What if deku had a quirk that let him to anything he wanted with no restrictions or weaknesses

 

The world, Izuku Midoriya would later realize, was built on a foundation of rules.

 

Gravity pulled things down. Fire burned. Time moved forward, marching relentlessly in a single, unyielding direction. For four years, Izuku had lived within these rules just like everyone else. He was a boy who worshipped the sun in the form of a man named All Might, a child who believed that if he smiled brightly enough and wished hard enough, he too could stand in the light and uphold the rules of justice.

 

But wishes are dangerous things. They are the seeds of defiance. And on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, in the sterile, white-tiled office of a local pediatrician, Izuku Midoriya became the boy who broke the rules of the universe.

 

The clinic smelled of rubbing alcohol, old magazines, and the faint, coppery tang of anxiety. Izuku sat on the edge of the examination table, his short legs swinging in the empty air, the crinkling of the paper beneath him the only sound in the suffocating silence. In his right hand, he clutched a limited-edition Silver Age All Might action figure, his knuckles white from the strength of his grip.

 

Across the room, Dr. Tsubasa sat in a rolling chair, a pair of thick, round goggles pushed up on his forehead. The doctor sighed, a heavy, weary sound that made the room feel ten degrees colder. He tapped a pen against an x-ray illuminated on a glowing board on the wall.

 

"You should probably give it up," the doctor said.

 

The words were spoken casually, almost callously, like a man talking about the weather. But to Izuku, they were a death sentence.

 

Inko Midoriya, sitting in the hard plastic chair beside the examination table, gasped softly. She leaned forward, her hands hovering as if she wanted to catch the words before they could hit her son. "Give it up? But... doctor, surely there’s a mistake? The other kindergarteners have already started manifesting their Quirks. Izuku is just a late bloomer, right?"

 

Dr. Tsubasa shook his head, pointing his pen at the glowing x-ray. It displayed the small, fragile bones of Izuku’s foot. "It’s a matter of basic evolutionary biology, Mrs. Midoriya. When Quirks first began appearing, researchers noticed a correlation between the presence of a Quirk and the absence of the proximal phalange joint in the pinky toe. It’s an evolutionary streamlined process. People with Quirks have one joint. Your son," the doctor tapped the film again, "has two. He’s completely normal. But in this day and age, that means he is Quirkless. He will never develop a power."

 

Izuku stared at the x-ray. Two joints. A tiny, insignificant piece of bone, no larger than a grain of rice, was the wall standing between him and his dreams.

 

The Silver Age All Might action figure slipped from Izuku’s numb fingers. It hit the linoleum floor with a sharp, plastic crack, the left arm snapping cleanly off at the shoulder.

 

Izuku didn't look down at the broken toy. He couldn't look away from the computer screen playing the video of All Might’s debut. He had watched that video ten thousand times. He knew every pixel, every sound, every triumphant laugh. He had built his entire identity, his entire soul, around the promise that he could one day be like the man on that screen.

 

You should probably give it up.

 

A terrible, suffocating pressure began to build in Izuku's small chest. It was a physical ache, a burning, jagged pain that felt like swallowing broken glass. His vision blurred with hot tears. He thought of Kacchan, who could create explosions from his palms. He thought of the kids at school who could stretch their fingers, breathe tiny wisps of fire, or change the color of their skin. They were special. They were part of the future.

 

He was just... obsolete. Left behind. A mistake of biology.

 

No.

 

The thought was small at first, a tiny spark of rebellion in a sea of despair.

 

No. I don't want this.

 

"Izuku, baby..." Inko reached out, her voice trembling. Her hand rested on his small shoulder, pulling him into her side. She was already crying, her tears falling into his messy green curls. She was mourning for him. She believed the doctor.

 

NO.

 

The spark flared into a roaring inferno. It wasn't just sadness anymore; it was a desperate, primal rejection of reality itself. Why did the universe get to decide his fate based on a tiny bone in his foot? Why did a doctor get to tell him what he could and couldn't be? It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. He had so much love, so much determination, so much heroism locked inside his tiny body, and it was suffocating him.

 

Izuku squeezed his eyes shut, clenching his fists so hard his blunt fingernails dug into his palms. He didn't pray to a god. He didn't pray to All Might. He screamed at the fabric of existence itself, a child throwing a tantrum at the cosmos.

 

"I WANT A QUIRK!"

 

He didn't just say it. He felt it. He willed it with every atom of his four-year-old being.

 

And reality blinked.

 

It was not an explosion. There was no flash of light, no deafening boom, no gust of wind. It was infinitely more terrifying than that.

 

For exactly one Planck length of time—the smallest measurable unit of existence—everything simply stopped. The hum of the fluorescent lights ceased. The dust motes dancing in the air froze. The tears halfway down Inko's cheeks halted in mid-air. The rotation of the Earth, the burning of the sun, the expansion of the universe—all of it paused, waiting for the command of the boy in the green hood.

 

Then, a ripple.

 

It felt like the drop in air pressure right before a massive thunderstorm, but internalized in the mind. Izuku gasped, his eyes flying open. The world looked the same, but it felt entirely different. The room was no longer just a room. It felt like a drawing on a piece of paper, and he was suddenly holding the pencil.

 

Dr. Tsubasa blinked, violently shaking his head as if he had just woken from a micro-sleep. He looked at the x-ray on the wall. He frowned. He rubbed his eyes beneath his goggles and looked again.

 

"What..." The doctor muttered, leaning closer to the light board. "That... that wasn't there a second ago."

 

Inko sniffled, wiping her eyes. "W-what wasn't, Doctor?"

 

"The joint," Dr. Tsubasa said, his voice laced with profound confusion. He pulled the x-ray down and slapped a different chart onto the desk. "I... I misread the chart. Or the technician made a mistake. Mrs. Midoriya, look."

 

Inko leaned over, her breath hitching.

 

Izuku looked too. Where there had undeniably been two joints in his pinky toe just thirty seconds ago, there was now only one. The bone structure was seamless, perfect, as if it had always been that way.

 

"I don't understand," Dr. Tsubasa muttered, frantically typing on his computer, bringing up Izuku's brainwave scans and genetic blood markers. The doctor's eyes widened to the size of saucers. "The markers... the Quirk factor. It's there. It's not just there, it's... it's off the charts."

 

"He has a Quirk?" Inko gasped, her tears of sorrow instantly morphing into tears of shock and relief. She hugged Izuku tightly. "Oh, Izuku! You have a Quirk!"

 

Izuku didn't celebrate. He didn't cheer. He stared at his own hands. They felt strangely light, yet heavy with an invisible gravity. He looked down at the floor, where his broken All Might toy lay.

 

"What kind of Quirk is it, Doctor?" Inko asked, her voice bubbling with hysterical joy.

 

Dr. Tsubasa stared at the screen, sweating profusely. "I... I can't classify this. The energy readings are completely localized in the prefrontal cortex, but they encompass... well, everything. It's an emitter type, clearly, but the output is... undefined. We'll have to wait and see how it manifests. But he definitely has one."

 

Izuku slipped off the examination table. He knelt on the cold linoleum and picked up the two pieces of his broken toy. The plastic was jagged where the arm had snapped.

 

He held the pieces together. In his mind, he remembered what the toy looked like when it was whole. He didn't want to glue it. He wanted it to never have been broken at all.

 

He pushed that desire into the air around his hands.

 

There was no glowing aura. No sparks.

 

Underneath his fingertips, the jagged edges of the plastic simply ceased to exist as two separate entities. The atomic structure of the polymer re-knitted itself. The scuffed paint on All Might's fist flowed backward, smoothing out until it shone like it had just come out of the factory box.

 

Izuku pulled his hands apart. The action figure was whole. Not fixed. Whole.

 

A cold shiver ran down the four-year-old’s spine. He looked up at his mother and the doctor, who were still talking animatedly about Quirk counseling and registration. Neither of them had seen what he just did.

 

Izuku tucked the toy into his pocket. His heart beat a steady, unnervingly calm rhythm against his ribs. He had wanted a Quirk so he could be like everyone else. But as he walked out of the clinic, holding his mother’s hand, Izuku looked up at the grey, rain-filled sky, and realized he wasn't like everyone else.

 

He wasn't sure if he was even human anymore.

 

 

 

The car ride back to their apartment in Musutafu was a blur for Inko, who chattered excitedly on the phone with her husband, Hisashi, currently working overseas. She told him about the miracle, the misdiagnosis, the joy.

 

Izuku sat in the back seat, staring out the rain-streaked window.

 

The raindrops were hitting the glass, streaking downward due to gravity. Izuku watched one particularly large droplet.

 

Go up, he thought.

 

The raindrop stopped halfway down the window. It defied gravity, defied momentum, and slowly began to crawl upward against the glass, defying the wind of the moving car. Izuku watched it, his breath fogging the window.

 

Turn blue.

 

The clear water instantly shifted to a vibrant, glowing sapphire blue.

 

Disappear.

 

The drop vanished. No evaporation, no residue. It simply ceased to be a part of reality.

 

Izuku pulled his knees to his chest. He was a smart boy. He was observant, analytical, and prone to muttering about how Quirks interacted with the laws of physics. He had filled half a notebook with messy crayon drawings of heroes and how their powers worked. Pro Hero Endeavor produced fire by superheating his sweat. Pro Hero Hawks controlled his feathers through a specialized telekinetic link. Every Quirk had a mechanism. Every Quirk had a limit.

 

Izuku reached inward, probing his mind for his limit. He looked for a well of energy that he was draining, a muscle that would grow tired, a threshold that would cause him pain.

 

He found nothing.

 

It was like looking into a canyon and realizing there was no bottom, only a starry, infinite void. There was no mechanism. There was no sweat, no telekinetic strain. If he wanted something to happen, reality simply obliged. It folded, bent, and rewrote itself to accommodate his will, as effortlessly as a man breathing in air.

 

When they arrived home, Inko made his favorite dinner to celebrate: Katsudon. She hummed a happy tune in the kitchen, her previous despair entirely forgotten.

 

"Go play in your room for a bit, sweetie!" Inko called out over the sizzling of frying pork. "Dinner will be ready soon!"

 

"Okay, Mom," Izuku said quietly.

 

He walked down the short hallway to his room. It was a shrine to heroism. Posters of All Might covered every inch of wall space. Action figures, comic books, and bedsheets blared the red, white, and blue colors of the Symbol of Peace.

 

Izuku stood in the center of the room. He looked at a poster of All Might laughing heartily while holding up a collapsed bridge.

 

I want to be a hero, Izuku thought. Heroes save people. They fight villains.

 

He needed to test what he could do. He needed to know what his weapon was if he was going to fight villains. He opened his window, letting the cool, damp evening air into the room. He looked down at the small garden behind their apartment building.

 

Underneath a patch of hydrangeas, he saw something small and still.

 

Izuku climbed out his window, using the fire escape to drop down into the garden. The grass was wet and squished beneath his red sneakers. He approached the bushes and crouched down.

 

It was a small sparrow. It must have flown into the glass of an upstairs window during the storm. Its neck was bent at a sickening, unnatural angle. Its eyes were milky and unblinking, staring blankly at the mud. A line of small black ants had already found the body, marching in a uniform line across the bird’s ruffled brown feathers.

 

Death. It was absolute. It was the ultimate rule of the universe. Nothing comes back from it.

 

Izuku stared at the bird. He felt a profound, aching sadness. It was so small, so fragile. It didn't deserve to die in the cold rain.

 

He reached out, his small, chubby finger hovering an inch above the bird's broken body.

 

If he could fix plastic... could he fix life?

 

"Wake up," Izuku whispered.

 

He didn't just speak the words; he commanded reality. He envisioned the bird alive, warm, and singing.

 

The effect was instantaneous and horrifyingly beautiful.

 

The ants scurried backward, moving in perfect reverse, abandoning the body. The bird’s neck gave a sickening crack as it snapped itself back into perfect alignment. The milky film vanished from its small black eyes, replaced by a sharp, terrified clarity. The cold, stiff flesh suddenly expanded and contracted.

 

A heartbeat.

 

The sparrow gasped, its beak opening wide. It flapped its wings frantically, shedding water and mud, and launched itself into the air. It landed on a low branch of a nearby tree, chirping loudly, completely unharmed, completely alive.

 

Izuku fell backward onto the wet grass, his breath catching in his throat.

 

He had just resurrected the dead.

 

He looked at his hands, trembling violently. He wasn't panting from exhaustion. His head didn't ache. He felt perfectly fine, which was exactly what made it so terrifying. He had just reversed the cycle of life and death with a whisper, and it had taken less effort than tying his shoes.

 

"Izuku!"

 

His mother’s voice called from the open window above. "Dinner is ready! Come wash your hands!"

 

Izuku scrambled to his feet. "C-coming, Mom!"

 

He ran back inside, washing the mud off his hands in the bathroom sink. The water flowing from the faucet felt strange now. He knew he could turn it into lava, or ice, or solid gold with a passing thought. The realization made him feel dizzy. He felt like he was walking on a tightrope over a bottomless pit, and a single stray thought could send him plummeting.

 

He walked into the dining room and sat at the table. A steaming bowl of katsudon was placed in front of him.

 

Inko sat across from him, untying her apron. She smiled, but Izuku could see the dark circles under her eyes. The stress of the day had taken its toll on her. She had been so afraid, so heartbroken, and even though things had turned out well, the emotional whiplash had left her frayed.

 

She picked up her chopsticks, but her hand was shaking slightly. She dropped one of the wooden sticks onto the floor.

 

"Oh, clumsy me," she murmured, bending down to pick it up. When she sat back up, there were tears welling in the corners of her eyes.

 

"Mom?" Izuku asked, his voice tight. "Are you okay?"

 

Inko wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, forcing a smile. "I'm fine, sweetie. I just... I'm just so relieved. I was so worried about you, Izuku. I was so worried about how the world would treat you if you were Quirkless. People can be so cruel. The world is so dangerous. I just want you to be safe. I worry about you so much."

 

She sniffled, looking down at her bowl, completely overwhelmed by her own maternal anxiety.

 

Izuku felt a heavy weight in his chest. He hated seeing his mother cry. He hated that he was the cause of her stress. She worked so hard, cared for him so much, and all she did was worry. Worry about bills, worry about his future, worry about his safety.

 

Without thinking. Without pausing to analyze. Driven entirely by the pure, innocent desire of a child who wanted his mother to be happy, Izuku spoke.

 

"I wish you would stop worrying, Mom."

 

He meant it. He wanted the burden of anxiety lifted from her shoulders. He wanted her to feel peace.

 

He commanded reality to make it so.

 

The change was violently abrupt.

 

Inko's tears stopped flowing instantly. The droplets on her cheeks didn't fall; they vanished, as if they had never existed. The tense lines of stress around her eyes and mouth smoothed out with the artificial perfection of a porcelain doll. Her posture, previously slumped with exhaustion, snapped perfectly, rigidly straight.

 

She looked up at Izuku.

 

Her eyes, usually warm and filled with deep, soulful emotion, were completely vacant. The irises were a flat, dead green. They looked like painted glass. Her lips stretched into a wide, symmetrical, perfect smile. It was a smile completely devoid of joy. It was the physical manifestation of the concept of a smile, with none of the human emotion behind it.

 

Izuku froze, a spoonful of rice halfway to his mouth. "Mom?"

 

"Hello, Izuku," Inko said.

 

Her voice was wrong. The pitch was identical, the timber was the same, but the cadence was utterly flat. It sounded like a machine mimicking human speech.

 

"A-are you okay?" Izuku stammered, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

 

"I am perfect," Inko said, her smile never wavering, her eyes never blinking. She picked up her chopsticks and perfectly grasped a piece of pork cutlet. "I am not worried. There is nothing to worry about. Everything is perfect. You are perfect. The world is perfect."

 

She chewed the pork. She didn't look at it. She just stared directly at Izuku with those dead, glass eyes.

 

Panic, cold and sharp as a blade, pierced Izuku’s chest. "Mom, stop it. You're acting weird."

 

"I am not weird. I am not worried," Inko repeated, her voice a terrifying monotone. "I feel nothing but peace. You wished for me to stop worrying, Izuku. I have stopped. I will never worry again. I will never feel anxiety, fear, or sadness. I am perfectly fine."

 

She took another bite of rice. Her movements were robotic, precise, and completely devoid of humanity.

 

Izuku pushed his chair back, scrambling away from the table. He hit the wall, his breathing coming in short, ragged gasps.

 

He had taken her away.

 

He hadn't just removed her anxiety; he had rewritten her mind. He had reached into the intricate, beautiful, chaotic soul of his mother and surgically removed a piece of what made her human. Because anxiety, fear, and worry are born from love. To strip her of her worry was to strip her of her maternal bond, her free will, her very essence.

 

He had turned his mother into a meat puppet programmed to be happy.

 

"Mom, please," Izuku begged, tears streaming down his face. "Go back. Please, go back to normal!"

 

"I am normal. I am fine," the thing that looked like his mother said, smiling that horrible, empty smile.

 

"NO!" Izuku screamed, clapping his hands over his ears. He focused every ounce of his will, terrified of making another mistake, terrified of breaking her further. He visualized his mother—crying, stressing, laughing, human.

 

Go back! Undo! I want my mom back! Be worried! Be human!

 

Reality violently snapped back into place like a stretched rubber band.

 

Inko gasped, dropping her chopsticks. The porcelain bowl clattered against the wood of the table. She blinked rapidly, the warm, wet shine returning to her eyes. She put a hand to her chest, breathing heavily, looking around the room in confusion.

 

"Oh... goodness," she murmured, her voice trembling with genuine, beautiful, human emotion. "I... I felt lightheaded for a second. What happened?"

 

She looked at Izuku, who was pressed against the wall, sobbing hysterically.

 

"Izuku! Baby, what's wrong?" Inko jumped out of her chair, rushing over to him. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into a tight, warm embrace. "Why are you crying? Did something scare you?"

 

Izuku buried his face in her shoulder, clutching her shirt in his small fists. He felt her heartbeat. He felt her warmth. He felt the tremor of anxiety in her arms as she held him. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever felt.

 

"I'm sorry," he sobbed, his small body shaking. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

 

"Shhh, it's okay, mommy's here," Inko cooed, stroking his hair, her own tears of worry falling into his curls. "Mommy's got you. There's nothing to be afraid of."

 

But she was wrong.

 

There was everything to be afraid of. And Izuku was afraid of himself.

 

Later that night, long after Inko had finally calmed him down and tucked him into bed, Izuku lay awake. The rain had stopped, and moonlight filtered through the blinds, casting long, barred shadows across his All Might posters.

 

He stared up at the ceiling.

 

He understood now. He was only four years old, but the trauma of what he had almost done had violently forcefully matured a part of his brain.

 

He had wanted a Quirk so he could be a hero. He wanted to punch villains, save citizens from fires, and smile bravely in the face of danger.

 

But you cannot punch a villain if your fist can accidentally erase the concept of matter. You cannot save people from a fire if you can casually rewrite the laws of thermodynamics.

 

He was not a hero. He was a god wearing the skin of a little boy.

 

If he used his power, his true power, he would destroy the world. Not by blowing it up, but by stealing its soul. If he fixed every problem, if he wished away all pain, all villainy, all struggle, he would turn humanity into a planet of smiling, empty dolls, just like he had done to his mother.

 

Free will required struggle. Life required consequence.

 

If he used his Quirk, consequence ceased to exist.

 

Izuku sat up in bed. He looked at his hands in the moonlight. He could feel the infinite power thrumming just beneath his skin, eagerly waiting for a command, ready to reshape the cosmos at his slightest whim.

 

He had to cage it.

 

He could never, ever tell anyone what he truly was. If the villains knew, they would try to use him, or despair entirely. If the heroes knew, they would stop trying, relying on him to solve everything. If the world knew, society would collapse into a cult of worship or absolute apathy.

 

He needed a disguise. He needed a mask.

 

Izuku closed his eyes. He reached into that infinite void within his mind and built a wall. He visualized a massive, unbreakable vault, locking away the reality-warping, the time-manipulation, the life-and-death commands. He left only a tiny, microscopic crack in the vault door. Just enough power to slip through.

 

He looked at a pencil sitting on his desk across the room.

 

He didn't command reality to move it. Instead, he forced himself to simulate a mechanism. He imagined a physical, invisible hand reaching out from his brain, grabbing the pencil. He forced himself to feel a phantom strain in his forehead.

 

The pencil wobbled, then floated an inch off the desk. It hovered there, shaking slightly, before dropping back down.

 

Izuku let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.

 

Telekinesis. That was his mask. His mother had weak telekinesis—she could pull small objects to her. It made perfect genetic sense. He would pretend he had a slightly stronger version of his mother's Quirk. He would pretend he had to work out, to train, to struggle to lift heavier things. He would pretend to have a limit.

 

He would pretend to be a normal boy, with a normal, slightly above-average Quirk, who had to work hard to become a hero.

 

He would never revive the dead. He would never alter a human mind again. He would lock the god away, deep in the darkest corner of his soul, and he would play the role of Izuku Midoriya flawlessly for the rest of his life.

 

Izuku lay back down on his pillow. He turned his head to look at the All Might action figure on his nightstand. It stood tall and proud, perfectly whole, a testament to a miracle no one would ever know about.

 

"I'll be a hero," Izuku whispered to the empty room. "But I'll do it by their rules."

 

He closed his eyes, forcing himself to fall asleep, knowing that his childhood had ended the moment reality had blinked. The world outside his window continued to spin, blissfully unaware that it now existed entirely at the mercy of the boy in the green hood.

 

He was the strongest being in existence, and he had never felt more alone.

 

For a boy who held the universe in the palm of his hand, waking up was the most exhausting part of the day.

 

At exactly 6:00 AM, Izuku Midoriya’s alarm clock began to beep. Before the third electronic chirp could fully form in the air, his eyes snapped open. He did not groan, nor did he stretch lazily like a normal fourteen-year-old boy. He lay perfectly, rigidly still, staring up at the ceiling.

 

He had to boot up the system. He had to remind himself of the rules.

 

Gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared, he thought, anchoring his consciousness to the physical world. The walls are made of drywall and wood. They are solid. My skin is flesh. The air is nitrogen and oxygen. I am Izuku Midoriya. I am human.

 

Only after he had firmly established the parameters of reality in his mind did he allow his hand to reach out and hit the snooze button.

 

To Izuku, the world was no longer made of dirt, concrete, and flesh. Ten years had passed since the incident in the clinic, ten years since he had accidentally rewritten his mother’s soul and realized the terrifying truth of his existence. In that decade, his perception of reality had shifted completely. He lived in a world made of spun sugar and delicate, frost-thin glass.

 

Every single action required conscious, agonizing regulation. If he opened a door too fast, he might accidentally alter the kinetic energy of the room and blow the roof off his apartment building. If he stubbed his toe and allowed himself a momentary flash of unbridled anger, the offending piece of furniture might be erased from the timestream.

 

So, he lived in a state of perpetual, hyper-vigilant calm. He moved slowly. He breathed evenly. He built a fortress inside his own mind, a labyrinth of mental blocks and simulated restrictions to keep his Quirk—his Dictate—chained in the deepest, darkest abyss of his subconscious.

 

Izuku sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He walked to the bathroom, his bare feet padding softly against the floorboards. He picked up his toothbrush and squeezed out the paste.

 

He looked at himself in the mirror. He was plain. Messy green hair, a smattering of freckles, wide, dark green eyes. But if one looked closely—and people rarely did—they would see that his eyes were too still. They held the weary, ancient depth of an ocean that had never seen a storm.

 

"Good morning," he whispered to his reflection.

 

He held up his left hand. He needed to practice his "mask." He focused on his toothbrush, imagining a physical strain in his forehead, visualizing an invisible, telekinetic hand grabbing the plastic handle.

 

The toothbrush floated upward, hovering an inch above his palm. It wobbled slightly.

 

Perfect, Izuku thought. Weak, requires focus, easily disrupted. Completely average.

 

That was the lie he told the world. Shortly after his fourth birthday, when society demanded to know what his late-blooming Quirk was, he had registered it as "Minor Telekinesis and Physical Enhancement." He claimed he could lift objects up to fifty pounds and slightly boost his physical strength, though it gave him terrible migraines if he overused it.

 

It was a plausible, utterly boring Quirk. It kept the government off his back, it kept the hero commissions from scouting him, and it kept him safe from the peering eyes of villains.

 

Izuku finished washing his face and walked out to the kitchen. The smell of frying eggs and toasted bread filled the small apartment.

 

"Good morning, Izuku!" Inko called cheerfully from the stove. She was humming a pop song that had been on the radio yesterday.

 

"Morning, Mom," Izuku replied, taking his seat at the table.

 

He watched her carefully. He watched the way her shoulders relaxed, the way she occasionally fumbled with the spatula, the tiny, human sigh she let out when a drop of hot oil splashed on her wrist.

 

She's human. She's normal. I fixed her.

 

He repeated this mantra to himself every single morning. The memory of her dead, doll-like eyes, the empty, perfect smile of a woman robbed of her anxiety, still haunted his nightmares. He was terrified, utterly petrified, that one day he would wake up and find that his "Undo" command hadn't worked completely, that some lingering, invisible rot was slowly turning his mother back into a machine. But she complained about the rising price of groceries, she fretted over his grades, she cried when watching sad movies. She was imperfect. She was beautiful.

 

Inko set a plate of eggs in front of him. "I ironed your uniform, honey. It's on your desk. Oh, and don't forget, the career aptitude forms are due today!"

 

Izuku took a bite of his eggs. They tasted perfect. He made sure not to accidentally enhance his tastebuds, lest the sensory input overwhelm him. "I have it in my bag, Mom. I put down U.A. High School as my first choice."

 

Inko froze, the dish towel slipping slightly from her grasp. A shadow of worry crossed her face. "U.A. High? The Hero Course?"

 

Izuku’s heart clenched. There it was. The worry. The beautiful, agonizing proof of her love.

 

"Yes," Izuku said softly.

 

Inko sat down across from him, wringing the towel in her hands. "Izuku, I... I know you’ve always wanted to be a hero. Always. And your Quirk... it’s wonderful, it really is! But... U.A. is so dangerous. The entrance exam is brutal. People get hurt. And your telekinesis... well, it’s not really suited for combat against giant robots or hardened villains. If you push yourself, you get those awful migraines..."

 

She was giving him an out. She was trying to protect him from the harsh reality she believed he lived in.

 

If only you knew, Izuku thought, a bitter, phantom smile ghosting across his mind. If only you knew that I could disassemble U.A. High School down to its constituent atoms with a single sigh. If only you knew that the only thing in the universe capable of hurting me is myself.

 

"I know it's hard, Mom," Izuku said, playing his part, softening his voice to sound vulnerable. "But I have to try. I've been working out. Building my physical strength to compensate. I want to save people. I have to at least take the exam."

 

Inko looked into his wide, earnest eyes. She sighed, a sound full of maternal defeat and reluctant pride. "You're just like your father. Stubborn. Alright, Izuku. But promise me you won't do anything reckless. If it gets too dangerous, you run."

 

"I promise, Mom," Izuku lied smoothly. He couldn't run from danger. Danger didn't exist for him anymore.

 

 

 

The walk to Aldera Junior High took exactly twenty-two minutes. For twenty-two minutes, Izuku subjected himself to the psychological torture of the open world.

 

The morning air was crisp. The streets were bustling with commuters, cars, and the occasional Pro Hero on patrol. To a normal teenager, it was just a city. To Izuku, it was a cacophony of fragile variables.

 

He walked past a newsstand. The holographic screens were displaying the morning headlines.

 

VILLAIN ATTACK IN HOSU LEAVES THREE DEAD.

FAMINE IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE REACHES CRITICAL LEVELS.

NEW STRAIN OF VIRUS BAFFLES MEDICAL EXPERTS.

 

Izuku stopped on the sidewalk. Pedestrians bumped into his shoulders, grumbling as they passed, but he stood rooted to the spot, staring at the flashing red text of the news ticker.

 

The Trolley Problem.

 

It was a classic ethical dilemma. A runaway trolley is barreling down a set of tracks. Ahead, five people are tied to the tracks. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to a different track, where only one person is tied down. Do you pull the lever, actively killing one to save five? Or do you do nothing, allowing the five to die through your inaction?

 

Izuku Midoriya did not have a lever. He had the power to make the trolley turn into a flock of doves. He had the power to teleport the people to safety. He had the power to erase the concept of a trolley from human history.

 

He stared at the headline about the famine.

 

Right now, at this exact millisecond, a child on the other side of the planet was starving to death. Their mother was weeping over their emaciated body. The pain was real, absolute, and agonizing.

 

Izuku could fix it. He didn't even need to be there. He could simply stand on this sidewalk in Musutafu, close his eyes, and whisper, "Let the soil be fertile. Let the crops grow. Let the hunger end." Within seconds, thousands of acres of barren wasteland would bloom into lush farmland. The starving would be full.

 

Why didn't he?

 

Because he had tried to follow that logic to its end, and the end was madness.

 

If he cured the famine, what about the warlords who caused it? Should he alter their minds to make them peaceful, like he almost did to his mother? If he did that, he was stripping them of their free will. He was playing God. He was rewriting human consciousness to fit his personal moral code.

 

If he cured the mysterious virus, humanity would never invent the vaccine. They would never advance their medical technology. They would become dependent on the miraculous, invisible force that kept saving them.

 

If he stopped death, the planet would overpopulate in a decade. If he expanded the planet to accommodate the population, he would alter the gravity of the solar system.

 

If he solved every problem, humanity would stop being human. They would become an ant farm, safe inside a glass box, watched over by a benevolent, dictatorial giant who wiped away all struggle. Art, literature, triumph, courage—all of it was born from the struggle against adversity. Without the dark, there is no light. Without the capacity to fail, success is a hollow, meaningless script.

 

Izuku clenched his fists at his sides. His nails dug into his palms, breaking the skin. A drop of blood welled up.

 

Heal, he thought involuntarily. The cut vanished instantly, leaving behind smooth, unblemished skin. He cursed himself for his lack of discipline.

 

I cannot save the world by being a god, Izuku told himself, tearing his eyes away from the newsstand and forcing his legs to move toward the school. I have to let them bleed. I have to let them die. It is the only way they remain free.

 

It was a philosophical conclusion that made logical sense, but it felt like acid in his heart. Every time he passed a homeless man, every time he heard an ambulance wailing in the distance, a voice in his head screamed, You could stop this! You are letting them suffer! You are a monster!

 

To ignore the suffering of the world when you hold the cure in your hands was a special kind of hell. It was an isolating, crushing burden that no fourteen-year-old should ever have to carry.

 

He didn't want to be a god. He just wanted to be a hero. He wanted to jump into a burning building, risk his own life, and pull someone out with his own two hands. He wanted to earn the right to save someone within the rules of the glass world.

 

 

 

Aldera Junior High was loud, obnoxious, and utterly insignificant.

 

Izuku sat at his desk in the middle row, his notebook open, sketching the support gear of a new Pro Hero he had seen on TV. He was meticulously detailing the pneumatic pistons that allowed the hero to jump higher. It was utterly useless information to him, but the act of studying the limitations of physics grounded him.

 

"Since you're all third years, it's time for you to think seriously about your futures!" the homeroom teacher announced, standing at the podium with a stack of career aptitude forms. "I'll pass out handouts for your future plans now, but... you're all pretty much planning to go into the hero course, right?!"

 

The teacher threw the papers into the air. The classroom erupted into cheers. Students activated their Quirks in a chaotic display of minor superpowers. Fingers elongated, small sparks of electricity popped, rocks hovered in the air.

 

"Yes, yes, you all have wonderful Quirks!" the teacher laughed. "But using your powers in school is against the rules!"

 

"Sensei! Don't lump me in with these losers!"

 

The voice cut through the noise like a chainsaw. Izuku didn't look up from his notebook, but his pencil paused its scratching.

 

Katsuki Bakugo sat with his feet kicked up on his desk, a sneer of absolute arrogance plastered across his face. "As if I had anything in common with their crappy Quirks. I'm going to U.A. High School. I aced the mock tests. I'm the only one here with the stuff to surpass All Might and become the top hero!"

 

The class erupted in angry murmurs, but Bakugo silenced them with a small, threatening explosion from the palm of his hand.

 

The teacher adjusted his glasses, looking down at his clipboard. "Oh, right. Midoriya, you're also applying for U.A., aren't you?"

 

The silence that fell over the classroom was profound. For a long, agonizing second, the only sound was the ticking of the wall clock.

 

Then, the laughter started. It was mocking, incredulous, and cruel.

 

"Midoriya? No way!"

"You can't get into the hero course with a Quirk that just floats pencils!"

"His enhancement is a joke! He got exhausted just running the 50-meter dash last week!"

 

Izuku kept his eyes on his notebook. He felt the vibrations of their laughter in the air. He felt the exact frequency of their soundwaves. He could have silenced them all by permanently removing the concept of sound from the room. He did nothing. He just let the mockery wash over him like a warm, insignificant breeze.

 

SLAM!

 

An explosion ripped through the air, completely obliterating the top half of Izuku's desk. The force of the blast sent his notebook flying, the pages smoking and charred.

 

Izuku didn't flinch. He didn't blink. He just slowly lifted his head to look at the perpetrator.

 

Bakugo stood over him, his hands smoking, his crimson eyes burning with a furious, volatile rage. "Listen up, Deku," Bakugo snarled, using the insulting nickname he had coined years ago. "You’re below the rejects! You’re completely out of your depth! You think you can rub shoulders with me?! With a garbage Quirk like yours?!"

 

This was the dynamic they had settled into.

 

When they were four, before the clinic, Bakugo had been the confident leader, and Izuku had been the meek follower. When Izuku's Quirk was diagnosed as a "weak telekinesis," Bakugo's superiority complex had only solidified. He was the sun, and Izuku was a pathetic, orbiting rock.

 

But as the years passed, something had shifted. Bakugo bullied him, insulted him, and threatened him, but it never garnered the reaction Bakugo wanted. Izuku never cowered. He never cried. He never fought back.

 

Izuku looked at Bakugo. He looked past the aggressive posture, past the explosions, past the blustering ego. He saw a boy who was terrified of weakness. He saw a boy whose entire sense of self-worth was tied to his destructive capability.

 

Izuku felt a profound, aching pity for him.

 

Bakugo lived in a world where might made right. He lived under the illusion that his explosions made him a god among insects. Izuku knew the truth. Izuku knew that if he simply stopped actively maintaining the laws of physics around Bakugo's hands, the boy's sweat would never ignite. He knew he could snap Bakugo's spine with a stray thought.

 

Bakugo was yelling, posturing like a lion, completely unaware that he was standing in the palm of a titan who was actively trying not to crush him.

 

"I'm not trying to compete with you, Kacchan," Izuku said quietly. His voice was calm, steady, and entirely devoid of fear.

 

That tone. That damn tone. It was the thing that drove Bakugo insane.

 

"Don't look at me like that!" Bakugo roared, grabbing Izuku by the collar of his uniform and hoisting him slightly out of his chair. Small, warning explosions popped against Izuku's chest.

 

A normal person would be terrified of the heat. A normal person would feel the burns.

 

Izuku felt the heat radiating from Bakugo's palms. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn't lethal. Subconsciously, Izuku’s Quirk activated, a self-defense mechanism he had rigidly programmed into his own mind.

 

Rule 1: Izuku Midoriya's body cannot be destroyed.

 

The explosions touched the fabric of his uniform. The heat transferred, the kinetic energy struck... and then simply dissipated into the void. The fabric didn't scorch. The skin beneath didn't blister. Izuku had to actively force his face into a grimace of pain to sell the illusion. He let out a small, fake gasp.

 

"You're shaking, Deku," Bakugo sneered, though there was a hint of uncertainty in his eyes. He couldn't put his finger on it, but something about holding Izuku felt wrong. It felt like trying to push a mountain. "Withdraw your application. You're a liability. You'll just die in the exams."

 

"I have to try," Izuku whispered, maintaining eye contact.

 

Bakugo scoffed, throwing Izuku back into his chair. He grabbed Izuku's charred notebook from the floor. He held it between his palms and blasted it again, turning the cover into a blackened, smoking mess. He tossed it out the open window.

 

"Most top-tier heroes have stories about their school days," Bakugo said, turning his back and walking toward the door as the final bell rang. "I want the shine of being the only student from this mediocre city junior high to make it into U.A. I'm a perfectionist. So don't ruin my backstory by showing up, Deku."

 

Bakugo paused at the door, glancing back over his shoulder. A cruel, nasty smile touched his lips. "If you really want to be a hero that badly, there's a quick way to do it. Believe that you'll be born with a better Quirk in your next life, and take a swan dive off the roof!"

 

The classroom, already emptying, went dead silent. Even Bakugo's lackeys looked slightly uncomfortable at the suicide baiting.

 

Izuku sat perfectly still.

 

Bakugo expected him to cry. He expected him to tremble, to argue, or to finally break.

 

Instead, Izuku looked at the empty space where Bakugo had been standing. A cold, terrifying thought drifted through his mind, smooth and effortless as a shark moving through water.

 

I could erase him. Right now. I could make it so Katsuki Bakugo was never born. No one would remember him. His mother wouldn't miss him. The timeline would stitch itself together seamlessly.

 

The thought was so easy. So logical. Bakugo was cruel. He was a bully. The world might objectively be a slightly kinder place without his explosive temper in it.

 

Izuku closed his eyes and gripped the edges of his broken desk. The wood cracked under his fingers.

 

No.

 

To erase Bakugo was murder. It was worse than murder; it was the annihilation of a soul. Who was Izuku to decide who lived and who was erased? If he started deleting people who annoyed him or bullied him, where would it stop? When would he become the very villain he wanted to fight?

 

"Kacchan," Izuku said. The word was soft, but it carried perfectly across the room, hitting Bakugo right as he stepped into the hallway.

 

Bakugo stopped. He turned around, small explosions already popping in his hands, expecting a fight. "What did you say, you damn nerd?"

 

Izuku opened his eyes. The weariness in them was heavy enough to crush a star.

 

"You shouldn't tell people to kill themselves," Izuku said softly, his voice completely devoid of anger. "If they actually do it, you'll be charged with instigation. It will ruin your chances of becoming a hero. Be more careful with your words. They have consequences."

 

It was not a threat. It was an objective, factual warning from someone looking out for Bakugo's future.

 

Bakugo stared at him. The sheer, unadulterated calm radiating from Izuku was suffocating. It made Bakugo feel small. It made him feel like a child throwing a tantrum at a statue.

 

"Shut up," Bakugo spat, his voice lacking its usual venom, replaced instead by a deeply unsettled edge. He turned and marched down the hallway, leaving Izuku alone in the ruined classroom.

 

Izuku exhaled slowly. He stood up, picked up his bag, and walked out of the school. He walked down to the koi pond beneath the window and retrieved his ruined notebook from the water. He didn't use his power to dry it or fix the burned pages. He simply wiped off the water and shoved it into his bag. He needed the physical reminder of his limits.

 

 

 

The sun was beginning to set, casting long, golden shadows across the city. Izuku didn't walk home immediately. He took a detour, a route he took twice a week to maintain his fragile grip on his own humanity.

 

He arrived at the Musutafu General Hospital.

 

He didn't go to the emergency room, nor did he visit the maternity ward. He walked to the east wing, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and stepped into the Pediatric Oncology ward.

 

The air here smelled heavily of antiseptic, bleach, and the quiet, lingering scent of despair. The walls were painted with cheerful cartoon characters that only served to highlight the grim reality of the children living within them.

 

Izuku checked in at the nurse's station.

 

"Ah, Midoriya-kun," Nurse Sato said, offering a tired, genuine smile. "Here for your volunteer shift?"

 

"Yes, Sato-san," Izuku replied, bowing politely. "Is Yui awake?"

 

The nurse's smile faltered slightly. She looked down at a chart on her desk. "She is. But... it's a bad day. The chemotherapy isn't... well. Her white blood cell count dropped again. She's very weak. Keep the visit short, okay?"

 

"I understand," Izuku said.

 

He walked down the quiet hallway, his heart beating a heavy, painful rhythm against his ribs. He stopped outside Room 412. He took a deep breath, plastered a warm, gentle smile onto his face, and opened the door.

 

The room was dim, the blinds drawn against the setting sun. The steady, rhythmic beep... beep... beep of a heart monitor provided the soundtrack to the space.

 

In the bed lay a girl named Yui. She was seven years old. She was entirely bald, her skin pale and translucent, a stark contrast to the dark, purple bags under her eyes. Tubes snaked from her arms, connecting her to bags of toxic chemicals designed to kill the poison inside her, hoping it didn't kill her first.

 

She turned her head weakly as the door opened. A frail, tiny smile touched her chapped lips. "Izu-nii..."

 

"Hey, Yui-chan," Izuku said softly, pulling up a plastic chair next to her bed. He reached into his bag and pulled out a brightly colored comic book. "I brought the new issue of Captain Celebrity. You want me to read it to you?"

 

Yui nodded weakly. "Yes, please."

 

Izuku opened the book and began to read. He did voices for the characters, exaggerating the sound effects to make her laugh. And she did laugh—a small, wheezing sound that broke Izuku's heart into a million microscopic pieces.

 

He had been volunteering here for two years. He had read to dozens of kids. He had held their hands. He had watched some of them go home, cured.

 

He had watched many of them die.

 

Sitting next to Yui, Izuku felt the familiar, crushing weight of the Glass World pressing down on his shoulders.

 

He could see the illness inside her. Not literally, but his Quirk, his Dictate, understood the concept of her sickness. It was a cellular corruption, a chaotic misfiring of biology.

 

It would take less effort than blinking.

 

Heal.

 

One word. One thought. He could command her bone marrow to produce healthy cells. He could order the cancer to disintegrate. He could give this little girl seventy more years of life. He could give her parents back their future. He could erase the pain, the fear, the agonizing chemo.

 

He gripped the edges of the comic book. The paper began to compress under his fingers, the atomic structure tightening under his subconscious stress. He immediately forced his hands to relax.

 

Why do I let her suffer?

 

The internal debate raged, as vicious and tearing as a hurricane.

 

Because if I cure her, why not the boy down the hall? If I cure him, why not the adult ward downstairs? If I cure this hospital, why not every hospital in Japan? Why not the world?

 

But she is right here. She is seven. It’s not fair.

 

The world isn't fair. If I make it fair, I become the arbiter of reality. If nobody dies of sickness, the Earth runs out of food. Do I then create infinite food? If nobody dies, where do they live? Do I build new continents? Do I freeze them in time? Where does it end?

 

"Izu-nii?"

 

Yui’s weak voice pulled him from the abyss. She was looking at him, her large, sunken eyes filled with concern. "Are you sad?"

 

Izuku blinked. He realized a single tear had escaped his control, tracing a warm line down his cheek. He quickly wiped it away, forcing a smile. "No, no. I'm just... Captain Celebrity's backstory is just really moving, you know?"

 

Yui reached out a frail, trembling hand and placed it on Izuku's arm. Her skin was freezing cold.

 

"It's okay to be sad," the seven-year-old whispered, comforting the god who was letting her die. "The doctor said I might not get better. Mommy cries a lot. But... if I don't get better, I want to be reincarnated as a hero. Just like you want to be."

 

She looked at his notebook, the burned one peeking out of his bag. "Can you... can you do the magic trick?"

 

She didn't know about his true Quirk. She only knew about the telekinesis.

 

Izuku swallowed the massive, suffocating lump in his throat. He nodded. "Yeah. Watch."

 

He focused on the plastic cup of water on her bedside table. He forced himself to use his "mask," channeling the fake, strained telekinesis. The cup rattled, then slowly, shakily levitated into the air. He made it do a small, clumsy dance before setting it back down.

 

Yui smiled, a genuine, beautiful expression of childish wonder. "You're gonna be a great hero, Izu-nii. Even if your Quirk isn't super strong like All Might's. You're nice. Nice heroes are the best."

 

Izuku stared at her. The innocence in her voice was a physical blow. She was dying, and yet she possessed a strength of spirit, a capacity for hope, that he, with all his infinite power, could never fathom.

 

She was struggling. She was fighting a war inside her own body, and she was doing it with bravery.

 

If he snapped his fingers and cured her, he would be stealing her battle. He would be rendering her bravery moot. He would be turning her triumph, or her tragic end, into a footnote of his own omnipotence.

 

I cannot play God. I must be human. I must honor their struggle.

 

Izuku stayed for another hour, reading until Yui drifted into a restless, medicine-induced sleep. He tucked the thin hospital blanket around her shoulders, stood up, and quietly left the room.

 

He walked out of the hospital and into the cool night air. The city lights of Musutafu blurred against the darkness.

 

He looked up at the stars. He knew he could pluck one from the sky if he wanted to. He knew he could rearrange the constellations to spell his name.

 

But as he looked down at his own two hands, rough from mundane workouts, slightly scarred from faking the limits of his fake Quirk, he made a silent vow to the sleeping city, and to the dying girl in the hospital.

 

He would not save the world by snapping his fingers. He would not overwrite the beautiful, chaotic, agonizing reality of human existence.

 

He would go to U.A. High School. He would learn how to fight with his fists, how to bleed, how to fail. He would learn how to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people who could actually be hurt, and he would protect them from the shadows, ensuring that no one ever knew that a god was walking among them.

 

The Glass World was fragile, and it was painful, but it was the only world worth living in. And Izuku Midoriya was determined to protect it, even if it meant breaking his own heart every single day.

 

The air in the Tatooin Shopping District tasted of ash, ozone, and the bitter tang of burned sugar.

 

A cacophony of destruction echoed through the narrow streets. Windows shattered under the concussive force of unregulated explosions. Civilians screamed, pressing themselves against the hastily erected police barricades. The heat radiating from the epicenter of the chaos was oppressive, warping the air into a shimmering mirage that made the towering inferno look like a living, breathing beast.

 

Izuku Midoriya stood at the back of the crowd, his yellow backpack slung over one shoulder. He hadn't intended to be here. He had been walking home from school, his ruined notebook safely tucked away, his mind carefully compartmentalized and focused on the mundane task of calculating the trajectory of his own footsteps. But the explosions had drawn him. They were erratic, frantic, and laced with a very specific, familiar frequency of panic.

 

He looked past the heads of the murmuring onlookers, peering through the smoke.

 

In the center of the intersection, surrounded by a ring of uncontrollable fire, was a nightmare of fluid dynamics. A massive, undulating mountain of dark green sludge whipped its gelatinous tendrils through the air, smashing storefronts and tearing down streetlights.

 

And trapped within the center of the viscous mass was Katsuki Bakugo.

 

Bakugo was drowning. His face was a mask of absolute, primal terror, his crimson eyes wide and bloodshot as the sludge forced its way down his throat, suffocating him from the inside out. His hands, the source of his immense pride and the weapons he used to terrorize others, were thrust outward, desperately firing off explosions. But the blasts only fueled the surrounding fires, doing nothing to dislodge his captor.

 

Izuku’s eyes flicked to the perimeter. The Pro Heroes were there.

 

Death Arms, a man whose Quirk gave him the strength to lift bulldozers, was coughing violently, waving his arms as the smoke overwhelmed him. "It's no use!" he shouted over the roar of the flames. "I can't get a grip on that fluid body, and the heat is too intense!"

 

Kamui Woods, the rising star of the hero world, was clutching his wooden arms to his chest, retreating from the blaze. "Fire is my absolute weakness! I can't get close without igniting!"

 

Mt. Lady, standing at her massive height of twenty meters, was stomping her feet in frustration at the edge of the street. "I need at least a two-lane road to maneuver! If I step in there, I'll crush the civilians and the buildings!"

 

They were making excuses. Valid, logical, human excuses. They were bound by the rules of their biology, the limits of their Quirks, and the physics of their environment. They were waiting for someone else—someone with the right Quirk—to solve the problem.

 

Izuku felt a cold, leaden weight settle in his stomach. He looked back at Bakugo. The explosions were growing weaker. The frantic thrashing of his limbs was slowing down. The boy who had told him to take a swan dive off a roof just an hour ago was seconds away from brain death.

 

I am not supposed to interfere, Izuku thought, the mantra of the Glass World playing in his mind. They need to solve this. If I step in, if I show them what I am, the illusion breaks. They have to save him.

 

But as Izuku scanned the crowd, his eyes fell upon a painfully thin, gaunt man clutching a telephone pole for support. The man was trembling, his oversized white t-shirt hanging off his skeletal frame. His hand was pressed hard against his left side, right where Izuku knew a horrific, spider-webbing scar lay hidden beneath the fabric.

 

Toshinori Yagi. All Might.

 

Izuku could see the hero’s aura. Through the lens of his omnipotent perception, Izuku could see the agonizing biological reality of the Symbol of Peace. He saw the missing stomach, the destroyed respiratory system, the sheer, unrelenting agony that the man pushed through every single day. And right now, Izuku saw the flickering, dying embers of One For All failing to ignite. All Might was out of time. He was physically incapable of transforming. He was forced to stand there and watch a child die because his human body had reached its absolute limit.

 

Pathetic, Toshinori’s internal voice seemed to broadcast into the ether, a frequency of pure despair that Izuku picked up effortlessly. I am pathetic. I lectured that boy about reality, and now I am forced to watch this one die. I am a fake.

 

Izuku closed his eyes. The noise of the sirens, the crackling of the fire, the screaming of the crowd—it all faded away, replaced by the infinitely vast, chillingly silent expanse of his own mind.

 

He had spent ten years trying to be human. He had spent ten years forcing himself to believe in the struggle, to respect the limitations of the physical world. But right now, the physical world was failing. The rules of reality were about to allow a fourteen-year-old boy to suffocate in the middle of a crowded street while the strongest people on the planet watched.

 

What was the point of holding the universe in his hands if he let it rot to preserve an illusion?

 

If they cannot do it, Izuku thought, his mind crystalizing with terrifying clarity, then I must.

 

Izuku opened his eyes. They were no longer the wide, anxious eyes of a Quirkless fanboy. They were bottomless, serene, and ancient.

 

He stepped forward.

 

"Hey! Kid, get back here!" a police officer yelled, reaching out to grab Izuku's shoulder.

 

Izuku didn't break his stride. He didn't swat the officer's hand away. He simply commanded the space between himself and the officer's hand to expand by exactly three inches. The officer grasped empty air, stumbling forward in confusion.

 

Izuku ducked under the yellow police tape and walked into the inferno.

 

The heat was instantaneous and apocalyptic. The fire roared around him, tongues of orange and blue flame licking at his school uniform.

 

Do not burn, Izuku whispered in his mind.

 

The universe obeyed. The kinetic energy of the fire, the superheated gas, the rapid oxidation—it all ceased to interact with his physical form. He walked through the wall of flames as if it were a cool autumn breeze. His shoes did not melt against the superheated asphalt. The smoke parted before his face, refusing to enter his lungs.

 

"What is that kid doing?!" Death Arms roared, his eyes bulging as he saw Izuku casually strolling into the center of the catastrophe. "He's going to die! Stop him!"

 

Kamui Woods shot a branch forward, aiming to wrap around Izuku's waist and pull him back.

 

Miss, Izuku thought.

 

A sudden, localized micro-draft of wind, inexplicably powerful and completely invisible, diverted the heavy wooden branch a fraction of a millimeter to the left. It sailed past Izuku harmlessly.

 

Izuku stopped ten feet away from the Sludge Villain.

 

The villain's massive, liquid eyes swiveled to look down at the small, green-haired boy. The villain let out a wet, gurgling laugh. "Another meal? You heroes are just throwing yourselves at me! I'll take your body next, kid!"

 

Bakugo, half-conscious and suffocating, cracked one eye open. Through the haze of his impending death, he saw Deku. The useless, Quirkless, pathetic Deku. Standing in the middle of the fire, completely unharmed, looking up at the monster.

 

Bakugo wanted to scream at him to run. He wanted to call him an idiot. But his lungs were full of slime. He could only stare, pleading with his eyes.

 

Izuku didn't take a combat stance. He didn't clench his fists. He didn't draw back a punch or summon an aura of telekinetic energy to maintain his carefully crafted mask. There was no time for the mask. To rip the sludge away telekinetically might tear Bakugo's lungs out in the process.

 

This required precision. This required God.

 

Izuku looked directly into the swirling, chaotic consciousness of the Sludge Villain. He saw its malice, its desperation, its biological imperative to survive at all costs.

 

Izuku reached into the fabric of reality, placed his fingers on the code of the villain's existence, and erased that imperative.

 

He opened his mouth, his voice not raised in a shout, but spoken with the absolute, crushing weight of undeniable authority.

 

"Release him."

 

It wasn't a request. It wasn't an attack. It was a fundamental truth suddenly written into the laws of physics.

 

The effect was not flashy. It was deeply, unnervingly instantaneous.

 

The Sludge Villain did not scream. It did not fight back. It physically could not. The command bypassed its conscious thought, bypassed its Quirk factor, and struck the very atoms of its being.

 

With a sickening schlorp, the sludge violently reversed its flow. It ripped itself out of Bakugo's throat, nose, and tear ducts with terrifying speed, leaving not a single microscopic drop behind. The massive wave of liquid violently compacted itself, shrinking and solidifying against its will.

 

Bakugo collapsed onto the scorched asphalt, gasping violently, retching as his lungs filled with glorious, life-saving oxygen.

 

The Sludge Villain was now a tightly compressed, perfectly spherical ball of dark green gel, hovering three feet in the air.

 

Izuku looked at the sphere.

 

"Be still," he commanded gently.

 

The sphere froze. It didn't just stop moving; it stopped experiencing time. Its molecular vibration ceased entirely. It became an object locked in absolute, eternal stasis until Izuku decided otherwise.

 

The street was dead silent. The crackling of the surrounding fires seemed to mute themselves in reverence.

 

The Pro Heroes, the civilians, the police officers—even the gaunt man clutching the telephone pole—stared in absolute, paralyzed shock.

 

They had just witnessed a boy walk into a literal furnace without sweating, speak two words, and utterly dismantle a villain that had held the city's finest at bay for twenty minutes. There was no struggle. There was no epic clash of powers. It was the casual dismissal of a nuisance.

 

It was terrifying.

 

Izuku looked down at Bakugo. The blonde boy was on his hands and knees, coughing up saliva, staring up at Izuku with a mixture of raw terror, confusion, and shattered pride.

 

"Are you okay, Kacchan?" Izuku asked, his voice returning to its normal, mild timber.

 

Bakugo couldn't speak. He just stared. He realized, in that exact moment, that the boy standing in front of him wasn't playing a game. The absolute powerlessness Bakugo had felt inside the sludge was nothing compared to the aura of inescapable authority radiating from Izuku.

 

Izuku didn't wait for an answer. He turned around. He looked at the raging fires consuming the buildings. He could have snapped his fingers and turned the flames into flower petals. He could have restored the broken concrete.

 

But he had already done too much. He had cracked the glass. He needed to step back.

 

He let out a small, fabricated gasp, bringing a hand to his forehead as if he were suddenly struck by a massive migraine. He swayed slightly on his feet, playing the part of a boy who had just overexerted a powerful telekinetic Quirk.

 

"The... the fires," Izuku panted, forcing his breathing to turn ragged. "Heroes... please... put them out."

 

The illusion snapped back into place. The spell was broken.

 

"Right! Water hoses, now!" Death Arms roared, shaking off his stupor and sprinting toward the fire engines.

 

Kamui Woods rushed forward, grabbing Bakugo and pulling him away from the heat. Mt. Lady began directing the civilians away from the remaining flames.

 

Izuku quietly slipped back under the police tape. He pulled his yellow backpack higher on his shoulder and began to walk away, melting into the dispersing crowd. He didn't want the praise. He didn't want the interviews. He wanted to get home, lock his door, and rebuild the mental walls that he had just compromised.

 

As he walked down a quiet side street, leaving the chaos behind, he felt a presence following him. It was a heavy, exhausted presence, but one burning with an intense, singular focus.

 

Izuku stopped at the entrance of a narrow, shadowed alleyway. He turned around.

 

Standing ten feet away, coughing a small splatter of blood into a white handkerchief, was Toshinori Yagi.

 

"Wait... young man..." Toshinori wheezed, leaning against the brick wall of a nearby building.

 

Izuku looked at him. He knew exactly what was about to happen. He knew the history of One For All, he knew of All For One, he knew of the legacy this man carried. He could read it in the genetic scarring of the man's Quirk factor.

 

"Yagi-san," Izuku said politely, bowing his head.

 

Toshinori’s eyes widened slightly in surprise. He hadn't introduced himself, and in this deflated, skeletal form, no one ever recognized him as the Symbol of Peace. "You... you know who I am?"

 

"I know," Izuku said simply.

 

Toshinori wiped his mouth, his blue eyes locking onto Izuku with a burning intensity. Suddenly, steam began to pour from his pores. His muscles expanded with violent, impossible speed, his skeletal frame inflating into the towering, muscular, shadow-draped figure of All Might.

 

"I AM HERE!" All Might boomed, though the bravado was tinged with genuine awe. He looked down at the small boy. "Young man. I saw what you did back there. The pros were paralyzed. I was paralyzed. But you... a timid-looking schoolboy... you stepped into the flames when no one else would!"

 

All Might clenched his massive fist, placing it over his heart. "You embody the essence of what it means to be a hero! There are stories about every great hero, how they became great. Most have one thing in common: their bodies moved before they had a chance to think!"

 

All Might pointed a massive finger at Izuku. "That was true for you back there, wasn't it?!"

 

Izuku looked at the giant finger pointing at him. He felt a deep, profound sadness.

 

His body hadn't moved before he thought. He had thought about it for ten minutes. He had weighed the philosophical implications of saving a life against the destabilization of free will. He had analyzed the atomic structure of the sludge, calculated the precise amount of force required to rip it away without damaging human tissue, and meticulously orchestrated a localized reality warp to achieve the optimum result.

 

He was the furthest thing from an instinctual hero. He was a cold, calculating architect of existence.

 

"I..." Izuku started, but All Might was already steamrolling ahead.

 

"Young man, your Quirk is incredible. I have never seen a telekinetic hold such absolute, terrifying command over matter! But a Quirk is just a tool. It is your heart that makes you worthy!" All Might deflated suddenly in a massive cloud of steam, coughing up more blood and reverting to his skeletal form. He wiped his chin, looking at Izuku with a desperate, hopeful light.

 

"I have been looking for a successor," Toshinori said, his voice dropping to a solemn, revered whisper. "My Quirk, One For All, is a power passed down from generation to generation. A crystalline network of power, cultivated to defeat the greatest evil this world has ever known. And I believe... no, I know... you are worthy to inherit it."

 

Toshinori stepped forward, holding out his hand. "Will you accept my power, young man? Will you become the next Symbol of Peace?"

 

It was the ultimate fantasy. The greatest hero in history offering his power to a fanboy. A younger Izuku would have wept with joy, taken the hair, and trained until his bones turned to dust to honor the man.

 

But the fourteen-year-old Izuku just looked at the outstretched hand.

 

He didn't need One For All. If he took One For All, it would be like pouring a single drop of water into a boundless, infinite ocean. It would add nothing to him. But more importantly, taking the Quirk meant taking the mantle of the Symbol of Peace. It meant standing on a pedestal and acting as the pillar of society.

 

It meant becoming the God he was desperately trying not to be.

 

"No," Izuku said quietly.

 

Toshinori froze. His outstretched hand hung in the air. The absolute certainty on his face crumbled into profound confusion. "No? I... I don't think you understand. This is the greatest power on Earth. You could—"

 

"I understand, Yagi-san," Izuku interrupted gently. "I know about One For All. I know it compiles power. I know it was created to fight a man who steals Quirks. I understand the weight of what you are offering."

 

Toshinori’s jaw dropped. "How... how could you possibly know that? That is a state secret. Even the President doesn't know the full truth."

 

Izuku sighed, a weary, ancient sound that did not belong in the throat of a teenager. "Because I can see it. Just like I can see the damage inside your body."

 

Izuku took a step closer to the bewildered hero. He looked up into Toshinori’s sunken eyes.

 

"I cannot take your Quirk, Yagi-san, because I am already carrying too much," Izuku said, his voice laced with a tragic, beautiful sincerity. "If I take your power, and your place as the Symbol of Peace, humanity will rely on me forever. They will stop fighting. They will stop trying to be better. They will let me solve everything. And I... I have enough power to solve everything. That is why I must do nothing."

 

Toshinori stared at the boy. He felt a chill run down his spine. The way Izuku spoke... it wasn't the arrogance of a teenager who thought his Quirk was strong. It was the heavy, mournful confession of a deity trapped in a mortal shell.

 

"You're afraid of your own power?" Toshinori asked softly.

 

"I am afraid of what my power would do to your world," Izuku corrected him.

 

Toshinori leaned heavily against the wall, the adrenaline fading, leaving only the agonizing pain of his ruined body. He clutched his side, wincing as a fresh wave of agony radiated from his missing organs. "I... I see. I misjudged you. You are wise beyond your years. But... if you will not take my place... what will happen when my time runs out? The villains are getting bolder. I can barely hold my form for three hours a day. Soon, it will be zero."

 

Izuku looked at the man's hand, still clutching the fabric over his horrific scar.

 

Toshinori Yagi had sacrificed everything. He had given his stomach, his lungs, his peace of mind, and his entire life to hold the world together. He was a true hero. He was a human who had broken himself to protect others.

 

Izuku’s vow was to let humanity struggle. To let them fight their own battles.

 

But, Izuku thought, if the universe has rules, then surely, fairness must be one of them.

 

No one deserved to suffer the way this man was suffering. Not after all he had given.

 

Izuku made his second conscious decision of the day to break his own rules.

 

"You have given everything to this world, Yagi-san," Izuku said softly, stepping directly into Toshinori’s personal space.

 

"It was my duty," Toshinori coughed, confused by the boy's proximity.

 

"Then let me give something back," Izuku said.

 

Before Toshinori could react, Izuku reached out and pressed his small, scarred palm flat against the center of Toshinori’s chest, directly over the massive, puckered scar tissue that ruined the hero's torso.

 

Toshinori went to step back, thinking the boy was trying to push him, but Izuku’s hand felt like it weighed ten thousand tons. He was rooted to the spot.

 

Izuku closed his eyes. He didn't look at the physical scar. He looked at the blueprint of Toshinori Yagi's existence. He saw the violent void where organs had been pulverized by All For One. He saw the strained heart, the compromised respiratory system, the microscopic tearing of muscle fibers.

 

Izuku didn't pray. He didn't focus his energy. He simply issued a mandate to the universe.

 

"Heal."

 

The word slipped from Izuku's lips, and reality shattered and rebuilt itself around Toshinori Yagi in a fraction of a millisecond.

 

There was no glowing light. There was no warm, soothing aura. It was a violent, absolute assertion of physical perfection.

 

Toshinori gasped, a sharp, incredibly loud intake of air.

 

For five years, every breath he took had been shallow, restricted by a half-destroyed lung, accompanied by a wet, rattling wheeze.

 

This breath was different. It was deep. It was bottomless. It was the breath of a man in his absolute physical prime. The air rushed into a left lung that had not existed a second ago.

 

Toshinori’s eyes went wide with sheer, unadulterated shock. He dropped his hands from his side.

 

The phantom pain, the agonizing, burning ache that had been his constant companion for half a decade, simply vanished. It wasn't numbed. It was gone.

 

With trembling hands, Toshinori grabbed the hem of his oversized white t-shirt and ripped it upward.

 

He stared down at his torso.

 

The scar, the horrifying epicenter of his trauma, was gone. Not faded. Not reduced. Completely erased. His skin was smooth, taut, and unblemished. Beneath the skin, he could feel his body. He felt the heavy, solid mass of a fully functioning stomach. He felt his respiratory system working in perfect, flawless harmony. He felt the immense, overflowing reservoir of One For All, no longer leaking out of a broken vessel, but pooling deeply, ready to be unleashed without consequence.

 

He was cured. He was whole.

 

Toshinori fell to his knees in the dirty alleyway. He placed both hands flat on the asphalt, his broad shoulders shaking violently. A choked, wet sob tore from his throat. He wept. He wept with the sheer, overwhelming relief of a man who had been taken off death row moments before execution.

 

"How..." Toshinori whispered through his tears, staring at the smooth skin of his own hands. "This... this is impossible. Recovery Girl... the best surgeons in the world... they said it was gone. Matter cannot be created from nothing."

 

"It wasn't created from nothing," Izuku said quietly, standing over the weeping giant. "I simply commanded reality to remember what you used to be."

 

Toshinori looked up at the boy. Through his tears, the hero's perception shifted.

 

When he had first looked at Izuku, he had seen a brave, reckless child. When Izuku had spoken of his burden, Toshinori had seen a wise, traumatized teenager.

 

But looking at him now, standing in the shadows of the alleyway, Toshinori saw something that made his soul tremble. The boy's green eyes were completely devoid of the exhaustion a healer should feel. He had just casually rewritten the laws of biology, physics, and mass conservation, and he wasn't even breathing hard.

 

Toshinori realized, with a creeping sense of existential dread, that the title "Symbol of Peace" was meaningless. The strongest man in the world was kneeling before a fourteen-year-old boy who held the power of a God.

 

"Who... what are you?" Toshinori breathed, his voice laced with genuine awe and profound fear.

 

Izuku adjusted the strap of his yellow backpack. He looked down at the hero he had worshipped his entire life.

 

"I'm just a boy who wants to go to U.A. High School," Izuku said softly. "Please, Yagi-san. Do not tell anyone what happened here. Let them believe you miraculously recovered. Let them believe the Symbol of Peace is still the strongest."

 

Izuku turned his back and began to walk out of the alleyway, stepping back into the warm light of the setting sun.

 

"Wait!" Toshinori called out, scrambling to his feet, feeling the intoxicating, forgotten power of his own perfect health. "If you are this powerful... why? Why U.A.? Why play the part of a student if you can do... this?"

 

Izuku paused at the edge of the alley. He didn't look back.

 

"Because if I don't pretend to be human," Izuku whispered, "I will forget how to be."

 

With that, the boy stepped into the crowd and vanished, leaving the greatest hero in history standing alone, whole, and completely terrified of the future.

 

 

 

Ten Months Later.

 

The imposing gates of U.A. High School’s Battle Center B loomed over the massive crowd of prospective students. The air buzzed with nervous energy, the low hum of hundreds of teenagers stretching, warming up their Quirks, and mentally preparing for the most important exam of their lives.

 

Izuku Midoriya stood near the back of the crowd, wearing a simple green tracksuit.

 

He had spent the last ten months refining his mask. He had physically worked out, building a lean, dense musculature, not because he needed it for strength, but because he needed it to sell the illusion that his "telekinetic physical enhancement" was grounded in physical stamina.

 

He looked around. To his left, a tall boy with engines in his calves was doing rigid, robotic stretches. To his right, a girl with a round face and short brown hair was floating nervously above the ground, taking deep breaths.

 

Everyone was terrified of failing. Everyone was vibrating with the human desire to prove themselves.

 

Izuku felt completely, utterly hollow.

 

He looked at the massive gates. He knew what lay behind them. A mock city filled with giant, heavily armored robots designed to test the limits of teenage Quirks. It was a playground of destruction.

 

"START!"

 

Present Mic’s voice boomed from the observation tower speakers. "WHAT'S THE MATTER? THERE ARE NO COUNTDOWNS IN REAL BATTLES! RUN, RUN, RUN!"

 

The crowd surged forward like a tidal wave, a chaotic stampede of colorful Quirks and shouting teenagers. They poured through the gates, immediately dispersing into the fake city, desperate to score points.

 

Izuku did not run.

 

He let the crowd pass him. He took a slow, measured breath, grounding himself in the rules of the Glass World. He stepped through the gates, his hands resting casually in his tracksuit pockets.

 

He walked down the main avenue of the mock city.

 

Explosions echoed in the distance. He could hear Bakugo tearing through metal somewhere a few blocks over. He could hear the engine-legged boy kicking a robot to pieces.

 

Around a corner, twenty yards ahead of Izuku, a massive shadow fell over the street.

 

A Three-Pointer. It rolled forward on tank treads, its heavy machine guns tracking Izuku's movement. "TARGET ACQUIRED," its mechanical voice blared.

 

Izuku didn't stop walking. He didn't take his hands out of his pockets. He didn't furrow his brow to feign telekinetic strain. He was alone on this street. No other students were watching.

 

He looked at the towering war machine. He saw the bolts, the hydraulic lines, the microprocessors, the dense titanium plating. He saw exactly how it was put together.

 

"Disassemble," Izuku said.

 

The command was spoken at a conversational volume.

 

The Three-Pointer did not explode. It did not crumple as if crushed by an invisible hand.

 

It simply fell apart.

 

With horrifying, mathematical precision, every single bolt holding the machine together unscrewed itself simultaneously. Every weld dissolved. Every wire cleanly detached from its port. The massive robot collapsed into a perfectly neat, categorized pile of scrap metal on the asphalt. The titanium plates stacked themselves in a tidy pile. The screws arranged themselves by size. The motor oil drained into a perfect, unmoving puddle that did not stain the concrete.

 

It took exactly 0.4 seconds.

 

Izuku walked past the pile without looking down.

 

 

 

High above the arena, in the darkened observation room, the faculty of U.A. High School sat before a massive bank of monitors.

 

"We have a promising crop this year," Midnight purred, crossing her legs as she watched Bakugo blast a Two-Pointer into molten slag. "That explosive boy has a nasty temperament, but his combat instincts are flawless."

 

"The girl with the gravity Quirk is using her environment well," Snipe noted, pointing at a screen where Uraraka was dropping debris onto robots.

 

Aizawa Shota, seated in the corner in his yellow sleeping bag, narrowed his eyes at a specific monitor. "What about him?"

 

Principal Nedzu, the hyper-intelligent mammal, set his teacup down and followed Aizawa's gaze. "Ah. Midoriya Izuku. Registered Quirk: Minor Telekinesis and Physical Enhancement."

 

The teachers leaned in, watching the feed from Sector 4.

 

On the screen, Midoriya was walking. Just walking.

 

Two Two-Pointers flanked him from an alleyway. Midoriya didn't even turn his head. He just kept walking. As the robots lunged, they instantly disassembled, collapsing into neat, organized piles of parts.

 

A One-Pointer dropped from a rooftop directly above him. Before it even reached the halfway point of its fall, it dismantled itself in mid-air, the pieces raining down and stacking themselves perfectly on the sidewalk around Midoriya, who didn't even break his stride.

 

The observation room fell utterly silent. The sound of Bakugo's explosions on the other monitors seemed to fade away.

 

"What... what did he just do?" Present Mic asked, taking off his sunglasses, his loud voice dropping to a confused whisper. "I didn't see an aura. I didn't see a gesture. He didn't even look at them."

 

"His file says telekinesis," Vlad King grunted. "He must be using an invisible telekinetic grip to tear them apart."

 

"No," Aizawa said, his voice grim, his eyes glued to the screen. "Telekinesis requires force. To tear apart titanium plating with brute force warps the metal. Look at the pieces."

 

Nedzu pressed a button, zooming in on the pile of scrap Midoriya had left behind.

 

The teachers gasped.

 

The metal wasn't torn. It wasn't bent. Every single piece was perfectly intact, as if a team of engineers had spent hours carefully deconstructing the machine with specialized tools.

 

"He's not breaking them," Nedzu whispered, his fur standing on end. "He's... unpacking them."

 

"How is that possible?" Midnight asked, a shiver running down her spine. "To telekinetically unscrew a thousand bolts simultaneously without looking... the processing power required by his brain would fry his nervous system. And he's not even sweating."

 

"Is it a technopathy Quirk?" Snipe suggested. "Maybe he's commanding the machines' internal systems to eject their own parts?"

 

"These robots don't have auto-dismantle functions," Nedzu replied, his black eyes wide with a very rare, primal sense of caution. "Whatever he is doing, he is lying on his registry. That is not minor telekinesis. That is... terrifyingly precise."

 

Aizawa unzipped his sleeping bag and stood up. "Let's see how his 'precision' handles a blunt instrument. Nedzu, release the Zero Pointer."

 

Nedzu nodded slowly. He flipped open a glass case on his console and pressed a large red button.

 

 

 

Back in the mock city, the ground began to quake.

 

Izuku stopped walking. He had accumulated seventy-four points entirely by walking down a single street and politely asking the robots to stop being robots. It was boring. It was meaningless.

 

He felt the vibration in his feet. He looked up.

 

At the end of the avenue, a colossal machine rose from the ground, shattering the pavement and tearing down the surrounding fake buildings. The Zero Pointer. It was the size of a skyscraper, a behemoth of steel and hydraulic power, designed to be an insurmountable obstacle that forced the students to run.

 

The other students screamed, turning and fleeing in the opposite direction.

 

Izuku stood still. He watched the massive machine raise its arm, preparing to smash the street.

 

"Ow! Help!"

 

Izuku turned his head. Thirty yards away, the girl with the brown hair—Uraraka—was trapped. Her leg was pinned beneath a massive chunk of concrete debris that had fallen from a crushed building. She was desperately trying to push it off, but she was exhausted, and the Zero Pointer's shadow was falling directly over her.

 

Izuku sighed.

 

He didn't want to show off. He didn't want to draw attention to himself. He just wanted to pass the exam and go home.

 

He looked around. The other students were too far away. They were running. No one was coming back for her.

 

Izuku began to walk toward the Zero Pointer.

 

In the observation room, the teachers held their breath.

 

"He's going for it," Present Mic shouted. "But how?! He can't 'unpack' something that massive before it crushes him!"

 

Izuku ignored the giant robot. He walked directly to Uraraka.

 

She looked up at him, tears of pain and terror in her eyes. "Run!" she cried. "It's going to crush us!"

 

Izuku smiled gently. It was a practiced, human smile. "It's okay."

 

He looked up at the Zero Pointer. The machine's massive fist was descending, a meteor of steel screaming through the air, aimed directly at them.

 

Izuku didn't use a command word this time. He didn't need to. He simply looked at the fist, and then looked at the entire structure of the colossal machine.

 

Fall apart, he willed it.

 

The reality warp was instantaneous and absolute.

 

The Zero Pointer did not explode.

 

Mid-swing, the colossal machine lost its structural integrity. Trillions of microscopic welds, bolts, and rivets simply vanished from existence.

 

The machine dissolved. It was the only way to describe it. Millions of tons of steel, wires, and glass rained down from the sky.

 

But Izuku couldn't let it crush Uraraka. So, he issued a secondary command to the falling debris.

 

Lose your mass. Drift.

 

The teachers in the observation room stood up from their chairs in unison, their jaws hitting the floor.

 

On the monitors, the massive steel plates and hydraulic pistons of the Zero Pointer hit the ground like falling leaves. A piece of armor plating the size of a bus landed on top of a streetlamp, and the streetlamp didn't even bend. The metal bounced softly, completely robbed of its weight and kinetic energy.

 

It was a gentle, terrifying rain of feather-light steel.

 

Izuku bent down. He gripped the massive concrete slab trapping Uraraka’s leg. He feigned a grunt of effort, activating his "mask," and lifted the slab with one hand, tossing it aside (ensuring this piece retained its physics so it looked like he was actually using strength).

 

"Are you alright?" Izuku asked, offering her his hand.

 

Uraraka stared at the towering pile of soft, weightless scrap metal that used to be a skyscraper-sized death machine. She looked at Izuku's hand. She was trembling violently, her mind unable to comprehend the violation of physics she had just witnessed.

 

"Y-yes," she stammered, taking his hand and letting him pull her up.

 

"Good," Izuku said politely. "The exam is almost over. We should head toward the exit."

 

He let go of her hand and began to walk away, his hands returning to his pockets, his posture relaxed, looking completely unaffected by the fact that he had just casually dismantled a god of steel with a glance.

 

In the observation room, Aizawa Shota stared at the monitor. His eraser goggles were clutched tightly in his hand.

 

"Nedzu," Aizawa said, his voice dead flat, devoid of its usual tired drawl. "Find out everything you can about Izuku Midoriya. Because whatever that kid is... he isn't human."

 

Principal Nedzu didn't reply. For the first time in his exceptionally long, highly intelligent life, the mammal felt the cold, primal instinct of a prey animal staring into the eyes of an apex predator.

 

Izuku Midoriya had passed the test. And the illusion of the Glass World was beginning to show its first, irreparable cracks.