The summer I was eleven the orphanage got a new intake of three kids at once, which was unusual enough that it disrupted the routine in ways everyone felt for about two weeks.
Two of them settled in quickly the way resilient children do, finding their footing, making alliances, figuring out the social geography. The third one didn't. He was eight years old, dark-eyed, and had arrived with a bruise along his jaw that was fading from purple to yellow and nobody in the staff was discussing out loud but everyone had clearly discussed privately. His name was Daichi and his quirk made small objects float, which he used exclusively to keep things close to him at all times, a pencil case, a small stuffed bear missing one eye, a paperback book with a broken spine. A floating perimeter of possessions. I understood it immediately as what it was, which was armor.
I did not befriend him. I was not in the business of befriending people, and eight-year-olds were not my demographic. But I paid attention to how he was doing the way I paid attention to everything in my environment, as a matter of habit and operational awareness, and when Kenta, who was eleven now and should have grown out of it but hadn't, started circling the new kid with that particular predatory curiosity he had, I put myself in the way once without making a production of it and Kenta recalculated and went somewhere else.
Daichi looked at me the same way the flower-quirk kid had looked at me two years earlier.
I looked back and said nothing and went to the library corner and read about civil engineering for an hour because I was curious about load-bearing structures and that is the kind of thing you get curious about when you are eleven years old with the reading habits of a postgraduate student and unlimited free time.
This was my life. It was not a bad life. I want to be fair about that.
---
The training that summer pushed into new territory.
I had Dismantle at roughly seventy percent reliability at four feet. I had been working on extending the range and the success rate simultaneously, which was probably overambitious, so I made a decision to pick one and go deep on it before touching the other. I picked reliability. Range was useless if the execution was inconsistent. You do not want to be in a situation where you need something to work and it works seven times out of ten. You want ten out of ten, or as close to it as human imperfection allows.
I drilled it until I was bored of it, which took longer than you would think because boredom requires a kind of passive attention that I was not very good at. I was almost always actively thinking about something. The training had the particular quality of interesting work, which is that it never fully stopped being interesting because there was always something to refine.
By August the reliability was at ninety-two percent. I counted, kept the mental log, was honest about the failures and what had caused them. Tiredness was still a factor. Distraction was a factor. There was something emotional, too, a quality in the bad attempts that I eventually identified as a kind of doubt, a half-second hesitation in the intent, and once I identified it I could catch it before it collapsed the output.
Don't hesitate. If you're going to do it, do it completely.
This was not only a lesson about cursed energy.
---
School that year gave me Takeda-sensei, who was the first teacher I had encountered who was actually good at her job. Not good in the sense of being kind, though she was that too, but good in the technical sense of understanding that different students process information at different speeds and that teaching to the slowest pace in the room is a failure of the students at both ends of the distribution.
She gave me extra work without being asked, which I appreciated. She did it quietly, slipping additional problems into my assignments without announcing it to the class, which I appreciated more. She didn't treat it as a reward or a distinction. Just: here is someone who needs more, here is more.
I liked her. I added her to the small internal list of people in my life who I thought were doing what they were supposed to be doing and doing it well. The list was not long. It didn't need to be long. It just needed to exist.
She asked me once, keeping me briefly after class to return an assignment she had marked, where I thought I wanted to go. Future plans, she meant. The standard teacher question.
I thought about it genuinely for a moment.
"I'm not sure yet," I said, which was true in the specific sense and completely false in the general sense. I had extremely specific plans. I just couldn't tell her any of them.
She nodded in the way of someone who found that answer more interesting than a confident one. "You have time," she said.
"I know," I said.
I did know. That was exactly the thing I was managing most carefully. The time between now and when it would matter was finite and I could feel it ticking, not with anxiety, just with the steady awareness of someone who has a long project and a real deadline and chooses to treat every day as a unit of that project rather than as empty space to move through.
---
In October I extended the range of Dismantle to eight feet.
I was in the yard, early morning, an hour before the orphanage woke up properly and staff started moving through the building. I had been doing this for a year, the early morning sessions when the light was grey and flat and the yard was empty. A thin cut appeared in the wood of the fence post at eight feet and I stood very still and looked at it and did the thing I had trained myself not to do with small victories, which was to celebrate them before you had interrogated them.
I interrogated it. The cut was clean. The intent had been consistent all the way through. The energy expenditure felt proportionate to output, no waste I could identify. The headache that had attended early Dismantle attempts was absent, which confirmed that the technique had moved from effortful to practiced.
Then I allowed myself one small moment of satisfaction, private and brief and entirely internal.
Then I crossed the yard and examined the fence post closely. The cut was about an inch deep. Fine enough that it looked like it could be a natural crack in the grain of the old wood. I ran my finger along it anyway and then walked away and made a note to check periodically whether it drew any attention.
It didn't. Wood develops cracks. Nobody was looking for anything.
---
What I thought about in the autumn of my eleventh year, more than training and more than the timeline, was the question of what I actually was.
This sounds more dramatic than I mean it. I wasn't having an identity crisis. I was doing what I always did, which was thinking carefully about my actual situation rather than the version of my situation that would be comfortable to believe.
I was a person with full memories of a previous life in a different world. That previous person was dead, cleanly and completely, and mourning him wasn't something I had ever felt the pull toward because I was him, in the ways that mattered, while also being someone new. The memories were there like a reference library. I accessed them constantly. They informed everything. But I wasn't twenty-two anymore and pretending to be twenty-two inside an eleven-year-old's life would have made me ineffective and probably miserable.
I was eleven. I was Ryo Shiba. I was also the person who had been a university student who had liked anime and bad coffee and sleeping late and had died on a Tuesday without any warning.
Both of those things were true simultaneously and I had stopped needing them to resolve into something neater.
What was less easily settled was the other thing. The warmth in the chest that was not only warmth anymore, that had grown with me and become something more textured, more present. The thing that leaned forward in confrontations. The thing that had pulsed in satisfaction when Dismantle first worked.
Sukuna had been the King of Curses. Had been the most dangerous thing in his world. Had been, by every measure, a catastrophic presence whose primary relationship with humanity was one of comprehensive contempt broken occasionally by something that might, very generously, have been called interest.
I was not Sukuna. I was never going to be Sukuna. But I was carrying his power and his power had a flavor and that flavor was in me, not as a separate voice, not as a competing will, but as a quality of my own responses that I had to account for honestly.
I sat on the wall at the edge of the yard, feet dangling, watching the city past the roofline, and I thought: you are going to become very dangerous. You already know this. The question is what kind of dangerous you choose to be.
The kind that is dangerous to people who deserve it.
That was the answer I had arrived at before and kept arriving at. Criminals. People who preyed. The villain who had killed three people four blocks away from here and who was currently sitting in a detention facility waiting for a court date. Not civilians. Never civilians. The line was clear and I had drawn it clearly and I intended to hold it.
The thing in my chest didn't argue. It didn't need to. We were in agreement on that particular point, which was either reassuring or said something about the things we might not agree on later that I chose not to examine too closely.
I jumped down from the wall and went inside for breakfast.
Eleven years old. Three years until UA entrance exams, roughly. An enormous amount of work still to do.
I ate my breakfast and read and thought about load-bearing structures and the particular geometry of clean cuts, and the morning moved around me the way mornings do, ordinary and temporary and already becoming the past.