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(9 Advanced Chapters)
~~~~~
The gym at Shizuoka Technical & Vocational High School wasn't exactly built for drama. It was a large, stuffy room with worn floors and a constant scent of rubber and floor wax.
Today, it was divided into ten assessment zones. Each zone was equipped with biometric sensors, high-speed cameras, and a representative from the Hero Education Board.
Kaito Arisaka stood in the queue for Zone 4. He was eighteen years old. He was six feet tall, but he held his shoulders in a calculated slump that made him appear shorter. He wore his charcoal-gray vocational uniform.
The fabric was frayed at the cuffs. He had deliberately stained the left sleeve with permanent hydraulic fluid.
He was the last student in his track to be tested.
In the observers' gallery, three meters above the floor, Shota Aizawa stood with his arms crossed. He was not wearing his hero costume, but his yellow sleeping bag was draped over his shoulder. Beside him sat Agent Mera from the HPSC, her eyes fixed on a tablet.
"He's been a 'Dud' for fourteen years, Aizawa," Mera said. Her voice was flat. "We've run every stress test in the manual. The mall incident, the school surge, the Hosu sightings. He bleeds. He trips. He breaks. Why are we here?"
"Because the math is wrong, and your president entrusted me one last time" Aizawa replied. He did not look at her. "His Quirk Factor count is in the 99th percentile for his age group. Biologically, he is a powerhouse. Physically, he is a none. I don't like discrepancies."
"He's a biological dead-end," Mera countered. "It happens. The quirk factor is there, but the manifestation of his ability isn't. This audit is just a formality before we stamp his 'Non-Threat' status."
-----
Kaito heard them. His senses were partitioned. While his primary consciousness focused on the dusty texture of the floor, his background processes monitored the heart rates of everyone in the room.
The public's belief in Hero X had peaked. The "Update" was a roaring engine inside his chest, trying to force his skin into white marble and his eyes into orange glass.
Kaito executed a Manual Override. He used his mastery to "de-render" the strength in his legs. He made his pulse irregular. He forced a thin layer of cold sweat to manifest on his forehead.
"Arisaka, Kaito. Step forward," the evaluator called.
Kaito walked into the center of Zone 4. The evaluator was a mid-tier pro hero named Rock-Lock. He looked bored.
"Standard procedure, Arisaka," Rock-Lock said. "You've got a Quirk Factor on file. We need to see if there's been any late-stage manifestation before you get your vocational license. Try to activate it. Focus on the target."
He pointed to a weighted steel block in the center of the zone.
Kaito looked at the block. In his mind, he saw the atomic structure of the steel. He could have turned it into a 2D drawing of a butterfly with a blink. He could have deleted it from existence.
Instead, Kaito chose to perform a "Glitch."
Kaito planted his feet. He gripped his own wrists. He squeezed until his knuckles turned white. He forced his face to turn a deep, sickly red. He made his breath hitch in his throat, simulating extreme physical strain.
'Render: Localized Failure,' Kaito commanded.
In his right hand, the skin began to twitch. It wasn't a hero's glow. It was a sickening, unnatural grey. The veins in his forearm bulged and turned black.
To the observers, it looked like his body was rejecting its own power.
A small, pathetic spark of static electricity flickered between his fingers. It smelled like ozone and burnt hair.
Then, Kaito triggered a localized capillary burst in his nose. A single stream of dark red blood ran down his lip.
He collapsed to one knee, panting.
"I... I can't," Kaito gasped. His voice was raw. "It just... it hurts. It's just hurts."
Rock-Lock stepped back, a look of genuine worry on his face. "Dammit. It's a Rejection Type. His body treats the quirk like a foreign virus."
Aizawa leaped from the gallery, landing silently on the linoleum. He walked toward Kaito. His hair was floating. His eyes were glowing red.
"Don't move," Aizawa said.
He activated Erasure.
Kaito felt the "nullification" wave wash over him. It was a crude, binary tool compared to his own mastery.
Aizawa was trying to "shut off" a quirk that wasn't actually active. Kaito maintained the grey discoloration on his arm. He used his reality-warping to hold the skin in that state, making it immune to Aizawa's quirk.
If it were a quirk, Erasure would have fixed the arm. Because it stayed grey and sickly, it proved to Aizawa that this wasn't a power—it was a permanent deformity.
Aizawa deactivated his quirk. His hair fell back to his shoulders. He looked at Kaito's grey, twitching hand. He looked at the blood on the floor.
"It didn't change," Aizawa muttered.
"It never changes," Kaito said, looking up through his smudged glasses. He made his eyes watery. "I've been trying since I was four. And now this quirk suddenly 'appeared' 2 years ago and it was completely useless. It just makes me sick. Can I go now?"
Aizawa stared at him for sixty seconds. He was looking for the seam.
But all he saw was a tired eighteen-year-old with a broken body and a stained uniform.
"You're not a Dud anymore, Arisaka," Aizawa said. There was no malice in his voice. There was only the cold finality of a man closing a book. "It's always been there. Don't every try to use it. Go home."
-----
Aizawa walked back to the faculty lounge. He did not sit down. He stood by the window, watching the students leave the vocational school. He saw Kaito Arisaka limping toward the gate, his head down, his oversized blazer flapping in the wind.
Nezu was sitting on the sofa, sipping tea. "The report from Zone 4 just came in. Rock-Lock is calling it a 'Genetic Misfire.' He recommends a permanent Non-Threat classification."
"I used Erasure on him," Aizawa said. "The manifestation didn't vanish. The grey tissue stayed grey. The tremors didn't stop."
"Which means?" Nezu asked.
"Which means it isn't a quirk activating," Aizawa replied. "It's biological damage. He's not hiding a power, Nezu. He's carrying a corpse inside his DNA. HPSC spent three years chasing a boy because his numbers were high, but the numbers lied. He's just a kid who got the short end of the evolutionary stick."
Aizawa took out a red pen. He picked up Kaito's file. It was thick, filled with surveillance photos, biometric data, and interview transcripts.
He wrote three words across the front in large, aggressive letters: NON-THREAT / DUD/ LIABILITY QUIRK.
"I'm done with him," Aizawa said. "If Hero X is out there, he isn't connected to Arisaka. Arisaka couldn't even lift that steel block, let alone flatten a building or summon him."
Nezu nodded. "Then the HPSC will completely withdraw the satellite coverage by midnight. Graduation is in two days. He'll be off the grid."
Aizawa felt a strange sense of relief. He hated wasting resources. He hated looking for ghosts. He watched Arisaka disappear around a corner, merging with the crowd of mundane people. He looked like a drop of water in an ocean of grey.
-----
Mera sat in the back of the surveillance van. She watched the "Green Light" flash on the monitor. The HPSC's central server had accepted Aizawa's audit.
"Scale it down," Mera ordered. "Pull the drones from the Ashita district. We're moving the Shizuoka budget to the Hosu investigation."
"What about the 'Nine-Second X' video?" the technician asked. "The face analysis was still inconclusive."
"It doesn't matter," Mera said. She rubbed her tired eyes. "Arisaka just spilled blood on a gym floor in front of Eraserhead. He's been vetted by the best. If he was the one or even connected to him, he would have slipped by now. He's eighteen. No one has that kind of discipline at eighteen."
She closed the laptop. The screen went black.
[A/n: This stalker is finally gone. Good. Good. Good]
-----
Kaito walked into the hardware store. The bell chimed.
The grey color on his arm vanished the moment the door closed. The blood on his lip evaporated into clean air. His posture straightened. His height returned to its natural six feet.
He didn't feel like a hero. He felt like a man who had just finished a very long, very boring shift at a job he hated.
Grandma Saki was in the back, counting the drawer. She didn't look up.
"How was the exam?" she asked.
"I failed," Kaito said. He took off the charcoal blazer and hung it on a hook.
"It's ok, quirk or not you're still you Kaito," Saki said. She finally looked at him. "But did they believe you?"
"Aizawa signed the paper. The HPSC turned off the drones five minutes ago. I can't see them anymore when I'm outside. The air is quiet."
Kaito walked to the basement. He sat on a crate of industrial lubricant. He looked at his hands. For the first time in fourteen years, he didn't have to "lower" his presence. He could just exist.
The "Update" was still there, buzzing under his skin like a distant hive of bees. The world still believed in Hero X. But the world no longer believed in Kaito Arisaka.
He had successfully separated the God from the Man.
'Two days to graduation,' Kaito thought. 'Then the countdown starts.'
He knew what was coming. He knew about the boy with the green hair who would eventually change everything. He knew about the collapse of the Hero Society.
But for now, Kaito Arisaka had a more important task.
Kaito reached into a bin of 10mm hex nuts. He began to sort them by thread count. It's just a habit.
Kaito spent the next four hours doing nothing else. He didn't use his eyes to scan them. He didn't use his mind to calculate the volume. He used his fingers. He felt the cold, oily metal. He listened to the rhythmic clink of the nuts hitting the plastic bins.
It was the most satisfying thing he had done in years.
-----
Saito was at the ramen shop across from the school. He was scrolling through his phone. He saw the official school announcement for the graduation honors.
"Man, Arisaka didn't even make the honorable mention list," Saito said, slurping his noodles.
His friend leaned over. "Who?"
"Arisaka. The guy in the back row. Clumsy kid. Had that gross skin thing happen during the audit today."
"Oh, that one. Yeah, I saw that. Looked painful. What's he going to do after graduation?"
Saito shrugged. "He said he got a job at a logistics firm in the city. Filing paperwork for shipping containers. Sounds like hell."
"Better than being a dud in a hero world," the friend said. "At least he's safe."
Saito looked at a photo on his phone. It was a blurry shot of the "Hero X" mural in the downtown district. The figure in the white suit looked powerful, elegant, and unreachable.
"I guess," Saito muttered.
He deleted the photo. He needed the storage space for his auto-body shop manuals.
-----
The sun set over Shizuoka. Kaito stood on the roof of the hardware store.
Kaito wasn't wearing his glasses. His eyes were glowing a soft, steady orange. He looked out at the city. He could see the thermal signatures of every person within ten miles. He could hear the hum of the power lines.
Kaito reached into his pocket and pulled out the small, rusted hex nut Aizawa had given him months ago.
Kaito didn't crush it.
He didn't fix it.
He held it in the palm of his hand and looked at the moon.
'Its finally over,' Kaito thought
Kaito closed his hand. When he opened it, the nut was gone. It hadn't been destroyed; it had been moved to a 2D plane of existence, a permanent record of the day the heroes and the government stopped looking for him.
He went downstairs. He had some things to finish. He had a life to start.
The Hero Society was loud. The world was screaming for a savior. But Kaito Arisaka was going to have a very, very quiet night.
The victory was total. The file was closed. The countdown had begun.
~~~~~
[Author's Note]
With the completion of the Final Audit, Kaito has officially successfully navigated the most dangerous period of his "camouflage" phase.
By Age 18, his mastery over the "Update" has transitioned from a desperate struggle to a cold, calculated administration of reality.
He didn't just hide from Aizawa; he gave the Hero Society a biological reason to ignore him forever.
The "broken" quirk was the final piece of the puzzle. Now that the HPSC has cleared him, we move into the era of the "Clean Slate."
The next chapter will cover the final transition into adulthood and the beginning of the long, silent wait for the canon timeline to begin.