Chapter 28

"There we go," Recovery Girl said, patting his shoulder. "Nice and slow. You gave everyone quite a scare."

He sat up too fast anyway, chest tight, and the memory of what happened hit him before he'd even finished blinking.

"I need to talk to someone, please," he said.

Recovery Girl frowned, clearly confused by Momona's sudden reaction,

"You need rest, young man."

"It's important."

Aizawa, who left his post as a commentator, arrived in the room some time later, leaning against the doorframe with his usual half-asleep expression.

"I'm listening," Aizawa said.

Momona swallowed. He knew how this would sound.

"I tried to copy Arata's quirk... before the cavalry battle, right before I went down."

"We're aware you attempted a copy," Aizawa said, unimpressed.

"That's the thing." Momona's hands curled into the blanket. "It wasn't like copying a normal quirk. I've copied dozens of quirks. I know what that feels like it's like borrowing a tool. It wasn't like that; it was something else."

Aizawa didn't say anything, just watched him with that flat, unreadable stare that somehow made everything worse.

"At first I didn't feel anything, so I thought I'd failed. That's when I saw it, " Momona said. "I was looking at a monster, and that thing was looking back at me.”

"Everyone knows Arata's quirk involves an invisible construct. He said so himself; perhaps you've become able to see the construct instead of fully copying his quirk, and that's what you saw." Aizawa was still unbothered by what Momona was saying.

Recovery Girl's expression shifted, something between concern and skepticism. "Copying someone's quirk can cause some serious backlash and intense sensory distortion, especially with an ability that complex—"

"It was not a backlash." Momona's voice got louder.

"It didn't have a face. I don't even know how I knew it was looking at me, but that thing was alive; it knew I could see it, and it was observing me back, like something that was deciding if it should kill me after I saw it."

The room went quiet in a way that felt heavier than it should have.

"I'm not saying Arata did anything wrong," Momona added quickly after seeing everyone's reaction, as that mattered more than anything else he'd just said.

"I'm saying whatever that thing is, it's not just a construct."

Aizawa's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes did, small, the kind of reaction you'd miss if you didn't know him enough or weren't looking for it. Recovery Girl noticed too, glancing between the two of them.

"Shota," she said carefully. "Do you know something?"

"I have questions," Aizawa said, which, from him, was basically a confession. "That's different."

Momona looked between them, frustration bleeding into his voice. "So you don't believe me either."

"I didn't say that." Aizawa pushed off the doorframe.

"I said his quirk was registered as a psychic type, and that's what's on file. That's what everyone's been told, including me, up until about thirty seconds ago."

"Meaning what?" Momona asked.

"Meaning I'm going to go read it again."

Recovery Girl sighed, the kind of sigh that came from decades of dealing with teenagers and cryptic coworkers in the same building.

"He needs rest, not an interrogation."

"He's not being interrogated. He already said everything I needed to hear." Aizawa was already halfway to the door.

Momona sank back against the pillow, the adrenaline draining out of him and leaving something colder in its place. Nobody had told him he was wrong. Nobody had told him he was right either. Somehow that was worse.

"Get some sleep," Recovery Girl said, gentler now, pulling the blanket up. "Whatever it was, I'm sure the teachers can take care of it."

He didn't believe that for a second. Whatever that thing was, it had felt like it could go anywhere it wanted.

….

Before going back to commenting on the rest of the sports festival, Aizawa searched for Arata's registration file in one of the staff terminals, his expression unreadable as he logged in.

Quirk name: IBM (Invisible Black Matter)

Type: Humanoid psychic construct

Description: The user can manifest and control invisible constructs for manipulation and combat support.

He read it twice. Then a third time, slower.

Technically, none of it was false. Psychic type covered it. Invisible covered it. Manipulation and combat support covered exactly what he'd watched happen on the field.

It just didn't cover what Momona had described and the other ability he had shown so far. Aizawa scrolled to the submission date. Filed the same week Arata transferred into UA, standard intake paperwork, nothing flagged, nothing unusual; it was the same as what his quirk was officially registered as. Whoever wrote this description had either genuinely believed it was complete, or known exactly how much to leave out.

He was betting on the second one.

"Vague enough to be deliberate," he muttered, mostly to himself, and didn't like how true it sounded once he said it out loud.

He pulled up the intake interview notes next, brief, standard, a handful of lines confirming basic quirk function but nothing about limits, weaknesses or additional abilities. Either the interviewer hadn't asked the right questions, or Arata had made sure they didn't need to.

Neither option made Aizawa feel better about it.

He leaned back, rubbing a hand over his face. There were a dozen reasonable explanations. Kids downplayed their quirks on intake forms all the time, worried about being pulled into hero-course scrutiny too early, or just not wanting to stand out. It happened. It wasn't automatically sinister.

But awareness wasn't a downplayed detail. It was a category difference.

"Weird," he said quietly, to no one, and told himself it was nothing, even if he didn't fully believe that either.