Kaminari found me in the library.
It was late. The windows were dark. The shelves loomed around us like sleeping giants. I had been reading something I did not care about, waiting for the dorm to quiet down, when his footsteps shuffled across the floor.
He sat across from me. He did not speak.
I closed the book.
"You are going to apologise," I said.
It was not a question.
He nodded. His hands were on the table, fingers laced together, knuckles white. "I have been trying to figure out what to say. For days. I keep running it through my head and it sounds worse every time."
I waited.
"I did not mean it the way it came out," he said.
"The way it came out was the way you said it."
He flinched. "That is not fair."
"Fair has nothing to do with it."
He looked down at his hands. "I just... I saw that news about the mutant guy getting off easy, and I remembered reading something about how mutants get lighter sentences because no one wants to deal with them. Like, prisons do not want them because they are harder to manage. Or something. I do not even remember where I read it."
"You read it somewhere, so it must be true."
He winced. "That is not what I meant."
"What did you mean?"
He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was smaller.
"When I was younger, I got into a lot of videos. You know. The ones that pop up in your recommendations. The algorithm figures out what you like and just keeps feeding it to you."
I knew. I had seen the algorithms at work. The way they nudged you toward extremes, presented opinion as fact, made you feel smart for agreeing with conclusions you had never questioned.
"There was this one guy," Kaminari continued. "He made videos about the history of quirks. Really old stuff. Before heroes. Before the Commission. He talked about the first villain of Japan."
He looked up at me.
"His name was Jiro. No last name. Just Jiro. He was a mutant. Had these long, spindly limbs and too many joints. He could stretch his arms across entire streets. Wrap them around buildings. The videos said he used his quirk to rob banks, derail trains, collapse bridges. Killed hundreds of people."
He paused.
"The videos said he was the reason people started being afraid of mutants. That before him, it was not so bad. That he ruined everything for everyone else."
I let the silence stretch.
"You know, there's a pretty high chance that Jiro just wasn't the first villain," I said.
Kaminari blinked. "What?"
"I have read about him. The historians who actually study this stuff, not the content creators who need views. Jiro was a criminal, yes. He robbed banks. He derailed trains. People died. But he was not the first. He was just the first they could not excuse anymore."
I leaned back in my chair.
"Before Jiro, there were hundreds of villains. Mutant and otherwise. Most of them were never named. Never reported. Their crimes were too small, or too embarrassing, or too inconvenient for the authorities to acknowledge. But as mutants became more visible, more public, the narrative shifted. They just became the new face. A symbol. Someone to point to and say, 'See? This is what they are capable of. This is why we cannot trust them.'"
Kaminari's mouth opened. Closed.
"Jiro was that face," I said. "He was not the first. He was just the first they needed."
The library was very quiet.
"You are saying the videos lied."
"I am saying the videos presented a version of history that served a purpose. Propaganda does not have to be false to be misleading. It just has to be selective."
Kaminari stared at the table.
"There are examples of this in every culture," I said. "Every time period. When a group is marginalised, the dominant power finds a scapegoat. Someone to blame. Someone to fear. It is easier than admitting the system just doesn't work properly."
He was quiet for a long time. Then he asked a question about some of the first heroes eventually being mutants and even now in the top ten there are a lot more mutants like Mirko and Ryukyu.
"The problem there is that when people see that they think the system is working for them, but the reality is a better example is a hero like Wash, who reached that position in spite of the system."
Kobe didn't think he was being pessimistic or laser focusing on race relations but, "... it's honestly nasty seeing an oppressed class start to win sometimes because that makes people delude themselves into thinking that the system is finally working with no active change, and that is why things like the Eden project still exist in that system, or why the actual mutants that choose to be heroes typically still seem human like first just with a few add-ons."
Kaminari stood silent, this was a line of thinking he had never really heard of before, something he didn't think to care for.
"I did not know," he said finally.
"Now you do."
He nodded slowly. "I am going to apologise. To the whole class. I am going to tell them I was wrong."
"That is a start."
He looked at me. "Is it enough?"
I thought about Ashido. About the garden hedge and the boy on the tricycle. About the word aliens and the way it had stuck to her for years.
"It is not about enough," I said. "It is about what you do next. And the next thing after that. And the next."
Kaminari swallowed. "I am sorry."
I did not know if he was apologising to me or to the air or to himself. It did not matter.
"You should get some sleep," I said. "Tomorrow will be long."
He stood. His chair scraped against the floor. He walked to the door, stopped, turned.
"Thank you," he said. "For listening."
I nodded.
He left.
The library was quiet again. I picked up my book. I did not open it.
___
The class group chat was insufferably normal.
Kobe scrolled through the messages, thumb drifting across the screen, watching the flow of conversation. Memes. Complaints about homework. Someone asking if anyone had seen their charger. Kaminari had joined in twenty minutes ago, his messages indistinguishable from anyone else's. A laughing emoji here. A bad pun there. The usual.
The apology must have gone well.
Kobe set his phone down on the bedside table and stared at the ceiling.
He had been thinking about race relations. About how they were taught in schools. About how Japan, for all its flaws, had a curriculum that addressed discrimination against mutants. Not perfectly. Not even adequately. But it was there. Students learned about the Nishinari district. About the purges. About the heroes who had fought for integration and the ones who had argued for segregation.
So how had Kaminari absorbed that toxic material? How had he watched those videos, internalised those narratives, and never once questioned them?
The answer was uncomfortable.
People were good at compartmentalising. They could learn one thing in a classroom and another thing online and never feel the contradiction. The algorithm did not care about curriculum. It cared about engagement. And outrage was engaging. Fear was engaging. The feeling of being smart, of knowing something others did not, was deeply, dangerously engaging.
Kobe thought about Ashido. About Ojiro. About the others in the class who had every right to be furious and yet had chosen, apparently, to forgive. Or at least to move on.
It was not weakness, he decided. It was something else.
People who viewed someone as a friend did not want conflict. Did not want confrontation. It was not about being weak-willed. It was about preservation. Keeping a friendship intact, especially at this age, especially after everything that had happened since Hero's Eve, was a kind of survival. They had lost so much already. They did not want to lose each other.
He understood that. He did not know if he agreed with it. But he understood.
He reached for his phone to turn it off.
The alarm blared.
Loud. Piercing. Not just from his phone, from the walls, the ceiling, the hallway beyond his door. The school's emergency system.
A robotic voice followed. "All students, report to your year's common room immediately. All students, report to your year's common room. Class B students will join you there. This is not a drill."
Kobe was on his feet before the message finished. He pulled on a hoodie, shoved his phone into his pocket, and walked fast down the corridor. Others were doing the same. Faces pale. Eyes wide. No one spoke.
The common room was already crowded when he arrived. Class A and Class B mingled in uneasy clusters, the usual rivalry forgotten. Iida was trying to organise, waving his arms, calling for order. No one was listening.
Kobe found a spot against the wall and watched.
A robot rolled in. Not one of the small ones. A full-sized unit, its chassis gleaming under the fluorescent lights. It stopped in the centre of the room and scanned the crowd.
"Student count in progress. Please remain still."
The scanning beam swept across them. Red light. Quiet hum.
"All students accounted for. Your homeroom teacher will arrive shortly."
The robot rolled back to the door and stood sentinel.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Questions. Theories. Someone mentioned a gas leak. Someone else mentioned a villain attack. Neither sounded right.
A shadow fell across the doorway.
Aizawa stepped in.
His capture scarf was loose around his neck, but his posture was different. Tenser. His eyes swept the room, counting, assessing, filing information away.
Midoriya was the first to speak.
"Sensei. What happened?"
Aizawa's jaw tightened.
"Itsuka Kendo from Class B was attacked on campus."