The next phase of the training exercise began with everyone drawing lots to determine the order. It was the only fair way to structure it. Not because Tsutsumi needed the limitation, he could handle them all at once without much effort, but because that was never the purpose of this session.
The real objective was twofold.
First, to keep Tsutsumi entertained long enough that he might rediscover some interest in being a hero. Second, to observe him. Now that it had been confirmed he possessed limitless growth and the ability to travel across time and space, both Aizawa and Nezu needed more data on what exactly that meant in practice.
The first name drawn was Uraraka.
She stepped forward, clearly nervous, but forced herself to pump her fists lightly and hype herself up under her breath. Whatever she was telling herself, it was enough to steady her stance.
Tsutsumi drew a card.
Form Ride: Agnes Tachyon!
His body shrank slightly as the transformation completed. Brown hair replaced his own, and an oversized white lab coat draped over a smaller frame. Horse ears twitched subtly atop his head, along with a long ahoge.
Despite the almost harmless appearance, there was nothing casual about the shift in pressure.
Uraraka barely had time to adjust her footing. Tsutsumi lifted one foot and brought it down hard. The concrete fractured outward from the impact.
"Domain Expansion! [The Speed of "Tach-nology"]!"
In the next instant, he vanished.
It was not simple speed in the conventional sense. It was acceleration taken to an absurd extreme, movement refined past what the eye could process. Before Uraraka could even activate her Quirk, Tsutsumi reappeared in front of her and delivered a single, clean kick.
The impact launched her straight through the arena wall.
Concrete exploded outward as her body tore through it, leaving a human-shaped opening and a trail of dust hanging in the air.
Everyone: "..."
Tsutsumi glanced at the hole, then at his own foot.
"Hm. Maybe starting with an Ultimate attack was a bit excessive," he muttered thoughtfully.
Ida and Midoriya reacted immediately, rushing through the dust cloud and retrieving Uraraka before carrying her toward the infirmary.
From the sidelines, Aizawa pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Hold back a little," he said flatly. "This is training. Not a fight to the death."
Tsutsumi nodded without argument.
The next name drawn was Kaminari.
The blond stepped forward stiffly, shoulders tense. His earlier confidence had clearly evaporated after watching both Hado and Uraraka get launched into structural materials. His hands trembled slightly as he tried to hide it.
Tsutsumi drew again.
Form Ride: Virtuosa!
His figure grew taller this time, posture refining into something poised and deliberate.
Long jet-black hair fell smoothly down his back, styled in a precise hime-cut that framed his face. Above his head floated a fractured, segmented black halo, faintly luminous. Behind him, small crystalline wings hovered in detached fragments, suspended as if gravity did not apply to them.
The oversized lab coat disappeared, replaced by layered black-and-white attire: a collared jacket over a crisp white shirt adorned with an ascot, lace-trimmed skirt, opera-length gloves, thigh-high stockings secured by garter straps, and elegant black heels that clicked softly against the arena floor.
The transformation carried an almost sacred elegance, though the darkness of the halo and wings gave it an unsettling undertone.
A few of the boys and even girls in Class 1-A stared openly. For a brief moment, even Kaminari forgot to be afraid.
Those calm black eyes met his, causing his heart rate to spike.
A black cello materialized in Tsutsumi's hand. He positioned it with effortless familiarity and drew the bow across the strings.
The first note was gentle.
Smooth and soothing.
Kaminari felt the fear in his chest soften, replaced by something warmer. A strange longing he couldn't quite name. Before something deep inside his heart began to rise.
What Tsutsumi failed to account for was the nature of sound. Unlike physical strikes or targeted elemental attacks, music traveled.
Virtuosa's Arts did not create emotions. They amplified what already existed in the heart. They acted as a catalyst, pulling buried feelings to the surface and magnifying them without filtration.
And Class 1-A was full of teenagers.
Insecurity intensified into despair. Competitive pride sharpened into hostility. Hidden crushes bloomed into overwhelming fixation. Doubts turned corrosive. Confidence inflated into reckless arrogance. Emotions clashed and spiraled in unpredictable ways as the melody continued.
Arguments broke out. Some students dropped to their knees, overwhelmed. Others lashed out verbally or emotionally. A few simply shut down entirely, unable to process the sudden amplification of everything they had tried to suppress.
Within minutes, the arena descended into chaos.
Nezu, observing from his office, quietly began making calls. Aizawa was told to stop Tsutsumi before the situation became even worse.
And since Tsutsumi also realized his slip-up, he stopped his little performance.
The lingering raw emotions slowly die down, though the emotional aftershock remains. Several students required assistance to even stand properly. A few were escorted toward the infirmary for evaluation, and Nezu had discreetly arranged for multiple psychologists and therapists to be brought in to stabilize the situation before it could worsen.
Fortunately, Tsutsumi had halted the performance before the amplification reached a point of no return.
The arena slowly empties out as Tsutsumi looked down at the silent cello in his hands before his form shifted back to normal, and the cello disappeared.
...
Later that day, while the students of Class 1-A were still recovering from what their Class Representative had accidentally caused, Tsutsumi met directly with Nezu and Aizawa.
From that meeting, he learned that his future self had returned again and revealed multiple secrets to Nezu, Aizawa, and even All Might. It was not vague speculation but clear information about his abilities and what they could eventually become. Combined with what had happened during the training exercise earlier, it was enough to make both Nezu and Aizawa significantly more cautious in how they viewed him.
The emotional amplification ability alone was already too dangerous.
Society functions through a balance of order and a controlled amount of chaos. Order keeps systems stable and allows the weaker parts of society to continue functioning without collapsing. A small degree of chaos, however, is necessary so people can live freely, indulge in harmless desires, and avoid feeling trapped in something rigid and suffocating. Without that balance, society either stagnates or implodes.
But if the deepest and darkest emotions within people were amplified until they overwhelmed everything else, that would not be manageable chaos. That would be instability on a massive scale. Resentment, obsession, jealousy, hatred, once intensified beyond reason, would override logic and restraint. Systems built over decades could fracture in a short time if enough individuals lost control at once.
Even in a hero society supported by figures like All Might, the Symbol of Peace, and countless professional heroes, human nature itself cannot be rewritten. Role models can inspire, but they cannot erase the hidden thoughts people carry. No one, no matter how admirable they appear on the surface, can guarantee that their heart is completely free of darker impulses.
Tsutsumi's new ability did not create those impulses. It simply drew them out and magnified them.
That alone would have been enough to concern them, but the confirmation that Tsutsumi's potential was truly limitless made the situation far more serious. There was no clear ceiling to his growth, no predictable boundary to what he might eventually become capable of. A student with high potential could be trained and guided within known parameters. Someone without an upper limit was something else entirely.
Because of that, Nezu and Aizawa understood that how they handled Tsutsumi from this point forward mattered more than ever. A single miscalculation, whether in guidance, restriction, or trust, could push events in a direction that might not be reversible.
If something went wrong on a large enough scale, the consequences would not remain isolated. With the kind of power Tsutsumi possessed and could continue to develop, the damage would extend far beyond a training arena or even a single city.
In the worst case, it could lead to the collapse of the world itself.
Meanwhile, inside the student dorms, many were still recovering from today's little incident.
The atmosphere was quieter than usual, not because anyone had ordered silence, but because most of them were either resting in their rooms or trying to process what they had felt earlier. Some were physically exhausted, others mentally shaken, but no one was completely unaffected, except the one who caused it.
Jiro lay back on her soft red bean bed, staring up at the white ceiling above her. The room was dim, illuminated only by the faint light on the desk. Although her heart had already calmed down and her breathing was steady, the lingering feeling from earlier still hovered near the surface of her mind, subtle but persistent.
Growing up alongside Tsutsumi, their natural closeness had always felt normal to her. They had spent so much time together throughout childhood that understanding him had become second nature.
She knew his habits, his quiet moods, the way he would tilt his head slightly when thinking. Back then, everything about him had felt simple and familiar.
Because of her own naivety and inexperience, she never once thought about whether that closeness could turn into something more. It was just how things were, and she never questioned it.
That only changed after the day he discovered his true power.
From that point onward, he gradually became someone different. Not in a way that could be pointed out easily, and not in a way that others would immediately notice, but enough that she did.
His presence grew heavier, more distant, even when he stood right in front of her. He was still calm, still indifferent to others, still the same Tsutsumi on the surface, yet there was something beneath that she could no longer fully grasp. Sometimes, when she looked at him, she felt like she was trying to understand someone standing just slightly out of reach.
She reached for her phone and unlocked it, scrolling through her gallery until she found an old picture from when they were children. In it, Tsutsumi stood beside her with a bright, unrestrained smile. There was no calculation behind it, no restraint, no hidden weight. It was simply happiness, carefree and genuine.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the phone as she stared at the image.
"When was the last time… he smiled like this?" she murmured quietly, her eyes tracing the curve of that familiar expression.
She tried to remember a recent moment where he had smiled without that faint sense of control behind it, but nothing came to mind. The smile he wore now was still there, but it felt different from the one in the picture. It felt more deliberate, as though it were something shown to others rather than something that surfaced naturally from within. It felt both real and fake at the same time.
Her chest felt tight at the realization, and she looked away from the screen for a moment before locking her phone and setting it down beside her.
"What am I even thinking…" she muttered, shaking her head lightly as if trying to clear those thoughts away.
These were the kinds of things she usually kept to herself. Maybe she was overthinking. Maybe today's events had simply unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. Still, even after she closed her eyes, the image of that childhood smile lingered in her mind, refusing to fade as easily as she wished.
...
Meanwhile, in a different world.
The hallway was long and polished to a shine, the faint echo of distant chatter and announcements drifting through the air.
Just around the corner lay the open field where Agnes Tachyon's debut race would take place. The atmosphere carried that familiar pre-race tension, anticipation mixed with competitiveness, but Tachyon herself looked anything but nervous.
"Oh? Aren't you going to say anything encouraging to your own Uma Musume, Guinea Pig-kun?" Tachyon asked with a smug smile, placing her hands on her hips as she glanced sideways at him. Her tail swayed lazily behind her, ears twitching with clear amusement.
Tsutsumi stood across from her with his arms crossed, posture relaxed, gaze steady as he looked down at her. "There's no need," he replied calmly. "I would be more surprised if you somehow lost to those snails."
Tachyon's eyes narrowed slightly, though the smirk on her face only widened. "Snails, is it? If the other Uma Musume hear you calling them that, you might get beaten to death before the race even begins."
"As long as someone remembers me, I will never die," he answered without hesitation, tone casual as if stating a simple fact rather than something profound.
His expression softened just a little. "Still, do your best."
The words were simple and lacked any dramatic emphasis, yet they carried a quiet certainty that made her smile shift into something more genuine. She turned her head away slightly, adjusting her shirt and number plate as if to hide that brief reaction.
"Of course I will," she said lightly.
She began walking down the hallway toward the light spilling in from the open entrance to the track. The sound of the crowd outside grew clearer with each step, the energy of the stadium humming just beyond the threshold.
Then she paused and glanced back over her shoulder, eyes gleaming with mischief.
"And after I win," she added casually, "you'll be testing a few new potions I just made."
Before Tsutsumi could respond, she broke into a quick run, disappearing around the corner with light, confident strides.
He watched her go without moving, already aware that arguing would have been pointless.
A small smile formed on his lips, one shaped more by familiarity than surprise.