Chapter 6: The Architect of Order
The basement of the Higuruma estate was not merely a room; it was a cathedral of discipline and a laboratory of human suffering. Three stories beneath the manicured lawns of Minato, shielded by six feet of lead-reinforced concrete and specialized soundproofing foam designed to dampen the shockwaves of experimental support gear, Hiromi Higuruma spent his childhood dismantling the perceived limits of the human form.
By the age of seven, while his peers were playing with action figures of All Might, Hiromi stood in the center of this subterranean gym, his chest heaving like a bellows. Sweat matted his dark, charcoal hair to his forehead, dripping rhythmically onto the padded floor, which was stained with the salt of a thousand hours of exertion. His small frame was already beginning to exhibit an unnatural density—a "Heavenly Restriction" of sorts that had blessed the vessels of the world he once read about.
"Again," he rasped, the word tasting like iron in the back of his throat.
Before him stood a "Class-S" Combat Automaton, a sleek, obsidian-colored machine manufactured by the Yaoyorozu Group for high-level Pro Hero sparring. Its optical sensors flared a menacing crimson. Hiromi didn't move like a child; he moved like a predator that had lived a thousand years and forgotten how to fear.
As the robot lunged with a hydraulic-assisted jab that would have shattered a grown man's ribs, Hiromi didn't retreat. He stepped into the strike. This was the core of the Koryu Bujutsu he had spent the last two years perfecting: the negation of distance through absolute conviction. He caught the robot's wrist with a "sticky" palm, redirecting the force in a circular motion. The metal groaned under the redirected torque. Using the machine's own momentum, Hiromi pivoted, his heel digging into the reinforced mat, and drove his elbow into the robot's chassis.
CRACK.
The reinforced plating shattered, but Hiromi wasn't finished. He felt the surge of Cursed Energy—that thick, cold, black ink—pooling in his solar plexus. He channeled it down his arm, timing the release with the mathematical precision of a stopwatch.
"Divergent Strike."
The physical impact of his elbow landed first, a blunt-force trauma that buckled the metal. A microsecond later, the delayed pocket of Cursed Energy exploded like a shaped charge. The robot was sent hurtling across the room, slamming into the reinforced wall with enough force to leave a permanent crater in the concrete.
The Grandmaster's Lesson and the "Silent Killer"
By the age of ten, the robots were no longer sufficient. His father, Daichi, had noticed the "unnatural" progression of his son. Fearing the boy was becoming a blunt instrument—a mere brawler—he hired Master Sato, a world-renowned grandmaster of 'Silent Killing' arts and a legendary former underground pit fighter.
Sato was a man who viewed Quirks as crutches. He believed solely in the "True Body."
"You rely too much on your energy, boy," Sato said during their first meeting, standing in the center of the ring. He was sixty, but his skin was like tanned leather, and his eyes held the predatory sharpness of a hawk. "If I take away your 'black ink,' you are just a fragile child with a heavy hand. Show me your soul without the light show."
The sparring sessions were grueling, often lasting six to eight hours without a break for water or rest. Hiromi was systematically dismantled. Sato moved like smoke, his strikes landing on Hiromi's pressure points with surgical precision. Hiromi's vision would blur as he tasted the copper tang of blood in his mouth. Every time he tried to manifest his Cursed Energy, Sato would strike his solar plexus or his nerve clusters, disrupting his "flow" before the energy could even reach his limbs.
"Your mind is a lawyer's mind," Sato barked, catching Hiromi's roundhouse kick and sweeping his standing leg. "You try to negotiate with the air! You try to find a loophole in the physics of a punch! There is no loophole in a broken jaw! There is only the strike!"
Hiromi hit the mat hard, his ribs screaming in agony. He lay there for a moment, staring at the fluorescent lights, feeling the crushing weight of his own perceived inadequacy. Then, something snapped. He didn't reach for his Cursed Energy. He reached for the raw, physical instinct of the vessel itself.
He rolled, popping up to his feet with an explosive speed that finally caught Sato off guard. He didn't think about the "form" of the punch; he simply moved as an extension of the earth. He closed the distance in a blur, feinting a high jab, and as Sato raised his guard, Hiromi dropped low. He delivered a devastating liver blow followed by a rising knee that rattled the master's teeth.
Sato blocked the knee, but the sheer mass behind Hiromi's strike—the density of a body that was growing more like a cursed spirit's than a human's—forced the master back three full steps.
Sato touched his ribs, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face. "There. The beast wakes up. Now we can actually begin."
The Middle School Years: A Shadow in the Classroom
As Hiromi entered his middle school years at an elite private academy in Minato, he became a ghost in a sea of privileged teenagers. While his classmates obsessed over Hero Rankings and their emerging Quirks, Hiromi lived in a state of perpetual "Break and Repair."
The Student Life:
In the classroom, Hiromi was the "Ice Prince." He was terrifyingly brilliant, finishing exams in half the allotted time with a cold, mechanical accuracy. He sat at the back of the class, his posture perfect, his eyes often looking through the teacher rather than at them. He adjusted to student life by treating it as a series of depositions. He spoke only when necessary, and when he did, his words were so logically sound they left no room for rebuttal.
He was popular in a distant way. Girls were drawn to his sharp, mature features and the quiet intensity he radiated, but any who tried to get close were met with a polite, impenetrable wall. He spent his lunch hours in the library, not reading manga, but studying the "Quirk Laws" of other nations, looking for the inconsistencies he would eventually exploit.
The Physique:
By the age of thirteen, Hiromi's physique had become a masterpiece of "compressed" power. To his classmates, he looked lean and athletic in his school uniform, but those who brushed against him in the hallway felt like they had walked into a marble statue. He was 5'10" and weighed nearly 190 lbs of pure, dense muscle. His bones had reached a density that defied medical logic, a byproduct of training in a gravity-amplification chamber—a prototype gift from the Yaoyorozu family—where he performed thousands of repetitions of basic katas at 3x Earth's gravity.
He consumed a monstrous ten thousand calories a day, mostly lean proteins and complex fats, to fuel this rapid evolution. His skin was perpetually warm to the touch, a result of his Cursed Energy constantly circulating beneath the surface, reinforcing his cellular structure.
Cursed Energy Manipulation: The Surgeon of Shadows
During his midnight sessions, Hiromi practiced "The Veil" and "The Flow." He would sit in a pitch-black room and try to sense the Cursed Energy of the insects in the walls, learning to map out his surroundings without using his eyes.
He learned to "harden" his energy into razor-sharp layers. He would manifest a micro-thin coating of energy around his fingertips and practice "carving" complex legal kanji into sheets of diamond-coated glass. If his energy fluctuated by even a fraction of a percent, the glass would shatter. This taught him the precision of a surgeon. He wasn't just a brawler; he was becoming a man who could apply the death penalty with a mere flick of a finger.
He also developed "Cursed Reinforcement: Lawman's Gait," a technique where he flooded his legs with energy in a specific, rhythmic pattern, allowing him to move with a silent, sliding motion that made him appear to teleport across short distances.
The Final Test: Graduation of the Judge
By the age of fourteen, Hiromi stood a full 6'0". He was a silhouette of absolute, terrifying composure. When he stood still, he had no "presence"—a technique he learned from Master Sato to mask his intent—making him invisible to most Quirk-based detection. But when he moved, he was a localized hurricane.
One final test remained before the U.A. Entrance Exam. He stood before Master Sato in the cratered basement gym for their final spar.
"Use it all," Sato commanded, drawing a wooden katana that had been reinforced with ironwood. "The ink, the body, the judge. Show me the man you have become before you go to play with the children."
Hiromi didn't speak. He simply adjusted his stance. The air in the room grew heavy, the temperature dropping ten degrees as his black Cursed Energy began to leak out, darkening the corners of the room like a spilled inkwell.
He moved.
It wasn't a fight; it was a liquidation of an asset. Hiromi bypassed Sato's legendary guard in a blur of motion. His hands moved so fast they created audible sonic pops in the air. He reinforced his forearms with a dense layer of energy, parrying the ironwood sword and shattering it into a cloud of splinters with a single strike.
He ended the bout with his palm hovering exactly one inch from Sato's forehead. The wind from the "phantom strike" blew the master's hair back and cracked the concrete wall behind him.
Sato lowered his hands, breathing heavily, a look of profound respect in his eyes. "You are ready, Hiromi. The 'Heroes' at U.A. won't know what to do with you. You aren't playing their game of points and popularity."
Hiromi bowed deeply, his expression unreadable. "I'm not going there to play, Master. I'm going there to deliver a verdict on a broken system."
..............
Author's Note: This chapter has been expanded to show the transition of Hiromi from a gifted child to a refined weapon. His training with Master Sato and his "Heavenly" physical growth set him apart from the average Quirk user. He is entering U.A. not just as a student, but as an adult mind in a peak-human body. Thank you for following the journey!