Riku woke up before her.
Six in the morning, her bedroom, light coming through curtains she hadn't bothered to close. Yu was face-down in the pillow with one arm hanging off the bed and her hair covering everything from the shoulders up. The sheets were still wrecked. The room smelled like sweat and sex. His aura had settled overnight into something warm and ambient.
He lay there for a minute and took inventory.
His body felt different. Not just rested. Rebuilt. The aches from the last week were gone, not faded but actually gone, like they'd been surgically removed. His shoulder moved clean through its full range when he rotated it. His calves were loose and his reaction time, as far as he could tell from flexing his hand and watching the response, was back to where it should be. Maybe better.
The Vitality Drain had done its job. Three rounds of full intimate contact had filled a reservoir that had been running on fumes for seven days. He could feel the stored energy sitting in him like heat in a furnace, ready to be directed wherever he needed it. His senses were sharp. He could count the threads in the pillowcase. He could hear Yu's heartbeat, slow and deep in sleep, from a foot away.
He got out of bed without waking her. Pulled on his clothes from the living room floor, found his shoes by the door. The apartment looked different in morning light. Smaller, somehow. More human. Her signed poster of herself was right there on the wall and it looked less like a trophy and more like a woman who needed reminding that she'd accomplished something.
He left quietly. Didn't leave a note because she'd think it was corny, and she'd be right.
The morning air hit him on the street and he breathed it in deep. Everything was sharper. Colors brighter, sounds cleaner. The world running in higher resolution than it had all week. A pigeon took off from a railing near the station entrance and he tracked its flight path without meaning to, his eyes snapping to the movement and holding it with a precision that felt effortless.
This was what being fed felt like. Baseline. Where his body was supposed to operate, and anything less was running on a flat tire.
He took the train home. The car was mostly empty at this hour, a few early commuters staring at their phones. His aura was pulled tight and clean, the control effortless now. No leaking. No stray pheromones making strangers fidget. The quirk was a tool again instead of a liability.
Back at his apartment, he changed into training clothes and went straight to the park. Six-thirty in the morning. The dummies were waiting. The smug marker face was still there.
He hit it.
The impact was different. His fist connected and the dummy didn't rock. It jumped. The base scraped backward across the concrete and the padded surface cratered inward where his knuckles had landed. He looked at the dent and thought about how three days ago the same punch had barely made the thing wobble.
He ran the combination. Jab, cross, hook. Close the distance, grab, hold contact. Every movement was crisp, the signals from his brain to his muscles arriving without the half-beat delay that had been plaguing him. His footwork was clean. His weight transferred properly. The dummy took a beating that it wasn't designed to handle and he didn't get tired.
He sprinted the parkour route. The back alleys and fire escapes, the gap between buildings. The two-meter jump that had almost killed him three days ago was nothing. He cleared it with room to spare, landed rolling, came up already running. The whole circuit took ten minutes and forty-three seconds. Better than his best time by nineteen seconds.
He stood on the roof of the storage building and looked out over the neighborhood. His breathing was elevated but controlled. His legs felt like they could go again. His body wanted to move. Fight something. Burn through the stored energy in long clean arcs of effort.
Two weeks until the entrance exam. He was going to annihilate it.
His phone buzzed.
He pulled it out, expecting a news alert. It was a text from Mt. Lady.
7:14 AM: "You left." This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
He looked at the timestamp. She'd woken up and texted him within minutes.
He typed back: "You were sleeping. Didn't want to wake you."
The three dots appeared instantly. She'd been waiting for the response.
7:15 AM: "I wasn't sleeping I was resting my eyes"
7:15 AM: "My voice is still gone btw"
7:15 AM: "I have a press event at noon and I sound like a chain smoker"
7:16 AM: "This is your fault"
Riku grinned at his phone.
"You're welcome," he typed.
7:16 AM: "I didn't say thank you"
7:16 AM: "Also I can't walk properly"
7:17 AM: "Like actually. My legs are doing a thing"
7:17 AM: "I hate you"
He waited. The three dots appeared, disappeared. Appeared again.
7:19 AM: "When are you free again"
"I'll let you know," he typed. Same energy as everything else with her.
7:20 AM: "Fine"
7:20 AM: "Whatever"
7:20 AM: "I'm going back to sleep"
7:21 AM: "My bed smells like you"
7:22 AM: "It's a complaint"
7:22 AM: "Goodnight"
7:22 AM: "It's morning"
7:22 AM: "GOODNIGHT"
He pocketed the phone and dropped off the roof. Landed clean, no jarring, the impact absorbed by legs that felt spring-loaded. The parkour route was done but his body was still hungry for movement so he ran the perimeter of the park, fast laps on the gravel path, pushing his speed until the world blurred at the edges.
Fifteen laps. He wasn't breathing hard. He stopped because he'd decided to, not because his body asked him to.
He cooled down with stretches and checked the news on his phone. The usual morning mix. A villain incident in Hosu that had been contained overnight, a feature on some sports festival in Osaka. Weather.
Then a small item near the bottom of the feed: "Hero Commission Announces Public Quirk Demonstration Event. Pro heroes including Midnight, Endeavor, and others scheduled for this Saturday's event at Musutafu Convention Center."
Saturday. Two days from now.
Midnight.
He read the article twice. Standard Hero Commission PR event. Demonstrations and meet-and-greets. Something that drew crowds of aspiring heroes.
Midnight would be there. Nemuri Kayama. The R-Rated Hero. Pheromone-adjacent quirk, Somnambulist, the sleep-inducing aroma. The woman whose quirk would react to his the second they were in the same room.
Mount Lady had been the first thread. Midnight would be next.
He stood up and walked home. The morning was bright and the city was waking up around him and his body felt like a weapon someone had finally sharpened. The entrance exam was in two weeks. Midnight was in two days.
He showered and ate four eggs and a bowl of rice. Sat down at his desk. The math homework was still there, accusatory, the trains still leaving their stations at different times. He picked up a pencil and did twenty minutes of calculations that he didn't care about because he'd been blowing it off for a week and his teacher was going to email his parents if he didn't turn something in.
Then he opened his phone and looked at Mt. Lady's contact. The last message, all caps, GOODNIGHT. He smiled and put the phone face-down on the desk.
Two days until Midnight. Two weeks until UA. The plan was moving.
Riku finished the math homework and started on English.