The orphanage rooftop was usually loud with life—pigeons, traffic, the clatter from the market street two blocks over—but at sunrise the city held its breath. A thin line of gold slipped between buildings, and for a few quiet minutes Harry had the concrete, the sky, and the battered folding table to himself.
He set his satchel down, laid out a stubby pencil and his research log, and wrote at the top of a fresh page:
One week until internships.Deliverable: one reliable summon.
He'd slept badly. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Iida's face in the corridor—brave voice, hands shaking—and heard the way he'd said Stain. Harry had done the same loop in his head a dozen times: cards that worked in an arena might not matter on a real street with real knives.
Cards were tactics.Summons could be strategy.
He underlined strategy, then turned the page and sketched three circles linked by arrows.
Form Model — the body: shape, joints, gait.Anchor Model — how it stays: tied to his magic, fed from storage.Behavior Thread — what it does: short verbs, not wishes.
Not teleportation. Not calling a thing from somewhere else. Creation, anchored by intent and sustained by power. He'd seen Draco Malfoy conjure a snake as a second-year in that other life's memory—so the skeleton of the spell couldn't be impossibly advanced. The hard part would be keeping it there.
He boxed a fourth line under the others:
Cost — constant drain. Multiple summons multiply drain.
"Start small," he muttered to the city. "Start with something I can talk to."
He turned a loose paving stone over, dragged chalk in a neat circle, and marked three short sigils at cardinal points—form, anchor, behavior. The marks were simple—triangles and curls that meant more in his head than they looked. He took a breath, let his focus find a shape, and held onto it.
"Snake," he whispered, not because the system needed a word but because he liked the way it focused him. He pictured the coil: the weight of scales, the hinge of a jaw, the glass-bead black of the eyes. He tapped the ring against his thumb to time the magic's flow and pushed.
The circle breathed out a curl of smoke and a wet slap of sound, and then there was nothing but a bad smell.
"Too little," he said, and adjusted the anchor—widened it, like putting a bigger hook into a bigger wall. Second try.
The hiss of magic pressed his ears. A line drew itself up out of nowhere and put on scales too quickly, like a painting speeding to catch up with itself. The snake unrolled, lifted its head, opened its mouth—and blurred at the edges, faded, and fell apart into smoke and dust. Ten seconds. Maybe less.
Harry pinched the bridge of his nose, breathed out, and made two changes: more feed into the anchor; behavior thread set to stay instead of hunt. He drew the circle again, steadier now, and pushed.
This time the scales decided to exist. A pale, lean-bodied snake lifted its head and tasted the air. It turned toward him, eyes glossy.
"Can you hear me?" Harry said without meaning to in anything human. The words came out a little wrong. He tried a different ladder for the same thought, a language with fewer edges and more throat. "Ssspeak to me. Are you… whole?"
The snake's tongue flicked. Hungry, it said in a little rain of hisses that didn't need a mouth to carry them, and Harry felt the drain like light leaving a room. The anchor held—barely. Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. Then the creature softened and was gone, leaving the chalk circle scuffed and his heart going too fast.
He erased the circle with his sleeve and wrote:
Summon: Snake, v0.3 — anchor stable at low complexity.Duration ~30–60s. Drain steep, spikes when behavior thread "hunt" engages.Parseltongue comm possible; low-level instinct easy to seed.
When the city warmed up and the matron started her first sweep of the building with a mug of tea in hand, Harry packed the chalk and the log and the snake-shaped hole in his chest and went downstairs to wash the dust off his hands. The day had to be shared with school.
The next morning, the puzzle changed shape for an hour. Midnight strode into Class 1-A in a fitted suit like she'd come from the kind of board meeting that made CEOs weep, slapped a stack of name placards on the front desk, and pushed up her glasses with a smirk.
"Hero names," she said, and twenty heads lifted. "The public will know you by these. If you don't pick, they'll pick for you. You won't like what they pick. Try not to make me beg the Commission to approve something that violates a noise ordinance."
The room's mood swung toward light. Kaminari started whispering Chargebolt at Sero like he was inventing fire. Kirishima rehearsed "Red Riot" under his breath, proud already. Ochako fiddled with a pen clip and asked Midoriya what he thought he would choose. He stared at the blank placard as if it was a test he'd studied for and forgotten the language.
Harry rolled his pencil along his desk until it clicked into his palm. He didn't overthink it. He had been a lot of things in two lifetimes and one orphanage. Only one fit neatly.
When Midnight pointed to him, he held up his placard.
THE WIZARD
A few chuckles. A few nods. Midnight's mouth did the pleased-teacher thing she hid behind sarcasm. "On brand. Classic. Approve."
Iida's turn came, and the room softened. He held his board with both hands the way he held everything that mattered to him and said, firmly, "Ingenium." No flourish. An inheritance wrapped in a single word.
Bakugo tried "King Explosion—" and Midnight stamped an Absolutely Not across it so fast the ink might have smoked.
By the time the bell ended the hour, names hung around their necks like little windows into the people wearing them. Harry tucked his placard into his satchel, next to the research log, and let the rest of the day be ordinary where it would.
By dusk, he was back on the roof.
Wolves next. He drew the Form Model by feel rather than detail: digitigrade weight, a spine built for speed, ears that tracked, a mouth that didn't need to kill to be useful. The Behavior Thread he kept simple: guard, harry, heel. He let hunt wait for another week when he'd have more to give it.
The first cast made a smear of light that ran out of shape at the shoulders and left a wet nose pressed to his knee for the length of a single breath before it blinked away. The second had legs but no patience. It tried to sprint and crashed out of existence like a bad idea hitting a wall.
He built the anchor wider, sank it a little into the rooftop's concrete, tied it through to his ring so the feed didn't wobble under motion, and—third time—felt the creature choose to be.
It unrolled out of the circle like a shadow folding itself upright. Its fur wasn't fur so much as a fine mist stitched with light, grey with a darker ridge line. Its eyes were the pale color of old wood ash. It blinked once, sneezed like a puppy, and wagged absolutely nothing because it wasn't sure it had a tail.
Harry's drained breath came back as laughter he didn't have to explain to anyone. He kept his voice even. "Heel."
It padded to his side and stood there, head at his hip, listening. He took three steps. It took three. He pointed to the chimney stack. "Guard." It trotted to the spot, set its paws square, and looked very pleased to be vert.
Two minutes. Maybe a little more. Then the edges of it frayed and the anchor went light and it shook itself out like dust in sunshine and was gone.
Harry wrote:
Summon: Wolf, v0.2 — stable ~2–3 min. Drain heavy but less spiky than snake.Behavior Thread (heel/guard/harry) workable.Texture: vapor-fur, low mass. Not for grappling. Distract/harry best use.
He tried to push for a second wolf and felt the drain clamp down in the back of his skull like a vise. Two would be possible later. Not this week.
He left the rooftop smiling anyway.
The troll was arrogant with its own idea of itself before he started, which was his first mistake. He didn't try for flesh. He tried for mass and endurance that fit his current reach and drew the Form Model with blunt lines: a torso like a barrel, legs like stumps, arms made for shoving walls and holding.
He cast once and earned a headache, a smell like hot stone, and a shape that managed a knee before the rest refused to arrive. He cast again with a wider anchor and watched a blocky shoulder hump up out of the rooftop like a mis-tuned elevator and sink back into it with a groan that made him wince.
He shoved the anchor into the concrete itself, borrowed from his transfiguration notes just enough to stiffen the surface under the circle, and tried a third time with the behavior thread set to stand.
For three seconds he had a thing that looked like a statue someone had forgotten to carve a face onto. Then his vision narrowed at the edges and his knees felt empty and the thing obligingly stopped being because it was either that or he would.
He sat down hard with his back against the stairwell door and let the stupid feeling pass, the cold sweat creep and go. When his hands stopped shaking he wrote without arguing:
Summon: Troll, v0.1 — not viable at present. Anchor wants ground. Drain absurd.Note: revisit after artifact reservoir upgrade and transfiguration baseline.
He circled absurd and underlined revisit. Then he made himself walk downstairs and drink water like a sensible human who liked not passing out on roofs.
By midweek he knew two things: he could make a wolf that lasted long enough to matter, and free-casting it in a fight was a good way to put himself on the floor. Cards had solved that problem for almost everything else. They would have to solve it here.
He cleared the table, opened his stack of blanks, and drew the circle on card instead of concrete. The scale felt wrong at first—too small for a whole creature's worth of shape—but the ring hummed yes when he tested the anchor's line through it. He nested the three models together in a tighter weave than he'd liked to do before and added a dampener rune at the edge—his old friend from the remote-trigger project—to keep the feedback from biting his hand.
The first prototype curled when he kissed magic into it and went black at the corners, the ink burning backwards through the paper like frost. It stiffened and snapped itself in two. Harry stared at the halves, sighed, and wrote bad.
Second prototype held for three seconds and then disintegrated into grey fluff that left his fingers grimy.
Third through fifth taught him what not to cram too close to what.
He adjusted the anchor to prefer the ring's feed instead of his blood. He linked the behavior thread to a short two-note whistle in case his voice ever went useless. He separated the form lines into layers like a flip-book. Sixth prototype.
He breathed into the circle; it breathed back.
The wolf arrived so gracefully the little hairs on his arms stood up. It shook itself once, the paper under Harry's fingers stayed whole, and the drain climbed and held steady instead of spiking.
He walked the wolf back and forth across the rooftop, then down the stairs and into the narrow hall, wincing at how real its paws sounded on the linoleum. It snagged on corners the way a dog would.
Five minutes and change before the edges wore thin. When it went, it went clean—no collapse, no mess, just a sigh of light.
Harry put his forehead down on his forearm and let himself grin into his sleeve.
Later, with his hands finally steady, he wrote:
Summon Card: Wolf, SC-WOLF-01 — stable ~5 minutes or until dismissed/destroyed.Drain moderate while active; negligible on deploy thanks to card precharge.Behavior Thread via keywords & whistle cue.Note: pair with Bind/Rope for close-control; best roles = distract, harry, screen.
He slept like a person that night.
He didn't forget snakes. He drew a smaller circle, wrote stay in the behavior line, and tried a card version with only the anchor bulked up. The first snake came out too thin and snapped certain when the anchor hiccuped. The second stayed, tongue flicking, coiled around the table leg and tasting every draft like it was news.
"Hungry?" he asked without thinking.
You are thin, it told him in a curious hiss, as if it had been checking the pantry and found it wanting. Its head tilted. You smell like old fire.
"I've been busy," he said aloud, and it didn't care what words he used. The drain ticked up. He dismissed it with a soft whistle. It unraveled obediently.
He wrote:
Summon Card: Snake, SC-SNAKE-01 — cheap, very short duration unless stationary.Utility: scouting, intimidation, comm (parseltongue).Warning: drain spikes with aggressive thread.
On the fourth day he tried a different path: a spark wrapped in shape. Not a fire elemental proper—he could feel how far that was just from here—but an ember with an attitude. He mixed a sliver of his Ignite model into the anchor and tried to draw a plan for heat that didn't eat what it wore.
The first attempt smoked like a kitchen mistake. The second popped like a blown fuse and left a char mark he'd need to apologize to the matron about. He made a note to bring a tile next time and wrote off Ember Wisp for when he had more hours and a fire extinguisher.
By the fifth morning, the routine made a shape: rooftop before sunrise, class, sketching hero names on corkboard while Midnight used a laser pointer on mistakes, map-reading at lunch to keep his head from drifting, cardwork after dinner, then sleep so deep he missed his own alarms. He didn't tell anyone what he was making. Not because he didn't trust them. Because he didn't trust the week.
The wolf became reliable enough that he started measuring failures by how quietly they failed. He practiced commands without words, with the whistle, with touch. He taught it to hold a line while he cast a Shield, to circle left when he flicked his ring hand, to break off when he snapped. He learned how many steps he could take before his focus needed a check-in. He learned where standing still made the drain worse and where walking eased it.
He tried a two-wolf deploy exactly once. His knees told him "no" in a voice that sounded annoyingly like Aizawa's.
He tried stitching a Bind thread directly into the wolf's Behavior so it would quick-snap an enemy's ankle-line on contact. The card held, barely, and the wolf behaved like a helpful friend.
Late that afternoon he walked the wolf along the stairwell again and nearly ran into the matron halfway up. She squinted at the vapor-fur, blinked once at Harry, and said, perfectly calm, "No muddy paws inside," before stepping past. The wolf looked at him. He looked at the wolf. They both pretended it counted as permission.
He made a small adjustment to the Behavior Thread that night:
house — heels and holds still while inside.
It obeyed, and something in his chest unclenched.
On the sixth day, after an hour of card failures for a second kind of summon he refused to call a troll yet, Harry accepted reality and wrote himself a plan he could bring into a fight:
SC-WOLF-01 × 3 (precharged) — deployed in sequence, not simultaneous.
SC-SNAKE-01 × 2 — scout and scare tools, not fighters.
Standard kit (Aegis, Bind, Gale, Flashbang, Rope, Mend-S/M, Ignite, Slippery, Speed Burst).
Ring remote triggers functional.
Map kept for situational awareness; Comm for coordination.
He held the three wolf cards and felt the precharge hum like contained weather.
"Alright," he told the empty room. "Pack tactics."
He added one more line at the bottom of the page:
Artifact goal: familiar crest/bracelet to feed summons without card burn.Need: dedicated reservoir (M-STORE) integration + pulse regulator.
He didn't have time to make it this week. It went on the list for later, under transfiguration notes that would someday let him lift a wall in the time it took a blade to drop.
The seventh morning tasted almost like relief. He woke before the alarm. He took the cards to the roof and triggered one wolf, then the next five minutes later, then the third five minutes after that, walking figure-eight patterns until he knew exactly how long his breath would hold steady under the weight of all three doing what he asked, one at a time, without the room in his head going grey.
He left the roof to the pigeons and the city to its own plans and walked to U.A. lighter than he'd felt since the medal cooled.
Midnight spent the afternoon giving them a crash course on agency offers—how to read them, how not to impress the wrong kind of pro, how to decline politely without actually using the word decline. Students floated names across their desks like paper boats—Hawks this, Edgeshot that, Gunhead for training toughness, Best Jeanist for people who liked having their posture fixed from the outside in.
Harry looked at the stack of offers in front of him and tried not to think about the ones that wouldn't want what he actually had. He'd figure it out tomorrow. Today was for finishing what he'd promised himself.
He went home by way of the long street under the rail bridge. The trains folded light over his head. The wolf card hummed faint in his sleeve.
On the roof, dusk made the city look like a diagram. He drew one last circle for luck, even though the card in his hand would have been enough. He didn't cast from it. He just liked the way it made the concrete feel like a plan.
He triggered SC-WOLF-01 with a press of his ring and a breath. The wolf took the air politely and settled beside him. He let his hand rest on its not-quite fur. It was cool, like mist that remembered winter.
"Guard," he said, and it stepped forward and took the edge of the roof the way a friend takes the nearer seat on a crowded train.