The second semester at Somei Middle School could be summed up in one phrase: an infinite power loop between spear and shield.
"Yujin!! Do not move through the hallway by absurdly compressing your stride! That is a blatant violation of the school walking-speed regulations!!"
"It is merely an inertia-optimized walking technique, Class Rep. My noble intention is to save thirty percent of my energy and reinvest it into my concentration for the next class."
"Do not spout sophistryyyyy—!!"
From the morning commute until the moment homeroom ended, Iida’s roars rang through the classroom and hallways as he sliced the air with rigid, right-angled knife hands.
Two shirt buttons undone, a black inverted-cross piercing in my earlobe, making a ballpoint pen float and spin with subtle gravity during class, even sliding up to the front of the room in a shortened step.
A rule-breaker creatively setting new school-rule violations every day, and an by-the-book class rep whose blood pressure broke two hundred trying to point out every last one of them—their fierce battle never ended.
At first, the other students had watched with shock and curiosity, swallowing nervously. But once the second week rolled around, they had attained complete enlightenment.
"Iida, are you at it again?"
"The bell for second period is about to ring. Why don’t you sit down already?"
Even when Iida clutched the back of his neck and screamed with his face turning red and blue, the boys just yawned wide and opened their textbooks.
"Those two really never get tired, do they...?"
"But isn’t the most irritating part that Yujin takes first place in the whole school on mock exams, even while getting under the class rep’s skin every single day?"
"When he quietly pushes his glasses up, he’s totally a cold, handsome guy. Why does he turn into that the moment he opens his mouth? What a complete waste of a face."
The girls clicked their tongues with their chins propped in their hands, yet remained busy glancing my way as I casually smiled and flicked the black inverted cross in my earlobe between my pomaded black hair.
By now, in Class 1 of Somei Middle School’s second year, the back-and-forth between Iida’s screams and my glib sophistry had become as natural and expected as the chime announcing morning self-study: the perfect background music of everyday life.
Then, one afternoon as the setting sun dyed the sky red, I had just left through the school gates and was walking along the grand granite pavement.
"Yujin—!!"
Along with regular footsteps that sounded capable of smashing the asphalt, a huge shadow bore down on me from behind. I knew that razor-sharp stride without even turning around. Iida marched over, gripping his bag tightly, and came to an abrupt stop in front of me.
"Class Rep, are you still not done supervising dismissal?"
"Do not brush this off as a joke! I am seriously advising you as Somei’s class representative, and as someone who aspires to become a Hero!"
Through his glasses, Iida radiated a sincerity as fiery as flame and chopped his hand down at a right angle.
"U.A.’s Hero Course is a breeding ground for heroes who protect peace and order! With such delinquent behavior—breaking school rules every day and acting so frivolously—you must never enroll at U.A., nor become a true Hero! What on earth are you thinking, aspiring to be a Hero?!"
Not even amid that flood of passionate preaching did I bat an eye. With my bag slung over one shoulder, I tapped the black inverted cross on my earlobe and answered flippantly through my rimless glasses.
"Ah, calm down, Class Rep. I have no intention whatsoever of doing anything as grand as Hero work. I’m only going there to get a certification—in other words, a license."
"...What?!"
Iida’s face was painted with disbelief. It was a shameless declaration that I sought the license itself alone, without any sense of duty or justice. As though he could not possibly comprehend what calculations were running inside that bizarre brain of mine, he pushed up his glasses with an expression that said he was nearly dying of curiosity and shouted,
"What... what could you possibly want that license for badly enough to enter the grueling U.A.?!"
I snorted at the question, tangled with pure curiosity and anger.
With both hands shoved deep into my pockets, I shrugged as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"So I can fold space when I commute later in life. Using shortened steps without a license is illegal, but if I have a Pro license, I can legally warp space-time and get home from work in 0.1 seconds."
"...Huh?"
A second of silence.
As if the processor in Iida’s brain had completely shut down, his eyes went blank. Then veins stood out as he screamed at the top of his lungs.
"B-but aren’t you already doing that as casually as eating a meal?!"
"Huh?"
I uttered a sound of realization as I pushed up the frame on the bridge of my nose with my index finger.
"Now that you mention it, you’re right."
The moment I finished speaking, I pulled my thumb from my pocket and lightly flicked it through the air.
• Activating the cooling loop of the black inverted-cross device on my earlobe.
• Identifying the coordinate system of the train-station exit 300 meters ahead and compressing local space.
Crush—
A bluish white gleam flashed through my pupils for an instant, and the space where I stood crumpled like a sheet of paper.
"Then I’ll head home first, Class Rep."
Crush—!
Leaving only a faint afterimage in the air, the school’s top-ranked troublemaker vanished in the blink of an eye.
"Y-Yujiiiin—!! Stop right theeeere—!!"
Under Tokyo’s red sunset, Iida’s anguished roar echoed at length as he slashed his right-angled hands through the air atop the empty pavement.
==
"Just... what kind of brain structure does that guy have?"
Iida stared at the now-empty pavement lit by the red sunset, one hand on the back of his neck.
His blood pressure had surged to the top of his head, making his temples throb. Breaking school rules, delinquent conduct, and on top of that, aspiring to attend U.A. for nothing more than legal shortened-step commuting—it was an insane notion. To someone who valued common sense and discipline as dearly as life itself, every move Yujin made was utterly uncomputable chaos.
"Haa... Tomorrow morning, I will absolutely confiscate that piercing first."
He adjusted his grip on his bag strap, suppressing his anger, and started toward the crosswalk. That was when it happened.
Screeech—!!
A piercing scraping shriek and a dull horn blast shook the intersection.
The instant he looked up, his eyes flew wide in horror.
In the middle of a crosswalk where the light had changed stood a small child, frozen after stopping to pick up a ball that had rolled away. And racing straight toward the child, out of control at terrifying speed, was a massive eight-ton cargo truck whose brakes had failed.
"N-no...!!"
Iida was too far away. At least fifty meters separated them.
Chzzzt—!
Reflexively, Iida opened the mufflers on his calves and ignited his [Engine] Quirk to its limit.
Boom—!!
He kicked off the asphalt and began to sprint, but before his engines could even reach full boost, the truck’s bumper had already closed to within mere dozens of centimeters of the child.
An absolute gulf of space and time he physically could not cross.
‘Please... stop, please...!!’
He bit his lip until it bled and reached out, but it was too late. Unable to bear witnessing the horrific, brutal tragedy that would unfold in the next instant, Iida squeezed his eyes shut.
But.
One second, then two passed, yet he heard neither the sound of bones being crushed nor screams or cries.
An eerily perfect silence.
‘...Huh?’
Slowly raising his trembling eyelids, Iida forgot even how to breathe at the sight before him.
The massive eight-ton truck hovered roughly a meter above the ground, utterly stripped of gravity and suspended in midair.
Even the inertia of its spinning wheels had been perfectly erased. The enormous hunk of metal hung motionless in the sky as if nailed there.
And beneath the truck’s vast shadow.
A black-haired boy with his hair slicked back stood there with one hand buried deep in his pocket, though Iida had no idea when he had appeared.
Frigid blue cold poured from the black inverted-cross piercing in his left earlobe, while with the lightest twitch of a single index finger, he held the mass of an eight-ton truck aloft as easily as a feather.
"...Y-Yujin?!"
While Iida murmured in a daze, the boy looked down at the terrified child sitting on the ground and pushed up his glasses at the bridge of his nose.
Then he lightly placed his index finger against his lips and gave a playful yet languid smile.
"Shh. It’s a secret, kid. Using a Quirk without a license is a one-way trip to the police station."
Whoosh.
With a light downward motion of his finger, the huge truck floating in the air landed softly as a feather on the asphalt, without leaving so much as a scratch.
Crush—
At the instant bluish-white light passed through his pupils, Yujin winked at the child and disappeared without a trace, as though sucked into a rift in space-time.
In the middle of the crosswalk, bathed in red sunset.
Iida Tenya could only stand frozen in place, staring blankly at the cold lingering afterimage left behind by the troublesome transfer student who had just ruled over space itself and vanished.
==
For some reason, my steps felt especially light as I passed through the granite school gates and walked down the hallway.
I had worked my frontal-lobe calculations a little hard yesterday, lifting that eight-ton truck into the air, but thanks to the black inverted-cross cooling device in my left earlobe, not even residual heat remained in my brainstem. I was in perfect condition.
With the Mandarin collar thrown open coolly, two buttons undone on my uniform shirt, and both hands thrust into my slacks pockets in a cocky pose, I opened the door to Class 1 of the second year.
Rattle—
The instant the door opened, I reflexively prepared to cover my ears.
It was the time when the robotic class rep, who every morning like clockwork would slash the air with his rigid knife hand in front of the teacher’s desk or classroom entrance and scream, "That attire is utterly wicked!" and "Do not insult Somei’s school rules!" should have let out his roar.
And yet.
‘...Huh?’
The classroom was strangely quiet.
At the dead center of the front row sat a huge back, its owner still holding himself upright at an impeccably straight, ruler-measured angle.
Iida remained firmly seated, neither springing to his feet nor windmilling his arms at right angles.
I strolled over, dropped into the seat directly behind him, and crossed my legs.
Deliberately making sure he could hear, I flicked the black inverted cross hanging from my earlobe with my fingertips and pushed my rimless glasses up with my index finger.
"Good morning, Class Rep. I’m disappointed—I can’t hear that resounding engine roar coming from your lungs today."
I casually poked at him, but the response from the seat in front of me was very different from usual.
Slowly—
When Iida turned his head, his face wore an utterly indescribable, bizarre expression.
Thick veins bulged and trembled across his forehead and temples, as if his blood pressure was about to explode at any second, but his tightly sealed lips quivered as he forcibly held his words back.
Each time his sharp eyes behind those square glasses swept over my unbuttoned shirt, my earlobe piercing, and the fingers stuffed into my pockets, the tendons on the back of his hands protruded.
It was plain to see that blood had rushed to his head and roughly twelve school-rule violations he wanted to point out were spinning through his mind—yet he was desperately grinding his molars and enduring it.
"..."
"...What is it? Why are you looking so scary?"
At my joking question, Iida merely breathed heavily through flared nostrils and stared straight at me with bloodshot eyes rather than answering.
‘Did watching me lift that truck and run away yesterday cause some fatal bug in his brain circuitry?’
Normally, this human blast furnace should have been hopping mad and running wild. Instead, he was only swallowing his rage with a blazing red face. At that bizarre silence, I lightly fiddled with the frame of my glasses and swallowed my puzzlement.
Iida drew a long, strained breath, then finally parted his trembling lips. Rather than his usual booming shout, his voice was low and grave.
"...I saw it yesterday."
"Saw what?"
"What happened at the crosswalk."
In his shining eyes behind his glasses, indescribable anguish and seriousness were tangled together. Iida clenched both fists tightly atop his knees and continued.
"Until now, I blindly believed that school rules, discipline, and legal formalities were the absolute qualifications of a proper Hero. That is why I could never acknowledge someone like you, who breaks school rules as casually as eating and speaks so lightly of U.A."
"You did. You roared about it enough to give me calluses on my ears."
"But... yesterday, seeing you reach out without hesitation, stop that massive truck, and save the child, I realized that my rigid perspective was not wholly correct. Sometimes, pure practice and action born of the desire to save people are far nobler and more important than formal school rules... I learned that from what you did yesterday, Yujin."
It was a solemn confession worthy of a shonen manga protagonist who had acknowledged a painful defeat to his lifelong rival and gained a revelation of the soul.
But as I listened to that lofty, impassioned speech with my chin propped on my hand, rather than stirring my heart, it made my spine curl so hard my frontal-lobe calculation circuits nearly froze.
‘...Has this guy lost his mind first thing in the morning?’
Swallowing my shock, I lightly pushed my rimless glasses up the bridge of my nose with my index finger. Then I let my characteristic brazen, sly smile creep across my lips.
"That was a moving confession, Class Rep. But what should we do? I didn’t save that kid yesterday out of any noble sense of duty. I only lifted the truck’s mass because if it hit the kid, they’d close the road and delay my commute home by fifteen minutes."
"...What?"
"Time is money, you know? I just cleared it away to prevent traffic congestion so I could get home even 0.1 seconds faster and play games. But you’re dressing it up as some grand heroic spirit, and now all my brain cells are so embarrassed they don’t know where to hide."
As I kept teasing him, flicking the black inverted cross in my earlobe, Iida’s face—which had been soaked in emotion—stiffened in real time.
Shock, betrayal, and then pure, one-hundred-percent anger bursting free after crossing the critical threshold.
"Y-you...!! You rotten little braaat—!!"
Bang—!!
Iida sprang up like a coiled spring, slammed his desk hard enough to shatter it, and slashed his right-angled hand as though he meant to pierce the classroom ceiling.
"Give back my heartfelt emotion and reflection at onceee—!! As expected, you are a disgrace not only to U.A., but to Somei itself!! First, button up that arrogantly undone shirt immediately!! Second, I will confiscate that wicked inverted-cross piercing from your earlobe and send it straight to the faculty officeee—!!"
"Ah, now this is the real Class Rep. He’s at his best with veins popping and his voice booming."
As I picked at my ear and snickered, the once-peaceful classroom returned in an instant to Iida’s screaming and the familiar morning pandemonium, as though nothing had ever happened.
Hahahahahahahahahhahahhshshah