The alarm went off at six and Riku let it scream for a solid thirty seconds before he rolled over and slapped it quiet.
His room smelled like sleep and the faint sweetness that always clung to his skin when his control slipped overnight. Warm sheets. He'd been dreaming about something. Couldn't remember what.
He sat up and the world took a second to catch up with him. Tired. He was always tired lately. The feeding thing was getting worse the older he got, like a battery draining faster the more power it tried to hold. Forty-eight hours since his last real contact with another person and his body was already starting to bitch about it.
He scratched the back of his neck, swung his legs off the bed. The floor was cold.
The apartment was small. One bedroom, a kitchenette that barely fit a rice cooker and a hot plate, a bathroom where you could wash your hands while sitting on the toilet if you were flexible enough. He'd been living alone since he was fourteen, which sounded worse than it was. The rent was cheap and the landlord didn't ask questions. Nobody noticed when the girl from 3B started finding excuses to knock on his door at weird hours. He'd had to start suppressing harder around the building after that.
Riku pulled on a shirt and shuffled to the bathroom. The mirror showed him what it always did. Dark hair that needed cutting, sticking up at angles that would've looked stupid on anyone else. Eyes still half-shut with sleep, amber-gold when the light hit them right. The face was good. He could admit that without it being ego. The quirk did something to his bone structure, his skin, the proportions of his features. Incubus-type.
He brushed his teeth and thought about the entrance exam.
Three weeks. Three weeks until UA opened its doors and he walked through them. He'd been thinking about it for years, obviously. Hard not to when you'd read the manga in your previous life and you knew exactly what was waiting on the other side of those gates. Shigaraki. All For One sitting in his cell like a spider, with the Nomu as his opening move.
Later. All of that was later. Right now it was just the exam, and Riku was going to crush it.
He spat, rinsed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
The cat was waiting for him in the hallway.
Orange tabby, belonged to the old woman in 2A. It had started following him around three months ago when his Allure Aura spiked during a bad week. Animals weren't supposed to be affected. The quirk documentation said it targeted human pheromone receptors. The documentation was wrong, or this cat was built different, because the thing rubbed against his ankles like he owed it money.
"I don't have food for you," Riku told it.
The cat purred louder.
He stepped over it and headed downstairs. The morning air hit his face and he felt the aura settle into its usual range. About five meters in every direction, a constant low hum of notice me that he couldn't fully turn off without concentrating. When he was rested and focused he could pull it down to almost nothing. When he was tired or emotional it leaked like a cracked pipe. Right now, running on fumes with no intimate contact in two days, it was leaking.
The walk to the convenience store was ten minutes. He knew the route by heart. The laundromat that smelled like bleach, then the little park where he'd been doing his morning training runs. Park was empty at this hour.
He pushed through the store door. The electronic chime played its three-note greeting.
The cashier was new. College age, maybe twenty, hair pulled back in a ponytail that she kept adjusting. She looked up when he walked in and then looked up again, harder, like she'd caught something in her peripheral vision that demanded a second take.
Riku grabbed a basket and headed for the rice balls.
He could feel it happening. His aura brushing against her from across the store, the pheromones doing their quiet stupid thing. She wouldn't know why she was suddenly hyperaware of the tall kid in the hoodie picking through the onigiri. She'd just feel warmer. A little flushed. Her eyes would keep drifting back to him and she'd tell herself it was because she was watching for shoplifters.
He picked two salmon, one tuna mayo, a bottle of green tea. Grabbed a protein bar from the rack because his body was burning through calories faster than it should. The feeding thing again. When his reserves ran low, his metabolism cranked up like it was trying to squeeze energy from anywhere it could find it.
At the register, the cashier's face was pink.
"Good morning," she said. She said it too brightly and then caught herself, the pink going redder.
"Morning."
He set his stuff on the counter. She scanned each item and her hand shook on the last one, barely visible. She probably thought she'd had too much coffee.
"That'll be, um." She looked at the register. Looked at him. Looked at the register again. "Six hundred and forty yen."
He paid in coins and she counted them twice because she kept losing track. When their fingers touched during the change handoff she inhaled sharply through her nose and pulled her hand back.
"Have a good day," she managed.
"You too."
He left. The door chimed behind him.
That was the part nobody told you about incubus-type quirks. Forget the combat applications and the stat boosts. The real daily experience was making cashiers forget how to count and making the girl at the ramen shop give you extra chashu without knowing why. The old man at the bookstore stared at him for too long sometimes. Riku tried not to think about that one.
Riku ate one of the rice balls on the walk home. The salmon was good. Not great. He ate the second one and thought about what his body actually needed and how rice balls weren't it.
Two days without real contact. He could stretch it another day, maybe two, before it started affecting his training. His reflexes would dull first. Then his reaction time. Then his muscles would stop recovering properly and everything would turn to shit. The quirk gave a lot but it always collected.
He'd figure it out. He usually did, anyway.
Back at the apartment, the cat was still in the hallway. He stepped over it again and locked his door. Dropped the bag on the counter, cracked the green tea, flopped on the couch.
The TV was a fifteen-inch piece of garbage that took three tries to turn on. He hit the power button and the screen flickered to life with a news broadcast already in progress.
"...the villain was apprehended at approximately 5:47 this morning after a brief confrontation with pro heroes. Kamui Woods and Mount Lady were both on scene, with Mount Lady delivering the final blow."
The footage cut to shaky cell phone video. A street somewhere in Tatooin Station. A giant villain, maybe two stories tall, thrashing between buildings. Kamui Woods swinging through the frame, wooden tendrils lashing out. And then a shadow falling over everything as Mount Lady went full size, sixty-eight feet of blonde hair and purple bodysuit, and brought her heel down on the villain's head like she was stepping on a bug.
Canyon Cannon.
The crowd in the video went nuts. Phones out, screaming, pushing for a better angle. The camera swung wildly and caught Mount Lady shrinking back down to normal, posing for the crowd, eating up the attention like it was breakfast.
Riku watched.
He knew her. Knew about her, anyway. Yu Takeyama. Twenty-two. Pro hero debut less than a year ago. Ranked in the low hundreds and climbing fast because the public loved a pretty face and she knew exactly how to sell one. Vain and fame-hungry, but under all of it, genuinely powerful. Also genuinely insecure about whether the power was the thing people noticed, but he figured she'd never cop to that.
She wasn't on his radar yet. Not really. The timeline was clear in his head: meet her at the debut fight, then again after. Let the aura do its initial work. Be the one guy in the crowd who didn't trip over himself to get a selfie.
If the timeline held. Timelines were shit, though. Rough guidelines at best. He existed and that changed things. He'd been changing things since the day he was born into a body that shouldn't have had his memories inside it.
The newscast moved on. A segment about quirk registration policy. A puff piece about a new hero agency opening in Hosu. Weather. He stopped watching and stared at the ceiling.
Three weeks.
He ran through it again. The entrance exam was a point-based practical. Faux villains with different values, ten minutes, arena setting. The zero-pointer was a trap designed to test self-sacrifice, but Riku wasn't interested in that kind of test. He'd score high through efficiency and speed, then get placed in 1-A where all the main cast would be. Where Aizawa would teach. Where Midnight would be down the hall.
Midnight. Nemuri Kayama. The R-Rated Hero.
He'd thought about her before. It would've been hard not to. She had a pheromone-type quirk, same general category as his. Somnambulist, the sleep-inducing aroma she could pump out at will. When two pheromone-types got close to each other, their quirks reacted. Resonated. Tangled up in each other's frequencies like radio stations bleeding together.
He wanted to see what happened when their quirks collided.
But first, Mount Lady. First the debut.
He finished his green tea and set the empty bottle on the floor. The protein bar was still in the bag. He'd eat it later. Right now his body wanted something it couldn't get from a convenience store and no amount of protein was going to fill that gap.
Riku closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the couch cushion.
Fifteen years in this body. Fifteen years of knowing what was coming. He'd learned to control a quirk that made people want him before he even understood what wanting meant. Trained his body for combat while other kids worried about test scores, mapping out this world from the inside, year by year, matching what he remembered against what turned out to be actually true. The details were always a little wrong.
The manga was a rough sketch. Good enough to plan around, not good enough to trust.
He opened his eyes. Same ceiling. Same water stain in the corner shaped like a boot.
His plan was simple. Get into UA and get strong enough to build something worth protecting. Women who chose him freely, not because the quirk pushed them there, but because he was worth choosing. And when the world started falling apart, because it was going to fall apart, he'd be ready. He'd read the final arc. He knew how bad things got.
Years away. All the bad stuff was years away and he had time to get ready for it. Right now he was a fifteen-year-old kid in a cheap apartment with a quirk that made cats follow him and cashiers blush, and in three weeks he was walking through the gates of UA.
The TV droned on. Something about a traffic jam near Musutafu station. He should get up. Do his morning run. Practice his close-range drills in the park before the families showed up. Get ahead of the day instead of lying on a couch thinking about how hungry he was.
Riku sat up.
"Okay," he said to the empty apartment.
He laced up his running shoes and grabbed his keys. The cat in the hallway followed him all the way to the stairs before giving up and sitting down to lick its paw.
The sun was already hot on the back of his neck. Three weeks.
Riku jogged down the steps and broke into a run.