The six months were not empty.
I had made the promise in October and I intended to keep it, which meant the six months were a specific kind of waiting, the kind that is not passive, the kind that is a sustained and deliberate preparation for something you have already decided to do. Every day in those months was pointed at April the way a compass needle is pointed at north. Not urgently. Just consistently.
The transformation held for four minutes by November. Five by January. The energy expenditure had dropped to a level that felt sustainable for real operational use, meaning I could hold the form through a physical confrontation without the maintenance cost degrading my combat capability. This had been the benchmark I set for myself at the start of the reliability training and I had reached it, which I noted and moved past.
What I was spending most of the winter on was movement.
Not training movement, I had been working on that for years. Operational movement, which was a different thing entirely. I needed to know this city the way you know a place you have lived in long enough that your feet could take you anywhere in it without consulting your brain. The orphanage was in the ward's residential interior. The areas where I intended to operate were not. I needed routes between them that did not use main streets, that passed through as few camera sightlines as possible, that had enough variation that a pattern could not be established from aerial or street-level observation.
I built this knowledge the way I built everything, systematically and without rushing. Saturday afternoons, legitimate excursions, a thirteen-year-old walking through the city with a book under his arm and no particular destination, except that I was mapping every detail of everywhere I walked and building a three-dimensional picture of the city's grid in the part of my mind reserved for operational information.
By February I could close my eyes and walk any of eight routes from the orphanage to the commercial district and the entertainment ward beyond it. Could identify the camera positions on seventeen blocks. Could tell you which alleys had through access and which dead-ended and which appeared to dead-end but had roof access via fire escapes that were old enough to not be locked at the base.
This was the unglamorous part of what I was building. Nobody was going to write about the Saturday afternoon route-mapping in any account of the vigilante Sukuna. That was fine. The unglamorous parts were what kept the rest of it from collapsing.
The RCT made a breakthrough in December.
I had been working on the multiplication for months. The negative into positive conversion, the specific quality of turning cursed energy back on itself to produce healing output rather than harmful output. Every attempt had produced either nothing or a faint warmth that I could not distinguish from ordinary body heat.
What changed in December was a stupid accident.
I had been pushing the technique late at night on the roof and had been tired, too tired, the kind of tired that makes you sloppy, and I had cut my palm on the edge of the rooftop exhaust vent, a shallow cut but real, bleeding cleanly in the cold air. My instinctive response to the cut was to push energy toward it, the reflex of someone who had spent years treating energy as the answer to problems in the body, and in the tired unfocused state I was in the energy went out in a way that was not the careful controlled projection of training but something less structured and more reactive.
The cut closed.
Not slowly. Not the way a cut closes overnight when you leave it. In approximately three seconds the bleeding stopped and the skin pulled itself together and what was left was a faint pink line that was gone by morning.
I stood on the roof with my palm open and stared at it.
Then I sat down very carefully and thought about what had just happened.
The tiredness had dropped something. Some careful gate I maintained without noticing I was maintaining it, a quality of deliberateness that apparently lived between me and the energy when I was at full capacity, had been open in a way it was not usually open. The energy had moved through it and done the thing it apparently already knew how to do.
The question was how to replicate the condition without requiring myself to be exhausted and bleeding.
I spent two weeks thinking about this before I tried again. What I was looking for was not the tiredness itself but what the tiredness had produced, which was a kind of release of control. Not absence of intent but absence of the particular overthought quality that had been getting between the intent and the execution.
The next time I cut my palm deliberately, shallow and careful, I did not push the energy toward it. I let the energy toward it. Without the gate. Without the deliberateness.
It took four seconds. The cut closed.
I sat there on the roof in January with my healed palm open and the night cold and clear around me and felt something that was close to awe, which was not an emotion I visited very often and which I allowed myself for about thirty seconds before I got back to work.
I told Hana about the orphanage in February.
Not in the way of a confession or a significant sharing. It came up because she had mentioned visiting her grandmother over the new year holiday and had assumed, in the way people with families naturally assume, that I had done something similar. I had said no, no family, and she had asked a clarifying question with the direct manner she applied to everything, and I had answered it.
Orphan. Since birth. Used to it.
She took it in the way I had observed she took most information, without the overcorrection that made these conversations tedious. No flood of sympathy. No awkward pivot away. Just a brief acknowledgment and a slight adjustment to her model of me.
"That explains some of the color," she said.
"What color am I now," I said, because I was curious.
She looked at me in the assessing way she had. "You were unusual before. Now you're unusual and I understand one of the reasons why. That's different from the color changing."
"Is it a bad color."
"No," she said. "It's a serious color. Old, kind of. For someone our age."
I thought about that. "That's accurate," I said.
She nodded and turned back to her notes and that was the end of it. No pity. No subsequent behavior change. Just: information received, model updated, continuing.
I liked her, I decided. In the uncomplicated way of finding someone's particular way of being in the world genuinely good. Not many people made it onto that list. She was on it.
March. Fourteen.
The cake was chocolate again. I ate it and watched the yard and did the annual inventory.
Height: meaningfully taller than last year, closer now to what I would eventually be. The lean quality had developed into something that read as deliberate rather than thin, the product of three years of consistent physical training visible in the way the body moved and held itself. Nothing that shouted threat. Everything that suggested capability, to someone who was looking carefully enough to see it.
Izuku Midoriya was also fourteen. Still quirkless. A year away from the encounter that would change that, give or take, the rooftop with Bakugo and the subsequent discovery of All Might's situation. I knew that timeline with reasonable precision and I did not interfere with it because I had no reason to. Midoriya needed that encounter. What he became was built on it. I was not in the business of editing other people's origins.
I had one month.
April arrived with the particular quality of spring beginning, that specific freshness in the air that felt like the city was exhaling after winter. I noted it because I noted things, filed it under seasonal atmospheric observations, and got on with the month.
The last four weeks I spent running the complete operational architecture through my mind. Not planning specific targets. I was not going to select targets in advance, that path led to the kind of systematic operation that drew investigative attention. I was going to do what I had done in the alley at twelve, move through the night city and respond to what I found, with the difference that at fourteen with two more years of development behind me I was going to be doing it intentionally and equipped rather than on impulse.
The clothing I had purchased in three separate transactions over six months, cash, different neighborhoods each time. Dark, fitted enough to move in without catching on things, generic enough that a description of it would match a significant percentage of the city's population. Not a costume, not yet. The transformation was the costume. The clothes underneath were a practical substrate.
The route from the orphanage I had mapped to a level of completeness I was confident in.
The transformation I could hold for eleven minutes at the last testing. More than enough.
On the last night of April I lay in my bed and looked at the ceiling and felt the fire in my chest burning at what I had come to recognize as its focused register, not the comfortable warmth of rest but the directed heat of readiness.
Tomorrow night.
The thing that lived in the warmth was very still, in the way of something that has been waiting for a long time and has learned patience from the waiting but has not lost one degree of its original temperature.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow.