The second day of camp greeted the students of 1-A and 1-B without a hint of mercy. They were back on their feet and training as hard as they could as soon as the sun came up. The only thing that kept Ochako from starting her assigned workouts that morning was a phone call. Aizawa pulled her aside and told her that All Might wanted to speak with her. She'd taken his phone and stepped into an empty area in the side of the Pussycats' cabin that the girls slept in. Her heart beat hard in her chest the whole time. She almost forgot to breathe, but kept her intake of air steady. The phone rang as soon as she was alone. She picked it up and nervously answered it.

"Hello?" she asked.

"Good morning, Young Uraraka!" All Might's unmistakable voice said. He sounded exactly like he always did, in spite of the early hour. How he managed to sound so full of energy with the state he was in was beyond her.

"Good morning," Ochako said. "Aizawa said you wanted to tell me something?"

"Yes, I do," All Might said. "I wanted to let you know beforehand that I'm going to be making an appearance at camp before the week is done!"

"Really?" Ochako asked, her worries fading away as a rush of anticipation took its place. "Why's that?"

"Well, the official reason is so that you and your classmates can get a nice surprise for working so hard. It's only been one day and Aizawa's already telling me good things. The real reason, the secret reason, is that I think it's time."

"Time for … that?" Ochako asked, her voice trembling.

"Yes." There was a blend of emotions that laced that single word. There was excitement there, but also sadness. "It is time for you to inherit the gift that you have been working so hard for. Your progress at school has been phenomenal, you've become even stronger than I ever thought possible. With this camp experience under your belt, you'll be more than ready to accept this gift."

"Wow, I … I don't know what to say," Ochako said, her hand shaking while she held the phone to her ear.

"Don't say anything just yet. Wait until we can talk face to face," All Might said with a laugh. "Just know that you are ready."

"Okay. Thank you," Ochako said with a grin on her face.

A knock on the door startled Ochako out of her own head. She quickly said goodbye to All Might and emerged to hand Aizawa back his phone. He looked at her strangely, and Ochako realised that he must have been curious about what the number one hero wanted to say to her that early in the morning. Ochako hadn't really thought about it before, but to an outside observer, that would look pretty … weird was one way to describe their relationship if one didn't have any context. Aizawa knew that Ochako had gone on her internship with All Might, though, so she thought she could get away with revealing less information than she'd normally have to. She chose a detail and honed in on it, choosing to reveal that to explain the unusual concern that All Might had for her in particular, rather than another student.

"During my internship, All Might helped me start a special diet so that I could gain muscle. I couldn't afford it by myself, though, so he covered the costs. He was just checking in about that," Ochako said with a vague smile.

"Right," Aizawa said flatly. "Get to training. You'll fall behind if you waste any more time."

Ochako nodded and picked up the pace as she made her way outside and to the training grounds. She walked past Iida, who was running with a harness connecting him to a car that Ragdoll, another member of the Pussycats who'd shown up yesterday along with their final teammate Tiger, drove in the opposite direction, which slowed him down significantly, even as he tried to maintain Recipro for longer. From what Ochako overheard while she passed, it was to get Iida used to forces acting on his body while he tried to run in order to prepare his body to withstand the air resistance that he'd encounter at his top speeds in the future. Apparently, Aizawa thought that since Iida's engines were a part of his body and not purely mechanical in nature, they should have been capable of increasing their output naturally, without needing to take him apart and rebuild him better than before. Thus, they were stressing his engines almost to the point of breaking but not quite past that limit in order to force his engines to grow capable of handling that burden more easily in the future. It looked like it was hard, but the whole time that Iida ran against the force of the car strapped to his back, he smiled.

Todoroki seemed to be making progress, too. His reaction time with his fire had gone way down since he'd started using it, and Ochako thought his unease regarding his fire was fading as well, though there were times that he simply couldn't ignite his left side while in a combat simulation at school. From what Ochako had seen, Todoroki hadn't used his fire on a person yet, which she understood, but he was getting better every day with the fire side of his Quirk. He did still seem to be distracted by something, though. At mealtimes, he'd almost dissociate entirely, lost in thought about something that seemed intense, judging by the frown he often wore during those periods of deep contemplation. Ochako knew it had to be the boy, which the students had learned was named Kota. Mandalay had explained it when he'd run off during dinner on that first night; Kota Izumi was her nephew, and Mandalay had custody of him. She hadn't elaborated upon why, but it was pretty clear that the kid's parents weren't around, and that Mandalay was his primary caretaker. Todoroki had gotten pretty invested in Kota, it seemed, and Ochako wasn't going to blame him for being curious. She even thought that it would be good for Todoroki to try and reach out to Kota. The last time Todoroki had managed to talk about his feelings, those feelings had been beaten out of him. His newfound interest in Kota was probably a little bit healthier than that.

Izuku was doing well, too, as he'd explained last night at dinner. Apparently, Aizawa had him doing some exercise where he was made to grab onto things at random, with no way to tell when and how he'd grasp an item, and try to not use his Quirk regardless of how many fingers he held onto the thing with. He explained what he dubbed 'the slider method', and had revealed that he thought he was close to getting it down to about twenty out of a hundred if he focused real hard on it. He couldn't do it very consistently, but he wasn't worried about that for now. Progress always started on a small scale, in his words. He seemed absolutely thrilled to be making progress in making his Quirk less potent, and Ochako believed that he could do it. Izuku could do anything if he really put all his energy into it. She'd never seen him outright lose anything in the entire time that she'd known him, except maybe that first battle trial back during their first week at UA. That had been different, though, there had been other things going on back then. Ochako realised she was rationalising in her own head something Izuku likely didn't even think about, and promptly put an end to that train of thought.

Ochako started training with even more enthusiasm than she'd had on that first day of camp. All Might's promise of her readiness to receive One For All sometime that week had given her an energy boost that kept her going for hours. She was tasked by Tiger with something simple, but difficult; maintain her Quirk on a bunch of small weights over a long period of time while she's exerting herself to the best of her physical abilities. Tiger was also working with the power-types in 1-A and 1-B, like Sato, Kirishima, and Shishida. He was kind of intense, but Ochako had signed up for this, so there was no going back on her promises. She would never want to, anyway; it sounded insane considering that she'd never so much as done a weightlifting exercise in her life prior to her internship — not with her hands, anyway — but she actually enjoyed working out now. She totally understood the feeling of an athlete's high after committing herself to physical conditioning. It was like she was in total control of every muscle in her body when she exercised, and that feeling of control only served to improve her Quirk technique. Ochako was improving so much that she didn't even recognise herself some days. How far could she go with One For All? She couldn't wait to find out.

The child, Kota, hadn't eaten dinner with the group once again. Shoto couldn't blame him that time, as the curry that he and his peers had made — learning to cook together is learning to fight together, in Iida's words — was terrible. He was certain that he'd set the heat too high. Shoto had never learned to cook at home, since Endeavor had micromanaged all his meals growing up, so he'd really had no idea what he was doing. He'd tried to explain it, but Yaoyorozu had placed her faith in him to manage the temperature of the curry, so he'd given it his best effort. It had burned slightly, but Yaoyorozu had been too polite to say what he thought she might have to anyone else. Shoto thought there were a lot of things that Yaoyorozu thought but didn't say to him, but that was another train of thought entirely.

After he finished his dinner, he put together another bowl and left the dining area. His classmates might have called out to him asking where he was going, but he didn't pay them any mind. Shoto was certain that Kota had fled northward, and he soon found a trail of small footprints that allowed Shoto to follow his trail precisely. He'd been in the wilderness before, but this was an unfamiliar area to Shoto. When he was twelve, Endeavor had decided that Shoto needed to know how to survive in the wild, and so he'd hired a team of woodland rangers to teach Shoto how to navigate without a map or compass, and how to tell which plants were safe to eat and which weren't. It was of no relevance to Endeavor that Shoto had missed his elementary school graduation to engage in this learning experience. Shoto kept moving while he thought, following the trail to a cliff that overlooked almost the whole forest that the Pussycats claimed ownership of. It was a nice view, but Shoto turned his back on it as he laid his eyes on Kota, who sat down on the hard, rocky ground and pouted out at the woods ahead of him as he dangled his legs off the edge of the cliff. Shoto walked up and sat down next to him, which startled Kota. The thought came to Shoto that Kota might not have noticed him before that moment, and he felt sorry for frightening Kota for a second time. He probably should not mention that he still believed that Kota was scared of him.

"I sometimes find myself employing stealth tactics in ordinary situations accidentally," Shoto said.

"I don't care," Kota shouted. "Why are you here? How'd you find my secret hideout?"

"I brought you dinner. I even kept it hot with my Quirk," Shoto said, placing the steaming bowl of curry, various vegetables, sausages and mashed potatoes between them on the ground. "The potatoes are somewhat chunky, so I apologise for that."

"Whatever," Kota said, though he took the curry and started eating it without further complaint.

Shoto was quiet while Kota ate. He didn't want to say anything that would cause another outburst and potentially cause Kota to abandon his dinner again. So, he was quiet. Shoto was aware that the things he said often had an effect on people. That reaction was most often sadness, which usually came after he honestly reported the facts of his life. He didn't speak up a lot because of it. He wondered if Kota was hesitant to talk to him because he thought Shoto would get sad if it turned out that he was the son of the Water Hose duo, like he suspected. Kota finished eating and Shoto kept quiet for a moment longer, trying his best to get the timing correct so that he didn't do the wrong thing and make Kota angry again.

"My father is a hero, you know," Shoto said, looking out over the forest as Kota did the same.

"So what?" Kota asked in return.

"So … you were right yesterday," Shoto continued, getting a shocked look from the boy beside him. "When you said that I didn't care about my family because I wanted to be a hero, you were right, partly."

Kota looked up at him with big, startled eyes. Shoto met his gaze and tried to soften his own, though according to Fuyumi he had a bad habit of glaring, even when he wasn't feeling anything particularly negative. Just another thing he'd inherited from him. "My desire to be a hero was pure, once. I wanted to help people because I thought it was the right thing to do with my powerful Quirk. I wanted to save the world. I don't know when I let that pure intention get twisted into something else, but I did. I started thinking about being a hero as a way to spite my father, who wanted me to surpass him. If I did it using only the side of my Quirk that came from my mom, that'd prove him wrong. He'd finally value my mother, and value my siblings." Shoto paused for a moment. "He'd see them. He'd see me."

"What's the point?" Kota said with a pout.

"Sorry," Shoto said. "I thought sharing my feelings about my hero parent might encourage you to open up about yours."

"What do you—? What, do you mean Shino?" Kota asked with a baffled look on his face. Shoto didn't recognise the name, and he must have made a face, because Kota then clarified. "Mandalay."

"Are you not related? She's always the one that's looking after you," Shoto said. He didn't want to suddenly surprise Kota with his Water Hose theory, so he let Kota reveal as much information as he wanted to. It was an interrogation tactic, to get someone talking so that they voluntarily said something that they otherwise would have kept secret by intentionally leading them to believe that you were woefully uninformed about a subject of interest. Kota didn't need to know that, though.

"She's not my mom. She's my aunt. I don't think I could take it if Shino was my real mom," Kota said with a deep frown. He seemed to realise the implication in his choice of words, and couldn't seem to make himself meet Shoto's eyes anymore.

"She seems nice," Shoto said warily. He didn't know if Mandalay had a hidden side to her family life, too, so he chose his words carefully.

"Most of the time, she is," Kota grumbled. "She just doesn't get it, though."

"What doesn't she get?" Shoto asked. He had to stop himself from saying anything more before Kota had a chance to answer his question. If Kota thought that Shoto was probing him for information, then he might realise that they were actually having a conversation.

"It's all just meaningless, you know?" Kota said, looking out at the forest with dull eyes. "Heroes and villains, Quirks. They don't matter. What's the use of them when nothing ever changes because they exist?"

"The use?" Shoto asked. "Heroes save people. Quirks define us."

"Yeah, but heroes hurt people, too. They go off and die avoidable deaths and leave behind the people that love them, all for what? Money? Fame? Is it really the right thing to do if you're hurting the people you're supposed to care about the most to save complete strangers?"

Shoto sat with that for a moment. Is it really the right thing to do if you're hurting the people you're supposed to care about the most to save complete strangers? He let his eyes sweep over the woods, taking in the muted green stretching out for dozens of kilometres ahead of the two of them. Not a single sound was uttered from the two boys' mouths as Shoto contemplated that. Kota was talking about ideas that Shoto had been living as his reality for ten years. Endeavor hurt his family, the people he should've been willing to do anything to protect, in order to create the perfect hero to surpass All Might. It wasn't exactly the same situation, but there was a thread that connected Shoto to Kota, even if it was small. Kota felt betrayed by the very hero society that they lived in. He didn't understand it. Shoto didn't exactly disagree that heroes weren't infallible icons to be revered. Heroes were just people, like Kota had said yesterday. They were people who chose to shoulder the responsibility of saving innocent lives. Heroes were entrusted with such a titanic weight to bear. They often, however, made mistakes. They did sometimes hurt the people they loved with their actions. Kota saw it as black and white, right and wrong, but Shoto didn't think that what he was saying and what everyone else believed were mutually exclusive. Heroes could have noble, pure intentions, but they were not gods. They were just people. Shoto considered that for a moment. Endeavor was just a man. The feeling that bloomed in his chest, like a blazing fire that froze him solid, was unpleasant and unwelcome. Shoto couldn't put a name to it. He didn't think he wanted to.

"I agree with you," Shoto said, causing Kota to look up at him with those wide, startled eyes again. "In essence, you're right. Heroes can sometimes get caught up in being heroes that they fail to consider the feelings of those who love them. I've never actually spoken with my siblings about whether or not they approve of me becoming a hero. It's always been a fact that I would grow up to be a hero. Like you, I have a hero parent."

"I told you, Shino isn't my mom!" Kota said, standing up so that he could look down at Shoto.

"I mean your real parents. I think I met them once, after they teamed up with my father. Your parents were Water Hose, weren't they? You bear a significant resemblance to them," Shoto finally said, the feeling in his chest leaving once he uttered the words he'd been keeping to himself.

"How do you …?" Kota said, fear flashing in his eyes. He then gasped, and took a step back to point at Shoto with a shaky finger. "You kept the food warm just before. That eye. Your dad is …?"

"I am the son of Endeavor," Shoto said, though the words were laced with bitterness. "That's how I know that there are some heroes in this world that will ignore their families and die meaningless deaths." Kota frowned, as if Shoto's agreement had only made him more upset. Shoto then sighed, and let all of his agitation out with the soft exhalation. "But there are real heroes, too, kind people with empathy and the power to protect everyone. At UA, I've met some incredible people. They call me a friend, but sometimes I'm not sure that I'm worthy of having them by my side. I'm not like them. My classmates are incredible, and I'm not."

"As if the son of Endeavor could fall behind," Kota grumbled.

"I have," Shoto said neutrally. "There's a weight on my shoulders, or maybe within my chest, that feels so heavy some days that I might collapse. My father, my mother, they pull at me. It's constant. One of my classmates reached out to me, and that made the weight less overwhelming, but I can't be like her. I can't meet her standards, because every time I use my fire, it's like my old man is patting me on the back. It feels like every time I use my fire, it confirms that he was right to push me the way he did, and I don't want that to be true. I'm training hard to be a good hero who doesn't make his family cry when he goes out to put himself on the line for other people. I want to be a good person."

Kota stared at him for a long moment, before laughing shakily. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"I wanted to help you understand that," Shoto said hesitantly. "For a long time, I was in pain, but I didn't want anyone to see it. I thought that if I ignored the pain and fought as hard as I could, then it would go away. It didn't. It never would have. It never will. I see the same pain in your eyes when you look at me and my classmates. The only reason I was able to move past even a fraction of that pain was because someone I respect reached out to me and made an effort. That's what I'm trying to do here. Mandalay seems like a good caretaker, but it must be hard to be without your parents. You must miss your mom. I know I do."

Kota abruptly turned and sprinted away from Shoto, back in the direction of camp. He left even more obvious footprints behind as he ran away. Shoto sat there, watching as Kota's small form got even smaller over the distance before disappearing entirely behind the trees. He wondered what exactly it had been that had made Kota finally break. Was it the comment about his mother? That was the most likely option to be true. He'd pushed the boy too hard. Shoto wasn't used to being emotionally vulnerable with people, much less with strangers, so he didn't know what was a normal amount to share with someone you'd just met. He guessed that he'd said too much about himself and not focused on Kota's feelings enough. Shoto would have to be better in the future. He didn't chase after Kota, but he did follow after a few minutes of contemplation about what he'd done wrong. Shoto was willing to take the blame for how his conversations with Kota had gone thus far. He wasn't very skilled at interpersonal communication. Anyone could see that he hadn't had a lot of practice at it. He still wished to try connecting with this child, though, and he wouldn't stop. Kota deserved to have someone reach out to him, just like Shoto had been lucky enough to have.

He noticed that, along the trail of Kota's footsteps leading the way back to camp, there were dots of water that had fallen onto the dirt and darkened it. It hadn't rained in weeks. Shoto decided to forget he'd ever seen it.

The piano was a torture device invented by the devil in order to trick people with subpar motor skills into hurting themselves for the entertainment of others. Izuku sighed as the seventh piano in a row was reduced to ashy chunks of material and scattered dust on the wind that blew around him in a cloud before dissipating. He balled his hands up into fists and kept his breathing even as pieces of what had once been a whole instrument noisily fell to the ground around him. He looked over at Aizawa, who was watching him with a detached expression that may have passed for an amused smile if the shadows of the tree he was sitting under didn't obscure his face so well.

"That's number seven," Aizawa said.

"I know," Izuku grumbled.

"You still haven't made it through an entire song yet," Aizawa continued. He definitely enjoyed his job too much.

"I know," Izuku groaned.

Yaoyorozu came rushing over from where she'd been sitting, constantly putting out small items with random, complex structures. It was part of her training to decrease the time it took her to make an object and increase the ease with which she could make random, complicated objects at a moment's notice. Every few seconds, Aizawa would call out a random shape, and she'd make it. Izuku kicked all the debris of the piano away and sat back down. He ignored the small pile of similar wreckage that was forming in a ring around himself. Yaoyorozu's stomach, which was exposed as she lifted her shirt up, glittered with the blue and pink sparkles that always accompanied a creation of hers. She pulled a plastic piano out of her torso, and the legs fell away from the bottom of the keyboard as she planted it on the ground. That was also part of her training — giving Izuku more pianos to play whenever he broke one, which furthered the premise of her training routine by happening pretty much at random. Izuku sighed again as he put his hands over the piano and Aizawa threw a new copy of the sheet music for the song he was supposed to be playing. He glared at his teacher as he deliberately did not catch the sheets. Instead, he picked them up with two careful fingers once they'd already hit the ground.

Izuku tried his best to play the song again. It was a fast song, with lots of chords, so he couldn't get away with using one or two fingers and taking it slowly. One of the conditions that Aizawa had set that morning had been that he needed to play the song as it was written. Izuku had never played piano before, but Yaoyorozu gave him tips and he'd worked himself up to getting the song mostly right over the hours that he'd been practising. He still couldn't play the whole song without his Quirk coming in and obliterating the instrument, though. Izuku was actually proud of how well he was managing his Quirk — he was gaining more consistent control over the strength of his Quirk by the third day of camp, and if his slider theory was correct, then he felt as though he was bringing his Quirk down to about twenty-five percent of its full power, or maybe even twenty. He continued playing as he reflected, and managed to put three fingers down on the piano on his right hand for such a brief period of time that his Quirk only put a hair-thin line in one of the keys.

The theory that Aizawa had brought to him that morning was that Izuku's Quirk worked like a circuit. His fingers were nodes, and the circuit was completed when enough nodes — two for his right, mangled hand, and three for his left — made contact with a medium. Then, Decimation worked its magic. However, Aizawa had a hunch that Izuku had some kind of unconscious control over the circuit. Izuku had shared with him something that had happened a couple of times over his term at UA. Every now and then, Izuku had found that he could sometimes disintegrate things without touching them with the number of fingers that it would normally take. He'd destroyed his gloves a couple of times, when they were specifically made to avoid triggering his Quirk. Because of this, Aizawa figured that Izuku had the potential to control whether or not the circuit activated regardless of how many nodes were in contact with a medium. The trick was just figuring out how to turn that unconscious mechanism into conscious control. So, piano — it was supposed to confuse his Quirk, in summary, and overwhelm the subconscious part of Izuku's brain that dictated when Decimation activated and when it didn't. The rapidity with which he touched the keys and the irregular rhythm of the song he was playing were meant to cross his brain's wires so that he could attempt to hijack what was usually an involuntary process. That's why it was so important for Izuku to get to the end of the song. He was supposed to press one finger on each hand onto the piano at the end of the song and attempt to disintegrate the instrument with just those two fingers after confusing his Quirk with the irregular rhythm of his finger movements. The only problem was that he couldn't get to the end of the damn song without destroying the piano by accident.

He would've been enjoying himself, if he were a masochist.

Izuku couldn't stop himself from allowing the excited grin to appear on his face as he neared the end of the song for the first time. Aizawa leaned forward from his spot sitting underneath a tree and eating an apple, watching intently. Even Yaoyorozu paused her random creation, and watched as Izuku played the last few notes perfectly, without disintegrating the piano. He stood up and, in his excitement, decided to vent some of his energy out by inverting the plan. He slammed the piano with all nine of his fingers and shouted in celebration. His hands stayed on the piano for a moment, and he willed his Quirk to not activate. His fingers were tired and sore from playing the piano for hours on end, there was a dull pain behind his eyes from reading and rereading the same pages all day, and his back and butt hurt from sitting in the stupid stool that Aizawa had brought out — refusing to allow Yaoyorozu to make him a more comfortable one had been part of his plan, apparently. He poured all of that emotion into forcing his Quirk to do nothing.

A moment passed. Nothing happened. The smile on Izuku's face widened even more and a swelling feeling blossomed in his chest. It was the first time since he was six years old that he'd touched something and not destroyed it. He looked up at Aizawa, who watched with raised eyebrows, and then the piano fell apart in a cloud of dust and a clattering pile of broken plastic. Izuku slumped back down onto his stool as the smile slid off his face.

"That wasn't bad. You saw it, didn't you?" Aizawa said, standing up.

"What, how I failed?" Izuku asked with a groan.

"No, I saw it as well," Yaoyorozu said. "It took a moment for your power to work. I think you may have succeeded."

"But then your focus slipped when you got excited. But for a moment, you did it," Aizawa said.

Izuku looked down at the destroyed piano — pianos, really — at his feet. A small smile made its way back onto his face. For a brief moment, he'd done it. That was good. That was progress. That was the first step to truly mastering his Quirk, one step at a time. His chest tightened, something like pride or excitement sinking its teeth into him and refusing to let go. He no longer felt any of the fatigue that he had just moments earlier. Izuku was ready to master his power right then and there.