The room was blessedly quiet, save for the sounds of my heavy breathing from the Sisyphean battle I had just fought with my own quirk.
In spite of everything though, I smiled.
Enji is going to be very surprised the next day when I demonstrate my newly developed control.
Groaning, I dragged myself back up on my feet and skulked away,
The dizziness from earlier was still affecting me somewhat, even after lying down for a full minute, so I mostly just hobbled back slowly to my room to rest and recuperate.
Luckily, the training chamber was completely soundproofed from the outside, probably because Enji would deafen all the members of the household when he trained otherwise.
I would hate for Shoto to stumble on me training in secret. Although I knew that Enji's purpose was probably to encourage mutual competition between us, I didn't want to lose the advantage I had from my extra training sessions. I needed to maintain my status as the heiress, because I was worthless without it.
Shoto was a legitimate son, while I was just a bastard. So long as I maintained my dominance and continued to overshadow him, things would be good for me. But I couldn't get careless. One mistake was all it would take… and I would be back at square one.
The road to success was right there for me to tread - I just had to NOT mess up. Easier said than done, when I was being pressured from behind by a legitimate son with an excellent quirk in his own right, the product of careful eugenics resulting from a quirk marriage. I had been lucky that my quirk was a mutated one, but luck didn't last forever, so I needed to continue working hard to compound my advantages.
Heavenflame… I was lucky that this was the quirk I ended up with.
Although people liked to rag on quirk marriages for always producing genetically perfect quirks, or at least superior quirks, it could just as easily backfire.
I'd seen far too many ruinous quirks that harmed their users as a result of some mismatch between the parents' quirks. Quirk singularity was a very popular theory that the news talked about all the time, with quirks becoming gradually more extreme and bizarre following every generation, and consequently, sometimes more dangerous to the user as well.
People with emitter quirks got off the lightest. They tended to have the least physical mutations deviating away from the human baseline, at least looks wise, and heroes with emitter quirks tended to be the most popular in general.
Transformation-type quirks generally didn't impact their users much either.
It was the last category that was reviled. Mutant quirks, or heteromorphic quirks, as they were sometimes called.
This was distinct from my own quirk, which Enji called a mutation. Heavenflame was still an emitter quirk - it could also be categorized as an accumulation type, but that was a whole other story - the reason why Enji called my quirk a mutation was because it drastically deviated away from both my parents' quirks. Usually speaking, the child of two parents would inherit some predictable combination of the effects of their parent's quirks.
If the child's quirk was completely unrelated to the parents, or deviated enough that you could tell it wasn't a direct one to one inheritance, then you could call it a mutation to some degree.
The heteromorphic quirks were totally different.
For one… their users were not users at all - because you couldn't turn heteromorphic quirks off. Heteromorphic quirks were permanent physical changes to the human body, and often in quite horrifying ways.
There were even groups of scientists who theorized that heteromorphic quirks were the results of a genetic collapse or bad mutation (hence the name) - people who should have developed a transformation quirk, but some congenital defect or other prevented them from doing so. Maybe it was something their parents ate, or a chemical they were exposed to while the baby was in the womb. Either way, the result was a quirk which could not be turned off, and manifested itself as permanently transformed physical traits.
Although I couldn't personally verify it, what the scientists said did make sense to a degree. The first heteromorphs during the Dark Age of Quirks were probably just baseline humans with some extra physical traits. For example, red hair, an extra eye, a third arm, maybe reptile skin, or even rocky skin.
At that point, they weren't yet considered too different. But as time went on, and people intermarried, the heteromorphic traits were passed down again and again, and they continued to stack up and accumulate until the changes became more and more drastic, which resulted in the modern-day heteromorphs who had totally deviated away from the human baseline.
So it was theorized anyway. I wasn't a scientist, so it wasn't my place to comment on the issue.
What I did know was that quirk marriages were infamous for producing extreme results - good and bad, following a similar principle to the aforementioned heteromorphs.
The children born of quirk marriages were rarely mediocre. They tended to inherit excellent quirks usually and tended to go on to become great heroes as a result of it.
However, there was a reason why quirk marriages were banned.
Like my father Enji had said, quirks were also physical abilities.
To enable a human to shoot out flames hot enough to melt tungsten into ash instantly, they had to have the corresponding biological adaptations as well.
I looked like a baseline human, my red hair possibly being an exception, but inside, I knew that my biology was probably extremely different to quirkless people. For one, I didn't think that the biology of a quirkless person would let them shrug off a thousand-degree flame like it was a candle.
A quirk could give a person the power to create fire, but the power to resist the heat of that fire might not come along with it. In that case, the person with the fire quirk might end up killing themselves or burning themselves when they used their quirk. It was toss-up as to whether your quirk would come with inbuilt "safety rails" as it were for their use, or whether your body came with the biological adaptations necessary to use your quirk.
Now, knowing all of this, what would happen if you combined two exceptionally strong or bizarre quirks together?
Take, for example, Enji and Rei's marriage. I was honestly mind blown how all of Enji's kids had turned out fine. If there was a God, then he had surely blessed Enji.
The number of ways that things could have gone wrong were so numerous that I couldn't even begin to fathom the probability of all his children turning out normal.
Going back to the discussion on adaptations necessary to use quirks - if you happened to inherit the power to create fire from your father, but not the corresponding resistance to heat - what did you think would happen? Or the power to create ice, but not the resistance to cold?
You'd definitely injure yourself or kill yourself using that quirk.
That was why quirk marriages were banned. There was only one reason why people did quirk marriage - to produce stronger quirks, and that generally involved both of the parents having strong quirks already in the first place.
And the stronger the quirk… the more biological adaptations or resistances provided by your quirk were needed to make use of that quirk, at least generally speaking. This wasn't an ironclad rule, but more a rule of thumb that just happened to be true a lot of the time.
If you put two quirks together that had demanding requirements to make proper use of, and half your DNA came from each parent - I wouldn't exactly call that a good situation to be in.
Oh, quirk marriage was probably perfectly safe three hundred years ago when all quirks were still pretty normal and tame. In fact, it was probably a good thing, because it ensured the child's quirk would be superior to their peers. Nowadays though… It was like playing Russian roulette.
That was why I considered myself lucky.
This was more a problem for the top 0.1% percentile of quirks, but it was exactly because I was Enji's daughter that I was in danger of that problem. Your average person's quirk did not come with a host of demanding requirements and necessary adaptations to use without killing themselves.
If you had a quirk that could slowly pull objects towards you - you were no different than a baseline human. What sort of biological requirement or adaptation would you need anyway?
But for quirks like mine, the line was very thin indeed.
I ceased my ruminations in favor of taking a hot shower, which I could barely feel due to my massive heat resistance. The extremes of cold didn't affect me much either due to my vast reservoirs of internal heat.
Ah. This shower isn't helping me at all.
I was cursed to forever take lukewarm showers.
Maybe Enji had some advice. I would have asked Shoto or my other two siblings because they were less intimidating, but I was a social outcast at the moment, so I'd have to turn to dear old dad for help if I ever wanted any chance of enjoying a hot shower ever again.
Maybe he knows a trick to restrain my heat resistance or dial it down. Or whatever. Surely he must have some way of feeling normal temperature right?
In my heart though, I wasn't holding out much hope. Unlike me, Enji could actually feel heat at lower temperatures, because he'd started off with barely any resistance - at least relative to my own at the same age. For me? I'd need to have a thousand degree shower to actually enjoy myself, and I was pretty confident that water boiled at 100C.
Maybe I could go for a swim in the local volcano to enjoy a proper hot bath?
I shook my head to dispel my thoughts. What a preposterous idea.
When I was done with the shower, I changed clothes and went to make my dinner.
Enji was away as usual. The moment our training sessions ended for the day, he would rush back to hero work immediately. It was a trait I could admire and appreciate.
Natsuo was watching the TV again, and although I wanted to watch too, I knew that approaching would just lead to him moving away - and taking the remote with him after turning the TV off. So, that was a lost cause.
There honestly wasn't much to do on a saturday. Training was done for the day, my dinner was busy cooking, and I had no school, and no homework.
And no one to talk to.
A sad state of affairs. Usually, I'd just crack open a book, but I'd already run through most of the books in Enji's house. He didn't keep many, primarily because he was too busy working to read any.
The TV was occupied by Natsuo. The household desktop was being used by Fuyumi to talk to her boyfriend - and they talked for hours, so that was a bust as well.
You should go back to train, something inside me suggested. Time waits for nobody. Maximize your efficiency and go back to training. Squeeze every second out of the day.
Maybe I would. But first, it was dinner time.
The pot was boiling now and steam was hissing out, so I moved over the stepping stool so I could reach the counter and pull the pot down.
As a wielder of a flame quirk, my heat resistance meant that I didn't need to fear burns, so I just grabbed the pot directly with my bare hands, reaching through the fire and bringing it down. The pot opened with a hiss and I admired my work.
Miso soup and rice. Very easy to make. All I needed to do was cook some rice in the rice cooker, or reheat some leftover rice, and dump it into a pot of water, and squeeze in a tube of miso paste. A little konbu thrown in, some mushrooms, carrots, and voila, a tasteful meal.
Low effort, high quality.
Ignoring the bubbling and obviously boiling pot of miso soup, I dove right in, slurping up the soup with great relish. At boiling temperature, the food was just warm enough that I could enjoy it, unlike with my shower system, which did not feature boiling water (maybe I could ask Enji to install something like that? I'd upgrade from lukewarm to semi-warm at least).
The rice turned the miso from a simple soup into something more akin to a congee, so it was quite filling. Knowing that the heat was rapidly fading from the pot of miso soup, I scarfed it down as fast as I possibly could, savoring the temperature and the texture of the rice grains and the salty flavor of the miso soup.
I cleaned up the messy floor from my ravenous eating after I was done and washed the pot.
Then, I went back and trained some more.
Thank you to my patrons for supporting me!
Dom Noct, Sean, Wesley, Jord