The observation room was colder than it needed to be and bright enough to make coffee nervous. Banks of monitors wrapped the far wall in a curve; each screen tiled into smaller panes, each pane a street, an alley, a roofline from one of the Battle Centers. Lines of numbers crawled along a central dashboard: Villain Points climbing in jagged bursts, a second column of Rescue Events quietly ticking when proctors pressed their hidden clickers.
Principal Nezu sat at the hub like a conductor at his piano, a porcelain teacup dwarfed in his paw, steam imprinting a small cloud into the air. His ears twitched fractionally when a bot exploded in Battle Center A; his eyes didn't leave the columns. He was smiling in the way of someone who found a good puzzle and a better reason to solve it.
Across from him, a lean, sunken-cheeked man in an oversized yellow puffer jacket tried to make himself smaller than his shadow. All Might—it was curious how even the name made the air sit up straighter—rested his knuckles against the counter's edge and watched the screens with a focus so intense it came off as stillness.
Around them, faculty rotated to the front in turns. Snipe's hat brim kept bumping a camera boom; Cementoss folded and unfolded his arms with the patience of a building waiting to be poured. Midnight leaned her hip against a console like it owed her rent and tapped a nail against the laminate to the tempo of distant artillery.
"Feed is stable," said a tech at the back, not looking away from her keyboard. "Point aggregation is updating in real time from all fields. Rescue adjudication—three-second lag on proctor flags."
Nezu's whiskers twitched. "Excellent. Let's meet our hopefuls."
On one wall, a bold A flared in the corner of several panes; the cameras cut from street to street until a familiar shock of ash-blond hair and a streak of smoke snapped into focus. Katsuki Bakugo didn't so much enter the frame as turn it into a weapon. He vaulted a plastered curb, palms already sparking, and detonated himself forward like a self-propelled grenade. The 2-pointer in front of him didn't make it to surprise. The explosion bloomed, concrete dust flowered, the bot's head sailed a clean arc into an awning that tried and failed to catch it.
"Efficient," Snipe drawled. He tipped his head to follow Bakugo as the boy corkscrewed midair and blasted down into a second target with bored precision. "Target acquisition is instinctual. No wasted motion."
Midnight smirked. "Egomaniac, but he dances."
Cementoss's mouth thinned. "No regard for collateral. He cracked two storefronts with that last one."
Nezu sipped. "He cracks things. It is what he does. We will help him learn when not to. If he allows it." On another screen, Bakugo laughed like a challenge and incinerated a three-pointer's knee. The Villain Points next to his name leapt in satisfying little increments. The Rescue column beside it remained zero.
"Overconfidence," Snipe added, not unkindly. "Useful till it isn't."
Nezu's teacup clinked when he set it down. "And when it ceases to be useful is precisely why we teach."
A different set of panes flicked into focus: BATTLE CENTER B. An examinee with a bob of chestnut hair—Ochako Uraraka—darted into frame, waving frantically to another student. The camera widened and caught a boy with green hair half-hidden by nerves and velocity. Midoriya Izuku didn't look like much to the untrained eye. To an eye that had been trained and then had trained others, he looked like a vector pointed toward a decision.
All Might's fingers curled against the console, as if to keep them from answering a question out loud. He said nothing. His eyes were bright in a face that didn't know how to be thin and still be him.
Midoriya skidded into an alley and yanked a fellow examinee out of a robot's lazy swing by the collar. The proctor in that field pressed a clicker with a tiny, satisfied nod. Rescue +1 ticked up beside his name. Izuku didn't look at the camera. He muttered at the air like it had formulas in it and sprinted toward a side street where there were too many noises and not enough people moving away from them.
"Low villain points," Midnight noted, skimming the feed on the left where numbers moved like stocks in a bad week. "High situational awareness. He keeps noticing where others will be in five seconds instead of where they are now."
"Forward-looking," Cementoss murmured. "I like him."
All Might exhaled, a sound so soft it might have been a chair settling. "He looks where it hurts to look."
"Mm," Nezu said. "And he goes there."
Other screens bore other stories. A frost-user in Battle Center C locked a lane into a slick, clever corridor and turned a messy scrum into a neat queue of immobilized targets. An examinee with engine calves—Tenya Iida—executed a surgical rescue of a pair who were about to be bracketed by two one-pointers; his Rescue column thumbed over, precise. In D, a lanky boy with a scarf and a slouch adapted a hero showboating run into an efficient sweep; the proctor flag caught him bracing a child as he lowered her from a window. The Villain column cared only for bots; the Rescue column remembered faces.
Nezu's smile widened by half its width and none of its warmth. "We are, as ever, measuring more than explosions."
"Explosions are easier to count," the tech at the back muttered, fingers stuttering a correction across three screens.
"And therefore," Nezu said, "less interesting."
A new pane shifted to BATTLE CENTER E. It was a less dramatic feed—at first. No one skied from rooftop to rooftop here. A lean boy with a satchel laid low against his ribs moved like a commuter who had just decided to reroute a train schedule. Harry Potter did not run. He placed himself a step to the side of disaster and made the next step obvious to other people.
"Who's that?" Midnight asked, tipping forward despite herself.
"Harry Potter," Cementoss read from a tablet, mildly bemused. "Transfer orphanage in Musutafu 4th Ward. Declared quirkless on school registry."
"Declared," Snipe said, leaving the remainder to be filled by the room and by the footage where Harry's hand flicked and a smoke veil rolled, thick and sudden, across a choke point. The robots balked; three examinees slipped left, one fumbled right, and Harry pointed with two fingers and his voice in a tone that even cameras recognized as command. The fumbler corrected. No one got crushed.
"He's triaging," Midnight said. "Not chasing points. Cover here, lift there—" She broke off as Harry slid a curved shimmer into existence just ahead of a falling restaurant sign; the metal thunked into the shield like a rude guest and scraped off. Harry shoved the barrier with his forearm to angle the impact into a flowerbed. "—that was pretty."
Nezu's eyes clicked toward the dashboard. Harry's Villain Points ticked up by ones and rarely; his Rescue column charted a steady, unshowy climb. Numbers like stairs, not fireworks.
"All Might?" Nezu asked mildly, not looking at him.
The hulking coat tightened at the shoulders, the man inside it smaller than the space he took up. "A mind for tools," All Might said, voice low enough not to startle the techs. "A hero who builds."
"Indeed," Nezu said, pleased. "And building is a verb."
Snipe pointed at the screen where Harry sidestepped a 2-pointer's lunge with the smallest possible movement, froze its knee with a clean line of something that was neither rope nor ice, and shouted at the boy he'd shielded, "Take it!" The boy did, pipes crashing against joint, shock giving way to a howl of success.
"Force multiplier," Snipe said. "Smart."
"He's also… hm." Midnight squinted. "He gave that one away."
"Leadership," Cementoss said, deadpan. "Not always popular with the self."
A tremor moved through the building—felt more than heard. Half the screens juddered as cameras tried to compensate for a frequency that wasn't for them. The tech at the back looked up with stale dread.
"Zero-pointer phase," she announced. "All fields."
"Here comes the lesson," Nezu sang, and lifted his cup.
The big ones hove into view in each arena like gods that had been badly translated. The monitor over BATTLE CENTER B caught the moment a slab broke free above Ochako Uraraka; the pinned girl's mouth rounded; Izuku Midoriya stopped moving away from the danger and turned hard into it.
All Might—what there was of him—leaned without seeming to, a thing you noticed only because the room tilted to accommodate it. No one commented. Some moments had to be allowed their oxygen.
Izuku's sprint looked ungainly until it didn't. For a handful of frames, the fragile boy became a line given volume. He launched. He hit the zero-pointer in the face with his entire future. The monitor had the good grace to crackle at the moment of impact as if a studio audience had applauded. The robot's head re-evaluated its relationship with its body; gravity filed a lawsuit; the giant listed and went down.
"Zero points," the tech said reflexively.
Nezu's eyes didn't leave the boy falling through the air with a look dawning on him like he had not fully considered the consequences of what he had just asked of his body. "And yet," he said.
The Rescue flag in that field hammered like a telegraph: Ochako freed; collateral minimized by the simple fact of where Izuku chose to aim. The judge in Nezu's head placed a quiet hand on the side of the scale labeled intent and risk taken for another. Numbers obeyed physics. Values obeyed something older.
All Might's mouth twitched—not up, not down, a private geography. He did not take his eyes off the boy even as the pane shifted to replay the moment from three angles. He did not need three.
"Back to E," Nezu said softly.
Harry had already engendered a reputation in the observation room for being where the camera didn't expect him to be. He flipped a slab with an economy that made Cementoss grunt in appreciation, shielded debris with a tilt of his arm that would have made a swordsman jealous, and got people moving in the right direction with two-syllable orders and a voice that belonged to emergencies.
"Resource management," the tech said, surprised into professional praise as she pulled up his artifact overlay in the HUD. "He's got some kind of speech-activated delivery system. Preloaded. He's down to single digits."
Nezu's eyes ticked toward the satchel. "A bag that listens. Delightful."
In the room, no one said the word quirk. The paper trail said quirkless; the footage said not ordinary. UA's halls had room for the distance between those descriptions. So did Nezu's curiosity.
On another pane, Bakugo detonated himself up a wall and ran a three-pointer's face along a cornice like a cheese grater. His Villain Points bloomed in spikes. Midnight's eyebrow climbed. "That boy is going to need a handler and a hug."
"Probably in that order," Snipe agreed.
"E," Nezu reminded, voice softened by amusement.
The E feeds split: one camera locked itself onto a side street where Harry shoved smoke one way and examinees another; another tracked him sliding a shield under falling signage like a mother's hand under a toddler's head; a third, tighter camera caught him stepping into an alley that most of the field had had the sense to avoid. The zero-pointer's shadow crawled across the mouth like an eclipse.
"Don't go in there," Midnight breathed. "You sweet idiot."
He went in there.
"Flagging," the tech said, thumb hovering over an icon that would bookmark the feed for later review regardless of score. Her job wasn't to care. She did anyway, just enough to count.
Harry planted a shield like a wedge where ornamentation was trying to become shrapnel. He levered a limestone cornice off a girl's leg with intent so focused it looked like a physical shape. He used something faint and steady and domestic to make the blood on her shin change its mind. He did everything a good rescue manual told you to do in a space where the manual had never expected a building to be allowed to behave like a tantrum.
"Textbook," Cementoss said softly.
"Adaptive," Snipe corrected, a little awe sneaking in.
The satchel overlay went from 2 to 1 to 0. The jacket spares, tracked on a secondary column the tech had dialed up for Nezu's amusement, flicked to spent. The kid reached for a scroll that wasn't there and met absence like a wall. He tried something without a carrier, raw will shaping air, and it failed in the way things fail when you already know how they will fail and your body cannot obey.
The zero-pointer's foot posed over the alley mouth. Fairy tales had made a lot of hay out of shadows that looked like that.
The room went quieter than sound.
Harry did not run. Perhaps could not; the folly and the nobility were indistinguishable at this resolution. He said something to the girl—Nezu could almost read the shape of run on his lips—and lifted his hand with the stubbornness of someone who had spent three years building a world where the answer to most problems was design a better one.
"Don't," All Might said, not at the boy.
A nervous laugh from the tech died at its own birth. "I didn't—"
"Not you," All Might said, and did not explain himself.
On the monitor, a thin red line lit under Harry's skin where a scar lived. It flared, not like light, but like heat behind glass. His pupils were wrong and then right again and then wrong, the iris rimmed the color of someone's bad idea. Audio rode the alley like a bad mic—hiss, grit, the low bass of approaching machinery—but there was a second sound threaded through, pitched to make bodies remember snakes they had never met.
Hissing phonetics. Not language the mics could parse into text, but the outline of language. Consonants that curled. Syllables that didn't care for orthography.
The tearing wasn't a blast. UA's cameras had seen explosions and called them by their names. This was a shearing.
"Jesus," Snipe said mildly, which meant I cannot classify this.
The zero-pointer's ankle assembly peeled. Metal fought it the way food fights teeth. The leg separated with a scream that made techs rub their own kneecaps as if to check they existed. The giant's foot came down half on, half off, and gravity punished it. Another hiss; a second rip; armor lifted like a lid after a kitchen mistake. Hydraulics spattered like arterial spray.
"That wasn't a standard quirk," Snipe said, words crisp with a marksman's certainty.
"Sounded wrong," Midnight said, equally precise. "Felt wrong. Like oil in a glass of water."
All Might's jaw clenched. He didn't look at Nezu. He didn't look away.
Nezu's smile did not leave, but it adjusted. He lifted one paw and made a circling gesture at the tech. "Flag it."
"Flagged," she said, already tagging the clip with ANOMALOUS PHENOMENOLOGY — FIELD E — TIME 13:22 and threading it to a subfolder in the admissions stack: Further Review — Private.
On-screen, the girl got out from under the lie the building had told and scrambled to her feet. She stared at Harry with the two equal and opposite reactions of gratitude and fear and then let fear apologize to gratitude by leaving. Harry didn't watch her go; he was busy trying to stand upright in a world where his legs had questions. The red behind his scar dimmed. The hiss vanished like a rumor hearing its name called.
The horn that ended the exam wound up across all fields like a siren remembering it had authority. One by one, robots froze mid-motion and sank into obedient stillness. The point columns halted; the Rescue tally added two last clicks and sighed. A murmur ran around the observation room that wasn't speech and wasn't relief but was adjacent to both.
"Freeze totals," the tech said, tapping a final command. The dashboard obeyed. Names stacked in columns; numbers settled into ranks the way pebbles settle in the palm when you stop moving your hand.
"Let's see," Nezu said, and spun his chair with a flourish he had practiced alone when people thought he slept.
Katsuki Bakugo sat near the peak of Villain Points—not the highest, surprisingly, but close, a sawtooth skyline of destruction. His Rescue column was a thin, elegant zero.
Ochako Uraraka's villain line looked modest; her Rescue line had a sudden, happy cliff from the zero-pointer event. Tenya Iida's plot was tidy: moderate villain, consistent rescues, the graph of someone who had read the assignment and enjoyed it. On the second panel, the green-haired boy's column looked confused until the Rescue figure landed beside it and made sense of it all by being enormous.
Midoriya Izuku: Low villain. Massive rescue. The note the tech had appended auto-populated: Decisive intervention under extreme risk.
Nezu tapped the edge of his cup with one claw. "Ah."
He pivoted to the E feeds. Harry's row was what Nezu had suspected: modest Villain, a Rescue column that had crept up like ivy all exam long. To the right of his name, the tech's red flag icon blinked patiently.
"Harry Potter," Cementoss read again, slower this time, as if names tasted different once you knew what people did to deserve them. "High support actions. Artifact-assisted delivery. Excellent triage."
"Plus a big question mark," Midnight said, glancing at Nezu. "The kind with teeth."
Snipe pulled his hat a fraction lower. "If I were on street duty and saw that, I'd call it in and then count my squad twice."
"He chose to save," All Might said, quiet enough that the techs didn't try to decide whether they were meant to hear him. "He did not choose the… method. But he chose to save."
Nezu's ears twitched. He turned that sentence over like a puzzle piece and placed it in his collection of possible truths. "Both halves can be true," he said. "And therefore both halves require our attention."
He padded two small notes into a waiting document with a stylus taller than his wrist. The first was simple: Admission Recommendations: candidates demonstrating outstanding rescue impact. Midoriya Izuku's name went into that line with a neat flick, as did Uraraka's, Iida's, and a handful of others who had quietly, competently kept people from being hurt when they had not needed to be. Harry's name paused at the edge of the line like a bird considering whether to hop to a closer branch.
Nezu hopped it. He drew a small star, then crossed it out to stop himself from being twee.
The second note was longer. Private Follow-up: Candidate Harry Potter. Sub-bullets sprouted: Health & Quirk Screening (he crossed out quirk and wrote abilities, because the forms should be flexible enough to hold what the world presented), Artifact Audit (the satchel fascinated him; he wanted to see it without the pressure of falling signage), Counseling Touchpoint (not punitive; a conversation with someone who could talk to a boy about choosing good ways to do good things when other ways shouted louder).
Midnight leaned down to read upside-down. "You'll have him in your garden, then," she said, amused and approving.
Nezu's smile returned to full wattage. "Heroes do not grow by accident," he said. "Some require staking. Some require shade. Some… require careful gardening."
"He'll need guardrails," Snipe said. "The kind you don't notice until you need them."
All Might's hands unfurled on the edge of the console, as if something unclenched inside his chest. "Guidance may be what he needs," he said. It sounded like a vow he was quietly making to nobody and to everyone, and perhaps to himself.
On the far wall, the panes cycled, obedient and oblivious. In one, Bakugo walked off the field like he'd been insulted by gravity. In another, Iida was already organizing a line, because lines were his preferred ecosystem. In a third, Ochako sat on a curb with her face in her hands, laughing like someone who had almost cried, a proctor kneeling in front of her with water and a proud look.
And on two adjacent screens, without meaning to and without the editor's permission, the observation room held a diptych: on the left, Midoriya mid-air at the moment of impact, a line given flesh and intent; on the right, Harry half-silhouetted in a dusted alley, an empty satchel at his side, his hand just lowered from a magic that did not belong to this room.
Nezu lifted his cup in a small toast to the images.
"To different kinds of bravery," he said.
He drank to that, then to the paperwork already blooming in the wake of it, and to the notion that teachers were gardeners who sometimes had to coax weeds into wheat and sometimes had to admit that a garden with only one kind of plant was not a garden at all.
"All right," he said, clapping his paws once, bright. "Let us turn numbers into futures."
The tech scratched her nose to hide a grin and rolled her chair deeper into the console. Snipe adjusted his hat and reached for a pen. Midnight flicked her hair over her shoulder like punctuation. Cementoss nodded as if to a foundation he trusted.
All Might kept his eyes on the screens for another beat, then straightened his coat as if it could measure a wish. He said nothing. He didn't need to. The room had heard him.
Outside, the fields were already resetting for the next batch of hopefuls. Inside, the staff of UA began, as they always did, the work after the work.