Chapter 2: Collision Course: The Dojo Mishap
The lavender scent in her room couldn’t quite mask the metallic smell of electronics. Sophia lay sprawled on her bed, one hand draped over her eyes, the other absently stroking Prince Caspian’s fur. The cat’s judgmental purr vibrated against her thigh.
Musutafu. Japan.A guest room.
Her mind kept replaying the neon club, the bass in her teeth, Mina’s sharp grin. “The whole beautiful, complicated, noisy package.” It sounded like a dream, or the premise of a very specific, very intimidating anime. Her passport was, in fact, valid. She’d checked. It sat on her nightstand now, a little blue rectangle of potential chaos.
What was she doing?
She rolled over, facing the tower of figurines. Among the plastic heroes, one stood out—a limited edition Dynamight, sculpted mid-explosion, face twisted in that iconic, furious roar. She’d bought it years ago, a silly impulse. Now it felt like a totem. A weird, scowling totem.
She grabbed her headset.
The suit’s pressure was immediate, a familiar embrace. She blinked into her usual avatar hub, a cozy personal space styled like her real bedroom but with floating, slow-rotating hibiscus flowers. Mina’s icon pulsed with a message: “Packing list sent! Also, maybe avoid public worlds for a bit. Things are… buzzy.”
Buzzy.Right. Because she’d probably laughed in the face of the world’s number one hero and then agreed to fly to his city. Smooth.
She needed to move.To not think. She opened the world browser, thumbing past the popular clubs. Her finger hovered over a serene-looking icon: “Kendo Dojo – Private.” It was marked as a friends-only world, but a glitch in the browser’s cache sometimes let her peek into locked spaces for a second before kicking her out. It was a quirk she used for inspiration, to see how people built their private sanctuaries.
She clicked.
The warp was wrong. Instead of the usual rejection message, her vision dissolved into a liquid swirl of light. A system hiccup. A full, unintended load.
She materialized not in a lobby, but directly inside.
The air changed. No bass, no neon. It was cool, quiet, with a faint scent of virtual pine and polished wood. The space was a simple, expansive dojo. Sunlight streamed through high, rectangular windows onto tatami mats. At the far end, a single avatar was moving.
He was shirtless, wearing only black training pants. Spiky blonde hair, sharp lines, a build rendered with punishing anatomical accuracy—every muscle defined, from the tense shoulders to the lean abdomen. He was mid-motion, a forceful, rotating strike, his body a study in controlled violence. His back was to her.
She froze, a trespasser in a silent gallery.
He completed the strike, settled, and began to turn.
She should have logged out. She should have vanished. But the detail was mesmerizing, the realism of the avatar beyond anything she’d seen in a public world. The subtle ripple across his shoulders as he moved. The faint, programmed sheen of sweat.
He saw her.
His eyes—a sharp, burning red—locked onto her. His face, handsome and brutally angled, twisted. Not with surprise, but with instant, pure irritation. The famous scowl, deeper than any figurine could capture.
“Who the hell—” he started, voice a low, gritty growl.
She panicked. Her finger jabbed at the logout command on her wrist interface. It didn’t respond. Stuck.
“I’m so sorry!” she blurted, her voice too loud in the quiet space. “World browser glitch! I’m leaving! It’s not—”
He was already striding toward her, not hurried, but with a deliberate, predatory intent. “Private world. Can you read?”
“Yes! Obviously! It’s a bug!” She backed up, her avatar stepping onto a tatami mat. “My interface is frozen. Just give me a sec—”
He was close now. Too close. The phantom sense suit transmitted the imagined space between them, a charged, electric proximity. She could see the individual pixels of his hair, the slight scar-like texture above his left eye. His expression wasn’t just angry; it was offended. A violation.
“You’re that girl,” he said, stopping a few feet away. His tone shifted, became analytical, almost bored. “From the club. Mina’s new obsession.”
Sophia’s brain short-circuited. “What? How do you—”
“Your avatar. It’s distinctive. The tattoos.” He flicked a glance at her chest, at the glowing hibiscus lineart. “The obnoxious laugh.”
The laugh. The Deku impersonator. Everything crashed together in her head. This wasn’t an impersonator. This level of detail, this specific, grating familiarity… This was him. The Dynamight figurine on her nightstand was laughing at her.
“You’re… you’re Bakugou,” she breathed. It wasn’t a question.
He didn’t confirm it. He just stared, as if waiting for her to catch up. “Your logout’s frozen because this world’s got a security lock on unauthorized entries. It traps glitches for review. You’re stuck for ninety seconds.”
“Oh.” Ninety seconds. An eternity.
He crossed his arms. The movement emphasized his physique, but his focus was entirely on her face. “Mina says you’re coming.”
She nodded, uselessly.
“She says you’re ‘fun.’” He said the word like it was a disease.
“I… try to be.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. He looked away, toward the windows. “The dojo’s for focus. Not for social interruptions.”
“I wasn’t trying to socialize! I was trying to leave!”
“Yet here you are.” He looked back at her. The irritation was still there, but it had cooled into something more assessing. “You laughed at Deku.”
The memory flooded back, hot and embarrassing. “I thought he was an impersonator! A really good one!”
“He’s a terrible impersonator. He’s just himself.” A faint, almost invisible smirk touched his mouth. It wasn’t friendly. It was competitive. “You called him ‘cute.’”
Sophia felt her real body flush. The phantom sense carried the heat to her cheeks. “It was a compliment!”
“It was a dismissal.” He took one more step closer. Now she could see the finer details—the way his avatar’s eyes weren’t just red, but had a faint, inner glow. “He’s not ‘cute.’ He’s the Symbol of Peace. You don’t reduce him to a… aesthetic.”
She held her ground, her own annoyance sparking. “I wasn’t reducing him! I was being nice! And anyway, why do you care? You’re the one who’s always yelling at him in the news clips.”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s different. That’s professional. That’s…”
He stopped. He seemed to realize he was arguing with a stranger trapped in his private world. His scowl returned, fuller. “Ninety seconds is up.”
Her wrist interface chimed. The logout function glowed green.
“Right,” she said, her voice smaller. “Sorry. For interrupting.”
He didn’t answer. Just watched her, his expression unreadable.
She hit the logout command. The world began to dissolve, the tatami mats, the pine scent, the sunlight all peeling away into digital mist.
The last thing she saw was his avatar, shirtless and still, in the center of the dojo. The last thing she heard was his voice, flat and final.
“Don’t expect it to be fun.”
His words— “Don’t expect it to be fun.” —echoed in the silent, lavender-hazed reality of her bedroom. The headset came off with a soft hiss. Sophia stared at her ceiling, the phantom pressure of the suit lingering like a ghostly embrace.
Prince Caspian meowed, nudging her hand. She felt raw, exposed, as if the shirtless, scowling avatar had seen straight through the digital construct to the nervously fluttering heart beneath. It wasn’t the anger. It was the assessment. The way his pixel-perfect eyes had cataloged her, found her lacking, and dismissed her all in one flat, grinding glance.
She didn’t log back into VR that night. Or the next.
The passport on her nightstand became a point of avoidance. She’d flip it open, stare at her own unimpressed photo, and then slide it under a pile of comfy, dark-colored laundry. Setting a date felt impossible. A commitment to walk into a space where he existed, where her bubbly ignorance might be dissected like a flawed battle strategy.
Weeks bled together. She went to her online classes, doodled hibiscus in the margins, and slept a lot. The expensive VR suit hung in its closet, a sleek black shadow. Mina’s messages piled up, cheerful and patient, then curious, then gently concerned.
Mina: You alive in there, sleepyhead? We miss your obnoxious laugh.
Sophia would type a reply, delete it, and roll over. The memory of Bakugou’s irritated scowl was a strangely effective deterrent. It was a month later, almost to the day, when a different notification chimed. Not a text. A direct world invitation.
It was from Mina. The preview thumbnail showed a cozy, rustic-looking lodge, all warm wood and glowing fireplace light. The title was simply “Rest Area.”
Her finger hovered. Her chest felt tight. Prince Caspian head-butted her phone.
“Fine,” she muttered to the cat. “But if he’s there, I’m logging straight out.”
The suit’s embrace was a familiar shock. The warp was smooth, seamless. She materialized not in a club or a dojo, but in profound, quiet comfort. The air smelled of virtual cedar and something like cinnamon. A massive fireplace crackled in the center of a circular room, its light dancing over plush velvet couches and deep fur rugs.
Mina’s avatar was curled at one end of a couch, swaddled in an oversized pastel hoodie. “Soph!” she called, her voice warm but quieter than usual. “Get over here. You’ve been a hermit crab.”
Sophia’s avatar moved on its own, sinking into the incredible softness of the couch opposite Mina. The phantom sense translated the plush fabric perfectly. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Just. Life.”
“Uh-huh.” Mina’s golden eyes were knowing. “Life looked a lot like a certain glitch into a private training sim. I heard about that.”
A flush crept up Sophia’s neck. “He told you?”
“He complained. Extensively. It was basically a five-minute rant about security vulnerabilities and ‘nosy civilians with zero spatial awareness.’” Mina grinned. “I took it as a positive review. He noticed you.”
“He wanted to evaporate me,” Sophia corrected, pulling a virtual cushion onto her lap. She was about to say more when movement at the far end of the lodge caught her eye.
Two avatars stood by a vast, crystal-clear window that looked out on a star-dusted mountain range. One was tall, green-haired, wearing a simple gray sweatshirt. The other, blonde and rigid in posture, wore a black tank top. They were close. Not touching, but the space between them was charged, intimate.
It was Izuku and Bakugou.
And they were talking. But it wasn’t the loud, competitive sparring from public clips. Izuku was smiling, gesturing gently toward the window, his head tilted. Bakugou had his arms crossed, but he was listening, his sharp profile softened slightly by the fireplace glow. He gave a short, sharp nod, then said something that made Izuku duck his head and laugh—a soft, private sound that barely carried across the room.
Bakugou’s shoulder bumped against Izuku’s. A deliberate, small touch.
Izuku didn’t move away.
Sophia stared, her earlier grumpiness melting into a confused, flustered heat. This was the dynamic Mina had hinted at, but seeing it was different. The rawness of it. The quiet bump of a shoulder spoke volumes more than any boastful headline. It was a language she instinctively understood but felt like an intruder for witnessing.
“See?” Mina murmured, following her gaze. Her voice was a fond whisper. “They’re disgusting, right?”
“I… yeah.” Sophia’s own voice felt stuck. She was furious at Bakugou for weeks of making her feel small and foolish. Now, watching the effortless, gentle way he leaned into Izuku’s space, she just felt unmoored. “They’re really… together.”
“Took ‘em long enough,” Mina sighed, happily. She sipped from a virtual mug. “So. My guest room. It’s got a window that faces away from the city. Very quiet. When are you filling it?”
The invitation landed differently now. It wasn’t an abstract leap into a fanfiction. It was a key to a reality where this—the soft bump of shoulders, the private laughs—was just a Tuesday night. Where the scowling man from the dojo was also this person, capable of a quiet, wordless flirtation.
Izuku said something else, his hand coming up to briefly, so briefly, brush against Bakugou’s forearm. Bakugou didn’t shrug it off. He turned his head, and from this angle, Sophia could just see the barest hint of a smirk on his face.
A jolt, electric and warm, went through her. It was curiosity, now. A desire to understand the contradiction.
She looked back at Mina, who was watching her with a patient, sly smile. The momentum shifted inside her, the lingering fear finally outweighed by a pull she couldn’t name.
“Okay,” Sophia said, the word decisive in the cozy quiet. “Next month. After my finals. Tell me what flight to book.”