Monday arrived with the irritating punctuality of things one waits for with a mix of anticipation and nervousness.
Mineta showed up at Seiryuu Dojo at 4 PM in sportswear, his hair tied up as much as his spheres allowed, and with the mental attitude of someone who knows what's coming won't be pleasant but accepts it as necessary. He had read about Wing Chun, Muay Thai, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu over the weekend. Not to arrive knowing things, but to arrive knowing what to expect. There was an important difference between the two.
What he expected was that it would be difficult.
What he did not expect was that it would be so immediately, so brutally, so humiliatingly difficult.
Hayashi was waiting for him on the central tatami with his arms crossed and that expression of constant evaluation that Mineta was already learning to decipher. It wasn't coldness. It was focused attention. The difference was subtle but real.
"Before we start with any technique," Hayashi said without preamble, pointing to the floor in front of him, "I need to know how you move naturally. Walk to that wall and come back."
Mineta looked at him.
"Just walk?"
"Just walk."
He did, feeling vaguely ridiculous, aware that every step was being analyzed with a precision that was somewhat uncomfortable.
"Stop." Hayashi walked around him slowly. "You keep your weight too far back. When you walk, you load your heels, which means your center of gravity is behind your movement. In combat that would make you slow to react forward and easy to unbalance with a push."
"How do I fix it?"
"With weeks of active body awareness until it becomes automatic." A brief pause. "You're not going to fix it today. Today you're just going to be aware that it exists."
That set the tone for what followed.
The first session had nothing of what Mineta had vaguely imagined when thinking about learning martial arts. There were no strikes, no locks, nothing that remotely resembled combat. Hayashi dedicated the entire hour to three things: posture, breathing, and what he called structure.
The Wing Chun stance was counterintuitive for someone without experience. Feet parallel, slightly wider than shoulder width, knees slightly bent inward, weight evenly distributed. It wasn't a position of immediate power like the ones Mineta had seen in movies. It was a position of efficiency. Of being ready to move in any direction without telegraphing intent.
"It doesn't look like what I expected," Mineta admitted while holding the stance for the fourth time after Hayashi corrected it for the third.
"Wing Chun is not meant to look intimidating." Hayashi adjusted his elbow position with surgical precision. "It's meant to function. Most styles people recognize visually are designed to look good as well as work. Wing Chun decided a long time ago that it didn't care about looking good."
"And Muay Thai?"
"Muay Thai has the elegance of a hammer." Something in his voice suggested that was a compliment. "We'll get there. First this."
Breathing was the second lesson, and it was harder than posture. Not because of technical complexity, but because it required a level of simultaneous attention that clashed with the brain's natural tendency to do one thing at a time. Coordinating exhalation with effort, maintaining rhythm without thinking about it consciously. It was the kind of skill that only existed once he stopped being conscious of it, which meant he first had to be very, very conscious for a long time.
It's going to take weeks, Mineta thought with something like resignation. Good. There are weeks.
Structure was the third lesson and the most abstract. In Wing Chun, power didn't come from isolated muscles, but from the alignment of the entire body. A strike delivered with bad structure could have more raw force than one delivered with good structure, but it would be inconsistent, inefficient, and leave the striker in a worse position than before the strike.
"Your body is small," Hayashi said without any apologetic tone, as if observing that the sky is blue. "That means structure is more important for you than for someone with additional mass. You can't compensate with brute force. You have to make every movement count exactly what it should, no more and no less."
"Understood."
"You don't understand yet." He wasn't cruel, just precise. "You will in a few weeks, when it starts to make sense in your body as well as in your head."
The following two weeks were a continuous lesson in the difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing something physically.
Mineta arrived at the dojo three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and each session added a new layer over the previous one. The stance was refined until it stopped requiring conscious attention. The first basic Wing Chun hand movements—Pak Sao, Tan Sao, Bong Sao—began to make sense not just as names and descriptions, but as physical sensations with internal logic.
And then Hayashi introduced Chi Sao.
Chi Sao, or sticky hands, was the central Wing Chun exercise. Two practitioners maintained arm contact and learned to feel the other's intent through touch, responding to pressure and movement without thinking, with reflexes instead of the conscious mind.
The first time they practiced it, Hayashi dropped him three times in thirty seconds without apparent effort, with movements so small and precise that Mineta barely saw them coming.
He got up the third time with a thoughtful expression.
"I didn't anticipate any of that," he said.
"No." Hayashi adjusted his arm position. "Because you were looking at my hands, trying to read intent with your eyes. Chi Sao doesn't work like that. The information comes from contact, not vision."
Mineta processed that.
The information comes from contact, not vision.
Something in that phrase resonated with him in a way that went beyond Wing Chun. He wrote it down that night in the notebook, underlined, with an asterisk next to it meaning to review it in relation to his quirk.
Muay Thai arrived in the third week, introduced gradually as a complement to the hand work.
If Wing Chun was precision and structure, Muay Thai was power and accumulation. Hayashi taught him the fundamentals of the clinch, the close body-to-body position where knees and elbows became the main weapons. For someone Mineta's size, it was particularly interesting territory: in the clinch, the height difference between two people was significantly reduced, and whoever knew how to use the space had the advantage regardless of size.
The first knee attempts were technically disastrous.
"More hips," Hayashi said with the patience of someone who had seen this same mistake enough times not to get frustrated. "The power doesn't come from the thigh. It comes from the hip rotation that drags the thigh with it. Without that, it's just a weak kick from a compromised position."
Mineta tried again.
"Better. Still terrible, but better."
Still terrible but better became the official summary of his first weeks at the dojo.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was the last to be introduced, and it was the one he had the hardest time accepting emotionally, though he wouldn't have admitted it out loud.
The problem with BJJ wasn't the technical difficulty, which was considerable, nor the physical discomfort of learning to fall properly, which also was. The problem was what it represented: learning to fight on the ground meant accepting that there were situations where you would end up on the ground, and something in him instinctively resisted planning for partial defeat.
Hayashi identified it with a speed that was somewhat embarrassing.
"You're resisting the ground," he said during the second BJJ session, while Mineta got up for the fifth time with more brusqueness than necessary. "Not physically. Mentally."
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said you're resisting." Hayashi sat on the tatami with the naturalness of someone completely comfortable on the ground. "The ground is not defeat. It's territory. Your job is not to avoid getting here. It's to get here better prepared than the other person."
Mineta looked at the tatami under his hands for a moment.
"Sit."
He sat.
"Someone your size in a real fight has two main problems." Hayashi raised one finger. "First: if the other person is bigger and manages to grab you, the difference in brute strength can be decisive if you don't know what to do." He raised a second finger. "Second: if you end up on the ground without knowing how to maneuver there, you're in the worst possible position. BJJ solves both problems. It doesn't make you bigger. It makes you more dangerous where size matters less."
More dangerous where size matters less.
"It makes sense," Mineta admitted.
"I know." Hayashi stood up. "Now we're going to practice falling until you stop being afraid of it. Even unconsciously."
The dojo afternoons integrated into a routine that began to have its own rhythm.
Mornings: physical training in the yard, which evolved as his body responded. Push-ups reached fifteen in a row by the end of the second month. Running extended to six blocks. He added specific core work that Hayashi had recommended as a complement.
Dojo afternoons: Wing Chun, Muay Thai, BJJ in rotation depending on what Hayashi determined for each session, always building on what came before without saturating any specific discipline.
Nights: quirk.
The work with his quirk had evolved in an interesting way. The passive spatial awareness he had detected at the beginning had become more consistent with practice, though it was still diffuse. He could close his eyes and have an approximate notion of where the thrown spheres were, not with millimetric precision but with a general certainty that improved week by week.
The most interesting part was what he discovered one night almost by accident.
He was practicing accuracy in the yard, throwing spheres at marked targets on the wall, when he tried to apply what Hayashi had taught him about Chi Sao: instead of looking at the target and calculating the trajectory with his eyes, he closed his eyes, felt the position of the sphere in his hand, and threw trusting the sensation instead of vision.
He hit the center of the target.
He stayed there for a moment with his eyes closed, processing what had just happened.
The information comes from contact, not vision.
What Hayashi had said about Chi Sao applied, in a completely different way but with the same underlying logic, to his quirk. The spheres were part of his body. He had information about them that did not depend on seeing them. If he learned to trust that information instead of compensating with vision, accuracy could be consistent regardless of visibility conditions.
He wrote everything down in the notebook that night with the fastest handwriting he could maintain.
Chi Sao training is developing something that is not specific to Wing Chun. It is a form of spatial information processing that can be applied to the quirk. The question is whether it can be trained directly in addition to as a side effect of the dojo.
Hypothesis: if I actively train awareness of the spheres simultaneously with Chi Sao training, progress in both areas could feed into each other.
Below that, after a pause:
Hayashi doesn't know I have a quirk. I don't know if it's relevant. For now it isn't. The dojo is the dojo. The quirk is the quirk. Eventually they'll have to integrate, but that moment is not today.
He closed the notebook.
Outside, it was raining softly. The sound of water against the windows was constant and monotonous in a way that was, surprisingly, quite comforting.
Two months and a bit. Push-ups: fifteen. Spheres before noticeable fatigue: sixteen. Height: 109 centimeters.
One centimeter.
One centimeter in two months.
He considered that for a moment. In his previous life, it would have been a disappointing number. Here, with three years ahead and a body in full development, it was simply the beginning of a curve that hadn't reached its inflection point yet.
Patience, he told himself.
It wasn't his most natural virtue.
But he was learning.
End of Episode 4.