Fushiguro woke up sore in places he hadn't known could get sore.
Not injured, Recovery Girl's work from the tournament had held up fine, this was a different kind of ache entirely, the kind that came from a body being asked to absorb far more impact than it was used to over a single afternoon. He worked through it methodically while getting dressed, rolling his shoulder, testing the wrist Jin'ichi had locked more times than he'd bothered counting, and decided none of it was bad enough to mention.
He was wrong about that within the first ten minutes of reaching the training hall.
"You're moving stiff," Jin'ichi said, not looking up from where he was adjusting the wrapping on his own knuckles. "Sit. Stretch properly before we start, or you'll spend today compensating for yesterday instead of building on it."
Fushiguro sat. "You already said you were going to hurt me today."
"I did say that. Yesterday I needed you intact enough to actually absorb what I was teaching. Today I need you to feel what happens when someone doesn't extend you that courtesy, because nobody in a real fight is going to extend it either."
"So we're sparring for real."
"Full contact, full speed, whatever you have. I'll hold back on the parts that could actually put you in a hospital bed. Everything else is live."
...
They started slow anyway, the first several exchanges closer to yesterday's pace than anything resembling a real fight. A punch, absorbed. A redirect, reversed. A joint entry Fushiguro tried and failed to complete, Jin'ichi's arm simply too strong to move through leverage alone.
By the fifth exchange, Jin'ichi stopped holding anything back at all, and the gap that opened up was immediate and total. A strike caught Fushiguro's shoulder and spun him a full half turn before he'd registered being hit. A follow-up he barely avoided by dropping into shadow, resurfacing several feet away with his pulse hammering. A third exchange ended with him flat on his back, staring up at the rafters, genuinely unsure for a full second which direction was actually up.
"Better," Jin'ichi said, not unkindly, watching him get back to his feet. "You're starting to actually respect the distance. Most people your age need to get hit harder than that before it sinks in."
They kept going, and Fushiguro lost far more than he won, strikes he tried to redirect simply plowing through the attempt, joint entries that never had the chance to fully form before Jin'ichi's strength broke the grip apart. Twice he found himself flat on the ground with no clear memory of exactly how he'd gotten there, and once more after that with a very clear memory of it, having tried to meet a strike head-on instead of moving with it, a mistake Jin'ichi corrected without a word beyond making sure it actually hurt enough to remember.
"You're rushing the recovery," Jin'ichi said, after the second fall. "Hitting the ground isn't the end of anything. It's just another position."
Fushiguro tried it once more, and this time, instead of scrambling upright, rolled with the fall and dropped into shadow from the ground itself, surfacing several feet away, guard already raised.
Jin'ichi nodded once, a small, contained acknowledgment rather than anything larger. "That's better. Keep using it that way instead of as a way to run."
...
Somewhere past the twentieth exchange, Jin'ichi finally stepped back and rolled his shoulders, a small motion that nonetheless carried some kind of weight to it, like he was settling into something.
"You've earned seeing the rest of it," he said. "I've been fighting you on raw strength and basic technique alone this whole time. That's not actually what I am."
Shadowless energy gathered around both of his fists, and then, impossibly, two more fists appeared alongside the physical ones, translucent and enormous, easily three times the size of his actual hands, hanging in the air just behind his shoulders like something had been quietly building there the entire morning without ever announcing itself.
Fushiguro's stance shifted instinctively, every instinct he had reading the projections as a threat before his conscious mind had finished processing what he was actually looking at.
"This is the technique this family actually values me for," Jin'ichi said. "Everything else, the throws, the locks, the years of grinding technique, none of that impresses anyone here. This does."
He threw a single punch, unhurried, almost lazy, and the giant fist behind his shoulder moved with it, throwing itself forward in perfect synchronization with his real one.
The impact when it hit the wooden support post at the edge of the hall didn't just crack the wood. It caved a section of it inward entirely, splinters raining down across the polished floor, the whole structure groaning under a force that had no business coming from a single unhurried punch. Dust drifted down from the beam above it, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.
"That's your quirk."
"That's my quirk. I don't need finesse when I have that sitting behind every strike I throw. Most of this family's actual combat reputation, the parts that get whispered about instead of published in rankings, comes down to this." Jin'ichi dismissed the projections, the giant fists fading back into nothing as quickly as they'd appeared. "I don't use it on you. Not today, not this week. You're not ready to be hit by it, and I have no interest in finding out what it does to a fifteen-year-old's ribs. I wanted you to see it, though. So you understand exactly how much distance still separates a promising first day from someone this clan actually considers dangerous."
...
They broke for water, Jin'ichi drinking properly this time, actual effort finally showing on him for the first time all week.
"Why show me that at all, if you're not going to use it?"
"Because pretending I don't have it would be its own kind of dishonesty, and I'd rather you understand the real shape of the gap than assume yesterday's forty attempts put you anywhere close to closing it." Jin'ichi set the bottle down. "This clan doesn't care how good your joint locks are. It cares whether you can put a hole in a wall without trying very hard. I built the rest of myself, the technique, the patience, specifically because I always suspected that one day I'd be standing across from someone this family actually valued, and I wanted to have something to offer that wasn't just raw output."
"Is that why you're teaching me the technique instead of just letting the strength speak for itself?"
"Yes." Something quieter crossed his face. "Your father built every piece of himself from nothing, against a family that had already decided the outcome before he started. I'm not going to repeat that with you, whatever else this family decides to do with what you eventually become."
...
The afternoon session returned to the same fundamentals as before, and progress came slower than the morning had suggested it might, Jin'ichi's raw strength still closing most gaps regardless of how cleanly Fushiguro executed a redirect.
Late in the session, chaining a strike into a redirect for perhaps the thirtieth attempt of the two days combined, something finally held together cleanly enough that Jin'ichi actually had to step back and reset his own footing rather than simply absorbing it.
"That's real progress," Jin'ichi said. "Not mastery. Progress. Two days of work, showing up the way two days of work should."
"Doesn't feel like enough."
"It isn't enough. It was never going to be enough in two days, and I'd be lying to you if I said otherwise." Jin'ichi rolled his shoulder, testing it. "What it is, is a foundation. Something real to build the rest of your life around, if you choose to keep building on it after the internship ends."
They ate dinner on the veranda again, the light going gold and then gray over the garden while staff cleared plates around them without comment.
"Tomorrow you'll train with Jinya," Jin'ichi said, watching the koi move under the pond's surface. "I want to tell you something before that happens."
"I've been listening."
"You've been listening to the parts about your father. I'm not sure you've been listening to the parts about the clan." Jin'ichi's voice stayed level. "Jinya is going to tell you things about your own quirk that I genuinely cannot teach you. Whatever he shows you the next two days will be real, and valuable, and you should learn everything he's willing to hand you."
"But?"
"But everything he gives you will come with a price attached, even when he doesn't say the price out loud. He is not the kind of man who hears no and stops offering. He simply changes what he's offering until something lands."
"And Naobito?"
"Naobito wants you strong because a strong clan member is good for the clan's reputation, and he's honest about that, which almost makes him easier to deal with than Jinya. I'm the only one of the three of us who actually wants something from you that isn't about what you can do for this family. I want you to be alright. That's the whole thing."
"That's a strange thing to want from someone you barely know."
"Is it? I watched your father grow up in this compound, for the little time I actually overlapped with him, and I watched this family let him leave without anyone here ever telling him it had mattered that he existed at all. You're the only piece of him this family has left, and every single person here who isn't me is already calculating what that's worth to them." Jin'ichi looked out at the dark garden. "I don't think that's strange. I think it would be strange if I didn't want something better for you than what he got."
Fushiguro didn't have an answer ready for that. He sat with it instead, the garden going properly dark around them.
"I'm not him," Fushiguro said eventually. "Whatever you didn't get to fix. I'm not a way to fix it."
"I know that." Jin'ichi's mouth curved, something sad underneath it. "Believe it or not, that's exactly why I think there's still a chance you'll be alright."
He stood, brushing off his knees. "Two more days with Jinya. Then two with Naobito. Then you get a day to yourself before you decide anything. Whatever you decide, the door of this training hall stays open. That part isn't conditional on anything you choose."
Fushiguro watched him disappear into the dark toward the main house, and sat alone on the veranda a while longer, listening to water he could no longer see moving steadily beneath the garden's surface, still turning over the image of a wall caving in under a single unhurried punch.
...
Feel free to give me your feedback in the comments
...
150 PS By Saturday = Bonus Chapter on Sunday
...
Join my Patreon for access to more chapters!
https://www.patreon.com/ZimaBlue29