Sometime later that month, Enji finally got me started on controlling my fire without the string as a guideline.

Although some of my fire still spilled out a little, I 'proved' to Enji that I was fully capable of directing the fire to travel in whatever direction I wanted even without the string to follow.

Enji was very impressed. I would have been a lot happier though if he didn't constantly use me to badger Shoto into training harder.

"See, Shoto, look how hard Tanya is working! Why can't you be the same?" Enji would say, and I would grit my teeth and hope that I hadn't earned any more hatred from Shoto. I didn't want to draw any fire from him, but Enji was making it hard.

Things had settled into a strange dichotomy after Shoto started attending training with me. I wasn't quite sure how to act around him, and his presence made everything considerably more awkward. Shoto didn't seem to resent me in any way though, which was just downright bizarre.

Enji's time off work ended a few weeks back, so we usually only had two one-hour training sessions with him every day, once in the morning, and once at night. During most of the day and evening, Enji was busy with hero work, so he assigned me personal training to do in my own time. He didn't bother giving any to Shoto because he always blew it off anyway.

Sometimes, we couldn't even fit two training sessions into the day, because Enji would get late-night calls for help from his agency during off hours. Enji was one of the fastest heroes on call, just under Hawks and a few other mobility-type heroes, so he was expected to be ready to deploy at a moment's notice in the case of emergencies.

I was in the training chamber again training my fire, slowly moving it along the floor to form a square. There was no string anymore, and hadn't been for the past two weeks.

Enji called this training exercise shape training. What I had to do was maneuver my fire to spread in a thin line, and use it to draw geometric shapes like squares.

Straight lines were the easiest to do without a string. I didn't need to think too hard about where the fire was going as long as it moved forward without deviating or spilling outward as the end result would always become a straight line.

Shapes were much harder. Without the string as a guideline, I now had to exert much more conscious control over my fire to get it to obey. As I'd come to discover, my fire liked to consume things, and it tended to follow the path of least resistance - or the path with most things to consume, and without the string to follow, my fire just tended to spread out uniformly unless I exerted my will.

Squares were the easiest shape to do, but they still involved a great deal of calculation.

To form a perfect square - Enji demanded nothing less than perfection, because imperfect control meant accidents, and accidents meant deaths - I needed to ensure that my fire would stop at the exact moment I wanted, so none of the square's sides would be too long or too short.

Once I'd moved my fire forward to create the first side of the square, I needed to command my fire to stop moving, and then move perpendicular to the direction it came in. I would repeat this process again after moving the fire - sideways now relative to me - until I deemed taht the length of the second side roughly equivalent to the first, halt the fire, and exert my will so it would turn again.

Each time, I needed to ensure that my fire turned exactly ninety degrees and that it didn't stray away from the rigid path I envisioned. Otherwise, what I would end up with would be an irregular rectangle and not a square.

For every one-hour training block I did, I was expected to draw at least one hundred squares.

We didn't do other shapes yet because they were much harder. Creating a perfectly equilateral triangle was much harder than a square, and that was next on Enji's list for me.

Training was the only time I would ever sweat - not because my body heated up, but from the stress of controlling my heavenflame. Normal people perspired to expel heat from their bodies. My body temperature was sitting at a comfortable three hundred degrees Celsius, more than enough to kill a regular person. Suffice to say, sweating to expel heat was vestigial for me.

However, controlling my fire was so mentally taxing that it would make me sweat profusely each time. Even after I'd developed rudimentary flame control, I still found it somewhat taxing to move my fire around.

If I wanted my fire to move, it would move, but it might not move in a direction as straight as I had wanted, or turn at the right angle.

This was another facet of my flame control training that Enji covered.

Enji snapped his fingers and flicked out a ball of fire. It soared upward and fell on an arc, exploding into a series of crackling sparks. "See what I just did?"

"What do you think would happen if you tried to do the same thing?" Enji asked. "Would you be able to get your fire to move the same way?"

"No," I admitted easily. Enji's little display there was so far beyond me that I didn't even hesitate to answer.

Controlling fire in three dimensions was far harder than doing it on the floor, which only required me to think in two dimensions, and Enji had even added a perfect parabola to the movement of the fire. The detonation at the end was overkill. It would take years before I could even get close to that point. "I could give it my best shot, but I would fail miserably."

Enji cast more fire out, this time down onto the floor, willing it to move until it formed the shape of an equilateral triangle. "Let me use a more relevant example. Try copy what I just did and make a triangle."

I started tracing out the triangle, going slowly so that I would get the shape right.

"Do it faster!" Enji barked, upon seeing me slowly trace out the shape. "You're not allowed to take your time! Do you think you'll have time to go slowly in a real combat scenario?"

Unbeknownst to Enji, I'd already been practising with equilateral triangles in my own time, so I was barely able to create the desired shape within the time limit, even as Enji urged me to speed up.

I willed the fire to spread rapidly and then halt, then turn at a sixty-degree angle and continue moving. As it moved, I had to retain control over it and prevent the flames from spilling out of the narrow column I allowed it to inhabit, and by the time I was done, I was sweating more than ever, but I'd managed to trace out a perfect triangle.

Seeing the look of surprise on Enji's face, however brief it was, was totally worth it. Enji masked it quickly though, denying me further satisfaction.

"Make a star now," Enji commanded.

This time, I was unable to keep up with Enji. The star I created was malformed and irregular, and compared to Enji's perfect star, it looked terrible.

"This is the discrepancy between thought and action," Enji lectured, gesturing to the stars of flame we'd each made. One perfect, and one imperfect. "Both of us envisioned the creation of a perfect star shape. However, upon executing that vision, you failed to bring that vision into reality. The goal of training - of control - is to align your actions to your thoughts."

"When you act," Enji enunciated harshly, "your actions must match your thoughts. There must be no discrepancy. What you think is what you will do exactly, and what you do will be what you think. This is the level of control that you MUST achieve with in everything you do - do you understand me?"

I nodded rapidly to show that I was listening intently. "I understand father."

"Good."

Enji's face was stony. "Heroes who utilize flame must be the most careful of all, because the injuries fire can inflict are often irreversible. Even healing quirks struggle to perfectly deal with severe burns… and the wounds left behind by flames are often the most horrifying to look at."

He didn't lecture me any more after that.

"Get back to training," Enji ordered. "I have to go back on shift soon, so you'll be continuing alone as usual. Since you've proven you can do triangles, I want you to mix them into your routine from now on. Alternate between squares and triangles each training block."

Shoto wasn't training with us today because Fuyumi took him out to go shopping, and Enji apparently didn't care enough to drag him back

Most days, Enji at the very least made a half hearted effort to get him to show up to two training sessions daily, but Shoto often ran away or outright refused to train even when he showed up.

Fuyumi argued on his behalf today that he deserved a break, and surprisingly, Enji ended up agreeing with her.

To me, it was a sign that my status was continuing to rise. The fact that Enji was becoming more lax with Shoto was proof that he didn't see Shoto as a serious candidate to inherit his legacy anymore, and it was proof that my position was growing more stable. Seeing Shoto go out with Fuyumi made me so happy that I nearly cried when I saw them go.

It got me a weird look from Shoto, which made me concerned again that he would start hating me. I was horrified when I saw that look on his face.

From an outside perspective, it must have seemed like I was gloating at him. Not only did I take away his status and his birthright, but I was also mocking him too! I wanted to rush up to Shoto to explain that it was a misunderstanding - but I couldn't.

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to lie to his face, because it was true - I was happy that I took away his status. His fall enabled my rise, even if I couldn't say it out loud.

The problem was stopping Shoto from hating me. That was a situation that I wanted to avoid at all costs.

Fuyumi and Natsuo already hated my guts, and as a bastard daughter, my standing was incredibly shaky.

Having the acknowledgement and support of at least one of the legitimate children would make my own position more legitimate, especially in the eyes of the media who would scrutinize my life once I became a hero.

If all the legitimate Todoroki children hated me, then it would only serve to communicate to the media that there was something wrong with me, and that was the last thing I wanted to see.

To become Number One, I would need perfect PR, and that was an uphill battle already considering that I was born out of wedlock.

Although I was unsure of how much Japan had changed during the intervening years of the Dark Age of Quirks, what I'd observed thus far suggested that Japan was still pretty socially conservative.

If I wanted to stand any chance at becoming Number One, I needed to start cultivating my relationship with Shoto and building the image of a harmonious family.

But how though? How could I possibly become friends with Shoto when I was leeching away at his status and his birthright? It was so very obvious as well - Enji gradually spending less time with Shoto and training him less, stripping him of the benefits he'd formerly enjoyed, giving more training and more attention for me - could I really befriend Shoto when I so obviously coveted his legacy?