Blurred Lines | shouto.

[10]: Improvement

Your previous two weeks had been filled with lots of intense full-body training.

You were grateful to have a fully-healed wrist during the process.

Morning and night, you used every spare minute you had to train. All sorts of different techniques, focusing mostly on variety and overall strength.

In this time, you had managed to gain much better control of understanding and regulating the degree of poison that comes with your fire at any given second.

With the slowly improving skill, you came to the revelation that the less poison in your fire, the more it started to turn orange, and red, in colour.

The darkest blues and greens equaled the most poisonous.

It felt good to slowly be gaining control of something that had stressed you out ever since your quirk manifested.

Your favourite (and least favourite) training activity was what you liked to call the 'water bucket'.

The name lacked creativity.

All you did, was simply submerge your body in a cauldron filled with room-temperature water.

With both arms in the water, you had to continuously blast mediocre firepower, to try and empty the cauldron via slow-burn evaporation.

You would sit in the tub, sweating profusely and breathing heavily for sometimes, for over an hour.

It was one of the hardest exercises you had ever come up with—that was why you did it once or twice a day, every day, for the two consecutive weeks in preparation for the carnival.

And it had definitely started becoming easier.

You got your time down to eleven minutes.

Although it didn't mean much, the results clearly indicated that your training had been successfully strengthening and improving your quirk, one way or another.

It was a great thing that your training room had been equipped with a full convection-ventilation system, to draw out the heat and poisonous gasses that often welled inside the room during your quirk training.

Many times over the two weeks, you had found yourself wondering why you were training your body so hard for something as simple as a school sports festival.

But, you heard rumours about it getting fairly competitive in previous years.

And, you knew that there would be all sorts of people attending, to watch the sports showdown. There would be support teams, management, ordinaries, hero scouts, and reporters who would all come together to observe.

For them, you wanted to perform well.

To go above and beyond what you had learned. To surpass even your own expectations.

You liked to think of it as your own personal debut.

You had to demonstrate what you could do with your raw power, and chiseled skill. You knew you could do well.

You would strive for first-place.

One time during the weeks of training, Todoroki had come to your work again. He asked to take you up on your offer at joining you for training inside your home.