The Tythonian Ridge was not a name found on any map of Musutafu. It was a designation Shizuka Moriya had bestowed upon a secluded, wooded rise overlooking the Dagobah Municipal Beach Park. While the beach itself was a testament to human consumption—a graveyard of rusted appliances and forgotten dreams that Izuku had spent ten months clearing—the ridge was different. It was wild, overgrown with gnarled pines and thick underbrush, the air tasting of sea salt and damp earth.
It was 6:55 PM when Izuku Midoriya crested the hill. His breath hitched in his throat, not from the climb, but from the sheer, crushing weight of anticipation.
He wore his gym tracksuit, the green fabric rustling softly against the bracken. In his hand, he clutched a fresh notebook, 'Hero Analysis for the Future: Volume 14,' his knuckles white. The events of the day—the Battle Trial, the feeling of One For All flowing like water rather than exploding like a grenade—were still buzzing in his veins. He felt electric. He felt ready.
He found Shizuka in a small clearing where the trees broke to reveal the ocean horizon.
She was not standing in a heroic pose. She was not practising lightsaber forms. She was sitting cross-legged on a flat, moss-covered stone, her eyes closed, her hands resting loosely on her knees.
To anyone else, she looked peaceful. To Izuku, who was learning to see with more than just his eyes, she looked... busy. The air around her wasn't still; it was orbiting her. Leaves that fell from the canopy didn't touch the ground near her; they diverted, sliding around an invisible dome of pressure before settling a foot away.
Izuku swallowed, stepping on a twig. Snap.
Shizuka didn't flinch, but the orbiting sensation stopped instantly. Her silver eyes opened, snapping to him with a focus so sharp it felt like a physical touch.
"You are early," she said, her voice cutting through the ambient noise of the wind. "Seven o'clock was the agreement. It is six-fifty-eight."
"I... I didn't want to keep you waiting, Moriya-san!" Izuku stammered, bowing quickly. "And I wanted to make sure I found the place!"
Shizuka stared at him for a moment longer, then blinked, the intensity vanishing as she seemingly reorganised her thoughts. She stood up, brushing moss from her trousers. Her gaze drifted to a squirrel running up a nearby tree, tracking its movement with absolute fascination for three seconds before snapping back to Izuku.
"Punctuality is good. Eagerness is... dangerous, but useful," she stated, reaching for her belt. She unclipped her lightsaber hilt, not to ignite it, but to fiddle with the emitter switch, clicking it back and forth rapidly. Click-click-click. "Sit."
Izuku blinked. "Sit?"
"The ground. Sit on it."
Izuku looked around. He had expected... well, he wasn't sure. Obstacle courses? heavy lifting? Perhaps lifting rocks with his mind like she had done with the robot? He awkwardly sat on the grass opposite her.
"So, Moriya-san," Izuku started, opening his notebook and uncapping a pen. "I've been thinking about what you said yesterday. About the 'flow'. I managed to use Full Cowling at five per cent by visualising the energy as a current rather than a switch. I was wondering if today we could work on increasing that output? Or maybe mobility? I saw how you moved against Bakugo, that kinetic enhancement—"
"No."
The word was a stone wall. Izuku stopped, his pen hovering over the paper.
"No?"
"We are not doing that," Shizuka said, sitting back down on her rock. She stopped clicking the switch and placed the hilt on her lap, smoothing her hands over her knees. "You are thinking like a builder who wants to construct a skyscraper but has not yet mixed the cement. You have power, Izuku. Too much of it. Your vessel is cracked. If we pour more in, you will break. Not your bones, but your mind."
She leaned forward, her expression deadly serious.
"Today, we begin with Control. Specifically, the discipline of the mind and body connection. Put the notebook away. You cannot learn this with ink."
Izuku hesitated, looking at the blank page. He wanted to write this down. He needed to write this down. But under her gaze, he slowly capped the pen and set the book aside. A small knot of frustration tightened in his chest. He had One For All. He had the strongest Quirk in the world. Surely, physical training was what he needed?
"The Jedi Order was built on three pillars," Shizuka began, her voice taking on that reciting tone she used when quoting texts. "The Force, Knowledge, and Self-Discipline. We are focusing on the third. Without self-mastery, mastery over the Force is impossible. We begin with meditation."
"Meditation?" Izuku asked, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
"Meditation," Shizuka confirmed. "The Council of First Knowledge mandated five sessions a day for Initiates but due to time's sake, I'm going to have you do three sessions a day instead, one in the morning when you wake, one like this that you can do when you want or when I ask it of you in training, and a 3rd for when you are preparing to sleep. It is one of the only ways to achieve inner peace, harmony, and serenity. Three core principles of the Code."
She gestured to him. "Close your eyes. Straighten your spine. Breathe."
Izuku did as he was told. He closed his eyes.
"Now," Shizuka's voice drifted over him. "Clear your mind. Feel the Force around you. Do not grab it. Just... be."
Izuku tried. He really did.
He focused on the blackness behind his eyelids.
Inhale. Exhale.
'I wonder what mom is making for dinner. Did Aizawa-sensei really mean it when he said I have potential? Kacchan looked so angry today. Why does he hate me so much? I need to master twenty percent before the Sports Festival. Three sessions a day? That's hours. When will I study? When will I train my muscles? Is this really helping?' His mind was a cacophony. It was like a room full of televisions all tuned to different static channels. He twitched, his brow furrowing.
The silence on Tythonian Ridge was far from quiet. For Izuku, the world was a cacophony of sensory input. Below, the rhythmic, metallic crashing of waves against the junk-strewn shore of Dagobah Beach acted like a metronome for his anxiety. The wind whistled through the pines, a low, mourning sound that seemed to mock his inability to remain still.
"Your breathing is shallow, Izuku," Shizuka said. She hadn't moved an inch, but her voice felt like it was originating from inside his own head. "You are treating oxygen like a finite resource you must hoard. Let it go. The Force is in the breath."
Izuku squeezed his eyes tighter. "I'm trying, Moriya-san. It's just... there's a lot to think about. The Sports Festival is coming up, and Aizawa-sensei's quirk assessment results... I was eighth. Eighth is good, but it's not top tier. If I don't increase my percentage, if I don't figure out how to use One For All without the 'lag' in my movements, I'll be left behind. I just feel like every second I'm sitting here, I could be doing push-ups, or practicing my footwork, or—"
"Or feeding the chaos," Shizuka interrupted. She opened her eyes, and the silver depths seemed to hold the cooling twilight. "You speak of 'One For All' as a mechanical engine. You want to tune the valves and increase the fuel intake. But the Force is the driver, Izuku. If the driver is panicked, the fastest car in the world will only find the nearest wall."
She stood up, her movements fluid and devoid of the jerky, nervous energy that defined Izuku's every waking moment. She walked toward him, her boots making no sound on the damp grass.
"The Jedi Order did not mandate meditation because they were fond of silence," she explained, pacing a small circle around him. "The Council of First Knowledge—the masters who guarded the ancient wisdom—created a regimen of five sessions a day for a reason. They knew that without self-discipline, the power we wield is a poison. You are an Initiate, Izuku. You are a child in the eyes of the Force. And like a child, you want to run before you can crawl."
Izuku bit his lip, his eyes still closed.
'A child? I've worked harder than anyone to get this power. I cleared a whole beach of trash. I broke my bones to save Uraraka-san. How can she call me a child? He didn't want to feel resentful. He liked Shizuka; she was his friend at best and mentor at worst.. But the discrepancy between her calm and his frantic need for progress was beginning to grate his nerves.
The Tythonian Ridge was an island of primordial silence in a world of industrial noise. Shizuka Moriya didn't just sit on the moss-covered rock; she seemed to be part of its geological history. To Izuku, watching her from his patch of grass, she was an enigma of stillness. Every time he shifted his weight, the grass crunched like glass shattering. Every time he breathed, it felt like a bellows in a quiet library.
The frustration was a small, cold ember in his gut. It had been nearly an hour of "sitting." In his mind, an hour was sixty minutes of potential reps, three hundred potential kicks, or at least ten pages of notes on urban combat tactics. Instead, he was staring at the back of his eyelids, trying to find "serenity" while his leg was falling asleep and his brain was replaying every mistake he'd made in the Battle Trial.
"You are fighting the silence, Izuku," Shizuka said, her voice a calm ripple. "You are trying to conquer it. You cannot conquer the Force. You can only harmonize with it."
"I'm trying, Moriya-san," Izuku replied, his voice tight. He opened one eye, looking at her. "But I don't see how this helps my Quirk. If I'm in a fight with a villain, I won't have time to sit and find 'harmony'. I'll have to react. I'll have to move. If I can't push my body to handle ten percent, fifteen percent... then I'm just a liability."
Shizuka opened her eyes. They weren't angry, but they were heavy with a weight Izuku couldn't fathom. "Reacting is what animals do. A Jedi acts. There is a difference. Your Quirk, this 'One For All', is a tempest. But even a tempest has an eye. If you cannot find the center of yourself, you will always be tossed by the wind of your own power."
She stood up, the movement so economical it made Izuku feel clumsy just watching it. She gestured for him to stand. He did, rubbing his numb thigh, his notebook sitting discarded like a forgotten toy.
"The Jedi Order divided the study of Force abilities into three main branches: Control, Sense, and Alter," Shizuka explained, her hands falling to her sides. "Today, we begin with Control. It is the foundation. It is the ability to master one's own internal environment—the body, the mind, and the cellular flow of energy. Without Control, you are nothing but a bomb with a very short fuse."
"Control," Izuku repeated, the word tasting like a bitter medicine. "Is that where the 'kinetic enhancement' comes from? The speed you used?"
"That is a byproduct," Shizuka said, walking toward him until she was only a few feet away. "We begin with Altus Sopor. In the ancient tongue, it means 'deep sleep', the ability to withdraw your presence from the material world and heightens one's internal focus on The Force, at higher levels you can merge into The Force becoming invisible to others."
She held up a single finger. "Focus on this. Not the finger. Not the nail. Focus on the Force that binds the atoms of my skin together. Focus on the intent behind my movement."
Izuku stared. He tried to "see" what she was talking about. He reached out with that sixth sense he'd felt yesterday—the "hum" of the world. But the hum was messy. It was the sound of the ocean, the rustle of leaves, the distant sound of a car horn in Musutafu. It was too much data.
"It's... it's too loud," Izuku whispered.
"Because you are listening to the noise, not the frequency," Shizuka said. "Close your eyes again. Altus Sopor is about the 'sink'. You must sink your presence into the Force. Imagine yourself as a stone dropping into a deep, dark well. As you sink, the surface noise fades. The ripples vanish. There is only the depth."
Izuku closed his eyes. He tried to visualize the stone. He tried to "drop."
But the well was full of jagged rocks. Every thought of the previous day's success felt like a weight, but not a stabilizing one. It was a chaotic, tumbling mass. He thought of the green lightning dancing across his skin. He thought of the way Uraraka had looked at him with such genuine awe. He thought of Kirishima who had called him manly after he got to the paper bomb earlier that day.
Drop.
He felt the grass beneath his palms. It was damp. Was it going to rain? If it rained, his notebook would get ruined. He should have put it in a plastic bag. Why was Shizuka making him do this? The Sports Festival was only three-ish weeks away. He needed to be able to handle more than five percent. He needed to be able to compete with Todoroki's ice and Bakugo's explosions. He needed more power.
Izuku sat, his legs crossed, trying to achieve the "Altus Sopor" Shizuka demanded. But his mind was a storm. April 12th, he thought. The school year has barely started. I was eighth in the Quirk Assessment. Eighth. Behind Todoroki, behind Bakugo, behind even Yaoyorozu and Iida. If I don't bridge the gap now, I'll never be the Symbol of Peace.
"You are clenching your jaw, Izuku," Shizuka's voice cut through his spiral. "The discipline of Altus Sopor requires you to heighten your focus on the Force by withdrawing from your physical anxieties. You are doing the opposite. You are wrapping yourself in them like a shroud."
"I just... I don't understand how being 'invisible' helps me win a tournament!" Izuku burst out, his eyes snapping open. He immediately looked down, ashamed of his tone, but the frustration wouldn't subside. "The Sports Festival is in May. I have less than a month to figure out how to use One For All without breaking. This... this 'Deep Sleep' focus... it feels like we're wasting time."
Shizuka didn't move. Her stillness was infuriating. "You think of time as a commodity to be spent on 'reps'. You think that if you punch the air ten thousand times, you will be ready. But tell me, Izuku: when you moved against the pipes today, was it your muscles that saw them falling? Or was it the Force?"
Izuku hesitated. "It was... the hum. The warning."
"Exactly," Shizuka said, her voice dropping into a low, resonant register. "Altus Sopor is the sharpening of that hum. Without it, you are a blind man with a sword. You might be strong, but you will strike nothing but the wind. If you cannot withdraw your ego from the moment, you will never see the truth of the battlefield. Now. Sink. Again."
Izuku gritted his teeth and shut his eyes. He tried to imagine the stone dropping into the well. He pushed away the thought of Bakugo's sneer. He pushed away the image of his mom's worried face. He sank.
For a heartbeat, the world went quiet. The sound of the waves became a distant vibration, and the wind ceased to be a noise, becoming instead a pressure against his skin. He felt a flicker of something vast—a deep, rhythmic pulse that seemed to beat in time with his own heart, yet was infinitely larger.
The Tythonian Ridge grew darker, the horizon swallowing the last vestiges of bruised purple and deep orange. The temperature dropped, but Izuku barely noticed; the heat of his own internal friction was enough to keep him warm. He sat there, eyes pressed shut, trying to find that "sink" again, but the heartbeat of the world felt less like a rhythm and more like a ticking clock.
Eighteenth, he thought, the number echoing in the hollow of his skull. I was eighth in the assessment. It was a good rank, a respectable rank, but it wasn't the rank of a successor. It wasn't the rank of someone who could stand atop a pillar.
"You've stopped sinking," Shizuka said. She was standing now, her presence moving around him like a predator—or a guardian. "You hit the bottom, and instead of settling into the silt, you're trying to climb back out. Why?"
Izuku's eyes flew open. They were bloodshot, rimmed with the exhaustion of a boy who had spent ten months clearing a beach and was now realizing the mountain behind it was even higher. "Because I can't just 'withdraw', Moriya-san! I have to be present! If I'm not focused on my body, if I'm not focused on how the power feels in my veins, I'll lose it! I'll go back to breaking bones! I can't afford to be invisible to myself!"
Shizuka stopped pacing. She looked down at him, her silver eyes reflecting the rising moon. "You are confusing focus with obsession, Izuku. You think that by gripping the Force—by gripping your Quirk—you are controlling it. But the more you tighten your grip, the more it slips through your fingers. Altus Sopor is not about losing yourself; it is about finding the part of you that isn't afraid."
"I'm not afraid!" Izuku lied, his voice cracking.
"You are terrified," Shizuka countered calmly. "You are terrified of failing All Might. You are terrified of the boy with the explosions. You are terrified that the 'spark' you were given will flicker out. And that fear is making you brittle."
She reached out, her hand hovering over his shoulder but not touching it. "We are moving on. If you cannot sink, perhaps you can learn to mend. We will discuss Curato Salva."
Izuku blinked, the name pulling him out of his defensive crouch. "Curato Salva? You mentioned that before. Self-healing?"
"In the Order, it was the first family of techniques taught to Initiates. Before they were taught to move objects, they were taught to move the energy within themselves," Shizuka explained. She sat back down, her posture mirroring his, but her energy was vastly different. "A Jedi must be fit to serve. We do not have the luxury of hospitals in the far reaches of the galaxy. We learn to flush out toxins, to knit muscle, and to stave off decay."
Izuku's heart leaped. Self-healing? If he could heal himself, then the limitations of One For All would drastically change. If he broke a finger, he could fix it in seconds. He could push to twenty percent, thirty percent, and just... mend the damage as he went.
"Is this how I can use more power?" Izuku asked, his voice breathless with a sudden, desperate hope. "If I can heal the tears in my muscles as they happen, I can push the output higher, right? I can handle the kickback!"
Shizuka's expression darkened. It was the first time Izuku had seen a flicker of genuine disappointment in her. "Is that all you see? A way to break yourself faster?"
"No! I mean—it's tactical! If I can ignore the damage—"
"You seek power then?" Shizuka asked, or rather stated. She already knew the answer.
Shizuka's gaze was like a frozen lake—beautiful, but perilous if you stepped too far. "The Jedi did not develop Curato Salva so they could act as batteries for destruction, Izuku. It was developed to maintain endurance, to flush poisons from the blood, and to stay fit for the service of others. If you use the Force only to patch a body you are intentionally shattering, you are not a healer. You are a fool."
Izuku flinched. The word "fool" stung worse than the "Deku" Bakugo used. It felt like a condemnation of his entire methodology. "But Moriya-san, I have to! All Might gave me this power because he believed I could be the next Symbol. If I'm too careful, if I'm too 'harmonious', I'll just be a person with a strong Quirk who arrived too late to save anyone! My body is the only thing I have to give!"
"And if you give it all at once, you have nothing left for the tomorrow that needs you," Shizuka countered. Her voice didn't rise, but the pressure in the air increased. "You want to learn to mend? Then stop looking at your muscles as pulleys and wires. Look at them as a flow of life. Curato Salva is about directing the internal current of the Force to the areas of cellular distress. It requires an intimacy with your own biology that you currently lack because you are too busy counting your failures."
She gestured toward his right hand, the one scarred from the entrance exam. "Focus on the old tissue. Don't think about 'fixing' it. Think about 'reminding' the cells of what they were before the trauma. The Force has a memory of your perfection, Izuku. You just have to listen to it."
Izuku looked at his hand. He tried. He closed his eyes and channeled the warmth he usually used for Full Cowling. But instead of letting it wrap around his skin, he tried to push it in.
It felt like trying to thread a needle with a firehose. The energy of One For All was too dense, too chaotic. It didn't "knit" anything; it just made his hand throb with a dull, bruised heat.
'It's not working,' he thought, his teeth grinding. 'It's too slow. Everything is too slow. Why are we talking about "reminding cells" when I could be working on my transition speed from a crouch to a sprint? I'm eighth. I'm eighth in the class. If Todoroki is training right now, he's probably freezing a whole city block. If Bakugo is training, he's perfecting his aerial maneuvers. And I'm sitting on a ridge, trying to talk to my own skin.'
He opened his eyes, sweating. "I can't feel it, Moriya-san. It just feels like... like static."
"Because you are trying to force the healing," Shizuka said. She began to click her lightsaber hilt again. Click-click-click. The sound was rhythmic, almost hypnotic, but to Izuku, it sounded like a countdown. "You are approaching the Force with a 'Quirk' mindset. You think if you exert enough 'will', the effect will happen. But Control is about the absence of ego. You must get out of your own way."
"How can I get out of my own way when I'm the one who has to do the work?" Izuku's voice was rising now, the shy boy momentarily eclipsed by the frustrated initiate. "You make it sound so easy because you've had years of this! You have the 'Space Monk' training! But I have three weeks until the Sports Festival! One day of 'meditation' and 'self-healing' that doesn't work is a day I'm not getting stronger!"
Shizuka stood up slowly. The squirrel she had been watching earlier paused on a branch, sensing the shift in the clearing. "You think strength is a number, Izuku. You think ten percent is stronger than five percent. But a master of Control at one percent can defeat a brute at one hundred percent because the master knows where the center is. If you continue to chase the percentage, the Dark Side will find you very easily. It loves people who are in a hurry."
"The Dark Side? You said that was about hate and anger," Izuku muttered, looking away at the junk on the beach below. "I'm not angry. I'm just... I'm just behind."
"Impatience is the brother of anger, and the cousin of fear," Shizuka said, her silver eyes narrowing. "You fear being inadequate. That fear is making you impatient. And that impatience is making you resent this training. Do you think I don't feel it? The 'static' coming off you right now is foul, Izuku. It tastes like copper and frustration."
Izuku recoiled as if slapped. He hadn't realized he was "leaking" his emotions that clearly. The shame hit him instantly, a cold wave that extinguished the heat of his anger. "I... I'm sorry, Moriya-san. I didn't mean to be... disrespectful. I know you're trying to help me. It's just... the weight of this power... it feels so heavy tonight."
Shizuka watched him for a long beat. The click-click-click stopped. She walked over and picked up his discarded notebook, handing it to him.
"The Jedi were never done learning, Izuku. Even the Masters studied the basics every day. If you find the basics 'trivial', then you have already lost the path." She looked toward the moon, which was now high and pale. "Go home. Meditate before you sleep. Not to find power. Not to fix your rank. Just to find the silence. If you can't find the silence in your room, you will never find it in the arena."
Izuku took the notebook, his fingers trembling. "Will we... will we do physical training tomorrow?"
"We will do what the Force requires," Shizuka replied enigmatically. "And right now, it requires you to be humble. Goodnight, Midoriya-san."
She turned and walked back to her mossy stone, sat down, and closed her eyes, vanishing back into that impenetrable dome of serenity.
Izuku stood in the middle of the clearing for a long time. He looked at the blank page in his notebook. He had come here expecting a secret technique, a shortcut, a way to be 'Top Tier'. Instead, he felt smaller than he had when he arrived.
As he walked down the Tythonian Ridge, his boots crunching on the dry needles, he didn't feel like a hero-in-training. He felt like a cracked vessel, just as she had said. And deep down, beneath the shame and the exhaustion, the ember of frustration remained.
Izuku's descent from the ridge was a solitary march of mounting internal discord. Despite the hours spent absorbing Shizuka's lecture on the Jedi Code earlier that afternoon, the profound "serenity" she championed felt less like a philosophy and more like a shackle. He understood the words—he had deconstructed the logic of "emotion vs. peace" in his head until it made sense—but in the cold reality of the twilight, the practice felt agonizingly stagnant.
He was a boy who had spent his life being told he was nothing, and now that he possessed the power to be everything, he was being told to sit still and breathe. The dichotomy was suffocating; he respected Shizuka's wisdom, yet he loathed the passivity it demanded. To Izuku, every moment spent "sinking into the silt" of his mind was a moment he wasn't proving his worth to a world that was already moving past him.
The resentment he felt toward the Code was a bitter pill he couldn't swallow. He had memorized the lines, but they felt antithetical to the very drive that had allowed him to inherit One For All. How could there be "no passion" when it was his passion that had driven him to save Uraraka from the zero-pointer?
How could there be "no chaos" when his entire life was a whirlwind of frantic adaptation? He felt as though Shizuka was trying to teach a fire how to be a pond. He lacked the fundamental spiritual maturity to see the Code as a lifeline; instead, he saw it as a set of arbitrary hurdles designed to slow his ascent. The "Space Monk" philosophy that had seemed so poetic in the cafeteria now felt like a cold, alien barrier between him and the hero he was desperate to become.
This frustration was compounded by a profound sense of inadequacy. Izuku realized that while he could recite the philosophy, he didn't truly understand it—not in the way Shizuka did. He was an analyst who couldn't analyse his own soul. He felt like he was failing a test he didn't even have the study guide for. The realization that he might be "brittle," as Shizuka put it, terrified him more than any villain could.
If his foundation was truly this weak, was All Might's legacy built on sand? The weight of the secret he shared with the Symbol of Peace felt heavier than ever, a crushing burden that made the "basic" training feel like a distraction from a looming catastrophe. He wasn't just behind his classmates; he felt like he was failing the Force itself.