Aki is standing on the end of my bed before I have finished being asleep.
I know it's her without opening my eyes. She has a quality of stillness when she's waiting for something — not patience exactly, more like a spring that has decided to be polite about the tension it's holding. The mattress dips. There is a pause during which I can feel her deciding whether I am asleep or pretending. Then she grabs me by both shoulders and shakes.
"You have that look again," she says.
Her voice reaches me several seconds after it probably should.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I say.
I know exactly what she's talking about. I just want to see her face do the thing.
"Hmph." She crosses her arms. The thing happens: eyebrows drawn together, chin lifted, the expression of someone personally offended by my attention span. "Never mind that. You're going to train me, starting now."
I look at her. Then I look at the window, where the light has the pale, uncommitted quality of a morning that hasn't fully decided to exist yet.
"It's early," I say.
"You had the face last night," she says, in the tone of someone clarifying something that shouldn't have required clarification.
I know which face she means. Last night, on the couch, watching the evening news — Mirko finishing a chase that had apparently started four blocks away, dragging a villain across the pavement one-handed like she had somewhere better to be. The common room had been at full capacity the way it only managed in the evenings: little ones clustered on the floor, older kids filling in behind them in the unspoken order children arrange themselves without anyone asking. Peanut — four years old, whose actual name I have still never heard — had climbed into Aki's lap at some point without Aki noticing and was watching the screen with enormous, solemn eyes. Kenji was standing on the coffee table. Nobody had told him to get down.
And then Aki had stood up — or tried to, which dislodged Peanut, who grabbed her tail on the way down, which Aki didn't seem to notice — pointed at the screen, and said, with the absolute conviction of someone who has never once doubted themselves:
"I want to be a hero!!!"
Half the common room echoed her.
I had watched her face in that moment. Not the declaration — the look on her face while she was making it. There was no performance in it. No self-consciousness, no awareness of the room watching her back. Just a person saying something true out loud, as simply as if she were announcing that it was going to rain.
And then I made the face. Whatever the face is. I am apparently the last person in the building to know about it.
"You were serious," I say.
"I told you I was serious." She says it the way she says most things — direct, no hedging, personally offended that the word serious even needed to appear in this sentence given how obvious she thought it was last night. "You had the face. The deciding-whether-to-talk-someone-out-of-something face."
"I don't have a face."
"Everyone knows about it," she says. "It's very obvious."
I file that away for later and decide not to address it right now.
"You've got five years until high school," I say. "Why the rush?"
She looks at me. Her ears — cat ears, triangular and mobile, sitting on top of her head — flatten slightly. Not anger. The expression of someone about to deploy an argument they've been holding in reserve.
"You started at seven," she says.
I open my mouth.
"So I can't start at eleven?"
I close it again.
She is smiling now, openly and immediately, the way she smiles when she's won something — not smug, never smug, just genuinely pleased, like being right is a gift she wants to share with the person she just beat. The worst thing about Aki is that she can do that. The best thing about Aki is also that she can do that.
"Fine," I say.
Her smile gets wider.
"Don't make that face," I say.
She makes it worse on purpose.
---
We find Nana-san — or rather, Nana-san finds us — she is already at the back door when we come downstairs, coat on, with the look of someone who has been expecting this conversation for longer than either of us has been awake. She studies us both for a moment: me with my notebook, Aki bouncing lightly on her heels with the focused energy of someone who has been awake for at least two hours already.
"Good morning, Nana-san," I say.
She looks at Aki. She looks at me. She looks at the notebook.
Then she walks out to the yard, retrieves her chair from against the wall — the same chair she uses when she supervises my solo training, which she has apparently already brought outside — and sits down in it without a word.
"You're not going to say anything?" I ask.
"I am saying nothing," she says, in the tone of someone who has made a considered decision about this.
Aki leans toward me. "Is she okay?"
"She's fine," I say. "That is what fine looks like for her."
Nana-san gazes at the middle distance with the expression of someone commending themselves to a higher power.
---
"So," Aki says, once we're standing in the yard. "How do we do this?"
"That depends," I say. "What kind of hero do you want to be?"
She opens her mouth immediately, and I hold up one hand.
"Before you answer — actually think about it."
She closes her mouth. Her tail moves in the slow, deliberate way it does when she's genuinely considering something rather than waiting for her turn to speak.
"All heroes stop villains," I say. "That part doesn't change. But the shape of the work does. Some heroes work in public — what they're doing half the time is just being there, being visible, being the thing people know will show up. All Might built a career on that. Some do rescue work, disaster response, civilian extraction. Some work underground, no public profile, cases the visible heroes can't touch." I pause. "Most are some version of those. The point is that the shape of the work matters, not just the work."
She is quiet for a moment.
"I want to be like Mirko," she says. It comes out the same way it did in front of the television — certain, simple, no qualifications. "Someone who goes straight at it without any detours."
I look at her.
Of course. Obviously. I don't know why I bothered giving her the chance to surprise me.
"Alright," I say. "Then that's where we start."
She grins.
Then: "Why do you know all this, anyway? You're nine."
And I think about how to answer that. About two years ago, and a crater, and a conversation in Tanaka-sensei's office where a man who had spent thirty years working with children told me, very calmly, that I was lucky. About sitting in that chair with my hands folded in my lap and reaching, quietly, a conclusion: brute force was a solved problem. If something needed destroying, I had a fist and chakra and the geometry was simple. That chapter was closed.
What came after was more interesting.
The sensing work started with a principle I'd found in Hagoromo's teachings — the idea buried inside ninshu that chakra was not just power but something closer to language, and that when two people shared it, what passed between them was understanding more than information. I wanted to invert that. Turn it outward and read rather than speak. Not locations or signatures, the way standard sensing worked, but intent — the shape of someone's attention in the half-second before they committed to an action.
The first hundred attempts produced nothing useful. The second hundred produced headaches. By the third I could sit across from Nana-san in this same yard and tell, with some reliability, whether she was focused or quietly worried about something I'd done. She found this unsettling. I found it encouraging.
The elemental work came faster than I expected, which meant either I'd found something genuinely simple or I'd gotten lucky, and I've learned not to trust luck as a methodology. It started with Ōnoki — with the memory of him, the absurdity of a man who could make a meteor lighter, who flew by simply deciding that gravity was someone else's problem. I'd been thinking about the underlying principle one morning and found myself standing at the edge of the orphanage's pond — that I created — wondering: if you could lower the weight in stone, why stop at stone?
I held my hand over the surface and pushed the thought outward through my chakra.
The water froze. Not from the edges in, the way cold does it — all at once, a flat white disc spreading from the point directly below my palm, perfectly silent.
I stood there for a moment. Then I did it again, just to be sure.
What followed felt less like discovery and more like a door I'd walked through without noticing the threshold: water driven past steam into something that strips paint. Earth folded into lava. Fire pushed past its natural boundary into explosion. Magnet — which turned out to be the same density principle applied to electromagnetism rather than weight. Scorch release, fire fed through Yang chakra until it became something drier and more absolute, less burning and more erasing. Sound, which I built from nothing that already existed, wind and lightning properties mixed together at the right angle until what came out was neither — something that travels in waves, hits the body before the ears have finished deciding what they've heard.
Wood release I haven't found. Whatever Hashirama Senju was, he was something else, and I've found nothing to stand on when I approach what he built. That door is still closed but I haven't stopped knocking yet.
And then — last, after all of that — the flying.
It came from the same place everything else had. Weight as a variable. Applied inward this time, to myself, with more care than I'd taken with the pond, because the pond cannot make decisions about where it lands.
I stood in the yard and worked through it slowly: feeling for the place where the downward pull registered in my chakra, the way it quietly insisted on the direction of the ground — and began, carefully, to disagree.
My feet left the grass.
They didn't come back down.
I don't know how to describe what that felt like without making it smaller. It was the sensation of a rule I had been following without knowing I was following it, suddenly ceasing to apply — and the world opening up in every direction at once, all three hundred and sixty degrees of it, and understanding in a way that had nothing to do with thinking that I could go anywhere in any of them.
I stayed up for two hours. Nana-san and two caretakers hauled me back to earth by my ankles. I did not make it easy for them.
---
"So," Aki says, when I've finished. Her ears are forward, the way they go when something has genuinely caught her attention. "You've been doing all of that."
"Well, more or less," I say.
"Since you were seven."
"Since I was seven."
She thinks about this. Her tail moves.
"Okay," she says. "Then you definitely know how to train me." She cracks her knuckles — both hands, in sequence, which she does when she's decided something. "Physical first. Right? That's what you'd say."
She's not wrong. Her quirk is called Cat, and it does more or less exactly what the name suggests, which in this case is not the limitation it sounds like. Felidae is a large family. The speed she has is a sprinter who never warms up. She climbs with the instincts of something born to vertical surfaces. Her claws extend without her seeming to decide to extend them. She moves quietly enough that she has startled me twice, which I am noting for the record because it almost never happens, and she was extremely pleased with herself both times.
What the training will need to surface — what you can't know until you actually push — is how far inside her own limits she's been operating. Fast, but not as fast as she could be. Strong, but unevenly, the strength concentrated in her legs and diffuse everywhere else. Her spatial awareness is close to uncanny; she can walk through a room once and reproduce it accurately enough to be mildly unsettling.
She has whiskers. Fine ones, barely visible unless the light hits right. I ask her what they help with. She considers this with genuine seriousness and then says: everything, kind of. I write that down because I think she's right.
"Physical first," I confirm. "Your quirk gives you no reach. No projectile, nothing that works at distance. Everything you have requires you to already be on top of whatever you're fighting."
"That's not a problem," she says.
"It's not a problem if your body is ready for it," I say. "If it isn't, it's the problem. So we build the foundation before anything else."
She nods once, decisive, arms crossed, the expression of someone closing a negotiation.
"Mirko's proof of concept," I say. "Same principle as your quirk. Pure physical enhancement, close range, no fallback. She built herself into something that makes speed-based heroes look slow and she will be your blueprint."
Aki looks at me with something I can't immediately name. Then she says: "So you're going to turn me into a weapon."
"A very fast one," I say.
She considers this for a moment with great seriousness.
"Okay," she says. And that is that.
---
I had not accounted for the bite.
This is, in retrospect, an oversight of considerable size.
It was the second day — baseline assessment, working through each ability systematically, trying to get numbers I could actually use. Sprint speed, grip strength, wall-climbing. The bite was next on the list. I couldn't think of a cleaner way to test it than direct application. I offered my arm. She looked at it, then at me, with the expression of someone who had already found the flaw in the logic and was giving me one last chance to find it myself.
"I have enhanced durability," I said. "And fast regeneration. You won't hurt me."
She looked at my arm again.
"I won't hurt you," she repeated back, in a tone I should have paid more attention to.
What a jaguar's bite force does to a human forearm — even one with enhanced durability — is not nothing. The fracture was clean, and the regeneration handled it in a few seconds, bone knitting back with the specific deep ache that means the process is working. Objectively, less than a minute of inconvenience.
What mattered was Aki's face.
She had pulled back the moment she felt it give. Now she was sitting very still in the way she went still when something had genuinely alarmed her — ears flat, eyes too wide, the stillness of someone who has surprised themselves badly.
"I told you," I said, rotating my arm to demonstrate full function. "Look. Completely healed."
She looked at my arm. Then at my face.
"You said I wouldn't hurt you," she said. Very quietly.
"That one's on me," I said. "I underestimated you. I won't do it again."
She held my gaze for a moment, checking. Aki has very little patience for being managed — for someone saying the reassuring thing rather than the true thing. Whatever she found in my face was apparently satisfactory, because her ears came back up.
"Don't do that again," she said.
"I won't," I said.
"Okay." She stood, brushed off her knees with the decisive air of someone closing a topic. "What's next?"
"Climbing speed," I said.
"Finally," she said, and was halfway up the wall before I'd finished writing.
I looked down at my notebook. I wrote: *bite force — jaguar minimum. Do not underestimate again.*
Underneath that: *she was more upset than I was.*
I looked at that for a moment, then left it there.
Nana-san, who had observed all of this from her chair without comment, watched Aki reach the top of a tree and then looked at me. Not concern. The expression of someone revising an estimate upward, quietly, without announcement.
I looked back at the tree. At Aki, already at the top, already looking down to see if I was watching.
I was watching.
---
That was three years ago. The first few days of training my best friend, the kind of beginning I knew even then I would carry for a long time. Now I'm twelve, it's the first day of junior high, and things are looking up.
More freedom, a looser leash, and the quiet sense that something in my life has finally shifted into a higher gear. I turned twelve literally a few days ago, I'm starting 7th grade, and honestly? Things are looking up.
Oh, and I'm getting pocket money starting this month. Pocket money. Two thousand yen a month, just handed to me, mine to do whatever I want with. In my past life I never had a single coin to call my own — my parents bought everything I needed, sure, but there is a fundamental, life-changing difference between being provided for and having money that is actually, personally, indisputably yours. This is mine. I have money. I am a person of means.
Aki thinks I'm being dramatic about this. She can mind her business.
Aki is in 8th grade, currently thirteen and turning fourteen in just a few days, and she's been receiving pocket money since she started junior high last year — a full year's head start on me. Two thousand yen a month, twelve months, twenty-four thousand yen total. Not a single coin spent. All of it sitting in a disciplined little pile, waiting for the smartphone she has her eye on — assuming she gets the green light, that is, and assuming the budget ever actually lands there. It won't be this month. Probably not next month either. Buying something that significant means going through the caretakers first, or straight to the top: Director Tanaka-sensei himself. Knowing Aki, she's probably already drafted the request in triplicate and is now doing the arithmetic on how many more months she needs. A full year of iron self-control from someone who is still technically thirteen, and the finish line keeps moving. I find this funnier than I probably should.
The age gap between us is just how Japan's school system works. The admission cutoff runs April 2nd to April 1st of the following year, so April babies like Aki end up the oldest in their grade while late-March kids like me end up the youngest in ours. She turned thirteen starting 7th grade last year; I'm starting it freshly twelve. One grade apart, nearly two years of age difference. It's fine. I'm not thinking about it.
Grades, at least, are our great equalizer. Neither of us has ever scored below an A — letter grades back in elementary, and now that Aki's in junior high it's a five-point scale, with five being the best. The girl has never seen anything other than a five. I've matched her step for step. We are, as Kenji once put it, insufferably consistent.
We're also both training with UA in mind. Aki is going straight for the hero course — no detours, no games, no clever schemes. She picked a lane and she's staying in it. I, after a lot of deliberate thinking, had landed on a different route: general studies first, then a transfer into the hero course after the sports festival. By taking first place in it.
Was it calculated? Absolutely. I wanted that satisfaction — the specific, personal satisfaction of beating the hero course students before I became one of them. If I was going to walk into Class 1-A, I wanted to walk in having already proven myself in front of the whole school and millions of viewers. Let them know I was always coming.
When I told Aki and Kenji about this plan, their reactions were predictable in the worst possible way. Kenji looked at me like I'd announced I was walking to UA from Hamamatsu — slowly, on purpose, for the experience. Aki was worse. She didn't get loud about it. She just went quiet for a moment, the specific kind of quiet she uses when she's deciding how much patience to extend, and then she said, very evenly, that I was being an idiot. Her words. I have a power that could get me into the hero course directly. I have the grades. I have the potential. I was choosing the long way around for the aesthetic of it.
Which, yes. Correct. That was exactly what I was doing.
But then Aki made the actual argument, the one I hadn't let myself sit with honestly. The sports festival transfer isn't guaranteed. It's conditional —on whether the right people decide to extend the invitation. I had been treating it as a foregone conclusion because I'd assumed my performance would make it one. Aki pointed out, without particular cruelty, that assuming your own exceptionalism is a great way to get blindsided by the parts of a plan that depend on other people's decisions. Kenji added that I was, and I'm quoting directly, "doing the most for no reason."
I held the position for about two days. Then I thought about it without the attachment to the plan itself — just the actual logic, stripped of the aesthetic appeal — and found it less solid than I'd been pretending.
I'm going straight for the hero course. It was the right call. I am fine with this.
---
There's also the matter of clubs. Aoba has a genuinely good spread — track and field, martial arts, archery, music, football, baseball, art, dance. Something for everyone, apparently, though the rule is you pick one and commit. One. A single club for a person with multiple legitimate interests. The school system and I are already in conflict.
The practical choice is martial arts — I'm training for UA, and it fits neatly on paper. Aki made exactly that choice last year, which is the correct and sensible decision, and she has the results to show for it. She entered a junior high tournament two months in and won the whole thing. Clean. No close calls, no narrow decisions — she just walked through the bracket. Which surprised absolutely no one who has ever watched Aki commit to something, but the judges didn't know that yet, and their expressions were worth remembering.
Here's the thing, though: I don't actually need the club for the training. Aki practices those techniques on me. Regularly. Sometimes enthusiastically. And I have the Sharingan, which means every time she runs a combination on me I've already filed it away — the weight distribution, the timing, the particular angle of a sweep before she's finished the follow-through. The dojo gives her an audience and a structured environment. It gives me data I've already copied. Joining the martial arts club would be redundant at best and slightly condescending at worst.
So I'm joining the music club instead, and I'm at peace with this.
I like music. I've always liked music. In my past life I uploaded original tracks online — about ten of them over roughly two months, mostly compositions I'd been sitting on for a while. My total view count across all of them sat at around twenty-five million, which is by any reasonable measure a genuinely good number for someone operating without any kind of audience infrastructure. One track did most of the heavy lifting — someone used it in a short-form edit, that edit went viral, and suddenly it was everywhere. Twenty million views, strangers using it in their own clips, the whole cycle. I won't take credit for the edit itself. But someone had to choose that track out of everything else on the internet, and they chose mine. That part I'll keep.
The music club was decided the moment I saw it on the list. There wasn't really a deliberation.
---
For the past nearly three years, Aki and I have been training without much interruption. And it shows, in ways that have started making people visibly react.
We're not just fit, or athletic, or whatever polite word PE teachers use when they don't want to say something strange is going on. We are properly superhuman. That's not ego — it's just the accurate description. Our strength is in a category that has no business existing on twelve and thirteen-year-old bodies. We were already stronger than most adults when we started training at nine, which was alarming enough at the time. Three years of consistent, deliberate work on top of that baseline has produced something that doesn't really have a reference point in normal human experience. Gym assessments have become quietly awkward events. The teachers record the numbers and don't say much.
Visually it's obvious. Aki has the kind of defined muscle that makes people do a double-take when she walks past. I'm not far behind, and I'm nearly two years younger. We're both early bloomers — puberty hitting well ahead of schedule — and the training compounds everything. My voice hasn't dropped yet, which is the one indignity I'm still patiently waiting out, but in every other respect we're operating years ahead of where we should be.
Strength-wise, we're roughly equal, which is its own kind of absurd given the age gap. I am genuinely confident that if you put the two of us in a room with a hundred average people — adults included — we would walk out and they wouldn't. And that's without chakra. Without a single technique. Just baseline physicality built over three years of work that didn't stop for much of anything.
The chakra side of things is where it gets more interesting.
The major focus over these past few years has been nature transformation — specifically, combination releases. The theory is straightforward enough: two or more chakra natures, combined at the right ratio with the right control, produce something qualitatively different from either source element. The practice is extraordinarily difficult and most people never manage even one combination in a lifetime.
One thing became clear early on: you can fake it. A sufficiently skilled single-element user can imitate certain properties of a combined release — someone with strong water affinity can freeze things, someone with strong wind affinity can produce cutting vibrations that resemble aspects of my sonic release. The imitation is real. It works. But the moment I had an actual combination solid in my hands I understood immediately that the imitation isn't even in the same category. A real combination release doesn't just do more of the same thing. It becomes something that neither source element could ever produce alone, no matter how much raw power you threw at it. The difference is qualitative, not quantitative. That distinction matters.
The first combination I cracked was sonic release — wind and lightning pushed together at the right angle until what emerged was neither. Something that travels in waves, arrives before the ears have fully decided what they've heard. I almost called it sound release, which in retrospect would have been embarrassingly on the nose. Sonic release. Much better.
After that, the list grew. Each one had its own character, its own internal logic, its own moment of suddenly making sense.
Ice release — water and wind — was the one I understood least until I understood it completely. I'd been freezing water with chakra for months before and thought I was being somewhat clever about it. I wasn't. Freezing water is a trick any stubborn person can stumble into with enough practice. Ice release is structurally different: the cold it produces has presence to it, weight, like the temperature isn't merely low but intentional. When the real combination held for the first time I knew instantly that what I'd been doing before wasn't even adjacent.
Storm release — water and lightning — came together faster, which surprised me. The two natures resist each other less than expected. What comes out feels almost restless, like it's looking for somewhere to go.
Scorch release — fire and wind — took longer. Fire resists redirection. It wants to burn on its own terms, and combining it with wind without just producing a more energetic fire required a stubbornness I had to develop specifically for the problem. What scorch release actually does is drier than burning — it's more absolute.
Explosion release — fire and earth — went wrong several times before it went right. The combination is inherently unstable, which is, I suppose, the point. Lava release — earth and fire — is almost the inverse: patient and slow in a way that makes it feel inevitable rather than dangerous. It is also dangerous. These two things are not mutually exclusive.
Magnet release — wind and earth — was the last of them before I turned my attention to wood release, and the most conceptually interesting. Pulling two natures that far apart and finding where they overlap required a different kind of thinking than the others. I sat with the problem for three weeks before I touched it, then cracked it in an afternoon. Whether that's a lesson about patience or a lesson about not overthinking, I still haven't decided. Probably both.
Wood release is in an entirely different category from all of them, and its story is different.
It isn't a two-nature combination. It's earth, water, and yang release working in concert, and yang release alone is a discipline most people never meaningfully develop. I had the theory of it early. I could combine water and earth. I had yang release in sufficient depth. The components were there. I began attempting it seriously around age seven and kept attempting it, with various degrees of failure, for years. The earth would dominate and I'd just move dirt. The water would overwhelm and the whole structure would collapse in on itself. Yang release is the load-bearing element of the entire combination and getting it calibrated correctly — not too prominent, not buried — was a years-long problem.
The Rinnegan helped significantly, not as a power source but as a perception tool. It widened the feedback loop, let me feel what the chakra was actually doing at a granular level rather than inferring from the outside. Even with that advantage the combination kept failing. The three components would approach coherence and then fall apart just before it held.
And then I reached the threshold of nature energy sensing.
I can feel it now — the ambient energy that saturates the natural world, present in everything, moving through everything. I can't absorb it properly yet, can't actively draw it in the way a true sage can, but I can sense it. I can feel where it is and what it's doing. And something about that perception, about being able to feel the living quality in natural energy, changed what was missing from the wood release combination. The yang release component finally settled into the right depth. The three natures held.
I grew a tree. Knee height, barely, but alive — genuinely alive in a way I could feel through the technique, not just plant matter shaped by chakra into the right form. I stood there staring at it for a long moment and didn't say anything to anyone.
Then I went back to the mountain and the forest I'd destroyed three years prior and spent the better part of a day replanting all of it. The least I could do, really. It seemed like the right note to end on.
---------------------------------
Author's note:
this one is kind of a filler/time skip chapter.
from the next chapter UA stuff will start.
And originally this was suppose to be two different chapters.