After we delivered Bakugo to the police station, everyone went home.
My mom scolded me for staying out late and assumed that I must've been out with 'that girl from my class'. I guess she meant Yaoyorozu, which wouldn't be entirely wrong. I'd rather her think that I was sneaking out with a girl, though. If she knew that I was involved in that fight, I would have felt her wrath tenfold.
I ended up sleeping all day and through the night until the next day. I guess it made sense. After the camp incident, I hadn't slept more than a few hours. I probably would've spent even more time in bed if it weren't for the knock at the front door. It was Aizawa.
My mother was asleep since she worked the graveyard shift, and I wasn't very happy that I had to wake her up. After Aizawa explained that the students in Class 1-A were going to live in the dorms on campus for our safety, she exploded at him. My mother rarely brought out her Spanish; it was useless in Japan, but boy, did she unleash it on Aizawa. I doubt he understood a word, but she let him have it regardless, and he looked scared shitless.
Despite my mother unleashing a beatdown of a thousand words on him, a technique passed down from the Morales family in Puerto Rico for generations, she ended up agreeing to let me stay in the dorms. I was happy to hear that she would let me go, not just because I wanted to live on campus, but because it meant that once summer was over, she could finally get some rest.
There was still some time left before the school session would begin, but I wasn't going to sit on my behind doing nothing until then.
I wanted to learn how to control my Quirks, something that I didn't get the chance to work on at the training camp since all hell had broken loose. Despite that, nothing was stopping us students from training on our own time. On my own, I figured out how my invisibility worked and could do it on demand. After that, I teamed up with a couple of students with similar Quirks to understand mine better.
One of the classmates I came into contact with was Tooru Hagakure, the girl with the Quirk that made her invisible. To be honest, she and I never really said anything to one another. Class 1-A had their cliques; hers and mine didn't really much crossover. She was surprised when I asked her if she wanted to do some training, but she agreed to meet me at UA nonetheless.
"Miles!" I heard her call my name as I waited for her at the front gate. I noticed that she called people by whichever name she found to be more fun to say. It didn't really matter to me.
She was hard to see since she was wearing so few clothes, just a sports bra and some shorts. It hit me then that I didn't really know where to look when talking to her, since she was, you know, invisible. I just sort of imagined where her face would be and looked in that direction.
"Hey, I'm glad you could make it. We don't really talk, so it probably feels kinda sudden."
I heard her laugh, the visible parts of her bobbing up and down. "Don't worry, I don't feel that way at all. We just never really had the chance to talk one-on-one before. I am curious though..." I think I could hear her rubbing her chin. "What made you message me of all people? Could it be that you think I'm cute?" she teased. I could hear in her voice that she was smiling.
"I'm sure you are," I said, between chuckles. "But that's not really why I wanted you specifically. I guess you don't really talk to the others who might've seen my newest Quirk. It's still a bit finicky, but check this out."
The instant I turned invisible, Hagakure yelled, "What!? No fair!? You get to turn your clothes invisible!?"
"Yup. I realized after toying around with it that my body isn't actually invisible, though. If I were to take a wild guess, I'm doing some sort of electromagnetic spectrum manipulation. Rather than turning my skin invisible, I manipulate the light around myself, thus allowing me to appear invisible. With some practice, I might even be able to turn other people invisible, too!"
"So that's why you wanted to talk to me, then. Your Quirk and mine are similar."
"Yeah, I wanted to learn how to really be invisible. I'm sure there's a lot to fighting while invisible, right?"
"I have a few secrets that I might be able to share... But only under one condition."
"What's that?"
"You must call me Sensei!"
"I'm not doing that..."
"C'mon!"
"No."
"One time! It'll be really funny!"
"No. way."
Seeing that I wasn't budging, she sighed and lowered her shoulders. "Momo's right, you are stubborn..."
"How about I buy you a sweet treat after instead?" I asked her. Whenever I passed by her at lunch, she always had more desserts on her plate than real food. I figured that must be her weakness.
"I'm in," she said speedily.
I can't believe that worked so quickly...
She and I walked to the gymnasium together. As soon as we entered, she started stripping. Although she was invisible, I averted my eyes and covered her with my hands. "What are you doing?" I asked her.
She stopped halfway through removing her shorts and said, "Huh? Removing my clothes so you can't see me. If I wore my clothes, it would defeat the whole purpose of our training, silly."
"I guess that makes sense... So, what's lesson number one?"
"Well..." Hagakure said. Before I knew it, her voice came from the opposite direction. She even made me jump a little. "You have to learn how to move quietly, or else what's the point of being invisible. Besides, someone might have a Quirk that lets them hear things better, like Shouji. You'll have to be even quieter."
"So, what, do you walk on your tippy toes?"
"Yeah, you should try it," she said, her voice changing directions once more. I got on my tippy toes, but before I could take a step, she nudged me and I lost my balance. "Wrong!" she said, accompanied by her mimicking an incorrect buzzer sound effect. "If you walk on your toes, you can be knocked off balance."
"Then what is it that you do, then?" I asked her.
She grabbed me by my shoulder and pushed down on my knees, compelling me to bend them. "It's called a fox walk. You bend your knees about this much, so you're stable. Then, when you take a step, you put all of your weight on the foot that's still touching the ground. Next, you step onto the ground gently with the ball of the front of your foot and then roll the rest of your foot onto the ground."
I did as she told me. My knees were bent, and all of my weight was put on that back foot while I tried my best to keep the front foot weightless. I landed with my pinky toe first, then rolled the rest of my foot into the ground. I thought it was great, but Hagakure said otherwise.
"Not bad, but you're stepping too hard with your front foot. Try again."
I transferred my weight onto the front foot before trying again with my other foot. This time, it was even quieter, but not good enough.
"Try again."
I gave it another attempt.
"Try again."
And another
"Try again."
And another...
"Try again."
After about an hour, I finally had it down, and my footsteps were almost completely silent; at least, it was good enough to be unheard by a person without a hearing-type Quirk. According to Hagakure, it took her months to master this technique, but since I have superhuman equilibria, I was able to pick it up multitudes faster.
After I learned how to walk, I learned how to breathe. Apparently, once she decided that she wanted to be a hero, she forcefully changed how she naturally breathes. Rather than exhaling, then inhaling, she would exhale, hold her breath, inhale, and then repeat. Doing this allowed her to steady her breathing and sneak up on people. So, for the next hour, she and I meditated together until my breathing was dead silent.
Before that day, I used to wonder how she even got into UA with such a simple Quirk, but I realized that it wasn't her Quirk that got her into UA; it was her drive. She rewired the way she walked, ran, and breathed. Meanwhile, people like me just operated on instinct. Moments like these are why I want to reach out to my classmates that I'm unfamiliar with; every time I learn something about them, I begin to admire them.
"Alright," she said as we concluded our meditation. "Let's spar! First one to tag the other three times wins!"
As she started stripping down again, my brain entered the gutter. "Are you sure that's a good idea..." I mumbled awkwardly. "I don't wanna accidentally, you know, tag you in the wrong spot."
"I trust you enough to believe any accidents are honest ones," she told me. She tossed her clothes to the side, and her voice teleported across the room. "Let's begin."
The hum of the gym's air conditioning muffled what little sounds of hers that I might have been able to make out otherwise. As I fox stepped, I struggled to time my breathing with my steps, and I accidentally exhaled roughly.
"Tag!" she said, nearly pushing me over as she placed two hands on my back.
Damn it. She moves so fast! I need to fix my breathing. I should try holding my breath while I have a foot in the air.
I shifted all of my weight to my right leg and stepped forward with my left, holding my breath until the ball of my foot touched the ground. I repeated this process with the other foot, inhaling once it touched the ground. I started getting a rhythm going, and once it became automatic, I focused on finding Hagakure.
I closed my eyes, figuring that my eyes were nothing more than a distraction for this exercise. With one of my senses gone, I felt as though my other senses had improved, but perhaps that was nothing more than a placebo. I needed something more, a way to find her without any external forces, and I knew my Spider-Sense was the key.
When All for One first appeared, my Spider-Sense was able to pick up on his location. He didn't attack me, yet I knew he was there. It wasn't danger that I was detecting; no, it was his presence. How can I replicate it? What was I doing differently?
I started to relive the moment in my head, chasing down that feeling I had before All for One entered the fray. I had my back pressed up against the wall, and before I had that bad feeling rattling around in my skull, there was a tingle on my fingertips. I was stricken by such an emphatic feeling of fear and the fact that I'd suddenly turned invisible that I'd ignored that physical sensation.
If my invisibility is actually just electromagnetic spectrum manipulation, then I should be able to sense electromagnetism, right? Since the human body produces a natural bioelectric field, I should be able to detect it. That's it! That's how my Spider-Sense must work! My body likely always detects the bioelectrical fields around me, ignoring them if they aren't dangerous. The moment my body detects a bioelectric change in someone's brain, it warns me of their malicious intent.
This whole time, I thought that I had two Quirks: electricity and spider. In reality, it all falls under the single concept of electromagnetism, even my wall crawling. Well, I guess the web-slinging part is probably unrelated to that. Rather than thinking about my powers being two halves on a coin, I need to start thinking about them all being a part of a singular system.
Just like that, I had a new understanding of how my entire Quirk worked.
My eyes were still closed as I fox walked around the gym. I began to ignore all of my senses, aside from touch. With my bare feet, I produced as little bioelectricity as I could, just enough so that I could get a feel for it. Once I had that feeling memorized, I focused my mind and searched for that feeling. After a while, I began to detect another bioelectric field, and it was moving. I knew that it had to be her.
Eyes still closed, I fox walked toward that feeling and extended my hand, grabbing the top of Hagakure's head.
"Found you," I said.
"What!? But I didn't even make a noise!" she said before we split off again.
Since I had been able to pick up on her electromagnetic field before, I recognized it instantly. Unfortunately, she really didn't want to lose to me. She was prancing around like an actual fox this time, leaping silently from one end of the gym to the other. It was hard to track her electromagnetic field when she was moving that fast, especially since I was unable to do the same while fox walking. Still, I pursued her and decided to look for a pattern in her steps, so that I could cut her off. It wasn't long before I figured out that she was moving in a constant Z-shape. Knowing where she would end up, I stepped into her path and extended my arm outward. "Got you again!" I said, however, I was slightly off the mark.
She crashed into me, and I fell onto my back. The sudden force made me lose enough focus to knock me out of my 'invisibility', revealing my location to Hagakure. I thought she would run up and tag me, but instead, she was silent. It took a moment, but then I realized that she, too, had fallen. And based on the hot puffs of air that were hitting my face and her hands gripping my wrists, I could tell that she was hovering right over me.
"Tag..." she whispered.
I felt her long hair sliding down my neck. Her warm breath had gotten so close to me that I could taste the spearmint flavor she'd brushed with this morning as our chests touched. As she pressed her weight against me, her right hand slid up my arms, and she interlocked her fingers with mine.
"Is this part of our sparing match?" I asked her. I wasn't sure what was happening. Jirou's sudden confession blindsided me, but at least it made sense in the end. Hagakure and I'd never spoken a single syllable before that day. I couldn't justify how things could have ended up like this. It was as if I slipped into one of those fanfictions where the author is living his fantasies vicariously through the main character, throwing girls at him without any rhyme or reason. Even if it was sudden, I let whatever was about to happen, happen.
"Maybe," she whispered, her voice so close I could feel it on my lips. That sweet taste of spearmint was so rich that part of me longed to taste it in full. "If I tag you again... That means I win."
She lowered herself, I closed my eyes, and then I could feel her soft lips — but I felt them in a peculiar place. What I expected to be a kiss ended up being a nibble on my ear, which then turned into a mean bite.
"Gotcha! I win!" she said as she erupted in laughter.
So she was just messing with me on purpose, huh...
But when Aizawa burst into the gym, Hagakure leaped off of me and across the gym.
Silently, we both stared at him. He just looked at me, then at Hagakure's clothes on the ground, and then back at me. "Time's up, you two. The basketball club is about to start its practice." He started to leave, but then he stopped at the entrance and gave me another. glare. "And I'm getting tired of telling you kids when your time is up when you reserve facilities like the pool or the gym. You should have enough sense to keep track of time on your own."
I'd forgotten that there were sports clubs at UA for the general education students; to be honest, I didn't even know until around our final exams that there even was a general education course. What's the point of going to UA as a general education student, anyway?
"Right... Sorry, Mr. Aizawa," I said.
"Yeah, Sorry," Hagakure added.
I walked Hagakure to the front gate, stopping before she and I would have to split paths.
"Thanks for the help, Hagakure. I learned a lot today."
"No problem!" she said cheerfully.
"By the way," I said. "I don't want you to walk away empty-handed, so I do have some advice for you, too. I was able to detect the natural bioelectric field that your body produces. Everyone has one. You should look into upgrading your costume so enemies can't use that trick against you if they have the Quirk for it."
"So that's how you found me so easily toward the end? You really are just as amazing as they say, Miles. That's why I had to cheat a little to beat you. Wink!"
Did she just say wink out loud?
"Anyway, I'll keep that in mind. See you later."
I was so thrown off by her odd nature that I forgot all about the sweet treat I'd promised her. When I got home, I texted her and apologized for forgetting my promise. Her response was a tad unexpected:
Hagakure: It's okay, at least I got a little bite of my sweet treat today. Guess I'll save it for next time ;)