The clock in Tanaka-sensei's office was unbearably loud.
*Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.*
I had never noticed it before — not in any of the dozens of times I had sat across from this desk for good reasons. Report cards. Achievement certificates. The occasional word of praise. But today, in the suffocating silence of his office, that clock felt like it was counting down to something I didn't want to arrive at.
My heart wasn't helping either. *Badump. Badump. Badump.* It had been doing that since I was called in after school. Fast enough that I was certain both adults in this room could hear it too, if they were paying close enough attention.
Nana-san sat to my left, hands folded neatly in her lap, her face arranged into the kind of careful blankness that told me she was thinking very hard about something she had not yet decided to say. Tanaka-sensei sat across from me behind his desk, fingers laced together, watching me with the patient, measured expression of a man who had spent decades coaxing the truth out of children who didn't want to give it.
The silence stretched.
This was, I realised, exactly what being sent to the principal's office felt like. I had read about it. Seen it in dramas. Even in my past life I had never actually experienced it because I had been too careful, too composed, too aware of consequences to ever do something that warranted it.
And yet here I was. Because I had destroyed a mountain.
A hill, technically. But the news had been calling it a mountain, so.
---
"Do you know why you've been called here?" Tanaka-sensei asked. His voice had shifted into something I privately thought of as Principal Mode — not unkind, but deliberate, each word placed carefully like stones crossing a river.
I straightened in my chair. "I can make a guess."
"Then please do."
I took a breath. "It's about what happened yesterday. In the forest."
Neither adult reacted visibly, but the quality of the silence changed slightly. Tanaka-sensei gave a single slow nod. "Go on."
"The hill. And the earthquake." I folded my hands in my lap, mirroring Nana-san without meaning to. "The one they reported on the news yesterday evening."
Another pause. Tanaka-sensei glanced briefly at Nana-san, then back to me.
"Were you responsible for that?"
I met his eyes directly. In situations like this, in both of my lives, I had learned that hesitation read as guilt in a way that a clean admission never did. "Yes. I was training in that area and I misjudged the scale of what I did. It wasn't intentional — not to that extent. But yes. It was me."
Nana-san closed her eyes for a moment. It was the first crack in her composure since I had walked in.
Tanaka-sensei said nothing for several seconds. The clock filled the gap.
*Tick. Tock.*
"How," Nana-san said finally, her voice quieter than usual, "did you do that?"
---
Rather than answer with words, I reached out with the deva path — the gravity ability I had spent several days learning to control — and let it move. The small trinkets arranged on Tanaka-sensei's desk lifted gently into the air. A paperweight. A pen. A small framed photograph. They floated in a slow, steady orbit around each other, perfectly stable, before I set them back down without a sound.
Both adults watched this without speaking.
"My quirk is called 'Life Force,'" I explained. "With it I can do a lot of different things — like what I'm doing right now with these objects. I can also push things away with a lot of force, imitate natural elements like fire or water or earth, things like that." I paused, searching for the simplest way to put it. "Think of it like Goku's powers, but combined with the ability to imitate nature. That's probably the easiest way to describe it."
"I see," Tanaka-sensei said. He looked at the paperweight for a moment, then back at me. "And you were aware of how destructive this ability could be when used at full force?"
"Yes."
"And yet you used it at that scale anyway."
"I did take precautions," I said, careful to keep my voice steady rather than defensive. "I raised earth walls in a large area to absorb and redirect the shockwaves. I confirmed there were no people within at least three kilometres of my area before I did anything. I chose that location specifically because it was isolated forest land with no foot traffic on a Sunday afternoon." I held his gaze. "What I didn't account for was how far the impact would travel. That part was a genuine miscalculation and I'm sorry for it."
Tanaka-sensei was quiet for a moment. Then: "The news reported tremors felt as far as thirty kilometres away."
I kept my expression neutral, but internally I winced. Three kilometres of visible clearance against thirty kilometres of underground impact. The gap between those two numbers was, in retrospect, embarrassingly large. "I know. I understand that my precautions weren't sufficient. I'm not trying to argue otherwise."
Nana-san let out a slow, controlled breath. "Itsuki. I gave you permission to train in that area because you told me your clones would be handling the intensive exercises. That was the agreement."
"It was," I admitted. "And for most of the sessions, that's exactly what happened. What I did at the end — that was my decision, made in the moment. That's not on you, Nana-san. It's on me entirely."
She looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't quite read. Not anger. Something more complicated than that.
---
Tanaka-sensei unclasped his hands and leaned back slightly in his chair. When he spoke again, his tone had shifted — still measured, but the Principal Mode had softened into something more like genuine curiosity.
"Let me ask you something different," he said. "What do you want to do with your life? Not what you think I want to hear. What do you actually want?"
The question caught me off guard. I had been braced for consequences — a formal reprimand, a restriction on my training, possibly being marched to the local police station to confess in person. A question about my future was not what I had prepared for.
He seemed to read my confusion, because he continued: "I'm asking because I want to understand who you are, young Itsuki. Not just what you did. You're one of the sharpest children in this orphanage — possibly the sharpest I've seen in thirty years of this work. You explained compound interest to Mori-sensei well enough that she went home and restructured her own savings. You are at the top of your class without appearing to try. And you are, in all the ways that matter, an exceptionally well-behaved child." A pause. "That history matters to me when I'm deciding how to respond to something like this."
I considered the question honestly.
"I want to go to space someday," I said. "I want to be as strong as I can be. I want to be rich. I want to fly without restrictions. I want to travel the world." I thought about the kids I'd grown up alongside in this place, the ones who had to move out with age. "I want to help kids like me. Kids who don't have anyone." I paused. "And maybe become a hero. I'm not certain about that part yet — but maybe."
Tanaka-sensei was quiet for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved in what was almost, almost a smile. "That is quite the list."
Nana-san, for the first time since I had walked into this office, let out a small, soft sound that was unmistakably a laugh — quickly recovered, but real.
The tension in the room shifted. Not quite gone yet but just took a different form.
---
"Now," Tanaka-sensei said, returning to the matter at hand, "let me be straightforward with you, because I think you're smart enough to hear it plainly."
I nodded.
"What you did yesterday was illegal. The forest and the hill are local government property. Destruction of public land carries serious consequences for adults — heavy fines at minimum, potential criminal charges at worst. You are a child, and that changes how the law would treat you, but it does not make what you did legal."
"I know," I said.
"You were lucky," he continued, "in several important ways. No one was hurt. No privately owned property was damaged. And the nature of what happened — a tremor, a collapsed hill, no witnesses — means that without a confession, no investigator would immediately think to question a child." He let that sit for a moment. "I am not going to take you to the police station today."
I had suspected as much, but I didn't let relief show on my face. I wasn't sure I had earned relief yet.
"However," he said, and the word had weight behind it, "I want you to understand something. You are not going to be able to operate like this indefinitely. A quirk of this scale — one that can register as a seismic event across thirty kilometres — that is not a quirk you can develop in secret. Not safely. Not legally. Not for much longer and not till you are older" He leaned forward slightly. "You mentioned wanting to become a hero. If that is a path you are serious about — even as a possibility — then you need structure. You need proper supervision. Because the next time something like this happens, I may not be the one sitting across from you. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes," I said. And I meant it. Not as an automatic answer, but because I did understand — the gap between what I was capable of and what I could control responsibly was still significant, and that gap was dangerous for everyone around me, not just for me. "It won't happen again. Not like that."
"See that it doesn't." He held my gaze for a moment longer, then nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever he found there. "You're dismissed. Nana-san and I have a few things to discuss."
I stood, straightened my chair, and bowed. "Thank you for hearing me out."
As I reached the door, Tanaka-sensei spoke one more time.
"Young Itsuki."
I turned.
And there was something almost warm in his expression now. "If you want to be as strong as possible, then start by getting a hero license first."
---
I stood in the hallway outside his office, the door clicking shut behind me.
The clock on the wall out here was quieter. Or maybe I just had room to breathe again.
I looked up at the ceiling and let out a long, slow exhale.
The mountain — the hill — was gone. That wasn't changing. But I was still here, still free, and the two people in that room whose opinions I cared about most had looked at me and seen someone worth investing in rather than someone to be handed off to authorities.
---
Phew.
I let that sit in my chest for a moment as I made my way down the corridor toward the shared bedroom. A burden genuinely lifted — the kind of weight you don't fully notice you've been carrying until it's gone. I had known going in roughly how it would end, but knowing something and living through it are different things entirely.
I already had a good idea of what kind of ordeal waited for me outside that office, though. After all, it is not often that the model student gets summoned to the director's office — and word travels fast in an orphanage. The older kids, the junior high and high schoolers, were still in class and wouldn't be back until at least four-thirty. But the younger ones, all below twelve, were very much home. And every single one of them had been compared to me at least once by one caretaker or another, which I had come to accept as simply an unavoidable feature of communal Asian household living.
I had barely turned the corner when something launched itself at me.
I could have dodged. Easily. But I caught her instead — partly because I had seen her coming from a full second away, partly because I genuinely liked her company, and mostly because she was my best friend.
Aki landed in my arms and immediately redistributed herself onto my shoulders with the practised efficiency of someone who had done this approximately three hundred times. Which she had.
"You were in there forever," she announced from somewhere above my head.
"It was twenty minutes."
"Forever," she repeated, with complete conviction.
I am close with everyone here in one way or another, but Aki and Kenji occupy a different category entirely. With Kenji it is something like an older brother and younger brother — he comes to me with problems, I try not to give terrible advice. With Aki it is just friendship, the uncomplicated kind, the kind you don't have to maintain because it maintains itself. She is two years older than me but only one grade ahead, thanks to the Japanese schools admission policies.
She had settled her full weight across both my shoulders now, which was a different kind of burden than the one I had just walked out of — significantly preferable. She reminded me, not for the first time, of an extremely clingy cat. This was less of a creative observation on my part than a straightforward one, given that her quirk was literally called 'Cat' and gave her all the physical traits and instincts of the Felidae family of animals. The perching. The complete lack of apology about it. The purring, occasionally, which she would deny if asked.
I heard them before I saw them.
A small stampede of footsteps, all under five years old, came thundering around the corner with the kind of energy that suggested they had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Itsuki-nii! You're back!"
That was Sora — distinguishable from the others primarily by volume. The absolute loudest child in the building, possibly in a three-block radius, small enough to wrap both arms around my leg and determined to do exactly that.
Behind him came the others in a small, enthusiastic cluster, ages ranging from barely-walking to almost-old-enough-to-know-better.
I crouched down, Aki shifting her balance automatically as I did, and opened my arms.
The impact was considerable.
"Okay," I said, to the general pile. "One at a time. Who has something important to tell me?"
Every single hand went up.
It was, I decided, a very good way to stop thinking about mountains and consequences and just continue with life.
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Author's note:
chapter 10 here and unfortunately the MC would not be able to train much till he get's into UA. He will stull be training just he'll be training precision more. Stuff that does no destroy a city of kill a person more like restrains them completely.