The estate didn't look like anything Fushiguro had pictured on the drive up.
He'd expected something closer to a fortress, given everything he'd heard about the name in the space of a week, high walls, a gate with a crest on it, something built to announce itself. Instead the car turned off a quiet road lined with cedar trees, and the estate simply opened up in front of them the way old places did when they'd never needed to prove anything to anyone passing by. Low wooden buildings connected by covered walkways. Gravel paths raked clean. A garden that had clearly been maintained by someone who took it seriously for longer than Fushiguro had been alive.
It looked peaceful.
That bothered him more than a fortress would have. Fortresses at least admitted what they were.
Naobito led him through the front gate without slowing down, offering commentary on nothing, which was its own kind of statement. Staff bowed as they passed, uniform and silent. Nobody spoke directly to Fushiguro. A few of them looked at him a beat too long before catching themselves and looking away.
"They know who I am," Fushiguro said.
"Everyone here knows who you are." Naobito didn't turn around. "A first-year who wins the Sports Festival, tops six thousand offers, and turns out to carry this family's blood on top of it. That's not a small thing to walk into a compound carrying, even one this used to producing talent. Word travels fast in a place this small."
Fushiguro didn't ask what he meant by the rest of it. He suspected he already knew, and he suspected knowing wouldn't make it easier to hear out loud.
They crossed a second courtyard before Naobito finally stopped in front of a training hall set apart from the main buildings, wood darkened with age, the sliding doors already open.
"Your room first," Naobito said before Fushiguro could step inside. "You can't train in whatever you're currently wearing, and Jin'ichi can wait another five minutes."
Fushiguro stopped. "Who's Jin'ichi?"
Naobito glanced back at him, seeming mildly amused by the question. "Your uncle."
That didn't help much.
Fushiguro stared at him. "I have an uncle?"
"Several relatives, actually. Try not to sound so disappointed."
Fushiguro's expression stayed flat. Until the night Jinya walked into Tsumiki's hospital room, he'd barely known the Zen'in clan existed beyond the name attached to some famous heroes. Now every few hours someone seemed to be informing him about another branch of a family his father had apparently decided he was better off knowing nothing about.
They reached a small guest room farther down the estate. It was sparse and clean, with a low bed against one wall and a folded set of training clothes waiting on top of it.
Naobito gestured toward them. "Change. Someone will collect you when you're finished."
Fushiguro picked up the clothes but didn't start changing yet. "And this Jin'ichi is training me?"
"For the first two days."
"Why him?"
Naobito considered the question for a moment. "Because what he intends to teach you has very little to do with your Quirk."
Fushiguro's eyes narrowed slightly.
"You'll understand soon enough." Naobito turned toward the doorway, then paused. "And before you ask, no, you've never met him. He's seen you. You haven't seen him."
Fushiguro thought back to the Sports Festival, the thousands of faces packed into the stadium, then to the hospital. "He was there?"
"At the Festival. He watched from our box. Jinya was there too."
So they had been watching him before Jinya ever walked into Tsumiki's room.
Fushiguro didn't particularly like that.
Naobito seemed to read enough from his face to find it entertaining. "You'll discover very quickly that this family has spent considerably more time knowing about you than you've spent knowing about us."
"Creepy."
Naobito laughed. "You'll fit in."
Fushiguro's expression flattened further.
"Change," Naobito repeated, stepping into the corridor. "Jin'ichi isn't as patient as I am."
"You haven't seemed particularly patient."
"Exactly."
The door slid shut behind him.
Fushiguro looked down at the training clothes in his hands. The fabric was plain and worn soft from use, with nothing about it suggesting it belonged to the most famous hero family in the world. Only when he unfolded the top did he notice a small Zen'in crest stitched into the inside of the collar.
He stared at it for a moment.
Yesterday he'd had one grandfather he didn't know existed.
Today he'd apparently gained an uncle.
At this rate, somebody was going to introduce him to a cousin before lunch.
Fushiguro changed quickly, folded his own clothes on the bed, and stepped back into the corridor. A member of the household staff was already waiting.
"Fushiguro-sama. This way, please."
...
The training hall was mostly empty space, polished floor, a wall of mirrors running along one side. A man stood in the center when Fushiguro slid the door open and turned at the sound.
Megumi stopped just inside.
This had to be Jin'ichi.
Naobito had given him the name, the relation, and almost nothing else. His father's older brother. His uncle. Someone who had apparently known about Megumi for years while Megumi had learned he existed less than half an hour ago.
The man studied him for a long moment.
"Fushiguro Megumi."
He said the full name carefully, like he was comparing the person in front of him to something he already knew.
Megumi stepped farther inside. "Zen'in Jin'ichi?"
"Yeah."
That was all the confirmation he needed.
Jin'ichi looked him over once, from the training clothes to the way he carried himself, then back to his face.
"I've wanted to actually meet you since I found out you existed. Watching you from a distance wasn't the same thing."
Megumi's eyes narrowed slightly. "Naobito said you watched the Sports Festival."
"I did."
"And you never introduced yourself."
"No."
Megumi waited.
Jin'ichi seemed to understand what he was asking without needing the rest.
"I wasn't going to introduce myself by walking into your sister's hospital room uninvited, and the Sports Festival wasn't exactly the place for a family reunion."
That answer was more reasonable than Megumi had expected.
Jin'ichi continued, his expression staying even.
"You're probably still getting used to people here telling you they're related to you."
"Yeah."
"I figured."
A faint trace of amusement crossed his face, but it disappeared quickly.
"I'm Jin'ichi. Your father's older brother. For whatever that's worth to you right now."
"Not much."
There was no offense in the answer.
Jin'ichi folded his arms.
"We've got six days total. I only get the first two."
Megumi looked around the empty hall.
"What are you teaching me?"
Jin'ichi's eyes settled on him again.
"How to fight."
Megumi's expression barely changed.
"I already know how."
"I watched you."
That made Megumi pause.
Jin'ichi continued.
"You're good. Better than most kids your age."
He stepped away from the center of the floor.
"But good instincts and a few things you've picked up aren't the same as having a system."
Megumi watched him.
Jin'ichi gestured toward the open space between them.
"You've got two days with me."
His posture shifted slightly.
"By the end of them, we're figuring out what kind of fighter you actually are."
Jin'ichi walked to the center of the floor and turned to face him.
"Hit me. However you'd hit someone if this were real."
Fushiguro moved. He didn't overthink it, closing the distance the way he had against Tokoyami, against Bakugo, a straight punch aimed to land clean.
It never got there. Jin'ichi's forearm came up and simply absorbed it, no real attempt to dodge or redirect, and Fushiguro's whole arm rang from the impact like he'd hit something closer to stone than muscle. Before he'd fully recovered, Jin'ichi's own hand was already moving, a short, almost lazy-looking jab that still snapped Fushiguro's guard backward hard enough to sting straight through his forearms.
"Again."
Fushiguro reset and tried a low kick this time. Jin'ichi caught it on his shin without flinching, and the leg that hit it ached from the collision far more than the shin that took it.
"You're strong for your age," Jin'ichi said, like he was commenting on the weather. "You're not strong compared to me. Keep that difference in your head for the next two days, or you're going to keep hurting yourself against things that shouldn't hurt to hit."
"Noted."
"Again."
A third attempt, both hands this time, a real combination meant to actually pressure him. Jin'ichi didn't bother evading any of it, simply absorbing each strike on a forearm or shoulder like the impacts were closer to rainfall than punches, and answered with a single open palm to the chest that sent Fushiguro stumbling backward three full steps before he managed to plant his feet again.
"You're throwing everything you have into strikes that aren't actually landing anywhere useful," Jin'ichi observed. "That's not a flaw specific to you. Most fighters do this against someone who doesn't visibly react to being hit. The body keeps escalating, looking for the reaction it isn't getting. Stop escalating. Start reading instead."
They went through a dozen more exchanges, and Fushiguro lost nearly all of them outright, strikes absorbed rather than avoided, his own attempts at redirection sliding off a frame that simply refused to be moved the way a normal body moved. Twice Jin'ichi caught his wrist and turned it, technique layered over raw strength, and both times Fushiguro's whole arm locked before he understood what had actually happened to it.
By the eighth or ninth attempt, something small had started to change, not a breakthrough, nothing close to it, but Fushiguro's stance had begun settling lower after each failed exchange instead of staying high and open, and his recovery off the ground came half a beat faster than it had at the start.
Jin'ichi noticed. He didn't say much about it.
"You're adjusting. Slowly. That's expected, this early." He reset into stance. "Don't mistake adjusting for closing the gap. There's a difference, and you're a long way from the second one."
They ran through a throw next, hand on wrist, hip turning underneath, and Jin'ichi put him down hard enough that Fushiguro felt it in his teeth.
"Feel that? Right before you landed, where your balance actually left you. Same principle as the strike. Same principle as the lock I'm about to show you. Different direction, same idea."
He demonstrated the joint entry slowly, walking Fushiguro through the mechanics of it by hand, and then ran it at speed a dozen times, Fushiguro's arm locking every single time regardless of how he tried to brace against it. On the ninth attempt Fushiguro managed to slow the rotation by a fraction, bracing his shoulder into it a beat before Jin'ichi's grip fully committed, and Jin'ichi had to adjust his own angle slightly to finish the lock rather than simply taking it as freely as he had every other time.
"That's something," Jin'ichi allowed, releasing him. "Not a counter. A delay. Delays matter more than people think, against someone stronger than you. Buying half a second is sometimes the entire fight."
"You won't beat this one today," he added, resetting. "Most people don't beat it inside a year. I'm showing you the shape of it so your body has something to start chewing on. That's all today is."
Fushiguro nodded, jaw tight, and reset for another attempt anyway. The tenth locked clean. The eleventh locked clean. By the twelfth he'd stopped expecting anything different, and the acceptance of that alone seemed to matter to Jin'ichi more than any success would have.
"Good," Jin'ichi said. "You stopped fighting the inevitable outcome and started paying attention to the process instead. That's the actual lesson today, buried under forty minutes of getting your arm locked."
...
They broke for water before noon, both of them sitting against the wall with the sun cutting a long bar of light across the floor between them.
"You're taking a beating well," Jin'ichi said. "That matters more than most people realize. Talent without the ability to keep resetting after getting hit is worthless in this line of work."
"Doesn't feel like a compliment."
"It's not, entirely. It's an observation." Jin'ichi turned his water bottle over once, not drinking yet. "Striking gives you structure. Knowing where your own force is going before you commit it. Everything else I'm showing you, the redirection, the throws, the control, is a different discipline entirely, built around using someone else's weight instead of your own. Most people spend years blending the two into a single reflex instead of two separate decisions happening back to back. You're going to need those years. I'm not going to pretend two days changes that."
He was quiet for a moment, looking out at nothing in particular.
"There was a stretch, before your father left this place, where we were just children in the same house. I was young. He was younger still when it ended. We used to wrestle in the garden behind the main hall, whenever nobody was paying close enough attention to stop us. Nothing structured. No technique. Two boys throwing each other into the grass and calling it a game."
"Who won?"
"I did. Every time. He was too young to actually beat me, and there was never any real question about the outcome." Something crossed Jin'ichi's face, there and gone. "What I remember isn't the score. It's how he lost. He never once stopped adjusting between rounds, even at that age, even against someone who could put him on the ground without trying. By the end of an afternoon he'd already stopped falling for the exact same throw twice. I didn't think much of it at the time. I was five myself. Everything feels like magic when you're five, winning included." He paused. "Then he was sent away, and that was the end of whatever that was. I've spent twenty years unsure whether I actually remember something real or just built a story around a handful of afternoons because it was easier than admitting I barely knew him at all."
"Do you see it in me? Whatever that was."
Jin'ichi considered the question honestly before answering it. "Some of it. You take instruction faster than you should. Your body's already looking for the next adjustment before I've finished making the last one. That's real, and it's rare." He looked at Fushiguro directly. "It's also a long way from what I actually am, or what your father eventually became. Don't confuse a good first day with anything more than that."
...
The afternoon session covered the same ground again, slower, more deliberate, Jin'ichi walking him through the same handful of principles until the repetition itself started to mean something.
Fushiguro still lost the overwhelming majority of the exchanges. Jin'ichi's strength alone closed most gaps before technique ever became the deciding factor, and more than once Fushiguro found himself flat on the mat wondering exactly how he'd gotten there.
Near the end of the session, chaining a strike into a redirect for perhaps the fortieth time that day, something held together for the first time, not cleanly, not impressively, but real, his own block turning Jin'ichi's strike a few degrees off its line before the follow-up could land.
Jin'ichi paused. "That's the first one you've actually earned today."
"Feels like it shouldn't have taken forty tries."
"It should have taken longer than that, honestly. You're ahead of where a first-day student usually sits. You are not anywhere near where a top-twenty hero sits, and you won't be for a long time. Both of those things are true, and you should hold onto both of them equally." Jin'ichi rolled his shoulder. "Go clean up. Dinner's in an hour. Tomorrow I intend to actually hurt you a little, now that I know you can take it without falling apart."
Fushiguro headed for the door, every muscle in his body already reporting the day's cost in ways that would still be there tomorrow.
"Fushiguro."
He stopped.
"For what it's worth." Jin'ichi hadn't moved from the center of the floor. "He would be proud of you."
"Thanks," Fushiguro said, and left him standing alone in the last of the afternoon light coming through the open doors.
...
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