The letter would come when it came.
That was the thing about waiting. You could either spend the time staring at the mailbox, or you could get better. Manga was not the mailbox-staring type. He'd been home for less than two hours before he'd already changed out of his exam clothes, eaten the lunch his mother left in the fridge, drank an entire bottle of water, and was sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor with a sketchbook open across his knees and four different colored pens fanned out in his right hand.
His room was organized chaos that only made sense to the person living in it. The barbell rack in the corner had weight plates stacked neatly against the wall beside it, chalk dust ground into the rubber mat underneath. His desk had two monitors, one for the vocal training software he ran twice a day, one for whatever he was currently reading or watching or using as reference. The shelves above the desk were loaded with manga volumes and sketchbooks, the spines facing outward in no particular order except the order they'd been put back after the last time he'd pulled them down. Three empty water bottles stood in a line near the door, waiting to be refilled.
The sketchbook currently open was the fantasy one.
He had four going at the same time. The sci-fi one lived in his desk drawer and only came out when he had a specific idea he needed to get down before it left him. The heroes-based one was on the shelf behind him, half-finished, the protagonist mid-fight on the last page he'd drawn. The romance was the thinnest of the four, pages soft from handling, because he picked that one up when he needed to draw something quieter. And the fantasy one was the one he came back to most, sprawling and complicated and full of characters he'd been building for two years.
He drew for three hours without looking up.
His mother knocked at six to tell him dinner was ready. He bookmarked his page with a pen cap, stood up, rolled his neck until it cracked, and went downstairs.
His mother, Fukidashi Hana, was a small woman with a round face and had the pleasure of raising a child who had announced at age four that he intended to surpass God as a hero. She handled it well enough most would say. Deciding that ambition, at least, was better than the opposite route.
"How was it?" she asked, setting a bowl of rice down.
"I definitely got first place," Manga said, sitting down.
She looked at him for a moment. "Congraulations."
"I’d be shocked if anyone else did better than me."
His mother served dinner and they ate and Manga talked about the exam like it was an action movie. He talked about Tetsutetsu and the bet and Kamakiri and Monoma's copy quirk. His mother asked follow-up questions.
It was a good evening.
…
The days took shape around him like pages filling in.
Morning: wake up, drink water, eat breakfast. The barbell rack called to him before eight o'clock every day without exception. Squats first, then rows, then whatever accessory work his legs and arms felt like tolerating that morning. The chalk dust on his hands. The satisfying weight of a loaded bar across his back. His reflection in the small mirror propped against the wall, the speech bubble above his neck cycling through effort-face kanji while he ground through his sets.
After training: eat again, because training without eating after was just damaging yourself for free, and Manga couldn’t surpass God by mistreating his temple. His mother made good food.
Then the desk. The vocal training software he got for his birthday was not glamorous. It was a microphone, a program that measured pitch and resonance and sustain, and a library of exercises built for singers and stage actors and anyone else who needed their voice to do things over long periods without falling apart. Manga had bought it specifically because his quirk's greatest weakness was his own throat, and he intended to do something about that.
The exercises were boring but necessary. Scales. Breath control. Humming resonance patterns through his nose while the software drew little graphs on the screen. Projecting from his diaphragm rather than his throat. Holding notes until his lungs ached.
He did them every day. Twice on days when he had extra time.
The afternoons belonged to the sketchbooks. He rotated between them without agenda, picking whichever one his hands wanted to reach for. The fantasy one got a new chapter roughed out, the protagonist cornered in a collapsing tower, using a fire-based quirk to slow their fall. The sci-fi one got three pages of a chase sequence through a space station corridor that he was very happy with. The heroes-based one got a redesign of the supporting cast, because he'd decided the original designs were too similar to each other and needed more visual contrast. The romance got a conversation scene between the leads that he drew twice because the first version didn't feel right and the second one almost did.
Evenings: study. He had a stack of textbooks he'd bought specifically to stay sharp between middle school ending and high school beginning, math, Japanese, basic science. He worked through problems at the desk after dinner while his mother read.
He hydrated constantly because a dry throat is a damaged throat in waiting.
The same routine every day.
By the end of the first week, he could feel the difference.
His squats were heavier. His recovery was faster. The barbell that had made his legs shake on day one barely registered anymore, and he'd added weight twice. His arms filled out his sleeves a little differently. Dramatically and visibly thanks to using his quirk in combination with his training. A few pin-pins here and a few bari-baris. It allowed him to train at a rate that very few people in the world could compete with if at all. Pin-pin created an onomatopoeia that restored his stamina. Doesn’t heal injuries but does deal with fatigue. Bari-bari allowed him to perform at his peak. These two allowed him to push his body to his limit before resting to let his muscles heal naturally and rebuild stronger.
The vocal training showed even more. His throat had always been the bottleneck. His quirk could produce words that could do all sorts of things, but his body could only take so much of that before the strain caught up. That gap was closing. The exercises he'd struggled to hold for ten seconds at the start of the month, he could now hold for twenty. Then twenty-five. The rawness that used to creep in after thirty minutes of sustained quirk use took longer to arrive, then longer still. His diaphragm did the work his throat used to carry alone, and the difference felt like someone had widened the road his voice traveled on.
His understanding of his own quirk deepened in the sketchbooks, of all places. Drawing out fight sequences for his manga forced him to think about combinations, angles, timing. What would happen if this word hit at the same time as that one? What if you layered a Toro-toro field over a Zudon strike, slowing everything around you while a single focused blast punched through at full speed? What if you used a Fuwa-fuwa not to float, but to make a target weightless before hitting them with a Gusha that crushed them against nothing?
The ideas came fast. He filled pages with them. Some were theoretical. Some he tested in the backyard when his parents were out, whispering small versions and watching what happened. The nuances he'd always known were there but couldn't quite name started to name themselves. The vocabulary of Japanese onomatopoeia that he'd been building his whole life arranged itself in his mind like a dictionary rather than a pile of index cards.
He opened the heroes-based sketchbook one night and drew for two hours without stopping.
…
Seven days after the exam, the letter arrived.
He was mid-set on squats when he heard the mailbox. He racked the bar, wiped his hands on his shorts, and went downstairs shirtless, chalk still on his palms. His mother was already at the door with the envelope in her hands, looking at it with a tearful smile.
It was a thick envelope.
He took it from her. Turned it over. U.A. High School letterhead on the back flap, embossed.
He opened it at the kitchen table.
Inside was a folded letter, a second document he didn't look at yet, and a small disc that he recognized immediately as a projector. He set the letter and the document aside and pressed his thumb to the projector.
A figure materialized above the kitchen table. The projection was large, the size of a wide screen tv, rendered in blue-grey holographic light.
"Fukidashi Manga." The voice was clear. "My name is Kan Sekijirō. I will be your homeroom teacher in Class 1-B of U.A. High School's Heroics Department." He paused. "Before we get to that, I want to address your performance in the practical examination."
Manga leaned forward slightly.
"Most students who take the U.A. entrance exam understand they're being scored on villain points. What fewer of them understand is that we are also watching something else." He paused. "We observe rescue behavior. How students treat each other when points aren't on the table. Whether they help, whether they hesitate, whether they walk past."
He let that land.
"You did not walk past. On multiple occasions during the examination, you used your quirk to assist struggling examinees at no benefit to your own score. You simply did it and kept moving." Another pause. "That earns rescue points. You earned twenty."
Twenty rescue points on top of everything else.
"Combined with your villain point total of eighty, the highest in the examination, you achieved something quite amazing in this year's entrance examination." The projection straightened, and something shifted in his voice, not warmth exactly, but a kind of settled weight. "You placed first."
Manga stared at the hologram for a moment.
Then the speech bubble above his neck exploded into the largest, most elaborate fireworks display it had ever managed.
"Fukidashi Manga." Kan's voice was even. "This will be your hero academy."
The projection cut out.
Manga sat at the kitchen table in his shorts with chalk on his hands and stared at the space where the hologram had been for a long time. His mother, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway for the entire message, was stomping in place. The excitement and joy visible on her face.
"First, like I said." A smiling emoji appeared in his bubble.
"I always believed in you! I’m so proud of you sweetie!” She hugged him from behind.
“Mom! I’m sweaty! Come on!” Manga’s bubble flushed red.
He'd known he would get in. He had never doubted it, not really, not in the place where it mattered. But knowing a thing and having the paper in your hand were different weights entirely.
His mom set up reservations at a restaurant. They went out to celebrate that evening.
…
March became April in thirty days of the same beautiful routine.
The barbell rack. The sketchbooks. The vocal training software and its graphs and its exercises that were still boring and still absolutely worth doing. The textbooks in the evening. The water bottles lined up by the door. His mother's cooking. His father's newspaper.
His body changed first. A month of daily lifting, daily eating, daily rest, and the boy who had walked into the entrance exam was not the same boy standing in front of the mirror at the end of March. He was stronger. Bigger. Well, not big but more like compact and wider. His squats had tripled.
His voice changed next. Or rather, what his voice could endure changed. The day he ran through the full battery of vocal exercises without pausing, without strain, without the familiar raw scrape at the back of his throat that had always arrived eventually if he pushed long enough, he knew something had shifted for good. He held the final note for twenty-two seconds. The software drew a perfect horizontal line across the graph.
He stared at it for a while.
Then he closed the laptop and went downstairs and ate an extra bowl of rice because he felt that was appropriate.
The version of himself that was going to walk through U.A.'s doors on the first day of school looked nothing like the version that had walked out of the entrance exam.
Same speech bubble. Same height. Same absolute certainty about how this was all going to go.
Just better, in every way that was his to control.
The morning of April's first school day arrived like it had been waiting its turn.
Manga ate breakfast. Drank water. Put on the U.A. uniform, white button-up, grey blazer, dark trousers, red tie, and stood in front of the mirror in his room long enough to confirm he looked exactly as good as he'd expected. The speech bubble above his neck displayed a single small star. Then he picked up his bag and headed for the train.
U.A. High School sat where it always had, the same H-shaped building catching the April morning light, the same enormous gate open at the front. Except now it wasn't an examination site. Now it was his school.
Only one in three hundred applicants made it through those gates each year. Fewer, sometimes.
He was one of them.
The doors inside the building were enormous, built to be generous to everyone, to every shape and every quirk and every mutation, because this was a school full of people whose bodies had been remade by the age they lived in. Manga walked through them with wonder and awe.
He found 1-B on the directory and followed the corridor.
The classroom door was a sliding panel, the kind with a handle. He could hear voices on the other side.
He slid the door open.
Twenty faces looked up. Some curious. Some interested. Some already in the middle of their own conversations.
Manga's gaze moved across the room, fast, scanning, and found three faces he already knew sitting in three separate parts of the room, each of them looking at him with expressions ranging from resigned acceptance to active dread.
Tetsutetsu, silver-haired and sharp-toothed, had his arms crossed and was already making the face of someone who knew exactly what was coming.
Kamakiri, green-mohawked, blade-cheeked, had turned away.
Monoma, composed as ever, blond hair neat, had stopped talking from whatever he'd been saying and wondering whether it was too late to pretend he wasn't there. He concluded that it was.
Three trumpet emojis appeared in Manga's speech bubble, cycling one after another like a fanfare.
"Tetsutetsu! Monoma! Kamakiri!" His voice carried across the whole classroom without effort. "Down and center, please!"
A long pause filled the room.
"...Come on, man," Tetsutetsu said.
"In front of everyone?" Kamakiri tried. "Can't we wait until lunch or something?"
Monoma set down what he'd been reading. He closed his eyes for exactly one second. "A man must pay his debts," he said, and stood up.
The classroom watched this with the fascinated attention of people who had arrived expecting a first day of school and were getting something considerably more interesting.
Manga already had his phone out.
"We didn't say anything about recording!" Tetsutetsu pointed out, loudly.
The cheeky grin emoji that materialized in Manga's bubble was enormous and deeply self-satisfied. He looked at it. Then he looked at Tetsutetsu. Then he handed the phone to the nearest classmate, a girl with large round eyes who took it with the expression of someone who had not expected to be handed a phone this early in the morning but was not going to refuse, and put his hands in his pockets.
Kamakiri looked at the phone. Looked at Manga's empty hands. Looked back at the phone. Then at the three other classmates who had already gotten their own devices out.
"I'm not recording," Manga confirmed cheerfully. "So let's go, men! Get to dwerking! The faster you start, the faster it's over. And I'd hurry, because I don’t know when our teacher is gonna arrive."
The look on Kamakiri's face went through approximately four distinct emotions in two seconds and settled on furious determination. He was going to get this over with as soon as possible. He’d get his payback!
Tetsutetsu cracked his knuckles and looked at Monoma. Monoma straightened his tie.
And then all three of them started dwerking in front of their new class.
The classroom lost its mind.
Someone in the back row choked on their water. The girl who'd been handed the phone was shaking so hard the recording was probably unusable. A boy with pale blue hair had covered his face with both hands while looking in between his fingers. Two students near the window were laughing hard enough that one of them had slid halfway out of their chair. Someone at the front was staring with the expression of a person watching something they could not look away from despite every instinct telling them to.
Monoma was, genuinely, making it look not terrible. He moved with a natural ease, enough confidence to weaponize the embarrassment, and at least two people in the class looked more entertained than horrified watching him specifically.
Tetsutetsu had the energy right but it looked so raw. He was dwerking with everything he had. He didn’t pace himself. It looked like he was trying to drill a hole through the air itself!
Kamakiri looked like he was in physical pain. His hips went back and forth similarly to Tetsutetsu but he was far more ashamed compared to the other two. Visibly wanting this to be over already.
Manga watched all of this for approximately thirty seconds.
Then he walked to the front of the room and joined them.
He hadn't had to. He joined anyway because it was funny.
The classroom's response to this was screams and cheers. The girl with the phone whooped. The boy who'd been hiding his face was now laughing with the others. The laughter got louder.
Four students dwerking in front of a classroom of twenty on the first day of U.A. High School's heroics course.
Then the door opened.
Their homeroom teacher arrived. His hair was grey-white and spiked upward, his eyes were small and serious, and the expression on his face as he took in the scene in front of him moved through several stages before landing on something that was too tired for disbelief but too professional for amusement.
Two prominent lower canines showed when his jaw set.
The dancing stopped.
"Alright." His voice was the room-filling kind, the kind built for command. "Enough horsing around. Get to your seats." His gaze moved across all four of them without distinction, giving no one special treatment. "I'm your homeroom teacher, Kan Sekijirō. You're in the heroics department." A beat. "Act like it." He looked at the phone still being held by the girl in the second row. Then at the other phones. "Put those away."
Twenty students found their seats incredibly quickly.
Manga sat down last, mostly because he took a moment to collect his phone on the way. He smiled.
First place in the entrance exam.
Class 1-B of U.A. High School's heroics course.
The man who would surpass God was exactly where he was supposed to be.