Six months until UA.
The thought ticked in the back of my skull like a metronome, counting off days I couldn't afford to waste. Six months until the gates opened and a sea of kids with weaponized genetics sprinted into a field of robots. Six months until I either stood with them—or watched them disappear into a world that wasn't meant for me.
I wasn't quirkless anymore. I had something else. But "something else" didn't matter if I couldn't get it into the fight fast enough.
First, though, there was the strange quiet after the storm.
I expected payback. Not the next day, maybe, but soon: Bakugo's crew waiting behind the gym, smug and loaded for revenge. Instead, the halls went… careful. The boys who'd circled me last time walked past with their faces set, their eyes refusing to snag on mine. They didn't look scared. They looked embarrassed.
Of course they did. Nobody wanted to be the one who admitted they'd been blinded—then beaten—by the "quirkless weakling."
So they kept their mouths shut.
Bakugo didn't.
He'd drift close sometimes, the scent of nitroglycerin sharp in the air, sparks dancing at his palms like pet fireflies with a mean streak. His voice would come out a low grind meant for me alone. "Next time, Scarface, I'll turn you into ash."
I'd slide a folded scrap of paper from my pocket and hold it up between two fingers. The paper didn't have to be anything—half the time it was a torn cafeteria notice. But I'd keep my face calm and my eyes steady. "You sure you want to try?"
His eyes would flicker to the paper, anger cracking to calculation. Maybe it was a math quiz. Maybe it was a Fire Bolt scroll. He could roll the dice. He never did. He'd curse, shoulder past me hard enough to bump me into lockers, and stomp off.
It was a cheap trick. A bluff. But sometimes the best magic is letting someone else imagine the worst.
The rest of the school didn't change much. I was still the weird kid with the notebook and the scar. But the shove in the hall got a fraction lighter. The tripping foot came down a heartbeat slower. Rumor had it that "Scarface had a quirk after all"—something bright, something loud. Nobody wanted to be the next idiot who found out by accident.
Fine by me. I had work to do.
Midoriya stumbled into class looking like he'd been wrestling demolition equipment. Dark crescents dragged under his eyes; his shirt hung wrong; his notebook slipped twice from his fingers before he got it onto the desk. The usual scribble-scratch muttering was gone. He just stared at the page for a moment, pen still, as if the words had to climb out of a hole to reach him.
"You look like you wrestled a truck and lost," I said. "Twice."
He tried to laugh. "Ahaha. Training."
"Training," I repeated. "You mean… what? Climbing skyscrapers with your teeth?"
"Nothing like that." His smile tightened. "Just need to get stronger. For the exam."
Bandages peeked out beneath his sleeve when he shifted. He followed my glance and tugged the cuff down, then met my eyes with that stubborn brightness I'd come to recognize—the kind that said he'd rather chew glass than complain.
"All right," I said, hands up. "Just—don't die before the test. I'd like at least one friendly face at UA."
His mouth twitched. "Same."
He bent over his notebook, the muttering starting up again in a thin, exhausted ribbon. Whatever secret he was carrying, it wasn't mine to pry open. We all had our paths. His looked like a hill he kept running until it turned him into someone who could fly. Mine looked like a desk, a knife, and a lot of paper.
That night, the Tome opened under my hands with the weight of something finished.
Three years. Light was solid—Glow Orb, Beam, Burst. Barrier was no longer a shimmer; it was a wall that could take a Bakugo-level pounding and hold. Smoke Veil rolled thick and obedient. Mend closed cuts and stopped blood. Flashbang was old news: a proven scroll that did exactly what it said on the tin. Repulsion gave me space; Binding Beam stole seconds from other people's muscles; Fire Bolt burned through metal with a hiss. Light Body sharpened my steps; Levitation dragged heavy things where I needed them.
Ten spells. Ten different ways to say I belonged in the room.
I should have felt invincible. Instead, I dumped my jacket onto the desk and watched a dozen scrolls skitter to the floor, rolling under the bed, into the shadows, into that gap between desk and wall where pens went to die.
"This," I told the mess, "is how you get killed."
In a fight, seconds matter. In a fight, hands shake. In a fight, you don't want to be the idiot fishing around your coat for the right stick of dynamite while a robot the size of a van sprints at you.
I needed a system.
The idea had been nudging me for months, showing up on the edges of other diagrams: embed the model in the object. Not a scroll that burns away. A tool that helps. The Tome was permanent—but slow. Scrolls were fast—but dumb. I needed something in the middle: a clever assistant.
A satchel. Not a magical bag with impossible space—no shortcuts. Just a bag that listened.
I sketched circles and lines across the inside flap: twenty storage nodes, each a tiny containment loop, each labeled with a simple glyph set. Lines from nodes converged to a recognition matrix: a listening ear drawn in blood and intention.
Then I pricked my finger and got to work.
Prototype A looked like a toddler had gotten into a jar of paint. The runes bled together; my lines wobbled. I slotted ten scrolls, closed the flap, and whispered: "Barrier."
The satchel rustled like a suspicious cat—then spat out three scrolls at once. They bounced across the floor in different directions. One unrolled itself and flashed a glow orb in my face on the way down.
"Not ideal," I said through spots.
Back to the desk. I cleaned the flap, re-inked the nodes with steadier lines, tightened the recognition patterns. A lot of artifact creation wasn't about new ideas; it was about neat handwriting.
Prototype B was pickier. "Fire Bolt," I said, and the bag dropped a scroll into my lap. Five seconds later.
"In a fight," I told it, "five seconds is 'wake up in a hospital' territory."
I added a binding sub-model to the matrix—something like a name tag that told the satchel who to listen to, and a tighter trigger so it wouldn't activate when a classmate said "barrier" answering a physics question. I rewired the node lines so that each slot had a stronger handshake with its command word. Then I changed the command words themselves.
"Barrier" was too common. "Fire Bolt" sounded too much like "fire." I didn't need a bag that emptied itself because someone yelled in the hallway. I picked words that weren't likely to come up by accident:
"Aegis," for the shield. "Ignite," for the bolt. "Gale," for the push. "Bind," for the beam. "Curtain," for the smoke. "Lantern," for light. "Mend," for healing. "Feather," for Light Body. "Lift," for Levitation. "Burst," for the flashbang—though using that one verbally made me sweat.
Prototype C got it right. I stood in the room, heart thumping, and said, "Curtain."
The satchel rustled once and slid a single scroll into my hand between heartbeat and blink. I flicked it open on reflex; thick smoke poured into the room. I yelped and dove for the window, shoving it up to keep the alarm from screaming. Outside, a cool draft grabbed the plume and dragged it into the night.
"Okay," I coughed, watering eyes stinging. "Maybe testing that one indoors is dumb."
I waved the air clear and grinned anyway. It worked.
The abandoned lot behind the orphanage was where things that weren't supposed to happen happened. The chain-link fence rattled in the wind like it had been learning to talk. Broken concrete turned puddles into maps of imaginary countries. If you squinted, you could pretend the rusted pipe jutting from the ground was a robot's knee.
I strapped the satchel across my torso, twenty scrolls slotted in their nodes, and bounced on my toes.
"Feather." The bag kissed my palm with a thin slip of paper. I pressed it; lightness slid over me like a new coat. My steps sharpened. The world leaned in.
"Lantern." Glow Orb flared above my hand, obedient and bright.
"Aegis." The Barrier scroll slapped my fingers; the shield blossomed, clear and curved, and the old pipe rattled when I shoved a Repulsion into it and the shock came back.
"Gale." The Repulsion scroll arrived like it had always belonged in my hand. I popped it. Air punched forward. The chain-link fence chattered in satisfaction.
"Ignite." A lance of heat seared across the lot. The rusted pipe hissed and cracked.
I laughed—a loose, ridiculous sound that felt like a knot coming undone. I wasn't scrambling. I wasn't fumbling. The satchel listened and delivered. A word, a tool, a result.
There were limits. Twenty scrolls made the bag heavy; the strap bit into my shoulder in a way I'd feel tomorrow. The armhole edge snagged when I turned too fast—fixable with a better buckle. And the bag had to be meticulously reloaded after use, each scroll slotted in the right node, or I'd tell it "Bind" and it would hand me a bandage.
But compared to the chaos of grabbing random tubes in a panic? This was civilization.
I stood breathing hard in the cooling night, the city humming beyond the fence, and felt something I didn't usually allow myself this close to an exam: pride.
I had built a helper out of lines and listening.
Midoriya dragged himself into class the next morning looking, somehow, worse. His notebook was back to scribbling, though—the mutter low, relentless. His hands shook, but he wrote through it.
He caught me watching and gave an embarrassed smile. "Don't—uh—copy my sleep schedule."
"Don't copy mine," I said. "Unless you want to dream about ink arguing with leather."
He blinked, then laughed. The sound was frayed at the edges, but it was real.
We sat together at lunch, two boys with notebooks and different kinds of bruises. I told him a sanitized version of the satchel—"trying to organize my, uh, gear"—and he nodded like he understood more than I was saying. He didn't say what he was doing. I didn't ask. But every time he limped away from a table, I felt a twist of gratitude as mean as it was honest: my path didn't require destroying my body to rebuild it stronger. It required sharpening my mind until it could cut.
Bakugo glared at us once from across the room, lips peeled back from his teeth, palms ticking with sparks. I lifted my milk carton in a salute. He spat a word I wouldn't repeat and looked away.
I slid a piece of scrap paper back into my pocket and tried not to smile.
The satchel needed a name. I wrote AF-A-001: Command Satchel in the Tome and felt the letters settle into place like a weight in a good foundation.
I diagrammed its guts cleanly for the first time—the way the recognition matrix branched to twenty nodes; the way each node fed a tiny storage loop; the way the loop's release rune sat just-so under the flap seam, a spot where my fingers would naturally brush. I added a quiet "lock" sub-model so the bag wouldn't feed a scroll to a stranger shouting my command words. The binding to my voice was imperfect, but good enough that a classmate couldn't prank me into vomiting Fire Bolts across the cafeteria.
Then I printed the basics in a neat block that would still make sense if I was gasping for breath in a stairwell:
Capacity: 20 pre-charged scrolls.
Command retrieval: sub-second (aimed).
Power draw: negligible (passive listen), moderate (if rebind).
Reload: manual, slot by slot.
Failure modes: multiple-scroll vomiting (fixed), slow retrieval (fixed), false trigger (mitigated with rare command words).
Use: keep dominant-hand side clear; practice commands under stress.
I practiced. In the lot, in the room, whispering into my pillow so the house mother wouldn't decide to confiscate my "dangerous manga props." I practiced until the words and the motions braided together and the bag was part of my outline.
When I finally sat down and let the satchel rest against the chair, humming faintly with stored magic like a cat purring in its sleep, the tick in my head relaxed. Six months wasn't long. But it wasn't nothing.
Midoriya was out there somewhere, running until his lungs became bellows and his muscles learned a new language. I was here, drawing circles until the leather understood "Lantern" and "Gale" like they were music.
Different roads. Same mountain.
I added one last line to the Tome:
Six months. Arsenal complete. Tools online.
I closed the book and let my hand rest on the cover. The scar was quiet. The room was dim. Outside, the city shuffled its cards and kept dealing nights like it had an endless deck.
"UA," I said into the quiet. "I'll be ready."
The satchel didn't answer. It didn't need to. It would listen when it mattered.