Enjoy, this freshly editted chapter
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As the rest of Class 1-A was levelling up across Japan, Akira was facing his own struggles.
He sat in the middle of a forest clearing.
Cross-legged and hands resting on his knees. Eyes closed behind a strip of black fabric that had been tied around his head as a blindfold.
The clearing was silent. The trees stood tall around him, their canopy filtering the afternoon light into dappled patterns on the ground. Birds called from somewhere distant. Insects hummed. The forest breathed the way forests do — slowly, patiently, indifferent to the boy sitting in its centre trying very hard not to get kicked in the face.
Inner peace.
He repeated the words in his mind.
Inner peace.
Behind the blindfold, his thermal vision was operating at full power.
He could see everything. Not with his eyes — those were covered, useless, deliberately removed from the equation. With his flames. The thermal awareness that his quirk granted him, the ability to read the world through heat the way a bat reads it through sound.
Inner peace.
This was the exercise designed by Mirko. Remove the eyes. Force reliance on the quirk's sensory capabilities. Learn to process thermal information not as a secondary input but as a primary one — fast enough, accurate enough, reliable enough to replace sight entirely.
Because Mirko was faster than sight. She had proven that on day one, when she had kicked Akira through three trees before his eyes had registered her movement. She had proven it again on day two, when she had appeared behind Momo and tapped her shoulder while Momo's suit sensors were still recalibrating from the previous attack. And she had proven it every day since, in increasingly creative and painful ways.
His eyes couldn't track her. The only thing that had shown any promise of detecting Mirko before she turned his face into a landing pad was his thermal vision — the heat signature of her body, the warmth of her muscles firing, the subtle temperature shift in the air as she moved through it.
The problem was speed.
He could see her. He could feel where she was. But by the time his brain processed the thermal information, calculated her position, sent the command to his muscles, and his muscles executed the response — she had already moved. Already hit him and sent him through another tree.
Inner peace.
Till the time you have inner peace...
No crazy rabbit can hurt you.
And then....
THERE!!
A heat signature moved behind him.
The thermal bloom of a body that had been running at high speed and was now slowing for the final approach.
Found you.
Akira moved his wrist with everything he had.
Alas... his body could not move fast enough.
The heat signature shifted. Fractionally. A last-microsecond adjustment in trajectory that took the incoming body from "directly behind" to "slightly to the left" — just enough to make Akira's punch sail through empty air.
And then a foot connected with his face.
BOOOOOOOOOM!!
Akira's body left the ground, travelled horizontally through the clearing, and crashed through two trees before coming to rest against a third.
"FUCK!!"
Wood chips rained down on him. Leaves settled on his shoulders. The blindfold had survived the impact, but Akira's dignity had not.
He lay in the broken timber and stared up at the canopy through the gap he had just created. This was the seventh time today. The thirty-second time this week. At this rate, the forest was going to run out of trees before he ran out of face.
Just then, something landed beside him, and what followed was laughter.
Akira removed his blindfold and looked up. Momo was hovering over him in her hero suit, her visor pushed up onto her forehead, her ponytail swaying, and her face wearing an expression of pure bliss.
"It's so fun to see you struggle sometimes," she said.
"Yeah, yeah. Laugh at your boyfriend." Akira sat up, brushing bark from his suit. "What a supportive girlfriend I have."
"I am supportive!" Momo protested, still grinning. "I supported you emotionally when you flew through those trees. I was rooting for the trees, but I was supporting you."
"You're hilarious."
She laughed again and extended her hand to help him up.
He took it.
And then a smile appeared on his face.
"Akira, wh-"
He pulled.
"AKIRA!!"
She came down. Off balance, caught mid-stance, her suit's stabilisers unable to compensate for the sudden force applied to her.
She hit the ground beside him, and then Akira pinned her.
"Dodge this," he said.
And he started tickling her.
"HAHAHAHA!! AKIRA!! STOP!!"
His fingers found the spot beneath her ribs — the spot he had discovered during a movie night three weeks ago, the spot that turned the composed, analytical, brilliant heiress of the Yaoyorozu family into a shrieking, flailing, helpless mess.
"AKIRA!! AHHAHAHAHA!! STOP!! I'M SERIOUS!! HAHAHAHAHA!!"
"Say 'Ashborn is the greatest hero name ever chosen.'"
"NEVER!! HAHAHAHA!! OKAY!! OKAY!! ASHBORN IS— HAHAHA — IS THE GREATEST— AKIRA PLEASE!!!"
"Close enough."
He stopped. Momo lay on the grass beside him, breathing hard.
She looked at him with an expression that was equal parts fury and adoration.
"I will get you back for that," she said.
"Looking forward to it."
"You guys done being all lovey-dovey?"
Both of them jumped. Mirko was standing three feet away.
Akira looked at her. The remnants of his playful mood collided with the reckless confidence that defined his personality, and before his brain could install the appropriate filter, his mouth opened.
"Well, not our fault you took like thirty years to find a boyfriend."
The forest went silent.
And Momo joined her hands, offering her last prayers for Akira.
Mirko looked at him as her crazy grin was back.
"Say that again," she said.
"...Shit."
He ran.
Alas... that did not help him... all it did was delay his fate.
5 minutes later::::::
Momo was laughing again, and Akira was sitting on a log with a bruise forming around his left eye. Blue flames flickered around the injury, the healing warmth already reducing the swelling.
"You deserved that," Momo said.
"I know."
"You really, really deserved that."
"I said I know."
Mirko stood in front of them, ready to give him some good stuff.
"Now," she said. "Flame boy."
Akira looked up from his healing bruise.
"From what I've observed during the past few days, here's where you stand. Your thermal vision is strong. You can detect me, sense my position, and read my approach vector before I'm in striking range. That's impressive — most people can't track me at all."
She paused.
"But you can't react in time. Your detection is ahead of your response. By the time your body moves to counter what your thermal vision has identified, I've already changed position. The gap between seeing and acting is where I live. And right now, that gap is killing you."
Akira sighed. "Well, sorry to break it to you, but my quirk isn't designed to enhance my body. It's fire. It burns things. It heals things. It doesn't make me faster or stronger or give me superhuman reflexes. I was lucky that my mom developed her combat method — that's the only reason I can somewhat manage in close-range fights at all."
Mirko looked at him. Her expression shifted from evaluative to something more deliberate.
"Then you'll have to look into your quirk differently," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Let me ask you something. What's the greatest advantage my quirk gives me in a fight?"
Akira thought about it. He had been on the receiving end of that advantage for a week. The answer seemed obvious.
"Your super strength," he said. "The leg power. The kicks that can crater concrete and send people through trees."
"Wrong."
Akira blinked.
Mirko pointed at her ears.
"It's my enhanced hearing," she said.
She tapped the base of her left ear.
"These are as good as your thermal vision. Better, in some ways. I can hear the smallest things. The beating of a heart from metres away. A footstep on grass. The change in someone's breathing pattern when they shift from relaxed to ready to attack."
She looked at him.
"I don't need to see you to know where you are. I don't need sensors or cameras or technology. My ears map the world the same way your thermal vision maps it — constantly, passively, in real time. They're the reason I can fight blindfolded. They're the reason I can operate in complete darkness. They're the reason I detected you whispering to your girlfriend from three hundred metres away while I was eating lunch."
Akira made a mental note to never whisper anything to Momo within a kilometre of Mirko again.
"But here's the thing," Mirko continued. "When I first started as a hero, I didn't use my hearing like that. I used it the normal way — listening for obvious sounds, reacting to loud noises, the basic stuff. My quirk gave me rabbit legs, so I focused on kicking. The hearing was just... a bonus. An afterthought."
She sat down on a fallen log across from them.
"It took me years to realise that the hearing wasn't a bonus. It was the foundation. Everything I do in combat — the speed, the positioning, the ability to appear behind someone before they know I'm there — it starts with the ears."
She leaned forward.
"Now think. Your quirk gives you fire. Red flame that burns. Blue flame that heals. And a thermal vision that lets you see the world in heat. You've been using the fire as your weapon and the thermal vision as your radar. Like I used my legs as my weapon and my ears as my radar."
Her eyes locked onto his.
"But what if there's more? What if your flames can do something you haven't thought of yet? Not burn. Not heal. Something else. Something that closes the gap between detection and response."
She leaned back.
"How does flame work? How can it be bent and used?"
The words settled into the clearing like seeds into soil.
Akira stared at her. Then at his hands.
Bend and use.
How does flame work?
The question echoed in his head.
***