On his first day Soren picked the third-row seat by the window.
The radiator beneath it hummed with fifteen years of service, its cast iron ribs still holding heat efficiently despite the thin crust of mineral deposits lining its interior.
Above, the projector fixture sagged slightly on its mounts, one bolt weeping rust into the ceiling tile.
Two rows ahead, a girl with lavender hair had something small and dense embedded near her temple—surgical steel, probably a Quirk regulator.
Another student, this one with her hair pinned up by a clip, wore oxidized brass pretending to be gold.
Soren noted the ferrous core before catching himself.
He dropped his gaze to the desk’s laminated surface, where his own reflection blurred beneath a fingerprint smudge.
Footsteps.
Chairs scraping.
A yawn from the doorway where their teacher slouched against the frame, a sleeping bag draped over one shoulder.
The classroom filled up around him.
Aizawa came in through the door in a sleeping bag.
He shuffled forward like a caterpillar who’d lost its way, the fabric dragging faintly against the floor.
The class fell silent—not out of reverence, but the kind of quiet that settles when something inexplicable happens and no one wants to be the first to acknowledge it.
He unzipped the bag just enough to free one arm, then produced a clipboard from somewhere inside.
The roll call took thirty seconds.
He didn’t look up once, but Soren felt the pause when Aizawa’s pen hovered over certain names—the dual-track students, marked by whatever system the Joint Academy used to flag them.
No introductions.
No icebreakers.
Just the soft scratch of pen on paper.
“The term’s itinerary,” Aizawa said, his voice dry as the rust above them.
“Week one: assessments.
Week two: fundamentals.
Week three: applied theory.
Week four: field preliminaries.” He gestured to the stack of readers at the front without breaking eye contact with the wall.
“Start with chapter three.
Questions are personal failures.”
Then he zipped the sleeping bag back up to his chin and lurched behind his desk like a man fleeing a crime scene.
Soren opened his reader.
The spine cracked faintly, the adhesive still fresh.
He could feel the iron in the staples holding the pages together, tiny teeth biting down on the pulp.
After roll he went behind his desk to nap or pretend to.
The cohort talked among themselves the way students do on a first day—too loud, too eager, the kind of forced camaraderie that comes from not knowing who might matter later.
Soren turned a page in his reader without reading it, his attention on the boy two seats ahead who was demonstrating his Quirk by pressing his palms flat against the desk.
“I can feel vibrations through any solid surface,” the boy said, tapping the laminate for emphasis.
“Footsteps, door hinges, even pencil scratches if they’re heavy enough.”
Soren noted the way the boy’s shoulders hunched forward, how his fingers spread wide as if trying to catch something intangible.
The Quirk itself was more interesting than the description—pressure waves translated into spatial awareness, maybe even predictive if calibrated right.
But the boy just grinned and said, “It’s great for eavesdropping,” like that was the pinnacle of utility.
Across the aisle,
She hadn’t joined the chatter, hadn’t even glanced up when someone accidentally knocked a water bottle off their desk.
Her fingers traced a diagram as she read, the motion precise, almost surgical.
Soren watched the way her thumb paused at certain passages, the slight tilt of her head when she encountered something worth memorizing.
He cataloged the rest absently: the girl with the steel regulator tapping her foot in a nervous rhythm, the boy with brass-clip hair chewing on his pencil, the cluster near the door debating whose Quirk would “win in a fight” like it was a card game.
The radiator hissed softly beneath him, its iron bones singing a quiet, familiar song.
By the time Aizawa stirred from his sleeping bag cocoon, Soren had divided the class into categories without realizing it—the ones who talked too much, the ones who didn’t talk enough, the ones who’d already started sizing each other up.
He noted who he thought would manage and who’d need help.
The morning’s class was a survey of dual-system practice.
The instructor—a man with a badge clipped to his belt that held both a hero license and something arcane etched into silver—entered without preamble.
He carried a stack of papers under one arm and a pen balanced behind his ear.
The pen registered before he even uncapped it: steel nib with nickel alloyed at twelve percent, higher than commercial grade.
Custom, then.
Possibly handmade.
The lecturer tapped the stack against the desk to straighten it, and Soren noted the staple composition—carbon steel, cheap but effective—before forcing himself to focus on the man’s words instead of his materials.
“Heroics,” the instructor said, “operates on the principle of immediate response.
Mage guilds prioritize sustained engagement.” He held up his credentials—one laminated card with a hero emblem, one parchment with wax seal remnants—then slotted them back into the same folder.
“You’ll need both.”
Soren’s fingers twitched toward his notebook.
The lecturer’s pen moved in quick, decisive strokes across the whiteboard, leaving behind a trail of equations that blurred the line between Quirk physics and magical theory.
The ink itself was standard, but the nib’s wear pattern suggested heavy use—left-handed, with a slight downward pressure that had worn the metal thin on one side.
A figure passed the open doorway twice in quick succession: an administrator with a clipboard, its metal backing plate registering as cold-rolled steel with a faint manganese signature.
Soren marked the composition absently before returning to the lecture.
The instructor was explaining resonance frequencies now, how certain Quirks could destabilize spell matrices if timed right.
Soren doubted he’d ever need the information—his own Quirk was about as interactive as a brick—but he took thorough notes anyway.
The lunch bell let everyone out.
Chairs scraped back in unison, voices rising as backpacks zipped shut.
Soren watched the doorway clog with bodies—elbows, shoulders, the occasional flash of a phone screen—and waited for the current to ebb.
His fingers found the edges of his notebook, aligning it with the desk’s corner before sliding it into his bag.
Across the aisle, Momo Yaoyorozu had stayed at her desk past the bell.
She held something between her thumb and forefinger, small enough to disappear if she closed her fist.
When she spoke, her voice cut through the residual chatter like a scalpel through tissue.
“Would you verify this for me?” No greeting.
No preamble.
Just the object extended toward him, its surface catching the light in dull, uneven patches.
Soren set his bag down.
The thing in her palm registered before he even looked at it—carbon steel, forged not cast, with trace vanadium that suggested tool-grade alloy.
He picked it up by the edges, turning it once.
“Eighty-two percent iron,” he said.
“The rest is carbon and impurities.”
Momo’s eyes narrowed fractionally.
“I was aiming for ninety-four.”
“You got the crystalline structure right.” He tapped the edge with his thumbnail, listening to the dull *ping*.
“But your Quirk defaulted to a cheaper mix.
Probably subconscious.”
She took the object back, her brow furrowing as she studied it.
“How can you tell?”
“The way it resonates.” Soren hooked his bag over his shoulder.
“High-grade steel rings clearer.”
Momo Yaoyorozu had stayed at her desk past the bell.
She was holding something small in her palm.
The irregular lump of steel—no larger than a thumbnail—gleamed dully under the classroom lights.
Soren lifted it without hesitation, his fingers closing around it for exactly three seconds before setting it back down.
The contact was brief but decisive, like a doctor palpating a tumor.
“Two hundred fourteen grams,” he said.
“Iron content: one seventy-five point four eight.
Carbon at point zero six three.” He paused, his gaze flicking to the window where the afternoon sun caught the dust motes swirling above the radiator.
“There’s manganese too.
Trace amounts.
Your lipid conversion isn’t filtering it out.”
Momo’s expression didn’t change, but her fingers tightened slightly around the steel.
“The carbon is higher than I calculated.”
“Your body’s prioritizing structural integrity over purity.” Soren tapped the edge of her desk where the laminate had chipped away, exposing the particleboard beneath.
“Same reason rebar has slag in it.
Cheaper, stronger, less likely to fracture under stress.”
Momo exhaled through her nose—a controlled, measured sound.
She wrote the figures in a notebook she had ready.