Friday came slow.
Five days of degrading stats, sluggish mornings, training sessions that felt like dragging a sack of wet concrete through mud. Riku's body had settled into a low-grade misery that wasn't dramatic enough to call suffering but was too persistent to ignore. Everything took a little more effort. Getting out of bed, holding his aura down. The math homework he still hadn't finished was starting to feel like someone else's problem.
But Friday came, and he got dressed, and he took the train to Tatooin Station.
The community event had turned the district's main shopping street into a pedestrian zone. Temporary stages at both ends, food stalls running down the middle, hero agency booths with merch and pamphlets and sign-up sheets for quirk counseling. Something local governments organized twice a year to make people feel safe and connected to the heroes protecting them. A PR exercise with cotton candy.
The crowd was thick by the time Riku arrived. Families with little kids wearing All Might masks, old couples on folding chairs eating yakitori. Normal people having a normal day in a world where a guy with tree arms was considered a celebrity.
Riku found a spot near the edge of the crowd, close enough to see the main stage but far enough that the press of bodies wouldn't make his aura a problem. Even pulled tight, the pheromones reached further when he was packed in with people. He didn't want some random mom suddenly unable to remember why she'd come here.
He bought a crepe from a stall and ate it standing up. Strawberry and cream. It was fine.
The MC on stage was running through the hero lineup for the event. A couple of sidekicks from local agencies did demonstration rounds. A guy with a sonic quirk shattered a stack of concrete blocks and the kids in the front row screamed. A woman whose hair was literal fire shaped it into animal forms while a sponsor's jingle played over the speakers. The crowd clapped at the right moments.
Riku waited.
He knew when she'd arrive because the crowd's energy shifted before the MC even said her name. Phones came out. People stood up from their chairs. The teenagers near the Kamui cutout abandoned it and pushed toward the stage. A murmur ran through the whole street, a sound that meant the crowd had recognized someone before the announcement caught up.
"And now, fresh off her incredible debut last week, please welcome the newest addition to the pro hero ranks, the woman who brought a whole new meaning to making a big impression..."
Mount Lady walked onto the stage and the crowd lost its mind.
She was tall even at normal size. Maybe five-eight, five-nine. Blonde hair down to her waist, catching the afternoon sun so it looked like she'd planned the lighting. Purple and tan hero costume that was technically functional and practically a magazine cover. She walked to center stage like she owned the building and the building knew it. Waving, blowing a kiss to someone in the front row, soaking it up.
Riku watched from twenty meters back and finished his crepe.
She did a Q&A. The questions were soft, pre-screened, stuff a publicist would approve. "What inspired you to become a hero?" "How does it feel to be so tall?" She answered them with practiced charm, working the mic like someone who'd studied talk show hosts and taken notes. Got the laughs in the right places. Every answer pointed back to her, which was calculated but not fake. She really was that into herself. It just happened to play well on camera.
He could see her face from here. The smile was real when the crowd reacted well and automatic when they didn't. She scanned the audience while she talked, not looking for threats, looking for cameras. Counting phones pointed in her direction. The numbers mattered to her. You could see it in how her posture shifted when a cluster of phones went up versus when they went down.
Somebody asked her to go big and she laughed, gestured at the buildings on either side of the street. "I'd love to, but I don't think the city wants me redecorating." The crowd laughed. She preened.
After the Q&A she came down off the stage for the meet-and-greet.
The line formed instantly. Fifty, sixty, seventy people deep within a minute. She worked it fast and professional. Selfie, smile, next. Selfie, smile, next. A little girl in an All Might shirt asked for an autograph and Mount Lady crouched down to sign it at eye level, which was a nice touch and also put her face right next to the kid's phone for the mom's photo. Two birds.
Riku didn't get in line.
He stayed where he was, leaning against a shuttered storefront about fifteen meters from the meet-and-greet area. Arms crossed, watching. His aura was leaking a little, the exhaustion from the last week making his control sloppy. Five meters of passive range, maybe six right now. She wasn't close enough for it to reach her.
She moved through the line. He watched her switch from selfie-smile to genuine-smile when someone said something actually funny, then touch her hair after every third photo. A tic she probably didn't know she had. Between fans, her eyes checked the phone count in her peripheral vision while she pretended to read a fan letter.
She was exactly what he'd expected. Performative, hungry for attention in a way that was more sad than annoying once you understood where it came from. And underneath all of it, a woman who could grow sixty-eight feet tall and flatten a building.
The line thinned. She was getting closer to his section of the street, working her way through the last dozen fans. A guy in his twenties fumbled his phone trying to take a selfie and she caught it for him with a reflexive grace that didn't match her public persona at all. Her hands were fast. Hero fast.
Twelve meters. Ten.
His aura hit her at about eight.
She was mid-selfie with a woman in a sun hat. The phone went up, the woman smiled, Mount Lady did her pose, and then she stopped. Not dramatically. Just a half-second where the pose held too long and her smile went uncertain. She blinked. Looked to her left, then her right. Scanning for something she couldn't name.
The pheromones weren't strong at this distance. A whisper, not a shout. Enough to make someone feel warm without knowing why, like walking through a pocket of heated air on an otherwise cool day. Most people wouldn't even register it consciously. But Mount Lady wasn't most people. She was a pro hero with trained instincts and she'd felt something out of place and her body had responded before her brain caught up.
Her eyes swept the crowd and found him.
Riku didn't look away. Didn't smile or wave or reach for his phone. He was leaning against the storefront with his arms crossed and a crepe wrapper balled up in one hand, looking at her like she was something worth looking at and not much more.
She stared at him for maybe two seconds. In a crowd of people who were grabbing for her, shoving phones at her, treating her like a tourist attraction, one guy was standing back and just watching. Somewhere between starstruck and indifferent that she couldn't immediately categorize, and that bothered her, and the pheromones were making the act of being bothered feel strangely pleasant.
The woman in the sun hat said something. Mount Lady turned back, finished the selfie, laughed at whatever the woman said. Moved on to the next fan.
But she looked back at him. Twice. Quick glances between poses, checking if he was still there. He was.
The meet-and-greet wound down. The MC announced the next stage act. The crowd started shifting, some moving toward the stage, some drifting to food stalls. Mount Lady stepped behind a barrier with her handler, a tired-looking woman with a clipboard who was already talking about the next event on the schedule.
Riku pushed off the storefront and walked toward the train station.
He didn't approach her. Didn't try to get a photo or slip her a note or do any of the desperate-fan moves that would've made him just another face in the lineup. The whole point was to be the one who didn't. In a world where everyone wanted a piece of Yu Takeyama, the guy who watched and walked away was the one she'd remember.
Maybe. He was betting on psychology more than certainty. She was the type who chased what retreated and lost interest in what chased her.
The train was crowded on the ride home. Rush hour, pressed between a salary-man who smelled like cigarettes and a high school girl with headphones that leaked tinny pop music. His aura was touching everyone within arm's reach and he could feel them shifting. The salary-man loosened his tie. The high school girl took her headphones out and looked around the car with an expression that said she'd lost something.
Riku stared at the floor and pulled his control as tight as it would go. Six days without feeding now. His body ached in places he couldn't stretch out and the fatigue sat behind his eyes like sand.
The train rocked. Someone's elbow bumped his back. He thought about Mount Lady's face when the aura had hit her. Her smile freezing. Her eyes going sharp. She'd felt it and she hadn't known what she was feeling. That was step one.
Step two was letting her come to him.
He got off at his stop and walked home through streets that were going orange with sunset. The apartment building was quiet. No cat in the hallway this time. He unlocked his door and dropped his keys on the counter. Stood in his kitchen for a long minute doing nothing. The fridge hummed. A car alarm went off somewhere down the block and stopped.
He should eat. He should train. The math homework was now four days overdue and climbing but he couldn't make himself care about it.
Instead he pulled out his phone and looked at the news. Mount Lady was already trending. Photos from the event, fan accounts posting their selfies, a short video clip of the Q&A that had picked up a few thousand views. He scrolled through the photos until he found one that showed the crowd behind her during the meet-and-greet. If he squinted he could see himself in the background, a dark smudge against the shuttered storefront.
She wouldn't see that photo. Probably. And if she did, she wouldn't zoom in on the one guy standing apart from the crowd. Probably.
But she'd remember his face. He was almost sure of that.
Riku put his phone down and opened the fridge. Leftover rice, two eggs, half a bottle of soy sauce. He started cooking and tried not to think about how much better everything would work if he wasn't running on empty.
Two weeks and change until the entrance exam. He needed to feed before then. The Mount Lady timeline was moving but it wasn't fast enough to solve his immediate problem. He might need to find a shorter path. Something to take the edge off, get his stats back to baseline, buy him time until the real connections started forming.
The egg sizzled in the pan. He flipped it and burned the edge because his reflexes were garbage.
"Shit."
He ate it anyway. Burned edges and all. His body took the calories and asked for what it always asked for, and he ignored it the way he'd been ignoring it all week, and went to bed early because there was nothing else to do.
Sleep came fast. The dreams didn't stick.