sky, then at the class that had remembered how to breathe. "You are not here to perform," he said. "You are here to show work."
Murmurs answered; the bleachers answered louder. Renya answered with posture—Veil quiet, square tucked, pace that belonged to hallways rather than stages.
"Order," Aizawa said. "Sero, Kaminari, Yaoyorozu. Then… Kurotsuki."
Kaminari lifted his hands like a speaker who had finally found his audience. "Polite zapping," he whispered to Renya, who responded with an almost-smile. Yaoyorozu exhaled a diagram. Sero taped a triangle the size of a principle.
Renya took his place at the edge of the marked zone. The demonstration sheet in his pocket said Precision & Rescue; the instruction in his head said be boring; the bleachers said notice me in fifty different flavors.
The pulse arrived like rain remembered—soft, everywhere.
He drew the square inside his mind, not on the floor, and kept it small.
Sero went first—an honest mesh of tape that turned air into architecture and dignity into a safety net. The audience reacted in a ripple: impressed, relieved, entertained. The pulse rose with the relief and smoothed with the math. Sero grinned at the tape's good behavior and bowed as if to a colleague.
"Yaoyorozu Momo!" Present Mic called, and material obeyed her. She built a collapsible stretcher from nothing; she built a reason to trust it from tone. The bleachers murmured a bit louder. The pulse near her settled into enough and stayed there, like a cat choosing the warm spot again.
"Kaminari Denki!"
He took the lane and checked eyes for consent with the speed of a person who had learned it mattered. "Short bursts," he told the crowd as if they'd been invited to shop. "Wattage within safe ranges. We keep hair and eyebrows today."
A laugh. He fired—precise arcs that traced letters no one could read, then a curtain of crackle shaped like a door that a rescuer could pass through while the field dispersed around them. He had practiced; it showed. The pulse near him fizzed and then organized. For a second, it braided with the room's rhythm; for a second, everyone felt warm for the same reason.
"Thank you!" Kaminari yelled, then looked at Renya and mouthed, too loud, your turn.
"That's an instruction I'm ignoring," Renya said under his breath and stepped forward anyway.
"Next: Kurotsuki Renya—Precision & Rescue," Present Mic announced, trading hype for clarity, which was a compliment.
Aizawa's gaze touched Renya's shoulder and then left, like a teacher granting permission to be boring.
The setup was simple: two dummies placed where an aftershock would punish haste; a timing light that randomized green to go, red to reconsider; a narrow passage that would force a choice of angles. He had asked for it to be simple. He planned to make it simpler.
He walked into the zone and let the square appear only as posture—nothing on the ground, nothing for the camera. He touched the first dummy's shoulder and rotated its weight to a line the body was designed to like; he moved the second three centimeters and lied to friction that it had already agreed. The red light flicked at the far end. He stopped before the word stop finished forming. He shifted two fingerprints' worth of balance and waited with the patience of temperature settling in a cup.
Green. He moved again. No flourish. No flare. The kind of competence that refuses narration.
The pulse around the bleachers drew closer, curious. Not hungry—appraising. And then the audience reacted to itself reacting—the odd collective pleasure of watching someone refuse to build a myth.
He finished with both dummies at the exit line, faced no direction, and did not bow.
Silence.
Then claps, hesitant first—support students who liked small miracles—then firmer from the older class that had learned to respect the skill of not wasting anyone's luck. Kaminari's whistle cut through like punctuation. Mina yelled "hot!" and then "tasteful!" because she had decided those were synonyms today.
The pulse climbed with their approval, but it did not crash into him. It circled, curious, waiting to be fed and discovering instead that he was feeding nothing.
Aizawa didn't smile. He didn't need to. He said, mostly to the room, "He didn't move the floor. He made pressure give up."
The bleachers kept clapping anyway because civility sometimes deserves noise.
They cycled through the rest—Ojiro's tail negotiated with beams and did not lose; Tokoyami convinced the shadow that it could be a citizen; Midoriya's analysis turned the red/green light into a conversation and briefly broke it with sincerity.
Bakugou detonated a concept into spectacle, then caught his own fire with footwork and contempt for disaster. The bleachers roared. The pulse jolted, delighted by a narrative shaped like impact. Renya let the noise pass through his ribs and held the square like a lid.
Present Mic closed the circuit with a thank-you that sounded almost parental. The bleachers exhaled and turned into hallways again. The cameras folded. The posters went from banners back to grammar.
Aizawa approached Renya without urgency. "You kept it small," he said.
"I tried to be forgettable," Renya replied.
"You failed," Aizawa said, not quite dry. He tilted his head—the gesture he used instead of praise. "You also kept the field stable when the audience spiked. Felt it."
Renya didn't feign ignorance. "It's learning how to listen without answering."
"Good," Aizawa said. "Teach it boredom. There's a deficit."
He moved to speak to Kaminari about amperage and posture. Renya breathed out and let his shoulders rest.
The pulse, deprived of drama, didn't leave. It adjusted. It found a slower rhythm and tucked itself under the day.
News of small things travels faster than spectacle requires. By lunch, someone had whispered that 1-A had class and that the quiet one had made difficulty look like etiquette. Midoriya scribbled notes until his page insisted on rest. Yaoyorozu wrote permission to stand again in the margins and circled it. Kaminari tried to tell five different people that restraint could be sexy and was only slightly less convincing each time.
Uraraka perched on the opposite bench with a rice ball and a smile that had more stamina than coffee. "That was…" She searched for a word that didn't overpay. "Real."
"It was small," Renya said.
"That's why it was big," she replied, unbothered by paradox. She stood. "Don't forget to eat, okay?"
"Eating is my most obedient habit," he said, and saw her grin even as she walked away.
Aizawa passed within arm's length, and the square placed itself under both of them for the time it took to share air. He didn't look down. He didn't need to. "Commission's watching," he said without moving his mouth much.
"When are they not," Renya said.
"Today, more," Aizawa said. "Don't give them footage that looks like an answer."
"I intend to be an essay," Renya said.
Aizawa almost smiled. "Make it long."
The afternoon looked like routine breaking into smaller routines and rearranging itself as practice. The support course reclaimed the railings. The cameras were checked into closets by students who had learned the comfort of shelves. The pulse thinned—daylight losing its appetite. Renya signed out, nodded at a janitor who had upgraded a mop into a philosophy, and walked the gate like somebody that fences choose to like.
On the street, life turned back into logistics. Aki's text read spaghetti and then milk as a separate message, because milk had begun campaigning for its own line item. He sent back acquired and proud and left out of you because the phrase did its job without the pronoun.
The store did its evening pilgrimage—coins, ramen, tape, batteries, apologies, receipts. Natsume balanced the till as if the universe owed her a clean ledger and she intended to collect.
At 20:40, the door chimed, and the pulse arrived before the hinges finished speaking. Attention without footsteps. He raised his eyes without raising his head.
Kurobane's coat appeared in the reflection of the lotto display. He approached from the blind angle used by people who do not want to startle cashiers. He bought crackers—salted. The pulse around him measured as steady and tired.
"Controlled audience?" Kurobane asked, low.
"Mostly controlled," Renya said.
"An uncontrolled success," Kurobane said.
"I refuse the compliment," Renya replied.
"You can refuse, but you can't prevent the compliment from occurring," Kurobane said, matter-of-fact.
Renya considered allowing himself to like the sentence and declined. "Commission?"
"Active interest," Kurobane said. "No action—today."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow will pretend to be today," Kurobane said. He placed a slip of paper on the counter as if it were any other receipt. Small tomorrow, it read, handwritten.
Renya didn't nod. He slid the paper into the drawer as though it had a SKU.
The pulse reached for both of them, tiny and impolite, like a child at a museum reaching for glass. Renya tapped the counter with one finger. The square brightened the width of a pencil line and dimmed again. The pulse recoiled and then, astonishingly, waited.
Kurobane saw nothing; he felt it. "You felt that."
"Yes," Renya said.
"Active without trigger?"
"Ambient audience," Renya said. "It's learning to measure rooms that aren't rooms."
"Echoes," Kurobane said, not officially. "They don't sleep."
"They wait," Renya said.
"For what?"
"For the silence to blink," Renya said.
Kurobane didn't write it down. He carried it out with the crackers.
Night found the apartment in a forgiving mood. Aki had made enough to signal safety; she had bought milk with the satisfaction of a general who wins a very small war. They ate at a table that refused to wobble. The square under her chair brightened on each toe tap and accepted correction when she told it to stop imitating.
"Your show?" she asked.
"Demonstration," he corrected. "I demonstrated how not to be interesting."
"You failed, right?" she said, smirking.
"Yes," he confessed. "Modestly."
"Proud," she said, and this time said of you because someone had to pay praise in full sometimes.
They did the dishes with the competence of people who had agreed not to let knives flirt with fingers. The pulse in the apartment remained small and domestic. The square learned the rhythm of cabinet doors. The city breathed outside, not louder than home.
He took the trash down and felt it on the stairs: a traveling hum, not his, moving along the spine of the building. It touched three doors and learned three versions of tired; it touched a window and learned the temperature of anxiety; it touched his shoulder like a courtesy and passed. He did not follow. He let it catalog.
Back upstairs, the apartment had kept its shape. Aki had fallen asleep with her cheek on a textbook she had long since extracted value from. He placed a folded towel beneath it in stealth, a truce between vertebrae and aspiration. The square brightened once and then practiced still.
He sat on the floor with ankles against the line and let breath become a metronome. The pulse came. It did not knock. It waited at the edge like a student who has learned not to interrupt.
"We do not feed," he said. "We annotate."
It dimmed and then held—like a cursor blinking on a blank page.
He closed his eyes.
Across town, U.A. slept the way institutions do—one eye open. The telemetry nodes in the training hall idled. On one screen that wasn't supposed to be on, a graph rose and fell with the emptiness of the room itself—a low wave, constant, without a quirk in the space to justify it.
In an office where he wasn't technically on the clock, Kurobane watched numbers that shouldn't have numbers. He didn't call anyone. He wrote nothing. He memorized the curve the way some men memorize a prayer.
On a roof that did not need a witness, Aizawa looked at the city and did not use his quirk on the night. He blinked once. Somewhere, something blinked back.
At home, the apartment's pulse softened into the kind of quiet that children learn is safety because no one is yelling. The square held its boundary as if the idea had learned to sleep without dismissing its duty.
Renya lay on the mat and counted the breaths until counting gave way to the thing that comes after arithmetic. The hum threaded under his ribs, neither command nor request—just notice.
He didn't send it away.
He didn't invite it closer.
He allowed it the size of the room.
In the morning, there would be schedules that pretended to be laws, and laws that pretended to be schedules, and a demonstration that would fix itself into rumor. The Commission would polish their tools. Aizawa would polish his questions. Aki would find the right word for a pulse that learned to wait.
Tonight, nothing broke. Tonight, echoes took attendance.
And somewhere in a gym with the lights out and the benches leaning into their own sturdiness, a sensor recorded a rhythm without a source and sent it to a folder that did not exist. It rose. It fell. It did not stop when the building forgot itself.
Echoes don't sleep — they wait for the silence to blink first.