The concept of "Hope" is
fundamentally flawed.
It is a statistical anomaly, a fleeting
chemical reaction in the brain triggered by the illusion of safety. Society
treats it as a universal right, a warm blanket to throw over the cold,
unfeeling machinery of reality. They package it, commercialize it, and plaster
it onto billboards in the form of brightly colored spandex and blinding,
pearly-white smiles.
But Hope is not universal. It is an exclusive
club. It is a VIP lounge reserved only for those fortunate enough to be born
with the right genetic sequence. If you win the biological lottery, you are
bathed in Hope. You are told you can be anything. You are told you are the
future.
If you are born Quirkless, you are the dirt
beneath the foundation of their shining city. You exist only to provide contrast,
to make the bright lights of the "heroes" look that much brighter.
Izuku Midoriya did not know this at fourteen
years old. At fourteen, he was still infected with the disease. He believed in
the illusion with every fiber of his fragile, battered body.
He believed it when the Sludge Villain
enveloped him beneath the overpass. The sensation of drowning in sentient,
foul-tasting sewage was agonizing. The sludge forced its way down his throat,
burning his windpipe, invading his lungs. The smell was abhorrent, like
stagnant canal water and rotting meat. His vision swam, black dots dancing at
the edges of his peripheral sight as oxygen deprivation set in. His hands,
small and unscarred, clawed desperately at the fluid mass, but there was
nothing to grasp.
I’m going to die, his panicked brain had
screamed. I’m dying here, and no one will ever know. I’ll never be a hero.
And then, the manhole cover burst open.
"Fear not, kid!" a voice boomed,
rich and resonant, echoing through the underpass with the force of a sonic
boom. "I am here!"
Texas Smash. The wind pressure alone had
obliterated the villain, scattering the sludge like rain. Izuku’s lungs
convulsed, coughing up the vile fluid, gasping for the sweet, life-giving air.
As his vision cleared, he saw him. The Symbol of Peace. All Might.
To Izuku, All Might was not merely a man. He
was a deity. He was the living, breathing embodiment of Hope. Towering,
muscular, draped in primary colors that defied the gloom of the shadows. Just
looking at him made the crushing weight of Izuku’s daily life—the burns on his
shoulders from Katsuki Bakugo, the mocking laughter of his classmates, the
pitiful looks from his own mother—evaporate.
Izuku’s heart hammered against his ribs like a
trapped bird. He fumbled for his notebook, Hero Analysis for the Future, Vol.
13, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold the pen. All Might
signed it with a flourish, a massive autograph spanning two pages.
"Thank you! Thank you so much!"
Izuku had babbled, bowing repeatedly. "This is an heirloom! A family
treasure!"
But All Might was already turning away,
preparing to leap. "I must be off! I need to deliver this fellow to the
authorities!"
Wait. The word echoed in Izuku's mind. Wait, I
haven't asked you yet. I haven't asked you the only question that matters.
Before conscious thought could stop him, Izuku
lunged. He grabbed onto the fabric of All Might’s trousers just as the Number
One Hero bent his knees and launched into the stratosphere.
The wind tore at Izuku’s face, pulling his
cheeks back, making his eyes water blindly. The ground fell away, buildings
shrinking into toy blocks. It was terrifying, but it was also exhilarating. He
was flying with his god.
"Hey, hey, hey! Release me! Your
fanaticism is too much!" All Might shouted over the roaring wind, trying
to pry the boy off.
"If I let go now, I'll die!" Izuku
screamed back, his fingers locked in a death grip.
Realization dawned on the hero, and with a
heavy sigh, he steered them toward a nearby rooftop. They landed with a heavy
thud, Izuku collapsing onto the green-painted concrete, his legs entirely
turned to jelly. He was panting, his heart trying to break out of his ribcage,
but he forced himself up. This was his chance. His only chance.
"Good grief," All Might grumbled,
patting his pockets. "If you talk to the people downstairs, they’ll get
you down. I really am out of time."
"Wait!" Izuku cried out, reaching a
hand forward. "Just one second! I have to know..."
All Might paused, his massive back turned to
the scrawny boy. "No! I will not wait!"
Izuku squeezed his eyes shut. All the pain,
all the rejection, all the years of desperately pretending that his life had
value culminated in this single breath.
"Even if I don't have a Quirk... can I
become a hero?!" Izuku shouted, the words tearing from his throat.
"Can even someone without a Quirk be like you?!"
Silence fell over the rooftop. Only the
distant, muffled sounds of the city below—horns honking, sirens wailing, the
low hum of millions of people living their lives—filled the void.
Izuku kept his eyes squeezed shut, bracing
himself. He began to ramble, a defense mechanism he’d honed over a decade of
bullying. "Because... because people think I don't have a chance. And maybe
they're right. But I think saving people is the most amazing thing in the
world. The way you save people with that fearless smile! I want to be the
greatest hero, just like you!"
He opened his eyes, a desperate, tearful smile
on his face.
But All Might was gone.
In his place stood a skeletal, emaciated man
in baggy clothes. His eyes were sunken, dark shadows masking his face. Blood
trickled from his mouth.
Izuku stared, his brain completely stalling.
What? "An... an imposter? A fake? You're so skinny!"
The man wiped the blood from his chin. "I
am All Might," he sighed, his voice raspy and hollow, entirely lacking the
booming confidence from minutes prior.
What followed was an explanation that tore
away the curtain of Izuku’s reality. All Might lifted his shirt, revealing a
horrific, purple-mottled scar that looked like the epicenter of an explosion
radiating from his chest. He explained his limits. He explained the surgeries,
the destruction of his respiratory system, the missing stomach. He explained
that the "Symbol of Peace" was nothing but a brave face put on to
hide the fear.
"Pros are always risking their
lives," All Might said, his sunken blue eyes locking onto Izuku with a
chilling, cold realism. "Some villains simply can't be beaten without
powers."
Izuku felt a cold chill start at the base of
his spine and slowly creep upward. The air on the roof suddenly felt
suffocating, thinner than it had been a moment ago.
"So, no," All Might delivered the
final, fatal blow. "I cannot honestly say you can be a hero without a
Quirk."
The world stopped.
There was no dramatic thunderclap. No sudden
rush of wind. Just a quiet, absolute shattering inside Izuku Midoriya’s chest.
The sound of a grand, beautiful glass cathedral collapsing into powder.
"It's not bad to dream," All Might
added, turning away, walking toward the rooftop door. "But you also have
to consider what's realistic, young man. If you want to help people, become a
police officer. They get mocked for receiving villains at the end of the line,
but it’s a fine profession."
The door opened. The door closed.
Izuku was alone.
He stood there for a long, long time. The sun
began its slow descent, painting the sky in vibrant, bleeding hues of orange,
pink, and bruised purple. The colors seemed garish. Disgusting. Too bright.
Consider what's realistic.
The words echoed in his skull. They bounced
around, growing louder, distorted, like a corrupted audio file.
Consider what's realistic.
For fourteen years, Izuku had survived off the
fumes of hope. He had taken every beating from Kacchan, every mocking laugh
from his teachers, every sorrowful, tear-soaked apology from his mother, and
locked them away in a box in his mind. He had convinced himself that it was a
trial. A hurdle he had to overcome to achieve greatness. He believed that the
universe was fundamentally just, and that pure willpower could bridge the gap
between human and superhuman.
But the god of his world had just looked him
in the eye and told him the truth: You are defective. You are nothing.
Izuku looked down at his trembling hands. The
hands of a Quirkless nobody. They were small. Weak. Useless.
Suddenly, a strange sensation washed over him.
The panic, the deep, agonizing sorrow that usually accompanied his daily
humiliations... vanished. It didn't fade; it was cleanly excised, as if a
surgeon had reached into his brain and snipped the nerve ending connected to
grief.
In its place came a chilling, absolute
clarity.
He walked to the edge of the roof and looked
down at the streets below. The people looked like ants. Mindless, scrambling
insects moving along predetermined paths, dictated by the invisible forces of
their genetic code.
"A stage play," Izuku whispered. His
voice didn't sound like his own. It lacked the characteristic tremble, the
inherent apology that laced every syllable he usually spoke. It was flat. Cold.
Hero society wasn't a noble pursuit of
justice. It was an industry. It was a reality television show with collateral
damage. The heroes were just actors with flashy special effects, fighting
villains who were often just victims of the same genetic lottery, mutated into
outcasts by society's rigid standards.
And the currency that fueled this entire,
sickening masquerade?
Hope.
"Hope is a lie," Izuku breathed into
the evening air.
He turned away from the ledge and walked
toward the stairs. His footsteps echoed in the stairwell. With every step
downward, the boy who wanted to save people with a smile died a little more. By
the time he reached the ground floor, Izuku Midoriya—the crybaby, the Deku, the
hopeful fanatic—was gone. What remained was a vessel, rapidly filling with
something dark, dense, and infinitely more powerful.
As Izuku walked aimlessly through the streets,
the sounds of the city seemed different. He was no longer listening to the hum
of life; he was hearing the grinding gears of a broken machine.
Then, he heard it.
BOOM.
An explosion rocked the air, followed by a
plume of black smoke rising above the skyline a few blocks away. The smell of
burning asphalt and sulfur drifted toward him.
Under normal circumstances, Izuku would have
sprinted toward the commotion, his notebook in hand, eager to see which pro heroes
were on the scene. Today, his legs carried him at a measured, detached pace. He
wasn't walking toward a hero fight; he was walking toward a crime scene. He was
walking toward data.
He reached the edge of the crowd. A shopping
district was in ruins. Fires raged out of control, licking the sides of
shattered storefronts. Sirens wailed, and the heat was oppressive.
Izuku slipped through the throngs of
terrified, whispering civilians, moving to the front of the police barricade.
His green eyes, now devoid of their usual star-struck shimmer, coldly assessed
the situation.
It was the Sludge Villain.
The very same one. All Might must have dropped
the bottle when Izuku grabbed his leg. Ah, Izuku thought, a microscopic, hollow
smile touching the corner of his lips. The infallible god made a mistake
because of a bug like me. How beautifully pathetic.
But the villain wasn't alone. He had taken a
hostage.
Trapped within the suffocating, foul-smelling
mass of the villain was a boy with ash-blonde hair. Katsuki Bakugo. His
childhood friend. His tormentor. His abuser.
Bakugo was thrashing wildly, his palms
igniting with furious, desperate explosions. But the fire only fueled the
chaos, igniting the surrounding buildings and keeping the heroes at bay. The
sludge was forcing its way into Bakugo’s mouth, his eyes wide with a terror
Izuku had never seen before. The great, invincible Katsuki Bakugo, reduced to a
suffocating, helpless animal.
Izuku’s eyes flicked to the pro heroes on the
scene.
Death Arms was standing back, holding his
massive arms up as if shielding his face from the heat. "It's no
good!" he yelled. "I can't get near him with these fires! There's no
grip on that sludge!"
Kamui Woods was perched on a lamppost, his
wooden limbs useless. "I'm made of wood! Fire is my ultimate weakness! I
can't intervene without a clear path!"
Mt. Lady, towering over the street, was
rubbing her chin in frustration. "I need at least two lanes to maneuver! I
can't fit in here without crushing civilians or the buildings!"
Backdraft, the water hero, was entirely
focused on the fires, ignoring the dying boy in the center of the street.
"I'm busy with the flames! Someone else has to grab the kid!"
Izuku stared. His mind, the brilliant,
hyper-analytical engine he had used to worship these people, engaged at
blinding speed.
Death Arms possesses superhuman strength. If
he threw debris at the villain's eyes—the only solid, vulnerable part of its
anatomy—he could distract it long enough to rip Bakugo free. But he won't,
because he's afraid of getting burned, afraid of a liability lawsuit if he
misses.
Kamui Woods could use his Lacquered Chain
Prison as a bridge over the flames, sacrificing the outer layer of his bark to
snatch the hostage. It would hurt, but he would heal. But he won't, because he
doesn't want to damage his aesthetic, his marketability.
Mt. Lady could shrink, run in, and enlarge her
arm at the exact moment of impact to disrupt the sludge. But she won't, because
she's a newly debuted hero entirely reliant on grand spectacle and doesn't know
how to do precision rescue work.
They aren't helpless, Izuku realized, the
absolute absurdity of the scene washing over him. They are making excuses. They
are waiting for someone with a 'better Quirk' so they don't have to risk
themselves. They are waiting for a more convenient heroism.
Izuku looked back at Bakugo.
Bakugo's red eyes locked onto Izuku in the
crowd. Through the swirling smoke and the terror, a silent message passed
between them. It was a plea. A desperate, agonizing cry for help. For a
fraction of a second, the old Izuku flared to life. His muscles twitched. His
foot shifted forward. The instinct to save, to run into danger blindly, surged
in his blood.
If I run in, I could throw my backpack, Izuku
thought. I could hit the eye. I could claw at the sludge. I could give him a
breath of air.
But then, the voice of the god echoed in his
mind.
Consider what's realistic.
Izuku stopped. His foot lowered back to the
pavement.
Why should he?
Why should a Quirkless nobody, the bottom of
the societal barrel, risk his life to save a boy who had told him to take a
swan dive off the roof just that morning? Why should he do the job of the fully
licensed, highly paid adults standing ten feet away?
If this society worshipped Quirks so much, let
the Quirks sort it out.
Izuku stood perfectly still. He folded his
arms. His face went entirely blank, a terrifying mask of apathy. He watched. He
analyzed.
"Help him!" a civilian screamed.
"The kid is drowning!"
"We have to wait for someone with the
right Quirk!" Death Arms yelled back, gritting his teeth.
Wait, Izuku thought. Yes. Wait. Let the system
play out to its logical conclusion.
The seconds ticked by. They felt like hours.
Bakugo’s explosions began to weaken. The sharp, rapid-fire cracks turned into
muffled, pathetic pops. His thrashing slowed. The whites of his eyes rolled
back as the oxygen deprivation reached critical levels. The villain laughed, a
gurgling, triumphant sound.
"Yes! Just a little more! I've almost got
his body! What a powerful Quirk!" the Sludge Villain crowed.
Bakugo’s left arm, previously firing off
explosions, suddenly jerked unnaturally. A sickening pop echoed over the roar
of the flames, masked to most, but Izuku’s hyper-focused senses caught it. The
villain was forcing the boy's limbs into impossible angles to fully possess the
muscular structure.
"Where is All Might?!" someone cried
in the crowd.
Izuku didn't look around. He knew All Might
was out of time. The pathetic, bleeding skeleton was probably hiding in an
alley nearby, watching his failure.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity,
Bakugo went entirely limp. His hands stopped moving. The sludge forced itself
completely down his throat.
He's dead, Izuku thought, his heartbeat
steady, slow. Or his brain is starved of oxygen. Permanent neurological damage.
Suddenly, the crowd erupted. A massive blur of
speed and power tore through the smoke.
"I AM PATHETIC!"
All Might, in his muscle form, blood literally
bursting from his mouth, ripped through the air. He didn't even use a named
smash. He simply grabbed Bakugo by the collar and swung his other arm with the
force of a hurricane. The sheer wind pressure generated by the punch altered
the weather, pulling the clouds together in the sky above and creating an
updraft that blew out the fires in an instant. The Sludge Villain exploded into
a thousand scattered droplets, splattering against the walls of the ruined street.
The crowd was silent for a moment, stunned by
the sheer, godlike display of power. And then, it started raining.
The cheers that followed were deafening.
"All Might! It's All Might! He changed the weather!"
Izuku watched as All Might stood over Bakugo's
limp body, posing for the cameras, his trademark smile plastered onto his
bleeding face. He saw the pro heroes rushing in now, checking on the
unconscious boy, securing the sludge.
Izuku didn't stay to hear the reporters. He
didn't stay to see if Bakugo breathed again. He had seen everything he needed
to see.
He turned his back on the Symbol of Peace and
walked away into the rain.
The television in the Midoriya apartment was
murmuring quietly.
"...miraculous rescue by All Might in
Tatooin Shopping District," the newscaster's polished voice reported.
"However, tragedy strikes as the hostage, middle school student Katsuki
Bakugo, suffered severe, life-altering injuries during the prolonged attack.
Medical experts report catastrophic damage to his vocal cords from the ingested
sludge, and severe nerve damage to his forearms due to hyper-extension and
inward explosive force. Doctors are unsure if he will ever regain full motor
function, effectively ending any hopes of a hero career..."
Izuku sat at his desk in his dark bedroom. The
only light came from his desk lamp, casting long, sharp shadows across the
walls.
The walls.
They were covered in him. All Might. Posters,
action figures, limited edition prints, bedsheets, alarm clocks. Hundreds of
grinning, muscular faces staring down at him. For over a decade, this room had
been a sanctuary. A church dedicated to the religion of Hope.
Now, it felt like a tomb. It felt like a
monument to a lie.
Izuku reached into his yellow backpack. It was
scorched from the fires at the shopping district. He pulled out his notebook.
Hero Analysis for the Future, Vol. 13. The edges were charred, and the cover
was damp from the rain.
He opened it to the middle. The massive,
sprawling signature of All Might stared back at him.
Izuku stared at the signature. He didn't feel
angry. He didn't feel sad. He felt... liberated. As if a massive, suffocating
weight had been lifted from his shoulders. The chains of expectation, the
desperate need to fit into a society that fundamentally rejected him, were
gone.
He understood the truth now.
Society was sick. It was a hierarchy built on
a foundation of genetic superiority, masked as morality. The strong were
heralded as heroes, regardless of their actual character—like Katsuki, a
violent abuser groomed for greatness simply because he sweat nitroglycerin. The
weak were discarded, trampled, or turned into villains because society offered
them no other path.
And Hope was the opiate that kept the masses
blind to this cruelty. Hope was the belief that All Might would always swoop in
at the last second.
But he didn't, Izuku thought, his mind
replaying the image of Bakugo's limp, broken body. He was late. And because he
was late, the golden child of Aldera Junior High is broken forever. The heroes
did nothing. The system failed.
If Hope was the disease, what was the cure?
Izuku slowly picked up a lighter from his desk
drawer—one he kept to melt the ends of frayed shoelaces. He flicked the metal
wheel. A small, orange flame danced in the dark room.
He held the flame to the edge of the notebook.
The paper caught easily, the fire eating away at All Might’s signature, curling
the pages, turning his meticulous notes on hero quirks into black, flaking ash.
Izuku watched it burn until the heat licked his fingertips. He dropped the
flaming book into a metal wastebasket, watching as the fire illuminated the
smiling faces of the posters around him.
"Hope is unequal," Izuku murmured to
the empty room. "It relies on luck. On genetics. On the whims of people
who have power."
He opened his desk drawer again and pulled out
a fresh, unlined notebook. It was a stark, matte black. No hero insignia. No
bright colors.
He clicked his pen.
"But Despair..." Izuku's pen hovered
over the first page. "Despair is universal. Despair doesn't care if you
have a Quirk or not. It doesn't care if you are rich, poor, weak, or strong.
When faced with absolute, undeniable tragedy, everyone breaks the exact same
way."
In Despair, there was true equality.
In Despair, the playing field was finally
level.
Izuku began to write. He didn't write about
how to save people. He didn't write about the strengths of heroes. He wrote
about their flaws.
He started with Mt. Lady. Vanity. Desire for
media attention. Easily distracted by cameras. Weakness: Hostage situations in
enclosed spaces. Collateral damage liability.
He moved to Kamui Woods. Insecurity about his
rank. Rigid adherence to honorable combat. Weakness: Fire, yes, but also moral
ambiguity. Force him to choose between the law and a life, and he will hesitate.
He wrote about Death Arms. Fear of failure
masked by bravado. Weakness: Public perception. If the crowd turns against him,
his confidence shatters.
He wrote for hours. His handwriting, usually a
frantic, excited scrawl, was now immaculate, precise, and terrifyingly cold. He
broke down the psychology of every hero he had witnessed that day. He didn't
just analyze their physical Quirks; he analyzed their mental breaking points.
How much pressure would it take to make a hero abandon a civilian? How much
fear would it take to make them turn on each other?
When he finally stopped, his hand was cramped,
but his mind had never felt clearer.
He closed the black notebook. On the cover, in
precise white ink, he wrote:
Despair Analysis for the Future, Vol. 1.
Izuku stood up from his desk. The fire in the
wastebasket had died down to glowing red embers. He walked over to the
full-length mirror attached to his closet door.
He looked at his reflection. He saw a boy with
messy green hair, a face dotted with freckles, and dark bags under his eyes. He
saw the scars on his collarbone from Katsuki's explosions. He saw the weak,
Quirkless Deku.
But as he looked deeper, the reflection seemed
to shift. The green eyes, once wide and full of naïve wonder, were now completely
vacant. They were dark voids, devoid of light, reflecting nothing but the quiet
madness blossoming in his mind.
Izuku reached up and gripped his own face. His
fingers dug into his cheeks.
He forced the corners of his mouth upward.
It was a smile, but it was entirely devoid of
joy. It was too wide, stretching his skin taut. It was a manic, fractured
expression, a grotesque parody of the fearless grin All Might wore. It was a
smile that promised absolute ruin. It was the expression of a boy who had
looked into the abyss, and instead of blinking, had decided to invite the abyss
in for tea.
A low chuckle escaped his lips. It started
quietly, a dry rattling in his throat, before bubbling up into a quiet,
hysterical laugh. The laughter bounced off the walls of the room, mingling with
the mocking smiles of the All Might merchandise surrounding him.
"Let's see it," Izuku whispered to
his reflection, his terrifying grin stretching wider. "Let's see how
strong your Hope really is when it's drowning in the dark."
He would tear it all down. Not with physical
strength, not with a Quirk, but with his mind. He would expose the heroes,
dismantle the system, and plunge society into a beautiful, equalizing tragedy.
He wouldn't be a villain. Villains had goals. Villains wanted money, or power,
or societal reform.
Izuku didn't want any of that.
He just wanted to watch the illusion of Hope
burn, and revel in the pure, unadulterated Despair that would rise from its
ashes.
The Ultimate Despair was born. And he was
going to destroy the world.
The bedroom that once served as a shrine to
the Symbol of Peace was dead.
In its place, an entirely different kind of
sanctuary had been constructed. The posters of All Might, with their primary
colors and blinding smiles, had been torn down, leaving pale, rectangular
ghosts on the fading wallpaper. The action figures had been melted down in the
kitchen oven—Izuku had watched the plastic bubble and deform with a serene,
terrifying stillness, reducing the invincible heroes to unrecognizable lumps of
toxic slag.
Now, the room was bathed in the clinical,
harsh blue light of six computer monitors.
Izuku Midoriya sat in the center of this
electronic web, his fingers dancing across a heavily modified mechanical
keyboard. The rhythmic clack-clack-clack was the only sound in the suffocating
silence of the apartment.
Getting the hardware had been surprisingly
simple. Hero society was a wasteful machine. At Dagobah Municipal Beach Park, a
dumping ground for illegal trash that the heroes ignored because there was no
glory in cleaning it, Izuku had found everything he needed. Discarded
motherboards, cracked servers from bankrupt support companies, cooling fans,
and miles of copper wiring. While other kids his age were practicing their
Quirks or studying for high school, Izuku spent his nights hauling scrap metal
and electronics back to his room.
He didn't have a Quirk to build his body, so
he built a god instead. He networked the scavenged servers, creating an
encrypted, decentralized processing rig that spanned the entirety of his small
closet and under his bed.
He called his system The Panopticon.
Izuku took a sip of lukewarm black coffee. His
green eyes, previously wide and expressive, were now perpetually narrowed,
reflecting the scrolling lines of code and data packets. Over the past three
months, his hyper-analytical mind—once used to excitedly scribble notes about
Kamui Woods’ reach or Backdraft’s water pressure—had been unleashed onto the
dark web.
When you stop looking at the world through the
lens of hope, you see the cracks in the foundation everywhere.
"Let's see what the Commission is hiding
today," Izuku whispered, his voice a flat, emotionless drone.
He was currently routing his IP address
through thirteen different proxy servers across the globe, bouncing his signal
from an Internet cafe in Hosu, to a satellite over South Africa, to a server
farm in Russia, before finally knocking on the backdoor of the Hero Public
Safety Commission’s database.
It was a vulnerability he had found weeks ago.
The HPSC used a custom encryption algorithm for their top-secret files,
assuming that anyone smart enough to hack them would be a known, registered
intelligence Quirk user who was already on their payroll. They never accounted
for a fourteen-year-old Quirkless boy who had spent his entire life obsessively
analyzing patterns.
Click.
The firewall fell.
Izuku’s screen flooded with classified
documents. He didn't blink. He absorbed the information like a sponge.
File: Operation Tartarus Transfer. Cover-ups
of villain deaths in custody.
File: Lady Nagant. Pre-emptive assassination
orders against rogue heroes.
File: Hawks Project. Grooming a child into a
weaponized double agent.
Izuku smiled. It was the same wide, empty
smile he had worn the day he burned his notebooks. It didn't reach his eyes.
"Hypocrites," he murmured.
"They build their shining utopia on a mountain of corpses, and then smile
for the cameras. They dictate who is allowed to live, who is allowed to be a
hero, and who must be discarded in the dark."
He downloaded the files, encrypting them in a
hidden partition on his hard drive. This was his ammunition. Information was a
Quirk of its own, far more devastating than fire or ice. You couldn't punch a
leaked document. You couldn't put a barricade around the truth.
But information alone wasn't enough to induce
the kind of Despair Izuku envisioned. To tear down the system, he needed
physical infrastructure. He needed an army. He needed a symbol of his own.
Izuku minimized the HPSC files and pulled up
his next target.
Detnerat.
A leading lifestyle support item manufacturer.
On the surface, they were a legitimate, highly profitable company that made
gear for citizens with minor mutation Quirks. But Izuku’s analysis of their
supply chains, combined with anonymous chatter on the dark web, revealed
massive discrepancies. Thousands of tons of high-grade, weaponized alloys were
disappearing from their manifests.
Someone inside Detnerat was building an army.
Izuku had dug deeper. He cross-referenced the
CEO, Rikiya Yotsubashi, with historical databases. He noted Yotsubashi's facial
structure, his rhetoric in public interviews, and his suspicious connection to
an old, banned autobiography titled Meta Liberation War.
"Re-Destro," Izuku breathed, leaning
back in his chair. "The Meta Liberation Army. You're preparing for a war.
How quaint. You want a society where Quirk usage is completely unrestricted. A
world governed by pure Darwinism."
Izuku found the ideology utterly pathetic. It
was just another hierarchy. Instead of heroes ruling the weak, the strong
Quirks would rule the weak Quirks. The Quirkless would still be crushed beneath
the heel of the genetic elite.
It was boring. It lacked the beautiful
equality of absolute Despair.
But Detnerat had resources. Factories.
Engineers. Izuku needed those.
He opened a highly secure, encrypted messaging
channel, directing it straight to the personal, offline terminal in Rikiya
Yotsubashi’s private penthouse—a connection he had spent two weeks mapping.
Izuku typed a message.
Rikiya Yotsubashi was enjoying a glass of fine
bourbon in his high-rise office when his private, completely disconnected
terminal chimed.
The CEO froze. He slowly set down his glass, a
dark stain of stress spreading across his forehead. That terminal was hardwired.
It wasn't connected to the internet. The only way it could receive a message
was if someone had compromised the very physical cabling beneath the Detnerat
building.
He walked to the screen.
SENDER: MASTERMIND
Good evening, Grand Commander of the Meta
Liberation Army. Or do you prefer Re-Destro? I find the latter a bit
melodramatic, but to each their own.
Yotsubashi’s breath caught in his throat. His
Quirk, Stress, flared instantly, his hand growing massive and dark as pure
panic set in. The secret of the MLA, cultivated over generations, exposed in a
single text?
He typed back, his massive fingers barely
fitting on the keys.
YOTSUBASHI: Who are you? What is this? If this
is a prank, you have signed your death warrant.
MASTERMIND: I am not a hero. I am not the
police. I am simply a spectator who has noticed your grand play. I have
attached a file. It contains the names, addresses, and Quirk registries of
15,000 embedded Liberation Army members, along with the offshore accounts
funding your little revolution. It is currently set to an automated dead-man's
switch. If I do not reset it every 24 hours, the file will be simultaneously
emailed to the HPSC, the National Police Agency, and every major news outlet in
Japan.
Yotsubashi felt a cold sweat break out over
his body. He opened the attached file. It was all there. Trumpet’s political
ties. Curious’s media manipulation. Everything.
YOTSUBASHI: What do you want? Money? Power?
Name your price.
MASTERMIND: Money is a fiction. I require your
manufacturing capabilities. Attached is a blueprint. It is a highly advanced,
semi-autonomous robotic unit. I want one hundred of them built and delivered to
a warehouse in Kamino Ward by the end of the month. Fully armed. Completely
untraceable. You will use your best engineers, but you will compartmentalize
the production so no single worker knows what they are building.
Yotsubashi opened the second attachment. His
eyes widened.
It was a schematic for an animatronic mascot.
A rabbit. But the design was deeply unsettling. The left half was a soft,
innocent green, resembling a children’s cartoon character with a sweet, dotted
eye. The right half was a jagged, midnight black, with a wicked, jagged grin
and a glowing, blood-red mechanical eye.
The specifications were terrifying. Hidden
ballistic compartments in the mouth. Taser grips in the paws. A self-destruct
mechanism packing enough C4 to level a city block. It was designed to move with
unsettling speed, mimicking human biometrics.
YOTSUBASHI: A toy? You are blackmailing the
most powerful underground army in Japan to build you killer toys?
MASTERMIND: Symbols are important, Yotsubashi.
You have your Destro statues. I have my rabbit. I call him Monorabbit. He is
going to be the face of the new world. Produce them perfectly, and your secret
remains safe. Fail, or attempt to track this signal, and the Meta Liberation
Army ends before it even begins. Do we have a deal?
Yotsubashi stared at the grinning, split-faced
rabbit on his screen. For the first time in his life, the Supreme Commander of
the MLA felt entirely outmaneuvered. He felt a deep, creeping dread.
YOTSUBASHI: ...We have a deal.
In his dark bedroom, miles away, Izuku smiled.
He closed the connection.
"Perfect," Izuku whispered. The
pieces were falling into place. The physical infrastructure was secured.
Now, he needed to investigate the competition.
The criminal underworld of Japan was chaotic,
decentralized, and largely comprised of petty thugs and disorganized yakuza
remnants. However, over the past few weeks, Izuku had noticed a subtle shift in
the data.
Certain high-profile crimes were being covered
up not by the heroes, but by someone else. Villains with powerful Quirks were
disappearing before they could be arrested. There was a phantom current moving
beneath the surface of society, drawing the worst of the worst toward a single,
unseen singularity.
Izuku tracked the digital footprint of a
well-known underground broker named Giran. Giran was careful, but he was
old-school. He still used burner phones. By analyzing the triangulation of
Giran's cell tower pings, Izuku isolated a small, rundown bar in Kamino Ward.
Izuku hacked the city traffic cameras outside
the bar. He watched the feed for three days. No customers went in or out. But
the thermal imaging showed distinct heat signatures inside.
He dug deeper, hacking the municipal
blueprints. The bar had a massive underground facility beneath it, drawing an
absurd amount of electricity from the city grid—enough to power life support
systems and advanced Nomu incubation tanks.
Someone very powerful is hiding here, Izuku
deduced.
He didn't just want to know who they were. He
wanted them to know who he was.
Izuku pulled up a voice-modulation program on
his computer. He tweaked the settings until his voice lost all its youthful
pitch, transforming into a deep, distorted, metallic hum. It sounded like a
voice from a nightmare—entirely devoid of humanity.
He found the landline number for the bar. He
dialed.
Ring... Ring...
Inside the dusty, dimly lit bar in Kamino
Ward, Tomura Shigaraki paused. He was scratching his neck, his red eyes glaring
at a game over screen on his handheld console.
"Kurogiri," Shigaraki rasped.
"Why is the phone ringing? Nobody has this number."
Behind the bar, the misty, purple entity
composed of warp gates stopped polishing a glass. "I do not know, Tomura
Shigaraki. Perhaps a wrong number."
"Answer it," Shigaraki commanded,
his scratching intensifying.
Kurogiri picked up the receiver. "Hello?
This is a private establishment."
"Put the manchild on the phone," a
distorted, metallic voice echoed from the receiver.
Kurogiri’s yellow eyes narrowed. "May I
ask who is calling?"
"You are a glorified taxi service. I did
not ask to speak to the transport. Put Tomura Shigaraki on the line."
Kurogiri hesitated, then silently handed the
phone to Shigaraki. Shigaraki grabbed it, one finger carefully raised to avoid
decaying the plastic.
"Who the hell is this?" Shigaraki
hissed. "You've got some nerve. I'll turn you to dust."
"Fascinating," Izuku's modulated
voice replied. "Your immediate response to an unknown variable is violent
bluster. It highlights a severe lack of emotional regulation. You speak of
destroying things, yet you hide in a dusty bar like a rat in the walls. You are
a pawn playing at being a king."
Shigaraki slammed his fist onto the bar,
decaying a small chunk of the wood. "I'll kill you! Kurogiri, trace this
call!"
"He can't," Izuku stated simply.
"I am bouncing off a satellite currently orbiting over the Pacific. But
let us skip the pleasantries, Shigaraki. You hate All Might. You want to
destroy the Symbol of Peace. But you lack the vision. You think you can just
throw some bio-engineered freak—what are you calling them, Nomu?—at him and
win. You don't understand that killing a symbol physically only makes them a
martyr."
Shigaraki froze. The scratching stopped.
"How... how do you know about the Nomu?"
"I know everything. I know your 'Sensei'
is keeping you on a leash. I know you are impatient. But most importantly, I
know you are going to fail if you try to attack U.A. High School blindly."
"Who are you?!" Shigaraki screamed,
his voice cracking.
Before Izuku could respond, a dark, heavy
static filled the line. The sound of Shigaraki’s breathing vanished, replaced
by the mechanical whirring of a life support machine.
"Tomura, put the phone on speaker,"
a new voice said.
It was a voice that commanded absolute
obedience. It was cultured, smooth, but laced with a terrifying, ancient
malice. Even miles away, sitting safely in his room, Izuku felt a chill run
down his spine.
This is him, Izuku realized. The master.
"Who am I speaking with?" the deep voice
asked.
Izuku leaned closer to his microphone.
"The man who has deduced your existence from the shadows. Five years ago,
a massive seismic anomaly occurred in Kamino Ward, officially registered as a
minor earthquake. Simultaneously, All Might vanished from the public eye for
three months, undergoing multiple undocumented surgeries at a private HPSC
hospital. Violent crime in the underground dropped by 43% for two years
following this event. The conclusion is simple: a god-tier villain clashed with
All Might. You broke his body. He broke yours."
Silence stretched over the line. It was a
heavy, suffocating silence.
"...You are remarkably observant,"
the ancient villain finally said, a hint of genuine amusement in his tone.
"Very few put those pieces together. Those who do are usually eliminated.
You have my attention. What do you call yourself?"
"You may call me the Mastermind."
"Mastermind. A bold title. Tell me,
Mastermind, why are you calling my sanctuary? Are you seeking employment? Do
you wish to join the League of Villains?"
"Join?" Izuku laughed, the distorted
sound echoing harshly. "I don't serve. I called to offer a... mutually
beneficial non-aggression pact. And an education."
"An education?" the villain
chuckled, a dry, raspy sound. "I have lived for over a century. I have
ruled an empire. What could you possibly teach me?"
"I can teach you how to break them
properly," Izuku replied smoothly. "You want to steal Quirks. You
want to rule through fear. But fear is temporary. Fear can be overcome by hope.
If you want to truly destroy hero society, you must introduce them to absolute
Despair. You must make them destroy themselves."
Izuku brought up his files. "I will not
interfere with your League. In fact, I will occasionally feed you data.
Vulnerabilities in hero patrols. U.A. security schedules. In exchange, you will
stay out of my way. And when the time comes, you will let me orchestrate the
grand finale."
"You speak with the confidence of a god,
Mastermind. But you are hiding behind a screen. Why should I not simply order
my associates to tear this city apart until I find you?"
Izuku grinned. He pressed a key.
"Because, All For One," Izuku said,
using the name he had deciphered from deep-web urban legends, "if my heart
stops beating, or if my server goes offline, a highly encrypted packet will be
sent to the Number One Hero, detailing the exact GPS coordinates of your
life-support chair."
The silence on the line was absolute. For the
first time in perhaps fifty years, All For One was entirely caught off guard.
"...I see," All For One finally
said, his voice dropping an octave. "A dead-man's switch. You play a dangerous
game, Mastermind."
"I play to win. Do we have an
understanding?"
A low, dark chuckle echoed from the machine.
"We have an understanding. I look forward to watching your 'Despair'
unfold. Do try to keep Tomura entertained."
Click.
The line went dead.
Izuku exhaled slowly, letting his heart rate
return to normal. He had just played a game of chess with the devil, and he had
secured a stalemate. The League of Villains would be his perfect proxy. They
would act as the loud, destructive distraction, drawing the eyes of the heroes,
while Izuku planted the seeds of anarchy directly beneath their feet.
Ten months passed.
In the canon timeline, these ten months would
have been spent hauling trash on Dagobah Beach, crying, sweating, and inheriting
the power of the gods from All Might.
In this timeline, Izuku spent ten months
perfecting his art.
He didn't lift a single tire. His physical
body remained thin, unremarkable, and unassuming. He perfected his
"Deku" persona. He went to Aldera Junior High, kept his head down,
flinched when Bakugo (who had returned to school weeks later, heavily bandaged,
his arms fitted with bulky, compression support-gear, his voice reduced to a
raspy snarl) glared at him.
Izuku played the victim perfectly. He let
Bakugo push him around, let the teachers ignore him. Every insult, every shove,
only fueled the dark amusement festering in his chest. They have no idea, he
thought constantly. They have no idea that they are already dead. They just
haven't stopped breathing yet.
Under the cover of night, his empire grew. The
warehouse in Kamino Ward slowly filled with one hundred perfectly constructed
Monorabbits, courtesy of the terrified CEO of Detnerat. Izuku had hijacked a
defunct satellite, creating his own un-jammable broadcasting network.
And then, it was time for the U.A. Entrance
Exam.
Izuku didn't apply for the Hero Course. He had
no Quirk, and despite his robotic arsenal, he had no intention of fighting in
the dirt like a brute. He applied for the General Studies Department.
The morning of the exam, the sun was shining
brightly over the massive, H-shaped U.A. building. Cherry blossoms drifted
through the air. Hopeful teenagers marched through the gates, their eyes wide
with dreams of heroism.
Izuku walked among them, his hands shoved deep
into his pockets. He wore a plain black middle school uniform.
He spotted a girl with a round face and
permanent blush—Ochaco Uraraka—looking nervously at the gates. He saw a tall,
stiff-moving boy with glasses—Tenya Iida—lecturing someone about posture. And
he saw Bakugo, his posture hunched, glaring at the building as if trying to set
it on fire with his mind, his forearms wrapped in rigid, metallic braces to
compensate for his ruined nerves.
Izuku felt a surge of cold delight. Look at
them. The future of society. So fragile.
He walked past the auditorium where Present Mic
was explaining the practical exam. He didn't need to hear it. He proceeded
directly to the testing center for the written examination.
The General Studies written test was
notoriously difficult, designed to weed out those who couldn't make it into the
Hero Course but still wanted the prestige of U.A.
For Izuku, it was painfully simple. He
finished the mathematics, science, and history sections in half the allotted
time. His mind processed the information with mechanical efficiency.
But Izuku was careful. If he scored a perfect
100%, he would draw too much attention. He would be flagged as a genius,
monitored by Principal Nezu. He didn't want the rat looking at him. So, Izuku
intentionally answered several complex questions incorrectly. He calculated his
final score to be exactly 86%—high enough to be accepted, but low enough to
remain entirely unexceptional.
However, on the final section—an essay
question regarding the "Role of Heroes in Modern Society"—Izuku
allowed himself a small indulgence.
He wrote a flawlessly structured, seemingly
innocent essay. But hidden within the subtext, disguised behind academic
language, was a scathing, undeniable critique of the inherent inequality of the
Quirk system. He subtly argued that relying on individuals for structural
societal safety was a mathematical fallacy.
It was a masterclass in psychological
manipulation. Whoever read it would feel a deep, unsettling sense of dread, but
they wouldn't be able to articulate why.
Izuku placed his pencil down. He looked out
the window. In the distance, he could hear the muffled explosions of the
practical exam. The hero hopefuls were destroying giant robots, fighting for
scraps of glory.
Let them break their toys, Izuku thought, his
reflection in the window smiling that terrifying, jagged smile. I'll break
their minds.
Two weeks later, the mail arrived.
Izuku sat at his desk, his computer monitors
dark for once. On his desk sat a small, metallic disc. He pressed the button.
A holographic projection of Present Mic sprang
to life.
"YEAH! WHAT'S UP, LISTENER?!" the
voice hero shouted. "Izuku Midoriya! You applied for the General Studies
Department! And let me tell you, your written exam was SOLID! You scored an
86%, placing you squarely in the upper percentile of applicants! But what
really caught the judges' eyes was your essay! Principal Nezu himself read it
and said it was 'a remarkably pragmatic, if somewhat cynical, view of our
society!'"
Izuku rested his chin on his hands, his eyes
dead.
"So, with no practical exam required for
Gen Ed, it is my honor to tell you... YOU PASSED! Welcome, Izuku Midoriya! This
is your Hero Academia!"
The hologram fizzled out.
Izuku sat in the silence of his room. He
didn't cry tears of joy. He didn't clench his fist in triumph. He simply turned
his chair around.
Sitting in the corner of his room, partially
obscured by the shadows, was the prototype.
The Monorabbit.
It was exactly as he had designed it. Three
feet tall. The left side was covered in soft, plush green fabric, complete with
a floppy ear and a cute, stitched smile. The right side was exposed, jagged
black metal, ending in a razor-sharp mechanical ear. Its right eye was a
glowing red optic sensor, currently whirring as it locked onto Izuku. The
jagged metal teeth formed a permanent, sadistic grin.
"Boot up, Monorabbit," Izuku
commanded softly.
The mechanical rabbit twitched. Its head
snapped toward Izuku with terrifying speed.
"Puhuhu!" a high-pitched, manic
voice erupted from the rabbit's internal speakers. Izuku had coded the voice
himself—it was cheerful, grating, and utterly insane. "Good morning,
Mastermind! Are we ready to spread some Despair today?!"
Izuku stood up. He walked over to the
Monorabbit and gently patted its soft, green half.
"Soon," Izuku whispered. He looked
toward his window, looking out over the sprawling metropolis of Musutafu.
"I've gained access to the castle. Now, we observe. We find their
weaknesses. We find out who they love, what they fear, and what they
hide."
He turned back to his monitors, flipping the
switch. The screens roared to life, casting that cold blue light across his
face once more. The masterboard of The Panopticon displayed live feeds of U.A.
High School’s external cameras, data profiles of the incoming Class 1-A
students, and the encrypted channel to the League of Villains.
"The seeds are planted," Izuku said,
a dark, breathless excitement finally creeping into his voice. "Now, we
just need to add a little blood, and watch the anarchy bloom."
He grabbed a fresh, black notebook. He opened
it to the first page.
Target 1: Class 1-A.
The Ultimate Despair was going to school.
The gates of U.A. High School were a monument
to hubris.
Standing four stories tall, constructed of
reinforced steel and polished gold plating, they were designed to evoke a sense
of awe. They were meant to be the pearly gates of modern society, separating
the divine from the mundane. To the thousands of students pouring through them
on the first day of the academic year, the gates represented validation. They
meant you were special.
To Izuku Midoriya, walking with his head bowed
and his oversized uniform hanging loosely off his thin frame, they looked
exactly like the gates of an abattoir.
Look at them, he thought, his vibrant green
eyes hidden behind a curtain of messy curls. Marching into the grinder with
smiles on their faces.
He adjusted the strap of his plain yellow
backpack. Inside, tucked safely between his textbooks and a bento box, was
Despair Analysis for the Future, Vol. 1.
Izuku shuffled through the courtyard, his
posture radiating subservience. He kept his shoulders hunched, his steps short
and hurried. When a taller student with a minor mutation Quirk brushed past
him, Izuku violently flinched, gasping, "Ah! S-sorry! E-excuse me!"
The student didn't even look back.
Izuku’s internal monologue, however, was
running at a thousand words a minute. Subject 84, Class 1-C. Minor reptilian
scaling. Elevated aggression, likely overcompensating for the defensive nature
of his Quirk. Irrelevant.
He navigated the sprawling, labyrinthine
corridors of the school. U.A. was divided by a strict caste system, unspoken
but universally understood. The Hero Course students (Classes A and B) were the
aristocrats. The Support Course (Classes F, G, H) were the artisans. The
Business Course (Classes I, J, K) were the merchants.
And then there was the General Studies
Department. Classes C, D, and E. The untouchables. The leftovers. The ones who
dreamed of greatness but lacked the genetic capital to buy it.
Izuku slid into his seat in Class 1-C. The
room was standard. The teacher was unexceptional. The students around him
reeked of disappointment and simmering envy. They spent the homeroom period
whispering about Class 1-A, staring out the windows, wishing they were on the
other side of the campus where the "real" education was happening.
Izuku sat perfectly still, doodling aimlessly
in a normal notebook. He didn't care about the curriculum. U.A. wasn't a school
to him. It was a hunting ground. And Class 1-A was his primary prey.
By the time the lunch bell rang, Izuku’s plan
was already in motion.
The U.A. cafeteria, Lunch Rush’s domain, was
massive. It was a cacophony of overlapping voices, clattering trays, and the
smells of high-end international cuisine. It was also the only place where the
rigid caste system broke down. General Studies and Hero Course students sat in
the same room, though they rarely mingled.
Izuku stood in the rice line, his eyes
scanning the cavernous hall like a predator mapping a watering hole.
He spotted them quickly. They were hard to
miss, radiating the obnoxious, unearned confidence of the genetically blessed.
At a table near the center, sitting rigid and
upright, was Tenya Iida. Beside him, eating with a ferocious but cheerful
energy, was Ochaco Uraraka.
Izuku took a deep breath. He let his shoulders
slump. He forced his breathing to become shallow, simulating mild anxiety. He
widened his eyes, summoning the exact amount of moisture to look perpetually
overwhelmed.
Showtime.
He paid for his cheap bowl of katsudon and
turned away from the counter. He walked toward their table, purposely crossing
paths with a third-year student carrying a massive tray. With calculated
precision, Izuku tripped over his own feet.
"W-waah!" Izuku yelped.
He collided with the third-year. Izuku managed
to keep his katsudon upright, but he dropped his chopsticks, his notebook, and
his juice box, sending them clattering across the floor right next to Iida and
Uraraka’s table.
"Hey! Watch it, Gen Ed!" the
third-year barked before storming off.
Izuku dropped to his knees, his hands
trembling as he scrambled to pick up his belongings. "I-I'm so sorry! I'm
so clumsy, I'm sorry!"
"Are you alright?!" a loud, booming
voice demanded.
Izuku looked up through his eyelashes. Tenya Iida
was out of his seat, his arm chopping through the air with mechanical rigidity.
"That upperclassman was entirely out of line! A hero-in-training should
display situational awareness! Here, let me assist you!"
Iida stooped down, picking up Izuku’s notebook.
"O-oh, thank you," Izuku stuttered,
his face flushing a perfect, embarrassed red. "You're... you're in the
Hero Course, right? Class 1-A? I recognize you from the entrance exam... I'm
just in General Studies."
"A student of U.A. is a student of U.A.!"
Iida declared proudly, handing the notebook back. "I am Tenya Iida! And
this is Ochaco Uraraka!"
Uraraka smiled brightly, her cheeks puffing
out. "Hi! Wow, you really took a tumble. Do you want to sit with us?
There's plenty of room!"
Izuku widened his eyes in mock disbelief.
"S-sit with you? But I'm... I don't even have a Quirk! I-I'd just be in
the way of you amazing heroes!"
The bait was cast. Izuku watched as the
microscopic expressions on their faces shifted. Pity. The most predictable,
exploitable emotion in the human repertoire. Pity was a narcotic for heroes. It
made them feel superior while disguised as altruism.
"Nonsense!" Iida said, his brow
furrowing with righteous indignation. "Quirk or no Quirk, you are a fellow
student! Sit!"
"Yeah, come on!" Uraraka agreed,
patting the empty seat next to her. "What's your name?"
Izuku sat down slowly, pulling his tray close
to his chest like a shield. "M-Midoriya. Izuku Midoriya. Thank you... this
is really kind of you."
For the next thirty minutes, Izuku played the
role of the ultimate sycophant. He was the Quirkless fanboy, starry-eyed and
desperately clinging to the coattails of his betters. He asked them about their
Quirks. He asked them about their classes. He let them talk about themselves,
knowing that humans were biologically programmed to enjoy the sound of their
own voices, especially when speaking to an inferior.
And while he smiled and stuttered, his mind
was dissecting them alive.
"So, Iida-kun," Izuku asked, his
eyes practically sparkling. "Your Quirk... it's Engine, right? You must be
related to the Turbo Hero: Ingenium! He's amazing!"
Iida’s posture immediately stiffened, but a
look of profound, almost religious reverence crossed his face. "You know
of my brother?! Yes! He is the paragon of heroism! Our family has been in the
hero business for generations. I strive every day to be a man worthy of the
Iida name. It is a heavy burden, but one I bear with pride!"
Analysis complete, Izuku thought, though his
external smile didn't waver. Tenya Iida. Engine Quirk. Primary psychological
drive: Legacy. Familial expectation. His identity is not his own; it is
entirely predicated on his brother, Tensei Iida. He is bound by rules because
rules provide a framework for his immense fear of failure. If the rules are
broken, or if the idol (his brother) falls, Iida's entire psychological
foundation will collapse. He is rigid. And rigid things do not bend. They
shatter.
Izuku turned to Uraraka. "And
Uraraka-san! Your Zero Gravity Quirk is incredible! You must want to save so
many people!"
Uraraka rubbed the back of her neck, her
permanent blush deepening. She let out a nervous laugh. "Ah... well...
saving people is great and all! But, um... honestly? I'm in it for the
money."
Iida gasped, scandalized. "The money?!
Uraraka-kun, heroism is a noble pursuit! To do it for financial gain is—!"
"No, I know!" Uraraka waved her
hands frantically. "It sounds awful! But my family... they own a
construction company, and we're really struggling. Like, really struggling. If
I can get my hero license, I can use my Quirk to lift heavy materials and save
them overhead costs! I just want my mom and dad to have an easy life. I want to
buy them a trip to Hawaii..."
She looked down at her plain white rice, a shadow
of guilt crossing her bright features.
Analysis complete, Izuku noted mentally.
Ochaco Uraraka. Zero Gravity Quirk. Primary psychological drive: Guilt-fueled
Altruism masquerading as greed. She feels entirely responsible for her parents'
poverty. Her cheerful demeanor is a coping mechanism for severe financial
anxiety. She views herself as an investment. If she fails, she isn't just
ruining her own life; she is dooming her parents. The fear of poverty and the
guilt of being a burden are her fault lines. Show her that her efforts are
worthless, or that she is actively hurting those she loves, and her spirit will
implode.
"I think that's a beautiful reason,
Uraraka-san," Izuku said aloud, offering a soft, pathetic smile.
"You're fighting for your family. That's what a real hero does."
Uraraka beamed at him. "Wow,
Midoriya-kun! You're really nice! I'm glad we bumped into you!"
"Yeah," Izuku whispered, taking a
slow sip from his juice box. "Me too."
His eyes drifted across the cafeteria. He
found the table where the louder students of 1-A sat. A boy with red spiky hair
(Kirishima), a boy with a lightning bolt in his hair (Kaminari), and a girl
with pink skin (Ashido).
And sitting at the end of the table, isolated
by his own toxic aura, was Katsuki Bakugo.
Izuku’s eyes locked onto his childhood abuser.
Bakugo looked terrible. The confident, explosive posture was gone. He was
hunched over his food, eating with his left hand. His right arm, the one that
had been hyper-extended by the Sludge Villain, was wrapped in thick,
restrictive medical bracing from the wrist to the elbow. The doctors had saved
the limb, but the fine motor control and the sweat glands had been irreparably
damaged. He could still create explosions, but they were a fraction of their
former power, and using them caused him agonizing nerve pain.
Worse than the physical damage was the
psychological ruin. Bakugo’s vocal cords had been scarred by the toxic sludge.
He couldn't scream anymore. His trademark, ear-splitting yells were reduced to
raspy, painful snarls. The prideful lion had been declawed and muted.
As Izuku watched, Kaminari accidentally bumped
into Bakugo’s bad arm.
Bakugo flinched, his red eyes blazing with
feral panic for a fraction of a second before morphing into rage. He slammed
his left hand onto the table. "Watch... it... spark plug," Bakugo
rasped, his voice sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together.
The other students exchanged uncomfortable
glances but quickly apologized. They pitied him. The great Katsuki Bakugo,
reduced to an object of pity.
Izuku took another sip of his juice box to
hide the psychotic, razor-sharp smile stretching across his face.
Oh, Kacchan, Izuku thought, a dark thrill sending
a shiver down his spine. You are already a ghost. You're holding onto your
pride with bloody fingernails. You realize that you are broken goods, yet you
still force yourself into the hero course because you don't know how to exist
without superiority. I won't even have to break you. I just have to hand you
the hammer and watch you smash yourself to pieces.
Suddenly, Izuku felt a chill.
He moved his eyes slightly to the right.
Sitting alone at a table near the window, eating a bowl of cold soba, was Shoto
Todoroki.
Todoroki wasn't looking at his food. His
mismatched eyes—one cold gray, one burning turquoise—were locked dead onto
Izuku. There was no emotion in Todoroki’s stare. It was an analytical,
dead-eyed gaze, like a coroner examining a corpse.
Izuku didn't flinch. He let his
"Deku" mask slip for exactly one-tenth of a second. He met Todoroki's
gaze. Izuku’s green eyes went completely dead, void of all light, radiating an
aura of pure, unadulterated apathy.
Todoroki’s eyes widened slightly, the spoon in
his hand pausing halfway to his mouth.
Then, Izuku instantly reverted. He blinked,
blushed, and nervously looked away, returning to his conversation with Iida and
Uraraka.
Shoto Todoroki, Izuku categorized the data.
Half-Cold Half-Hot. The masterpiece of Endeavor's eugenics program. He is
highly perceptive. He noticed that I am acting. But he won't say anything,
because he doesn't care. He is completely isolated by his own trauma. He hates
his fire. He hates his father. He is a powder keg of repressed hatred, wrapped
in a thin layer of ice. All he needs is a spark.
The lunch bell rang, signaling the end of the
period.
Izuku stood up, bowing repeatedly to Iida and
Uraraka. "T-thank you again! I hope you have a great afternoon in hero
training!"
"You as well, Midoriya-kun!" Iida
chopped the air. "Keep your chin up!"
Izuku walked away. As he navigated the crowds
back to the General Studies wing, his mind was already moving to the next phase
of his operation.
Profiling was only step one.
Now, he needed to provide the Motive.
That night, in the dark sanctum of his
bedroom, Izuku initiated Phase Two.
The blue light of The Panopticon reflected in
his eyes. On the primary monitor, the sleek, black-and-green face of Monorabbit
bounced around the screen like a screensaver.
"Puhuhu! Welcome back, Mastermind!"
the AI chirped through the speakers. "Did we make some new friends
today?"
"We made acquaintances, Monorabbit,"
Izuku replied flatly, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "Now, we are
going to make them bleed. Pull up the deep-dive files on the Uraraka
Construction Company and the Iida family."
"Okey-dokey! Accessing financial records,
private medical files, and municipal tax documents!"
Izuku had spent the last two months not just
hacking hero databases, but civilian ones as well. To break someone, you had to
attack what they anchored themselves to outside of their own ego.
Izuku opened a highly advanced video editing
software. It wasn't standard consumer grade; it was a proprietary program he
had stolen from a movie studio's server, capable of flawless deepfakes and
audio synthesis.
"Let's start with Uraraka," Izuku
murmured.
He pulled up the financial records of her
parents' company. They were abysmal. They were operating at a massive loss,
drowning in debt to predatory loan sharks in the underground just to keep their
equipment running and pay for Ochaco’s expensive U.A. living expenses.
Izuku didn't just want to show her the debt.
He wanted to make it visceral.
He found a recent photograph of Uraraka's
father from his social media. Using the deepfake software, Izuku manipulated
the image. He animated the face, applying a filter of exhaustion, deepening the
bags under his eyes, and digitally adding bruises to his cheekbones—the kind of
bruises one might receive from a loan shark's enforcer.
Then, using audio samples taken from
voicemails he had skimmed from Uraraka’s phone during lunch (he had bumped her
bag and cloned her SIM card via a proximity scanner in his pocket), he
synthesized her father's voice.
On the screen, the deepfake of Uraraka's
father looked into the camera, his eyes filled with despair.
"Ochaco... sweetie," the synthesized
voice cracked with exhaustion. "I'm so sorry. The men came again today. We
can't make the payments. The interest on the loans we took out for your hero
gear... it's too much. They said if we don't pay by the end of the month,
they're going to take the house. They said... they might come after you.
Please, Ochaco... why did it have to cost so much? Why couldn't you just be
normal?"
Izuku played it back. The audio was flawless.
The slight tremor in the voice, the subtle background noise of a ticking clock.
It was utterly devastating. It attacked her guilt, her fear of poverty, and
inverted her desire to help her parents into the very cause of their suffering.
"Save file: Motive_Uraraka.mp4,"
Izuku commanded.
"File saved! Ooh, that's deliciously
evil! She's gonna cry her little gravity-defying eyes out!" Monorabbit
cheered.
"Next," Izuku said, devoid of
emotion. "Iida."
Tenya Iida was anchored by legacy. His idol
was his older brother, Tensei Iida. Izuku couldn't deepfake Tensei doing
something villainous; Iida's rigid mind would immediately reject it as a fake.
He needed the truth. But truth, presented in the right context, could be far
more damaging than a lie.
Izuku hacked into the Hero Public Safety
Commission's disciplinary archives. Heroes were heavily protected by PR firms,
meaning their failures were almost always buried.
Izuku dug until he found it. Three years ago,
during a massive villain attack in Hosu City, Tensei Iida had been first on the
scene. The official report stated he valiantly evacuated thirty civilians.
The classified HPSC report, however, told a
different story.
Tensei had rushed in too fast, ignoring
protocol. His reckless speed had caused a structural collapse in a burning
building. While he saved thirty people, his actions directly resulted in the
deaths of two civilian paramedics who were trapped under the rubble his sonic
boom created. The HPSC had paid the families millions in hush money to keep the
Ingenium name spotless.
Izuku compiled the raw, unedited bodycam
footage from the police officers on the scene. It showed the paramedics
screaming under the rubble. It showed Tensei Iida, panicking, fleeing the
immediate area to save face while the building burned.
Izuku added a simple line of text at the end
of the video:
This is your legacy, Tenya. A fraud built on
dead bodies. How fast will you run when it's your turn?
"Save file: Motive_Iida.mp4."
Izuku spent the next six hours crafting
customized videos for the most prominent members of Class 1-A.
For Momo Yaoyorozu, he compiled a
psychological breakdown of her immense wealth, proving mathematically that if
she liquidated her family's assets, she could end world hunger, implying her
choice to play 'hero' was an act of supreme, narcissistic selfishness.
For Eijiro Kirishima, he found middle school
security footage of him cowering in fear while his friends were bullied,
juxtaposed with his current "manly" persona, exposing him as a coward
playing dress-up.
For Shoto Todoroki, Izuku didn't need to fake
anything. He simply hacked into the Todoroki household's private servers and
downloaded a hidden audio recording of Rei Todoroki—Shoto’s mother—weeping
hysterically in her hospital room, screaming that she could still see
Endeavor’s eyes every time she looked at her son.
By 4:00 AM, Izuku was finished.
He transferred the files onto twenty sleek,
black electronic tablets he had procured from the Detnerat shipment. They were
un-traceable, built without serial numbers.
He packed the tablets into his bag.
It was time to deliver the Trojan Horse.
U.A. High School was supposed to be a
fortress. Its security system was state-of-the-art, designed by Principal Nezu
himself. Motion sensors, thermal cameras, and biometric locks guarded every
entrance.
But a fortress is only as strong as its code.
And code was Izuku Midoriya’s native language.
At 5:00 AM, before the sun had even crested
the horizon, Izuku stood in the shadows of the woods surrounding the U.A.
campus. He pulled out a modified smartphone, hardwired with a decryption
dongle.
He didn't break the firewall. Breaking a
firewall trips an alarm. Instead, Izuku simply politely asked the system to
look the other way. He fed the U.A. mainframe a localized loop, tricking the
cameras in the 1-A hallway into broadcasting footage from exactly 24 hours prior.
He disabled the thermal sensors by adjusting the ambient temperature baseline
in the code, rendering his body heat invisible to the system.
He walked through a side entrance used for
janitorial staff, the electronic lock glowing green and clicking open before he
even touched it.
The hallways of U.A. were eerie in the dark.
The grand, sprawling architecture felt hollow. Izuku moved with silent,
practiced steps, his dark clothing blending into the shadows. He didn't breathe
heavily. His heart rate remained perfectly steady at sixty beats per minute.
He reached the 1-A classroom.
The student lockers were lined up in the
hallway, secured with electronic keypads.
Izuku approached locker number 1: Yuga Aoyama.
He plugged his dongle into the port at the
bottom of the keypad. Three seconds later, the locker clicked open. Izuku
slipped a black tablet inside, nestled perfectly on top of Aoyama's hero
costume case. He shut the locker.
Locker 2: Mina Ashido. Click. Slip. Shut.
Locker 4: Tenya Iida. Click. Slip. Shut.
Locker 5: Ochaco Uraraka. Click. Slip. Shut.
Locker 15: Shoto Todoroki. Click. Slip. Shut.
Locker 17: Katsuki Bakugo.
Izuku paused at Bakugo's locker. He stared at
the nameplate. For a moment, the ghost of the boy who used to cry when Bakugo
pushed him into the dirt surfaced. But Izuku ruthlessly crushed it down.
Izuku hadn't made a video for Bakugo. Bakugo
didn't need a video. He was already living his worst nightmare.
Instead, Izuku opened Bakugo's locker and
placed a small, simple mirror inside. On the glass, written in red marker, was
a single sentence:
Look at what you've become.
He shut the locker.
By 5:15 AM, the deed was done. Twenty lockers.
Twenty seeds of despair.
Izuku retraced his steps, exiting the building
and restoring the security systems behind him, leaving absolutely zero digital
or physical footprint. He walked to a nearby convenience store, bought a box of
strawberry juice pouches, and waited for the school day to begin.
At 8:00 AM, the students of Class 1-A began to
arrive.
Shota Aizawa, the homeroom teacher known as
Eraserhead, was currently zipped up in his yellow sleeping bag behind his
podium, supposedly asleep. In reality, he was observing his class through a
tiny slit in the fabric. Aizawa was a creature of logic and observation. He
knew the baseline behavior of every student in his room within the first five
minutes of meeting them.
The baseline for Class 1-A was loud, overly
optimistic, and excessively energetic.
But as the clock ticked toward 8:15 AM, Aizawa
felt a distinct, undeniable shift in the atmosphere of the room. It was like a
sudden drop in barometric pressure before a violent storm.
The chatter was dying down.
Aizawa unzipped his sleeping bag and stood up,
his dark eyes sweeping over the room.
Something was wrong.
Tenya Iida was sitting rigidly at his desk. He
wasn't lecturing anyone about their posture. In fact, he was staring blankly at
the blackboard, his face entirely drained of color. His hands were gripping the
edges of his desk so tightly his knuckles were white. He looked like a man who
had just watched his religion burn to the ground.
Ochaco Uraraka was at her desk, her head
bowed. She was shaking. Aizawa could see the subtle tremble in her shoulders.
Her vibrant, cheerful aura had been completely extinguished. She looked
physically ill, her hands clamped over her mouth as if trying to hold back a
sob.
Momo Yaoyorozu was staring at her hands, her
brow furrowed in deep, existential distress. Kirishima was avoiding eye contact
with everyone, his usual "manly" bravado replaced by a nervous,
defensive posture.
Even Todoroki looked different. The usual
stoic indifference was gone. The air around him was literally freezing, a layer
of frost creeping over his desk as his Quirk reacted to intense, repressed
emotional turmoil.
And Bakugo. Bakugo was staring at his desk,
his red eyes wide and bloodshot, his breathing ragged and shallow, like a
cornered, dying animal.
Aizawa’s eyes narrowed. What the hell happened
between the lockers and the classroom?
He walked down the aisle. "Iida,"
Aizawa said, his voice flat but commanding. "Is there a problem?"
Iida flinched violently, as if he had been
struck. He looked up at Aizawa, his eyes wide and panicked. "N-no, Sensei.
Everything is... everything is perfectly fine. I am ready to learn."
The lie was so blatant, so out of character
for the painfully honest boy, that Aizawa almost activated his Quirk on
instinct.
"Uraraka," Aizawa turned to her.
"You look pale. Go to Recovery Girl."
"No!" Uraraka squeaked, her voice
cracking. She stood up quickly, wiping her eyes. "I'm fine! Really! I
just... I didn't sleep well! I'm ready for hero training!"
Aizawa looked at the rest of the class. It
wasn't just Iida and Uraraka. The entire room was suffocating under a thick
blanket of paranoia. They were looking at each other with suspicion, fear, and
deep-seated insecurity. The cohesive, energetic unit he had seen yesterday was
completely shattered. They were isolated islands of distress.
"Everyone, sit down," Aizawa
commanded, his tone hardening. "If something is going on, you tell me
now."
Silence. Absolute, terrified silence.
None of them spoke. The tablets had explicitly
stated at the end of the videos: If you tell a teacher, this information goes
public.
They were trapped by their own secrets.
Trapped by their own flaws.
Aizawa scowled. He couldn't force them to
speak. But he knew, with the instincts of a seasoned underground pro, that an
external variable had been introduced to his class. Someone had gotten to them.
Outside the classroom, in the brightly lit
hallway of the U.A. first-year wing, Izuku Midoriya leaned against the wall.
He held a strawberry juice pouch in his hand,
the small plastic straw between his teeth.
He could hear the silence radiating from Class
1-A through the heavy wooden door. He could feel the tension bleeding through
the walls. It tasted sweeter than the juice.
They realize it now, Izuku thought, a wide,
euphoric smile spreading across his face, hidden from the world. They realize
that their Quirks can't protect them from the truth. They realize they are just
children playing dress-up in a world that doesn't care about them.
Izuku took a long, slow sip of his juice.
The Trojan Horse was inside the walls. The
seeds of paranoia were planted. All it would take now was a little bit of
pressure, and the illustrious Class 1-A would tear themselves apart before the
villains even had to lift a finger.
The bell rang, echoing through the halls.
Izuku tossed his empty juice pouch into a
nearby trash can. He turned and began the long walk back to the General Studies
wing, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, whistling a cheerful, entirely
off-key tune.
The Ultimate Despair was having a wonderful
first week of school.