The pin was sterilized. Momo had been specific about this, which was Momo being specific about everything — the testing environment she'd created in Training Ground Gamma's sealed secondary room had the character of a setup designed by someone for whom the word controlled described both methodology and disposition.
Impact-resistant walls. Three of Momo's monitoring instruments on the side table, calibrated. A sealed transport container with a rat acquired from the support course's biology lab through what she described as a reasonable arrangement that I don't need to explain in detail. Two pairs of medical gloves. A biohazard disposal bag.
The pin was the last thing on the table. Sterilized. Ready.
Yami picked it up and looked at it.
"Ready," he said.
"Whenever you are," Momo said.
He pricked his left index finger. The blood appeared at the pinpoint — small, immediately — and he equipped the Bloodcurdle Shard to Slot 2, which the system acknowledged in the margin of his vision with the clean functionalism it used for administrative notifications.
[Bloodcurdle Shard — Slot 2 equipped. Blood contact required for activation. Effect: partial motor function reduction, 2-3 seconds. Range: contact only.]
He pressed his fingertip to the rat's flank.
The rat's movements changed over approximately one second — not dramatically, not a collapse, more the quality of an animal that had been running at a certain speed and found the speed reduced without apparent cause. Its legs continued moving but with the deliberate quality of something working through resistance. After two and a half seconds by Momo's stopwatch, it resumed normal movement.
He looked at his hand. The blood on his fingertip had transferred. No residue on his skin.
"Consistent with the shard's documentation," Momo said, making a note. "Two-point-six seconds at that blood volume."
"Against a human, three seconds of motor reduction opens one clean combat window," he said. "One hit, maximum. Depends on positioning."
"The mechanics concern me." She set the pen down. "To use it, you need to draw your own blood and achieve physical contact with the target. That's close range, and it requires you to be injured first."
"Controlled injury."
"Intentional self-injury, yes." She looked at him across the table. Not accusatory — the assessment expression, the one that appeared when she was building the full model rather than a partial one. "Where did this one come from."
He'd been expecting the question. Not this session expecting — he'd been expecting it since the hospital room, the moment the system notification had appeared and he'd thought about who else might eventually need to know the mechanism that produced fragments.
"Hosu," he said.
"The Hero Killer."
"Yes."
Momo processed this with the specific quality of processing something that was morally complex and required more than the first layer of response. "A fragment of Stain's quirk," she said. "In your inventory. Because he killed you."
"That's how it works. Each new killer — first time — produces a fragment."
She looked at the rat, which had resumed normal behavior in its container. She looked at her notes. She looked at him.
"Your first fragment," she said. "The absorption one. From the Nomu."
"Yes."
"And this one from Stain." She aligned the pen on her notepad with the precise attention of someone giving their hands something to do while the thinking continued. "Are all your fragments from people who killed you."
"Yes."
The secondary room had the specific quiet of an enclosed space in an empty training ground in the early afternoon. The ventilation system's hum. The monitoring instruments maintaining their baselines on the side table. The rat, alive and fine, moving around its container.
"Then every power you gain requires someone to end your life first," Momo said.
She didn't say it to him — she said it to the room, the way you said a thing that needed to exist in the air before you could continue thinking about it properly.
He didn't answer it, because it wasn't a question.
"That's the loneliest power system I've ever heard of," she said.
And then she was quiet, which was the correct response to having said a true thing and not having a follow-up that improved on it.
He looked at his index finger. The blood had already dried — not much of it, a pinpoint's worth. The skin looked exactly like skin.
The Shock Absorption fragment had come from the Nomu. The Bloodcurdle fragment from Stain. Whatever came next would come from whoever next managed to kill him, and that person could be anyone, in any context, at any point on the timeline — because he couldn't predict every death, and the system's economy was built on a mechanic that required dying to function, and the cost of every capability he'd built was written somewhere that only he could read.
Momo had understood this in approximately thirty seconds.
"Does anyone else know," she said. "The mechanism."
"No."
She made a note on the notepad that he didn't try to read. Then she created a small bandage for his index finger — produced it with the lipid shimmer at her forearm, the specific faint glow of creation-quirk output, and the bandage was exactly the correct size and correctly applied and the wound was a pinprick that didn't need a bandage.
She put it on anyway.
Neither of them commented on it.
The training ground sink ran cold. He washed the dried blood from his fingertip and watched the water spiral, and the water was the clear ordinary color of water before it went down the drain, and the drain had the quality of an ending that was not permanent — it went somewhere, came back, moved through the system in a way that implied continuation rather than cessation.
The loneliest power system.
He turned the tap off. Dried his hands on the paper towel that was the training ground's version of hand-drying infrastructure. Two fragments. Two killers. The Nomu's engineered weapon-body and Stain's personal philosophy about who deserved to exist.
He was carrying pieces of both of them.
The matchup board would post tomorrow morning. He went back inside to collect the testing equipment alongside Momo and thought about what Aizawa's face would look like on the board next to his name — not the face itself, the implication of it.
Aizawa had requested the matchup.
He was going to learn something important from this regardless of how it went.
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