“All right, we’re here.”
“I-it’s o-over...! It’s over...!!”
Training, Day 134.
After four months of running, after spending every single day doing nothing but running, Midoriya had finally heard the word “here” from Hakuji’s mouth.
“I made it...!”
On the lonely dirt road with no one around, Midoriya should have collapsed from his legs giving out, but the legs he had forged through four months of relentless running refused to allow it.
“But... where are we?”
After catching his breath a little, Midoriya finally looked around.
Rice fields stretched out on both sides, and the dirt road they had finally reached led to the entrance of a dark-looking mountain.
He couldn’t understand how far they had run to end up from the middle of the city to the middle of nowhere like this.
“Oh, this is my house.”
“Hakuji-kun’s house?”
“More precisely, the shrine behind this mountain is my family home.”
“Ah...!”
Midoriya suddenly remembered that there was a fairly famous shrine in this area.
He had no idea it was Hakuji’s family home, though.
“Come to think of it, the Haku in Hakuji means komainu, right?”
“If you put it that way, I guess so.”
Hakuji nodded and stopped right before the start of the mountain slope, turning to look at Midoriya.
“Hey, Izuku.”
“Huh?”
“Call your parents right now and tell them you’re staying at our house tonight and over the weekend.”
“Eh?”
“Look at the time. Isn’t it late?”
“Ah! W-wait, it’s already 9 o’clock!? Hold on, I’ve got nineteen missed calls from Mom!!”
At Hakuji’s words, Midoriya realized that while he had been running, his mother had called him nineteen times and sent dozens of messages. He hurriedly called her back.
[...! ...!! ......!!!]
“S-sorry, Mom! I’m sorry! I forgot to contact you!! ...Yeah, yeah... taxi fare? No, today my friend said I could stay over... No, I mean it, he really is my friend! Yeah, okay...”
A thunderous, tearful voice came through the phone, and Midoriya broke into a cold sweat as he barely managed to calm his parents down.
After a while, Midoriya started up the mountain path behind Hakuji.
“Um...”
“What are you doing? Come on up.”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
At some point, the path itself disappeared and they were truly climbing the mountain, and Midoriya’s face darkened.
Still, he couldn’t exactly choose to sleep rough in the middle of the mountain, so he grabbed his still-shaking legs and started climbing.
“Huff... huff... huup...”
“What... is this...”
As Midoriya climbed, he felt something strange.
He couldn’t breathe properly.
It wasn’t because he had run out of stamina.
There was genuinely less oxygen.
It felt as if he weren’t breathing through his nose, but through a thin straw underwater.
He was already completely exhausted and needed more oxygen, but the air was absurdly thin, and Midoriya was truly suffering.
“Oh, by the way, this mountain has a special magnetic field, so the air in the area is pretty thin.”
“Y-you... should have... h-huup! T-told me...! in advance...!”
Breathing with great difficulty, Midoriya was now climbing almost on all fours.
“T-this is insane...! How do people live here...!”
Only then did Midoriya realize there was something strange about Hakuji’s home being absurdly far from school and, on top of that, in a bizarre place with thin air.
“If his family home is here... then he’s been living on this thin-air mountain from birth, and running that whole distance to school every day!?”
So that’s why he’s so strong!!
The thought flashed through Midoriya’s increasingly foggy mind.
After another thirty minutes or so of climbing...
“I’m going to die... I’m really going to die...”
Midoriya had reached the point where oxygen deprivation made his thoughts spill straight out of his mouth, and his vision kept spinning.
In the end.
“...Ah... katsudon... I want to eat-”
He collapsed face-first onto the mountain path, making a truly pathetic sound.
“Get some sleep while you can. It’ll be your last rest.”
At the same time, just before losing consciousness, Midoriya clearly heard Hakuji speaking to him with a smile.
“Ugh...”
Bubbling...
“Uuuu...”
What woke the utterly exhausted Midoriya from his deep sleep was the sound of something boiling and a very savory smell.
“Hakuji-kun...?”
“Oh, you’re awake.”
Midoriya, barely roused from sleep, looked around with still-foggy eyes.
“...What is this, did I come to the Edo period?”
First there was a wooden building, then a hearth in the middle like something out of a period drama, with a pot hanging over it and boiling away.
And finally, Hakuji was wearing a pure white training robe instead of his school uniform.
“It’s an old shack, but make yourself at home.”
Hakuji said this as he ladled out the porridge that had just been bubbling hot and handed it to Midoriya.
“No, it’s not old, it’s just from a different era, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”
Midoriya managed to swallow the retort that had risen to his throat along with the porridge.
“I-it’s delicious!”
“Is it? I was worried, since it’s been a while since I cooked porridge for someone else.”
“......”
Watching Hakuji, who somehow looked oddly familiar in the kitchen, Midoriya thought he was a kinder person than he had expected. Except during training, of course.
“Eat up. Summer break starts next week anyway, and now that the foundation of your basics is finally starting to show, there’s no time to rest.”
“Eh.”
Drip, drip, drip.
And then Midoriya realized it.
He had just stepped into an Oni’s house of his own free will.
Later on,
the future Midoriya thought back on it.
He should never have listened to Hakuji.
He never imagined he’d be dragged to a mountain that insane.
But the Midoriya of the present didn’t know.
The mountain where Hakuji lived, that place was...
The mountain where legends said tengu lived,
and one of the worst rugged areas in all of Japan.
[Sagiri Mountain]
Sagiri Mountain.
“H-help meeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Kyaaaahhh!!!!
It didn’t take long for Midoriya’s scream to echo through the mountain the next day.
tmi
1. Sagiri Mountain: The mountain where the former Water Hashira Urokodaki lives, and a place with an absurdly low oxygen level. It’s also the first place Tanjiro learned Water Breathing.
2. Hakuji is terrible with machines. He can’t really use a smartphone properly, so he only uses it as a phone. For the record, Koyuki is also extremely bad with machines.
They’re from the Edo period, after all.
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