Neotory

  The wind howling across the rooftop of the forgotten office building felt sharper than usual, carrying with it the bitter chill of reality. Izuku Midoriya stood paralyzed, his worn red sneakers rooted to the concrete, his breath caught somewhere between his lungs and his throat. The sky above Musutafu was a bruised, indifferent violet, bleeding into the hazy twilight of late afternoon. 

  The world is not equal.   Izuku Midoriya learned this fundamental truth not at the age of four, but at the age of five, during a harsh, unforgiving winter.  

The world was ending, and Naruto Uzumaki felt strangely at peace with it.   He hung suspended in the crystalline space between life and death, his body battered beyond recognition. Blood dripped from countless wounds, each one a testament to the journey that had brought him here. The final battle had consumed everything—his chakra, his strength, his hope. But not his will. Never his will.  

The air in the Musutafu commercial district tasted heavily of pulverized concrete, ozone, and the distinct, metallic tang of blood.   Sirens wailed in the distance, a mournful, overlapping choir of police cruisers, fire engines, and ambulances rushing toward the devastation. Buildings that had stood proudly that morning now leaned at perilous angles, their glass facades shattered into millions of jagged diamonds that littered the asphalt.  

  The heat in the alleyway was suffocating, a localized inferno that tasted of burnt sugar, ozone, and sulfur.   Katsuki Bakugo was drowning. Not in water, but in a vile, sentient mass of sewage and malice. The Sludge Villain wrapped around him, forcing itself down his throat, into his nose, violating his lungs. Every instinct in Katsuki’s body screamed at him to detonate, to blow this filth to kingdom come, but his explosions only fed the flames trapping them in the narrow shopping district street.  

 All men are not created equal.   It was a harsh, immutable truth of the world, one that Izuku Midoriya learned at the tender age of four. Most children learned this lesson when they realized they couldn't breathe fire as brightly as their peers, or when their telekinesis could only lift a pebble while their classmate could levitate a desk. They learned it through playground hierarchies and the petty squabbles of kindergarten.  

  The air tasted like ozone and copper.   Izuku Midoriya ducked, the motion more instinct than conscious thought. A fraction of a second later, a jagged spike of concrete slammed into the space where his head had just been, shattering against the reinforced wall of the alleyway. Dust rained down on his shoulders, dusting the dark, muted green of his costume in a layer of pale grey ash.