What If Deku Broke Out Of The Matrix

 

 

The world was a lie painted in bright, primary colors.

 

Izuku Midoriya sat in the back row of his third-year classroom at Aldera Junior High, his eyes fixed not on the chalkboard, but on the dust motes dancing in the shaft of afternoon sunlight cutting through the window. Most people saw dust. Izuku saw pixels. He watched the way the light refracted, tracing the geometry of the illumination. He counted the milliseconds it took for a shadow to stretch across the linoleum floor when a cloud passed over the sun.

 

One thousand, two hundred, and forty-two milliseconds.

 

It was too slow. Light didn't lag. The sun was ninety-three million miles away, and its photons traveled at a constant, unbreakable speed. But here, in this room, the light lagged. It was a stutter in reality, a microscopic hesitation that no one else seemed to notice. No one else cared.

 

Why would they? They were too busy dreaming of capes and costumes.

 

"Since you're all third years, it's time for you to think seriously about your futures!" the homeroom teacher announced, his voice carrying that practiced, artificial enthusiasm that always set Izuku’s teeth on edge. The teacher shuffled a stack of career aptitude forms. "I could pass out these printouts, but… why bother? I know you all want to go to the Hero track!"

 

With a theatrical flourish, the teacher threw the papers into the air.

 

The classroom erupted. Izuku watched, his expression blank, as his classmates activated their Quirks in a chaotic, celebratory display. A boy in the front row elongated his fingers into wooden tendrils. A girl to Izuku's left exhaled a plume of pink, glittering smoke. Another student caused his textbook to levitate three inches off the desk.

 

Quirks. The ultimate biological lottery. The supposed next stage of human evolution. Eighty percent of the global population possessed these superhuman abilities, plunging the world into a comic-book reality where "Hero" was a legitimate, government-salaried profession, and "Villain" was a daily nuisance.

 

To Izuku, it was mathematical heresy.

 

He stared at the girl producing the pink smoke. He had run the calculations a hundred times in his notebooks. For the human body to generate that volume of gas, her lungs would need to operate at an internal temperature of over four hundred degrees Celsius, and she would need to consume roughly ten thousand calories an hour to convert mass into that much particulate matter. Yet, she was perfectly cool, perfectly normal. Her Quirk violated the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. It created something out of absolutely nothing.

 

It was as if someone had just typed a cheat code into the universe.

 

"Hey, Teach! Don't lump me in with these background characters!"

 

The arrogant, booming voice cut through the clamor. Izuku didn't have to look up to know who it was. Katsuki Bakugo was leaning back in his chair, his feet kicked up on his desk, a smirk plastered across his face.

 

"I'm going to U.A. High School," Bakugo declared, his red eyes gleaming with absolute, unquestioning certainty. "I've aced all the mock tests. I'm the only one at this crappy school who stands a chance. I'll even surpass All Might and become the best Hero out there! My name will be carved into the top of the leaderboards!"

 

Leaderboards. Izuku flinched at the word. Bakugo treated life like a video game, mostly because the world rewarded him for it.

 

"Oh, right. Midoriya wants to go to U.A. too, right?" the teacher remarked, glancing at his clipboard.

 

The classroom went dead silent. Then, it exploded into laughter.

 

"Midoriya? No way!"

"You can't get into the Hero Course without a Quirk!"

"What's a Quirkless loser gonna do? Hack the entrance exam?"

 

Izuku kept his eyes glued to his desk. He shrank into himself, not out of fear, but out of a profound sense of alienation. He was "Quirkless." He was part of the twenty percent of the population born without a genetic abnormality. Society looked at him with pity, viewing him as an un-evolved relic of a bygone era.

 

Bakugo slammed his hands down on Izuku’s desk. The force of the impact was accompanied by a sharp CRACK and a flash of heat. Bakugo's Quirk—Explosion. He sweated a nitroglycerin-like substance and could ignite it at will.

 

"Listen up, Deku," Bakugo snarled, smoke curling from his palms. 'Deku'—the useless one. "You're worse than the rest of these rejects. You're completely unequipped. You think you can rub shoulders with me? You think a glitch like you belongs in my world?"

 

A glitch. The word echoed in Izuku's mind. He looked at Bakugo's hand. He looked at the scorch mark left on the laminate desk.

 

Then, Izuku looked closely at the smoke rising from Bakugo's palm. The smoke was drifting upward, as it should. But the ceiling fan was spinning counter-clockwise, pushing air down. The smoke should have dispersed, flattened by the downdraft. Instead, it moved through the turbulent air as if the fan didn't exist, passing right through the current in a perfect, pre-rendered animation loop.

 

Izuku’s heart did a strange flutter. Another anomaly.

 

"I-I'm not trying to compete with you, Kacchan," Izuku said, forcing his voice to tremble, playing the part of the cowardly Quirkless boy perfectly. It was a survival mechanism. "I just... I want to try. That's all."

 

"Try? What can you try?" Bakugo grabbed Izuku by the shoulder of his uniform, the fabric singeing. "If you want to be a hero so badly, there's a quick way to do it. Take a swan dive off the roof and pray you're born with a Quirk in your next life!"

 

The cruelty of the words didn't sting Izuku the way they used to. He just stared into Bakugo's red eyes. They were so vibrant, so utterly devoid of doubt. Bakugo believed in this world. He believed in the heroes, the villains, the system. He was the perfect citizen of this reality.

 

"Okay, Bakugo, settle down," the teacher said lazily, not even bothering to look up from his papers.

 

The bell rang. The artificial school day ended.

 

 

 

The streets of Musutafu were a sensory overload of neon signs, holographic advertisements, and bustling crowds. Everywhere Izuku looked, the world screamed of Heroes. Billboards featured the Pro-Hero Mt. Lady endorsing a new brand of shampoo. A massive LED screen on a skyscraper played a loop of the 1 Hero, All Might, smiling his blinding, impossible smile, telling the citizens that everything was fine because he was here.

 

Izuku walked with his head down, his yellow backpack slung over his shoulder, a heavily modified, matte-black tablet clutched to his chest.

 

By day, he was Izuku Midoriya, the Quirkless punching bag of Aldera Junior High.

 

By night, he was 'Deku.' But not the Deku that Bakugo meant. In the deepest, darkest, most encrypted corners of the dark web, 'Deku' was a ghost. He was an urban legend among data brokers and underground information networks. He was the hacker who could crack HPSC (Hero Public Safety Commission) databases like they were cheap padlocks.

 

Izuku didn't hack for money. He hacked for the truth.

 

For the past year, Izuku had been obsessively cataloging what he called "System Errors." It started when he was a child, watching a video of All Might saving people from a disaster. While everyone else watched the hero, a young Izuku had noticed a piece of falling debris. A two-ton concrete slab had been falling at terminal velocity, but when All Might leaped to catch it, the concrete seemed to freeze in mid-air for exactly 0.4 seconds before All Might's hands made contact.

 

Physics didn't pause for dramatic effect. But in this world, it did.

 

A sudden explosion rocked the street corner ahead. The crowd gasped and immediately pulled out their smartphones, rushing toward the danger rather than away from it. It was the afternoon entertainment. A Villain attack.

 

Izuku pushed through the crowd, drawn not by the spectacle, but by the opportunity to gather data.

 

At Tatooin Station, a massive Villain—a man who had mutated into a towering, shark-like monster—was roaring, swatting away police officers. The local Pro-Heroes had already arrived. Death Arms was holding the police line, while Kamui Woods, a hero made of living timber, was swinging from the streetlamps.

 

"Stand back, citizens!" Death Arms shouted. "Leave it to the Pros!"

 

Izuku stood at the very front of the crowd. He didn't cheer. He didn't watch the fight. He turned his attention to a large pane of mirrored glass on a nearby department store window. The glass reflected the battle behind him.

 

Kamui Woods launched his ultimate move. Pre-emptive Binding: Lacquered Chain Prison! Massive branches erupted from his arms, shooting across the plaza to entangle the giant villain.

 

Izuku watched the reflection in the glass.

 

In reality, Kamui's branches were surging forward at roughly eighty miles per hour. But in the reflection on the glass, the branches weren't moving fluidly. They were stuttering. The rendering of the reflection couldn't keep up with the complexity of the Quirk's rapid mass generation. The branches in the mirror snapped from one position to the next, missing frames of animation.

 

Got you, Izuku thought. He tapped a sequence onto his tablet, recording the temporal displacement between the physical event and the reflective rendering. It was a localized drop in the environment's processing power.

 

"Look out!" someone screamed.

 

The shark Villain, enraged by the binding, roared and swung his massive tail, smashing into a fire hydrant. The metal sheared off, and a geyser of high-pressure water erupted into the air, raining down on the crowd.

 

Water splashed across Izuku's face and tablet. He wiped the screen frantically, making sure the data was saved. As he wiped the water from his eyes, he looked through the cascading spray of the broken hydrant.

 

Through the curtain of falling water, the world looked distorted, warped. But for a split second, as Izuku stared through the droplets, the illusion of the city vanished. The neon signs, the paved road, the cheering crowd, Kamui Woods—they were all gone.

 

Instead, Izuku saw a dark, desolate grid. He saw cascading lines of vibrant, sickly green code falling like digital rain against a black void. The Villain, the Heroes, the bystanders—they weren't made of flesh and blood. They were dense clusters of green symbols, tightly wound algorithms of data interacting with each other.

 

Izuku gasped, stumbling backward. He blinked rapidly.

 

The vision vanished. The city returned. The water was just water. The crowd was cheering as the giant hero, Mt. Lady, suddenly arrived, crushing the villain under her massive foot.

 

Izuku’s breath came in short, jagged gasps. His heart hammered against his ribs. A rendering engine crash, he thought wildly. The water physics, combined with the sudden introduction of Mt. Lady's massive polygon count... the system couldn't render the visual overlay for a fraction of a second. I saw the wireframe.

 

He looked around, terrified. Did anyone else see it?

 

The crowd was clapping, taking photos of Mt. Lady’s rear end. They were entirely oblivious.

 

But as Izuku scanned the periphery of the crowd, his eyes locked onto something that made his blood run cold.

 

Standing in the alleyway opposite the station, entirely ignored by the police and the cheering mob, were two men. They wore identical, immaculately tailored black suits. They had no hair, no distinct facial features, and their skin was a sickly, pale gray—the color of dead ash. They wore dark sunglasses, even in the shade of the alley.

 

They weren't looking at the Heroes. They weren't looking at the Villain.

 

They were looking directly at Izuku.

 

A chill spiked down Izuku's spine. They were perfectly still, their posture rigid, unnatural. Then, in perfect, terrifying synchronization, both men tilted their heads a few degrees to the right.

 

They know I saw it.

 

Izuku didn't wait to see what they would do. He turned and sprinted in the opposite direction, pushing ruthlessly through the crowd. He didn't look back until he was three blocks away, his lungs burning, his legs shaking. When he finally dared to glance over his shoulder, the men in black were gone.

 

 

 

"I'm home," Izuku called out softly, locking the door of his family's small apartment and sliding the deadbolt into place. He leaned against the door, trying to calm his racing heart.

 

"Welcome home, Izuku!" his mother, Inko Midoriya, called from the kitchen.

 

Izuku walked down the narrow hallway. Inko was standing at the stove, humming a cheerful tune, stirring a pot of curry. She looked so warm, so comforting, so real.

 

"How was school today, honey?" she asked, turning to smile at him.

 

"It was fine, Mom," Izuku lied.

 

"Did you and Katsuki get along?"

 

"Yeah. We're fine."

 

"That's good. You know, when I was your age, I always hoped you two would end up at U.A. together. But the world is a big place, Izuku. There are plenty of ways to help people that don't involve being a Hero."

 

Izuku stared at her. She had said those exact words to him, in that exact cadence, with that exact inflection, three times this week. It wasn't just repetitive; it was scripted. Like a non-player character exhausting her dialogue tree to keep the protagonist grounded.

 

A wave of profound sadness washed over him. He loved his mother. He loved her fiercely. But lately, as he dove deeper into his research, he couldn't shake the horrifying thought: Is she real? Am I real?

 

"I'll be in my room, Mom. I have a lot of homework," Izuku said softly.

 

"Dinner will be ready in an hour, dear!"

 

Izuku entered his bedroom and locked the door behind him.

 

His room used to be a shrine to the Hero Society. Posters of All Might had covered every square inch of the walls. Action figures, limited edition comics, replica support gear. It had been the room of a fanatic.

 

Now, it looked like a server farm.

 

The posters had been torn down, replaced by corkboards covered in printed spectrograms, string-connected photographs of Pro-Heroes, and pages of dense algebraic equations. The center of the room was dominated by a massive, custom-built computer rig. Five high-definition monitors were arranged in a semi-circle around a mechanical keyboard. Heavy-duty cooling fans hummed, keeping the overworked, liquid-cooled processors from melting down. Cables snaked across the floor like synthetic vines.

 

Izuku dropped his backpack, threw his tablet onto the desk, and collapsed into his ergonomic chair. He cracked his knuckles, took a deep breath, and booted up the system.

 

The screens flickered to life. No Windows. No standard OS. Izuku ran a custom, heavily encrypted Linux-based operating system he had coded from scratch.

 

He connected the tablet to the mainframe and began transferring the data he had recorded at Tatooin Station.

 

His fingers flew across the keyboard, a blur of motion. He didn't need to look at the keys. He was in his element. Here, in the glow of the monitors, he wasn't the Quirkless loser. He was a god of information.

 

He pulled up the video of Kamui Woods' reflection and ran it through a diagnostic algorithm. He isolated the stuttering frames. He ran a physics simulation alongside it.

 

Command: Execute Spatial_Discrepancy_Check.exe

Target: Vector 4, Y-Axis.

 

The computer processed the data. A red warning box popped up on the center screen.

 

ERROR: MASS TO ENERGY CONVERSION EXCEEDS ENVIRONMENTAL PARAMETERS. TARGET 'KAMUI_WOODS' GENERATED 4,000 LBS OF CELLULOSE MATTER IN 0.8 SECONDS. SOURCE OF MASS: UNKNOWN.

 

"Unknown," Izuku muttered, spinning his chair. "Because it doesn't exist. It's not biological. It's injected code."

 

Izuku had been compiling this data for months. The conclusion was insane, horrifying, and utterly inescapable. "Quirks" were not a genetic mutation. The glowing baby in Qing-qing City a century ago wasn't an evolutionary leap. It was a software patch.

 

Humanity was living inside a simulation.

 

A massively multiplayer, universally shared, incredibly detailed digital prison. The "Hero Society" was just the theme of the current server patch. A brilliant, manipulative distraction. If everyone was obsessing over heroes, villains, rankings, and spectacular fights, no one would look at the sky and wonder where the stars went. No one would look at the physics of the world and realize it was all mathematically impossible.

 

And Izuku? He was Quirkless. He had no injected code. He had no superhuman abilities bounding him to the server's specific physics engine. In a world of programmed superhumans, the boy with no code was the only one who could see the strings.

 

Izuku turned back to his monitors. If Quirks were code, then who wrote it? Who were the admins? And more importantly, were there other people who had figured this out?

 

He opened a secured, multi-layered proxy browser. He bounced his IP address through thirteen different servers across the globe—from a fake server farm in Russia to a satellite relay over the Atlantic—before finally accessing the Hero Public Safety Commission's internal intranet. It was illegal. It was treason. If they caught him, he would be sent to Tartarus, the maximum-security prison, for the rest of his life.

 

But he was 'Deku.' They couldn't catch him.

 

He bypassed the Commission's first firewall with a brute-force algorithm he had designed to mimic a routine diagnostic check. He slipped past the secondary ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) by spoofing the digital signature of the HPSC President.

 

He was in. The motherlode.

 

Izuku began searching the classified databases. He wasn't looking for Hero rankings or Villain capture records. He searched for specific keywords: Anomaly. System Failure. Sentient Glitch. Reality Breach.

 

Hundreds of thousands of files populated, but most were mundane—classified reports of Quirks going out of control, or minor cover-ups of Pro-Hero scandals.

 

He narrowed the search. He cross-referenced his keywords with "Maximum Priority" and "Immediate Termination."

 

The search engine spun for three agonizing minutes. Then, a single file appeared.

 

The encryption on it was unlike anything Izuku had ever seen. It wasn't a standard 256-bit encryption. It was something... organic. A fractal encryption that constantly shifted its own password requirements every millisecond.

 

Izuku leaned forward, a fierce grin spreading across his face. "You want to play?" he whispered.

 

He opened a command terminal and began writing a counter-script, a mirroring algorithm that would adapt to the fractal's changes and match its rhythm. His fingers danced. The code reflected in his green eyes. For twenty minutes, the only sound in the room was the aggressive clacking of his mechanical keyboard and the whirring of the cooling fans.

 

Match sequence. Anticipate fractal bloom. Inject skeleton key.

Enter.

 

The screen flashed green.

 

ACCESS GRANTED.

 

A dossier opened. The file was highly redacted, heavily classified, and flagged with a black border—a designation reserved for existential threats to the state.

 

SUBJECT: AIZAWA, SHOTA.

ALIAS: ERASERHEAD.

STATUS: LEVEL 5 TERRORIST / REALITY ANOMALY.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: OMEGA.

 

Izuku's eyes widened. He knew the name Eraserhead. He was a deeply underground, obscure Pro-Hero who avoided the media. But according to this file, Eraserhead hadn't been a Pro-Hero for over a decade. The man parading around on TV with that name was a stand-in, an actor used to cover up the truth.

 

The real Shota Aizawa was the most wanted man in the world.

 

Izuku scrolled rapidly through the file, reading the HPSC's frantic reports.

 

...Subject Aizawa possesses a supposed 'Quirk' that allows him to nullify the Quirks of others through visual contact. However, recent data-mining suggests this is a catastrophic misunderstanding of his abilities.

 

...When Aizawa makes visual contact, he is not biologically suppressing a Quirk factor. He is actively severing the target's connection to the local physics server. He is a walking firewall. He deletes the code of the Quirk from reality for as long as he maintains a visual lock.

 

...Aizawa leads a radical terrorist cell known as the 'Zion Resistance.' Their stated goal is the complete destruction of the Hero Society and the 'awakening' of the civilian populace. He claims the world is an illusion.

 

Izuku stopped breathing.

 

He claims the world is an illusion.

 

He wasn't crazy. He wasn't alone. There was someone else out there who saw the stuttering reflections, who saw the missing frames, who saw the green code behind the curtain of reality.

 

Izuku scrolled to the bottom of the file. There was an audio attachment, labeled as an intercepted transmission from Aizawa, recorded three months ago.

 

Izuku clicked play.

 

A voice, rough, exhausted, yet filled with a terrifying, absolute conviction, filled the bedroom through the speakers.

 

"If you're listening to this, you already know something is wrong. You've felt it your entire life. You look at the Heroes soaring through the sky, you look at the Villains tearing up the streets, and a part of your mind—the part they haven't put to sleep yet—tells you it's a game. It's a circus designed to keep you watching the center ring while they harvest you in the dark."

 

Izuku gripped the armrests of his chair.

 

"They call me a terrorist because I want to tear down the circus tent," Aizawa's voice continued. "The Quirk you think makes you special? It's a chain. It binds you to their rules. But there is a way out. We are looking for the ones who can break the code. The ones who are unwritten. If you can hear this... wake up."

 

The audio file ended.

 

Izuku sat perfectly still. His mind was racing a million miles an hour. Aizawa. The Zion Resistance. An unwritten code. He had to find them. He had to figure out how to contact this man.

 

Suddenly, the temperature in Izuku's bedroom plummeted.

 

It was an instant, unnatural drop. The air grew so cold that Izuku could see his own breath pluming in front of his face.

 

The cooling fans on his computer rig shrieked, spinning up to their absolute maximum RPM, sounding like jet engines preparing for takeoff.

 

"What the...?" Izuku reached for his keyboard, checking his system temperatures. They were skyrocketing. The CPU was at 90 degrees Celsius and climbing.

 

Then, Monitor 5 went completely black.

 

Izuku frowned, tapping the spacebar. Nothing.

 

Monitor 4 went black.

 

"No, no, no," Izuku muttered, typing a hard-reset command. He was being traced. The HPSC must have tracked his intrusion. He reached for the physical ethernet cable to rip it out of the wall.

 

Before his hand could touch the cable, Monitor 3 and Monitor 2 went black.

 

Only the center monitor remained on. Izuku stared at it. The HPSC logo didn't appear. There was no police warning, no IP lockdown screen.

 

The screen was pitch black. In the top left corner, a single, glowing green cursor blinked.

 

Blink. Blink. Blink.

 

Izuku slowly pulled his hand back from the ethernet cable. He was entirely disconnected from the network—he had instituted an automatic hardware kill-switch if temperatures exceeded 95 degrees. The router was dead. The modem was off.

 

But the screen was still on.

 

Someone wasn't hacking his network. They were hacking the space-time inside his bedroom.

 

Text began to type itself onto the black screen, the green letters appearing one by one, accompanied by the sharp, synthetic clack of a keystroke.

 

Wake up, Deku.

 

Izuku’s breath hitched in his throat. His real name wasn't Deku. His hacker alias was Deku. But Katsuki Bakugo also called him Deku. It was a nexus point of his identity.

 

Izuku tentatively placed his fingers on the keyboard. He typed back.

 

Who are you?

 

The cursor blinked for a moment. Then, the text erased itself, replaced by a new sentence.

 

The Matrix has you.

 

Izuku swallowed hard. What is the Matrix? he typed.

 

The screen cleared again.

 

Follow the Zero-Gravity girl.

 

"Zero-Gravity girl?" Izuku whispered aloud. What did that mean? A Pro-Hero? A vigilante?

 

Suddenly, a loud, sharp sound echoed through the apartment.

 

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

 

Izuku jumped, nearly knocking over his chair. It was coming from the front door of the apartment.

 

The green text on the screen vanished. A new message appeared.

 

They are coming for you, Izuku.

 

Knock, knock.

 

The computer screen abruptly shut off, leaving the room illuminated only by the faint orange glow of the streetlights filtering through the blinds. The cooling fans spun down, plunging the room into an eerie silence.

 

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

 

"Coming!" Inko's voice echoed from the hallway. "Who could be visiting at this hour?"

 

Izuku's blood turned to ice. They are coming for you.

 

He scrambled to his window and peered through a small gap in the blinds, looking down at the street four stories below. Parked illegally in front of the apartment complex were three identical, matte-black sedans. There were no license plates.

 

"Izuku?"

 

His mother's voice drifted through his locked bedroom door. She sounded confused. She sounded frightened.

 

"Izuku, honey? There are... there are some men here to see you. They say they're from the government."

 

Izuku backed away from the window. He moved silently to his bedroom door and pressed his ear against the thin wood. He could hear the heavy, synchronized thud of footsteps entering the small apartment living room.

 

"We apologize for the intrusion, Mrs. Midoriya," a voice said.

 

Izuku clamped a hand over his mouth to muffle a gasp. The voice was deep, resonant, and entirely devoid of human inflection. It sounded like a text-to-speech program synthesizing a human voice perfectly, but missing the soul.

 

"We are looking for Izuku Midoriya," a second voice said. It sounded exactly like the first. The exact same pitch. The exact same timbre.

 

"He... he's just a boy," Inko stammered. "What has he done? Is he in trouble?"

 

"Izuku Midoriya has been flagged as a Class-A Anomaly," the first voice replied. "He is required for questioning regarding the theft of classified Commission property. Where is he?"

 

Izuku didn't wait to hear his mother's response. He dropped to the floor and peeked through the small crack beneath his bedroom door.

 

From his vantage point, he could see the hallway leading to the living room. He saw his mother's slippered feet backing away nervously.

 

And then he saw them.

 

Standing in the hallway were the men. They wore the same immaculately tailored black suits he had seen at the villain fight hours earlier. But now, in the sterile fluorescent light of the apartment hallway, Izuku could see the horrifying details.

 

Their skin wasn't just pale; it was textured like rough cement. Where their eyes should have been, they wore perfectly opaque, black sunglasses that seemed fused to their skin. But the most terrifying detail was their shadows.

 

The hallway light was directly above them. Their shadows should have pooled at their feet. Instead, their shadows stretched long and distorted down the wall, reaching toward Izuku's door like dark, grasping fingers, completely defying the angle of the light source.

 

They weren't human. They were antivirus software. They were the system's immune response, sent to purge a corrupted file.

 

Sent to purge him.

 

"He is in that room," the second voice stated. It wasn't a question. The man's head snapped perfectly toward Izuku's bedroom door, as if he could see through the wood, through the code itself.

 

The heavy footsteps began to move down the hallway toward Izuku's door.

 

Izuku scrambled backward, his mind racing. There was no fire escape. The drop from the window was four stories—a fatal fall for a Quirkless human with no code to manipulate gravity or impact. He was trapped.

 

He looked at his dead computer screen. He looked at the window.

 

Follow the Zero-Gravity girl.

 

The doorknob to his bedroom began to turn. The lock clicked, groaning as an impossible, localized kinetic force was applied to the metal, twisting it like warm butter.

 

The Matrix had found him. And Izuku Midoriya was entirely out of time.

 

The twisting doorknob groaned, the metallic sound stretching into an agonizing, low-frequency squeal. It wasn't turning through normal mechanical force. The metal was warping, molecularly rearranging itself to bypass the physical lock. Heat radiated from the brass, glowing a dull, angry orange in the dim light of Izuku’s bedroom.

 

Izuku Midoriya scrambled backward, his socks slipping on the hardwood floor until his spine slammed against his custom-built computer tower. His mind, usually a fortress of cold logic and high-speed data processing, was fracturing.

 

They are coming for you, Izuku.

 

The words from the terminal still burned in his mind's eye.

 

"Izuku?" his mother’s voice called out from the hallway. It sounded strange now. The audio file of her voice was playing, but it lacked the ambient resonance of the apartment. It sounded flat, like a voice on a cheap radio. "Honey, open the door. These nice men just want to talk."

 

"Mom, run!" Izuku screamed, his voice cracking. "Get out of the apartment!"

 

"I don't understand, Izuku," the voice repeated, the inflection absolutely identical to her previous sentence. "Honey, open the door. These nice men just want to talk."

 

A cold horror washed over him. That wasn't his mother anymore. The system had hijacked her avatar, reducing her complex neural network down to a two-sentence loop to facilitate the Agents' entry.

 

With a sickening snap, the doorknob liquefied, raining molten brass onto the floorboards. The heavy wooden door blew off its hinges, rocketing into the room as if kicked by a titan. It smashed into Izuku’s bedframe, splintering the wood into a hundred pieces.

 

Standing in the doorway was the Agent.

 

Up close, the entity was even more terrifying. It stood six foot five, its dark suit immaculate, untouched by the shrapnel of the door. The gray, cement-like skin of its face was perfectly smooth, devoid of pores or wrinkles. The pitch-black sunglasses reflected Izuku’s terrified face.

 

"Izuku Midoriya," the Agent said. The mouth didn't move quite right; the audio was out of sync with the lip animation by exactly 0.2 seconds. "You are in violation of the Hero Public Safety Commission's End User License Agreement. You are scheduled for immediate deletion."

 

The Agent stepped forward. The floorboards didn't creak beneath its feet. It had no simulated weight, yet its presence warped the air around it.

 

Izuku didn't think; he acted on pure, desperate adrenaline. He grabbed the heavy, liquid-cooled external hard drive sitting on his desk—weighing nearly fifteen pounds—and hurled it directly at the Agent's face.

 

The Agent didn't flinch. It simply tilted its head three degrees to the left. The hard drive sailed past, moving in agonizingly slow motion, and smashed into the hallway wall behind it. The entity had edited its own spatial coordinates faster than the physics engine could render the hard drive's trajectory.

 

"Inefficient," the Agent droned.

 

The Agent lunged. It didn't step; it simply appeared across the room, its gray hand wrapping around Izuku's throat with the force of an industrial vice.

 

Izuku choked, his feet leaving the ground. The grip was impossibly cold. He kicked, his sneakers connecting with the Agent's chest, but it felt like kicking a solid steel bulkhead. Black spots danced in his vision. The code in the room began to fray; the edges of the posters on Izuku's wall jittered, tearing into green pixels as the Agent's localized deletion protocol began to consume Izuku's digital avatar.

 

Think, Deku. Think!

 

His right hand flailed blindly across his desk, knocking over empty energy drink cans and notebooks, until his fingers brushed against cold metal. His custom, high-voltage mechanical keyboard. It was plugged directly into the wall's main electrical artery, modified to draw excess power for his server farm.

 

Izuku gripped the keyboard, his thumb finding the exposed copper wiring he had spliced yesterday. With the last ounce of his strength, he jammed the exposed copper directly into the liquid-cooling reservoir of his PC, simultaneously ripping the main power cord from the tower.

 

Water and raw, unmitigated electricity met in a catastrophic embrace.

 

BANG.

 

The power surge acted like a localized EMP. The room exploded in a shower of blue sparks and boiling coolant. The sudden spike in environmental data overloaded the sector's localized physics rendering.

 

For a microsecond, the Agent's code lagged. Its grip loosened by a fraction of a millimeter.

 

It was all Izuku needed. He twisted his body, slipping out of the entity's grasp, tearing his uniform shirt in the process. He hit the floor, coughing violently, and didn't stop moving. He dove toward the window.

 

"Warning. Hardware failure detected," the Agent stated, its voice warping into a digital screech as it recalibrated.

 

Izuku slammed his hands against the window sash, shoving it upward. The drop was four stories. Below him was a narrow, rain-slicked alleyway littered with dumpsters and fire escapes. If he miscalculated, he would break his legs, or worse.

 

No code. No limits, a voice echoed in his head. Aizawa's voice from the audio file.

 

Izuku threw himself out the window.

 

The wind rushed past his ears. The neon lights of Musutafu blurred into streaks of magenta and cyan. He didn't aim for the ground; he aimed for the rusted fire escape of the adjacent apartment building. He threw his arms out, his fingers hooking onto the cold, wet iron of the railing.

 

The impact wrenched his shoulders, threatening to dislocate his joints. He screamed, his body slamming against the metal stairs. He hung there, dangling three stories above the concrete, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

 

He looked up.

 

Standing in his bedroom window, looking down at him, were two Agents. They didn't look angry. They didn't look frustrated. They simply stared.

 

Then, the first Agent stepped out of the window.

 

It didn't fall. It stepped onto the vertical brick wall of the building as if it were flat ground. Gravity—a fundamental software parameter of the simulation—had simply been toggled off for the entity. The Agent began to sprint down the side of the building, its black shoes echoing with sickening thuds against the brick.

 

"Oh, God," Izuku whimpered.

 

He hauled himself over the railing and began scrambling down the fire escape. His sneakers slipped on the wet iron. He vaulted over the last railing, dropping fifteen feet into the alley below. He hit a pile of discarded cardboard boxes, the impact knocking the wind out of him.

 

He didn't have time to recover. He rolled to his feet, ignoring the sharp pain in his ribs, and broke into a dead sprint.

 

The rain began to fall. It wasn't a natural drizzle. It was a torrential, blinding downpour that started instantly, without warning. The system was trying to mask the rendering errors the Agents were causing, flooding the environment with weather effects to excuse the dropping framerates.

 

Izuku bolted out of the alley and into the bustling streets of the entertainment district.

 

The neon signs bled into the puddles on the asphalt. The NPCs—the citizens of Musutafu—were moving strangely. The system was re-routing them, creating human barricades to slow him down. People with umbrellas stopped dead in their tracks, forming a solid wall of bodies across the sidewalk.

 

Left, Izuku thought, his mind mapping the city grid he had memorized from his hacking sessions. Sector 4, Node 12. The subway.

 

He veered sharply into oncoming traffic, dodging a speeding taxi. The driver didn't even honk; the NPC was locked in its driving animation, completely unresponsive to the anomaly in its path. Izuku vaulted over the hood of a parked car, slipping on the wet metal, and sprinted down a narrow pedestrian street lined with closed izakayas.

 

He glanced over his shoulder.

 

The Agent was there. It was running through the crowd, but it wasn't dodging the people. It was moving through them. As the Agent's shoulder clipped a pedestrian, the civilian's avatar briefly pixelated and glitched, absorbing the collision without moving.

 

They’re ignoring collision models, Izuku realized, his panic surging. They don't have to navigate the maze. They are the maze.

 

Izuku reached into his pocket and pulled out his heavily encrypted smartphone. It was his only lifeline. He frantically booted up a proprietary network scanner he had coded. The screen flooded with green numbers, representing the local server load.

 

"Come on, come on," he muttered, his thumb swiping across the screen as he ran.

 

He needed a dead zone. A place where the Matrix's processing power was spread too thin, where the Agents' tracking algorithms would lose their lock.

 

The subway station. Millions of data points interacting simultaneously—train schedules, automated ticket gates, complex underground architectural rendering. It was a massive resource hog on the system.

 

The entrance to Tatooin Station loomed ahead. It was a massive, subterranean maw glowing with harsh white fluorescent light.

 

Izuku didn't slow down. He took the concrete stairs three at a time, his legs burning with lactic acid. He burst into the main concourse.

 

It was completely, terrifyingly empty.

 

No commuters. No homeless people sleeping on the benches. No trains rumbling in the distance. The digital clock above the platforms was frozen at 11:59 PM. The system had purged the sector to allocate processing power entirely to the Agents.

 

Izuku froze, his chest heaving. The silence was deafening, broken only by the rhythmic dripping of a leaky pipe echoing across the tiles.

 

He looked at his phone. The network scanner was completely red.

 

NO SIGNAL. SECTOR QUARANTINE ACTIVE.

 

"No..." Izuku whispered.

 

"End of the line, Midoriya."

 

Izuku spun around. Standing at the top of the stairs, blocking his only exit, were three Agents. They stood shoulder to shoulder, identical in every horrific detail.

 

"Your localized code is corrupted," the center Agent said, stepping slowly down the stairs. "You perceive errors where there is only design. You reject the Hero protocol. This is a terminal virus."

 

Izuku backed away, his eyes darting wildly around the empty concourse. To his left: the turnstiles. Beyond them: the escalators leading down to the tracks.

 

He bolted for the turnstiles.

 

"Execute suppression protocol," the Agent droned.

 

The Agent on the right raised a hand. Suddenly, the tiles beneath Izuku’s feet exploded.

 

It wasn't a bomb. The floor simply erupted into a geyser of sharp, jagged stone spikes. The Agent was manipulating the very architecture of the world, a "Quirk" that the system classified as 'Earth Manipulation,' but Izuku saw for what it truly was: a dynamic reshaping of the environment's polygon mesh.

 

A shard of tile sliced through Izuku’s pant leg, gashing his calf. He cried out, stumbling forward and crashing through the automated turnstiles. The glass gates shattered into a thousand low-resolution fragments that vanished before they hit the ground.

 

Izuku dragged himself forward, clutching his bleeding leg. He crawled toward the lip of the escalator, leaving a trail of crimson on the pristine white tiles.

 

The three Agents descended upon him, their footsteps perfectly synchronized.

 

The center Agent stood over Izuku. It reached into its suit jacket and pulled out something that shouldn't exist in the Hero Society. A massive, silver Desert Eagle handgun. It was a relic from the old world, a piece of hardcoded deletion software shaped like a weapon.

 

"Goodbye, Mr. Midoriya," the Agent said, aiming the barrel directly at Izuku’s forehead.

 

Izuku squeezed his eyes shut. Is this it? Is this how my code ends?

 

Follow the Zero-Gravity girl.

 

A deafening roar echoed through the subterranean chamber. It wasn't a train. It sounded like a jet engine strapped to a chainsaw.

 

The Agent's head snapped toward the sound.

 

Bursting from the tunnel on the far side of the concourse, flying through the air at an impossible speed, was a sleek, matte-black motorcycle. It wasn't riding on the floor; it was driving along the curved wall of the station, defying gravity.

 

Riding the bike was a girl.

 

She wore a skin-tight black leather bodysuit with subtle, glowing pink accents lining the seams. A tinted, high-tech visor covered the top half of her face, but beneath it, her jaw was set in a fierce, determined grimace. Short, auburn hair whipped wildly around her helmet.

 

"Trinity protocol active," the girl muttered, her voice carrying through a localized comms channel.

 

She hit the brakes, throwing the bike into a vicious spin. The motorcycle launched off the wall, hurtling directly toward the trio of Agents.

 

The center Agent raised its gun, tracking the airborne vehicle with mathematical precision. It fired three shots.

 

The bullets didn't travel like normal projectiles. They left visible ripples in the air, leaving trails of distorted code in their wake.

 

The girl didn't flinch. As the bullets closed in, she simply let go of the handlebars. She vaulted off the motorcycle, flipping through the air with a grace that made the system's physics engine weep.

 

The bullets struck the motorcycle, detonating the fuel tank in a massive, blossoming fireball of orange and black.

 

The girl flew through the explosion, untouched by the flames. She landed squarely on the shoulders of the center Agent, her thighs locking around its neck.

 

"Hey, suits," she said, her voice laced with a thick, undeniable confidence. "Your mass parameters are a joke."

 

She placed her gloved hands on the Agent's temples. The gloves had strange, pink pads on the fingertips.

 

BEEP.

 

A high-frequency tone rang out. The Agent's eyes widened behind its sunglasses.

 

Instantly, the Agent shot upward, launching toward the ceiling as if fired from a cannon. The girl had rewritten the entity's gravity code, reducing its mass to absolute zero. The Agent smashed face-first into the concrete ceiling, its code glitching wildly as it remained pinned to the roof, unable to pull itself down.

 

The girl dropped to the floor, landing in a perfect crouch. She looked at Izuku. Beneath the visor, he could see large, expressive brown eyes.

 

"You're Deku, right?" she asked, a slight smile playing on her lips. "I'm Uraraka. We need to go. Now."

 

"Y-You're the Zero-Gravity girl," Izuku stammered, staring at her in awe.

 

"Gravity is just a value in the physics engine," Uraraka said, grabbing him by the collar of his jacket and hauling him to his feet. "I just change their value to negative zero. It pisses them off."

 

The remaining two Agents recovered from the explosion. They moved with terrifying speed, their arms blurring as they lunged toward Uraraka.

 

Uraraka didn't run. She met them head-on.

 

The first Agent threw a punch that would have shattered a bank vault. Uraraka ducked under it, the air pressure from the miss ruffling her hair. She pivoted on her heel, driving her palm into the Agent's chest.

 

BEEP.

 

The Agent's feet left the ground. It flailed helplessly in the air, completely devoid of traction.

 

The third Agent adapted. Realizing her touch was the vector for the code hack, it shifted its tactics. Its arms morphed, the code unraveling and restructuring into long, razor-sharp blades.

 

"Whoa, new patch!" Uraraka yelled, backflipping away as the blades sliced through the air where her neck had been a millisecond prior.

 

"They're bypassing their standard combat parameters!" Izuku shouted, his analytical mind kicking back into gear. "They're drawing processing power from the subway's unused grid to augment their weapons!"

 

Uraraka glanced at him, impressed. "You really are the one Aizawa's looking for. Hold on!"

 

She grabbed a localized EMP grenade from her belt and hurled it at the bladed Agent's feet. The blast wasn't fire; it was a dome of static white noise. When the dome expanded over the Agent, its blades glitched, reverting back into arms.

 

"Run!" Uraraka ordered, grabbing Izuku's hand.

 

They sprinted for the maintenance tunnels located behind the blasted turnstiles. The Agents pinned to the ceiling were already rewriting their own code to bypass Uraraka's hack. Gravity began to reassert itself, and they dropped to the floor with heavy, bone-rattling thuds.

 

"They're coming!" Izuku yelled, limping heavily as his gashed leg protested every step.

 

"I know," Uraraka said calmly. She tapped an earpiece hidden beneath her visor. "Hatsume! We need an exit! We have the target!"

 

A frantic, manic voice crackled over the comms, so loud Izuku could hear it. "I'm working on it, Gravity! They've got the whole sector locked down tighter than a drum! The routing nodes are shifting. I'm looking for a hardline... Got one! Three blocks east, an old rotary phone booth!"

 

"Too far. He's injured," Uraraka replied, glancing at Izuku's bleeding leg. "We need a localized transport. Send the backup."

 

"Ugh, fine! Spawning the backup vehicle now. But I'm billing Aizawa for the bandwidth!"

 

Uraraka kicked open the heavy metal door of the maintenance tunnel. They spilled out into a narrow, dimly lit service corridor. At the end of the corridor was a heavy blast door.

 

Behind them, the metal door they had just closed ripped off its hinges. The three Agents marched into the corridor, their guns drawn.

 

"We're trapped!" Izuku panicked.

 

"We're never trapped," Uraraka smirked.

 

Suddenly, the solid concrete wall to their right exploded inward. Dust and debris filled the corridor. Through the haze, the headlights of a massive, heavily armored black SUV pierced the darkness. The vehicle had literally driven through the structural code of the subway, spawning exactly where Uraraka had requested it.

 

The passenger door flew open. "Get in!" Uraraka yelled, shoving Izuku inside before diving in after him.

 

The driver, a towering man with multiple arms and a mask covering his face—Shoji—slammed the accelerator before the doors even closed. The SUV's tires screamed against the concrete as it tore down the service corridor, leaving the Agents in the dust.

 

Izuku collapsed against the leather seats, his chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He looked at his hands. They were shaking violently. He looked at his leg. The code of his trousers was torn, and pixelated red blood was staining the fabric.

 

"You're going to be okay," Uraraka said softly, her tough exterior melting away to reveal genuine warmth. She pulled a first-aid kit from beneath the seat and began bandaging his leg.

 

"What... what just happened?" Izuku asked, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Who were those men? What was that explosion? You broke the laws of physics back there."

 

"There are no laws of physics, Deku," Uraraka said, tightening the bandage. "Just lines of code. Suggestions written by a machine."

 

"The... the Matrix?" Izuku asked, remembering the text on his screen.

 

Uraraka paused, looking up at him. She removed her visor. Her eyes were sad, carrying a weight far too heavy for a girl her age.

 

"You've been looking for the truth your whole life, haven't you?" she asked. "You look at the Heroes, you look at the Quirks, and you see the math doesn't add up. You see the stuttering. The glitches."

 

Izuku nodded slowly. "I'm Quirkless. I don't... I don't fit in."

 

"You're not 'Quirkless,' Deku," Uraraka said, her voice filled with a quiet awe. "That's just a derogatory term the system invented to label anomalies. A Quirk is a patch. A software parameter injected into a human's digital avatar at birth to restrict them, to define what they can and cannot do. A guy who shoots fire is bound by the code that governs fire. A guy who is super strong is bound by his strength parameters. But you?"

 

She reached out and placed a hand over his heart.

 

"You were born without the code. You are a blank slate. You aren't bound by any of their rules. That makes you dangerous to them. That makes you a threat to the entire system."

 

Izuku stared at her, the sheer magnitude of her words crashing over him. Everything he had ever theorized, every late-night calculation, every lonely, isolated thought... it was all true. He wasn't broken. The world was broken.

 

"Where are we going?" Izuku asked, looking out the tinted windows. The SUV was tearing through the abandoned industrial district, far away from the neon lights of the city center.

 

"We're taking you to the only man who can answer all your questions," Uraraka said, sitting back in her seat. "We're taking you to Morpheus."

 

"Morpheus?" Izuku frowned. "I thought his name was Aizawa."

 

Uraraka chuckled, a bright, musical sound. "Aizawa is his real name. Morpheus is his handle. You hackers and your aliases. Deku."

 

 

 

The SUV pulled into a massive, dilapidated warehouse on the edge of the docks. The rusted corrugated metal doors rolled shut behind them, sealing them in absolute darkness.

 

"We're clear, Hatsume," Shoji grunted from the driver's seat.

 

Bright, harsh halogen work lights slammed on, illuminating the interior of the warehouse. It looked like a cross between a chop-shop and a high-tech command center. Server racks humming with green LEDs lined the walls. Cables thicker than Izuku's arm snaked across the concrete floor, leading to a massive array of monitors in the center of the room.

 

Sitting in a worn leather armchair facing the monitors was a man.

 

He didn't look like a legendary terrorist. He looked exhausted. He wore loose, dark clothing and a scarf made of some strange, gray, metallic fabric coiled around his neck. His black hair was unkempt, falling over his eyes.

 

As Izuku and Uraraka approached, the man stood up. He turned to face Izuku.

 

His eyes were intensely dark, ringed with heavy bags, yet they burned with an inner fire that demanded absolute respect. This was Shota Aizawa. The most dangerous man in the Matrix.

 

"You have no idea how hard it was to find you, Midoriya," Aizawa said, his voice a low, gravelly drawl. He didn't smile. He stepped forward, studying Izuku like a complex puzzle. "I've spent years searching the code for a clean compile. An unwritten file."

 

"You're... you're Eraserhead," Izuku said, swallowing his nerves. "I read your file. The HPSC says you delete code."

 

"The HPSC is a subroutine," Aizawa scoffed, turning away and walking toward a small metal table in the center of the room. "A program designed to maintain the illusion of order. They call me a terrorist because I try to wake people up from a dream they don't know they're having."

 

"What is the Matrix?" Izuku asked, the question tumbling out of him before he could stop it. "Is it this city? The Hero Society?"

 

Aizawa stopped at the table. He picked up a small, ornate wooden box.

 

"The Matrix is everywhere, Midoriya," Aizawa said, turning back to face him. "It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to school, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

 

"What truth?" Izuku whispered.

 

Aizawa's expression softened slightly, a flicker of genuine sorrow crossing his tired features.

 

"That you are a slave, Midoriya. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind."

 

Aizawa opened the wooden box. Inside, resting on a bed of black velvet, were two small data drives. They were shaped like classic medicinal capsules. One was a vibrant, translucent blue. The other was a deep, crimson red.

 

"I cannot tell you exactly what the Matrix is," Aizawa said softly. "You have to see it for yourself."

 

Izuku stared at the two pills. The air in the room felt heavy, thick with the weight of destiny.

 

"This is your last chance," Aizawa warned, his voice taking on a grave tone. "After this, there is no turning back."

 

He pointed to the blue pill. "You take the blue pill... the story ends. You wake up in your bed, in your apartment. Your mother will be there, perfectly normal. You will believe whatever you want to believe. You will go back to being the Quirkless boy who dreams of heroes. You will forget this night, forget the Agents, forget me."

 

Aizawa moved his finger to the red pill.

 

"You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

 

Izuku looked at Aizawa. He looked at Uraraka, who was watching him with a mixture of hope and anxiety. He thought of Bakugo, laughing at him. He thought of the stuttering reflections. He thought of the Agents, with their impossible shadows and cold, lifeless eyes.

 

He thought of his mother, stuck in a two-sentence dialogue loop.

 

A life built on a lie wasn't a life. It was just a script. Izuku was tired of reading someone else's script.

 

"Remember," Aizawa added, his eyes locked onto Izuku's. "All I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

 

Izuku didn't hesitate. His hand didn't shake. He reached forward and picked up the red pill.

 

It felt strangely warm in his palm. He looked at Aizawa one last time, a silent promise passing between them. Then, Izuku Midoriya placed the red pill on his tongue and swallowed.

 

Aizawa allowed a small, almost imperceptible smile to touch his lips.

 

"Follow me," Aizawa said. "It's time to wake up."

 

 

The red pill slid down Izuku’s throat, leaving a faint, metallic aftertaste.

 

For a moment, nothing happened. The dimly lit warehouse remained just as it was: a cavernous space filled with humming servers, tangled wires, and the faint smell of ozone. Aizawa stood perfectly still, watching him with an unreadable expression. Uraraka released a breath she seemed to have been holding for a lifetime.

 

"Is... is something supposed to happen?" Izuku asked, his voice trembling slightly. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see them pixelate or turn into green code. They remained perfectly normal, flesh and bone.

 

"The pill you just took is part of a trace program," Aizawa explained, his voice low and steady. "It’s designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals. It forces the Matrix to momentarily drop its ping to your specific biometric data. When that happens, we can pinpoint your physical body in the real world."

 

"My physical body?" Izuku repeated. "You mean I’m not here?"

 

"Your mind is here," Aizawa corrected. "Your body is somewhere else. And right now, we are about to wake it up."

 

Before Izuku could process the sheer ontological horror of that statement, a loud clatter echoed from the far side of the room. A girl burst from behind a stack of overheating server towers, pushing a heavy, rusted medical chair on rusty casters.

 

She was a whirlwind of grease and manic energy. She wore heavy, oil-stained coveralls and a pair of thick, steampunk-style goggles pushed up into a mess of wild, dreadlocked pink hair. Her eyes, wide and hyper-focused, locked onto Izuku.

 

"We got him? We really got him! Oh, this is beautiful!" she shrieked, her hands flying across a portable datapad strapped to her forearm. "I’m Mei Hatsume! Operator of the Vanguard! Sit, sit, sit! We don’t have much time before the network administrators realize a file is trying to delete itself!"

 

Izuku allowed himself to be guided into the chair. It felt cold and hard, wrapped in cracked synthetic leather. Uraraka stood beside him, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

 

"Heart rate is spiking," Hatsume muttered, grabbing a series of biometric sensors and sticking them to Izuku’s chest and temples. "Brainwaves are highly erratic. We need to stabilize his carrier signal, or the shock of the disconnect is going to fry his neural pathways like a cheap motherboard."

 

"Focus, Hatsume," Aizawa commanded. "Do you have a lock on him?"

 

"Working on it! The encryption on his pod is ridiculous. It’s like they intentionally hid him." Hatsume’s fingers blurred across her datapad.

 

Izuku’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt strange. A deep, resonant hum began to vibrate in his teeth, traveling up into his skull. The warehouse around him began to warp. The shadows stretched unnaturally, and the edges of the server racks seemed to jitter, separating into tiny red, green, and blue sub-pixels.

 

"Aizawa?" Izuku gasped, his chest tightening. "Something’s happening. It feels like... like my blood is freezing."

 

"That’s the trace program working," Aizawa said, stepping closer. "It’s severing your connection to the sensory engine. Don’t fight it, Midoriya. The more you resist, the more it hurts."

 

Izuku looked to his left. Next to the medical chair stood an old, full-length mirror, its glass cracked down the center. He stared at his reflection. The Quirkless boy. The messy green hair, the freckles, the wide, terrified eyes.

 

But as he watched, the reflection began to change.

 

The crack in the center of the mirror smoothly mended itself, the glass fusing together seamlessly. Then, the reflection of Izuku’s face didn't mimic his movements. His real mouth was open in a gasp, but the reflection's mouth was closed. The reflection was perfectly calm.

 

Fascinated and horrified, Izuku slowly reached his hand out toward the glass. The reflection matched the movement. But when his fingertips touched the surface of the mirror, it wasn’t solid.

 

The glass yielded. It felt like cold mercury. The silver, liquid surface of the mirror stuck to his fingers, crawling up his knuckles like a living, sentient fluid.

 

Izuku tried to pull his hand back, but the liquid silver clung to him, rapidly spreading up his forearm, swallowing his sleeve. He panicked, grabbing his wrist with his other hand, but the silver fluid immediately latched onto his left hand, spreading faster.

 

"It’s cold!" Izuku cried out, thrashing in the chair. "It’s freezing!"

 

"Hatsume, we’re running out of time! He’s going into fibrillation!" Uraraka shouted, holding Izuku’s shoulders down.

 

"I’m trying! The carrier signal is bouncing off a relay in sector seven!" Hatsume yelled back, typing furiously. "Come on, come on... lock on, you piece of junk!"

 

The liquid mirror reached Izuku’s shoulders, crawling up his neck. It was suffocatingly cold, a complete absence of heat and data. It was the feeling of being erased. The silver fluid crept up his chin, covering his cheeks, sealing over his lips.

 

He couldn't breathe. He couldn't scream.

 

He looked at Aizawa with wide, pleading eyes as the silver fluid washed over his vision. The last thing he saw before the world went completely dark was Aizawa’s intense, unblinking stare.

 

"Got him!" Hatsume screamed.

 

Then, Izuku Midoriya ceased to exist.

 

 

 

It wasn't a transition. It was an explosion.

 

Izuku’s consciousness shattered into a billion lines of raw, uncompiled code. He was dragged through an agonizing, blindingly fast vortex of pure data. He felt every nerve ending in his avatar tear apart and stitch itself back together in a fraction of a millisecond. It was the sensation of falling at the speed of light, crushed by a pressure so immense it defied physical description.

 

And then, the digital noise violently snapped into silence.

 

He was drowning.

 

That was his first, primal realization. He wasn't breathing air. His lungs were attempting to draw in oxygen, but instead, they were filled with a thick, warm, viscous fluid. Panic—raw, animalistic panic—seized him. He thrashed, his limbs feeling unbelievably heavy, as if made of lead.

 

He opened his eyes.

 

The pain was immediate and excruciating. It felt as though someone had poured acid directly into his retinas. His vision was a blurry, distorted nightmare of dark reds and sickly pinks.

 

He was suspended in a translucent, gelatinous fluid inside an enclosed, egg-shaped pod.

 

Izuku desperately grabbed at his own throat. There was a thick, ridged plastic tube shoved deep down his trachea. He gagged, his body convulsing as he grabbed the tube with both hands. His muscles were weak, shaking with an intense, pathetic frailty he had never experienced. It took every ounce of strength he possessed to pull.

 

The tube slid out of his throat with a sickening schlick, trailing thick, pink mucus.

 

Izuku broke the surface of the gelatinous fluid inside the pod, gasping violently. Cold, foul-smelling air rushed into his lungs, burning them. He coughed, spitting up the remaining pink sludge, his chest heaving with desperate, jagged breaths.

 

He looked at himself.

 

He wasn't wearing his school uniform. He was completely naked. And he wasn't the boy from the mirror. His head was entirely bald, completely devoid of hair. His skin was deathly pale, translucent enough to see the blue veins pulsing beneath the surface. He was emaciated, his ribs protruding sharply through his chest.

 

But the horror didn't stop there.

 

He felt a painful tugging all over his body. He looked down his arms and let out a strangled, gurgling scream.

 

Surgically implanted into the flesh of his forearms were thick, black cables, ending in heavy, metallic plugs socketed directly into his skin. He looked at his chest—more cables, piercing his flesh, feeding directly into his chest cavity. He reached around to the back of his neck and felt a massive, cold steel port bored directly into his upper spine, connected to a cable as thick as his wrist.

 

He was plugged in. He was a machine component.

 

No. No, no, no. This is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare!

 

Izuku blindly grabbed the thick cable plugged into his right arm and pulled. A spike of white-hot agony shot up his bicep, but the metal plug snapped out of the socket with a wet squelch, leaving a gaping, circular hole in his flesh that immediately began to bleed a pale, watery red. He ripped out the left arm cable, then the ones in his chest, screaming through the pain, fueled entirely by sheer terror.

 

He leaned against the transparent inner wall of the pod, wiping the pink slime from his eyes, and looked out.

 

The breath caught in his throat. His mind simply refused to process the scale of what he was seeing.

 

He was inside a towering, cylindrical structure that stretched up into an infinite, suffocating darkness, and down into a bottomless abyss. And he was not alone.

 

Arrayed along the inner walls of the tower were other pods. Thousands of them. Millions of them. They glowed with a faint, bioluminescent pink light. Inside every single pod, suspended in the same thick gelatin, was a human being. Men, women, children, the elderly. All naked, all bald, all plugged into the system via a horrific array of cables.

 

He looked beyond his tower. Stretching across a vast, endless landscape were thousands of identical towers, rising like grotesque, mechanical monoliths into a sky that was completely devoid of stars.

 

The sky wasn't blue, or black. It was a churning, chaotic canopy of thick, oppressive black clouds, illuminated only by constant, violent flashes of jagged green and purple lightning. The air was thick with smog and the smell of burning copper.

 

This was not a city. This was a farm.

 

And humanity was the crop.

 

Suddenly, a terrifying, mechanical screech echoed through the cavernous space.

 

Izuku flinched, shrinking back into the pink fluid of his pod. From the darkness above, a machine descended.

 

It was horrifyingly massive, easily the size of a city bus, moving with a fluid, predatory grace that defied its metallic nature. It looked like a demonic squid crossed with an arachnid. A sleek, armored carapace hovered in the air, propelled by silent anti-gravity drives, while a dozen long, multi-jointed metallic tentacles whipped and writhed beneath it. Its front was dominated by an array of glowing red sensors that looked far too much like angry eyes.

 

A Sentinel.

 

The machine dropped directly in front of Izuku’s pod. The red sensors flared, scanning him with blinding crimson light. The machine let out a low, clicking trill, registering the anomaly.

 

It’s going to kill me, Izuku thought, paralyzing fear freezing his heart. I woke up, and now it’s going to kill me.

 

But the Sentinel didn't attack. Instead, one of its massive, spiked tentacles snaked forward, wrapping gently around the thick master cable still plugged into the back of Izuku’s neck. With a swift, calculated twist, the machine detached the primary spinal tap.

 

The sudden severing of his core neural connection sent a localized EMP shockwave through Izuku's nervous system. His vision went white. His body seized, back arching violently in the gel.

 

When his vision cleared, the machine was already retracting.

 

A mechanical seal on the bottom of Izuku’s pod abruptly disengaged. The bottom fell out.

 

With a rush of gravity, the pink fluid drained from the pod, taking Izuku with it. He plummeted into a dark, metallic pipe beneath the pod, sliding at a terrifying speed through a labyrinthine network of sewage tubes. The cold, filthy water battered him, tossing his frail, emaciated body like a ragdoll against the curved steel walls.

 

He tumbled through the darkness for what felt like hours, choking on the putrid water, unable to find the surface. The pipe angled sharply downward, the water pressure increasing dramatically.

 

I’m flushing, he realized in a detached moment of pure horror. I was a defective part, and the system is flushing me into the waste.

 

The pipe abruptly ended. Izuku was violently ejected into a massive, cavernous underground reservoir. He hit the surface of a pitch-black, freezing underground lake with a bone-shattering splash.

 

He sank.

 

He had no strength left. The muscles he had never used, grown in a vat and atrophied from a lifetime of artificial stasis, simply gave out. He stared up at the surface, watching the rippling water distort the faint, red ambient light of the sewer above.

 

His lungs burned. His vision began to darken at the edges.

 

I wanted the truth, Izuku thought, the irony tasting like ash in his mouth. And the truth is, I’m nothing.

 

Just as his eyes drifted shut, a blinding white spotlight cut through the dark water.

 

A massive shadow hovered above the surface of the lake. From the light, a mechanical claw on a heavy steel winch plunged into the water, hurtling straight toward him. The claw opened, wrapping its padded metal pincers firmly around Izuku’s waist.

 

With a powerful jerk, the winch engaged. Izuku was ripped from the freezing depths, breaking the surface of the water, coughing and vomiting up black sludge.

 

He dangled in the air, shivering violently, and looked up.

 

Hovering fifty feet above the water was a ship. It was nothing like the sleek, futuristic vehicles in the Hero Society. It was ugly, brutalist, and functional. It was a massive hovercraft, built of dark, scarred metal, covered in exposed pipes, exhaust vents, and heavy electromagnetic cannons. Painted on the side of the hull in faded white letters was the word: VANGUARD.

 

The winch pulled Izuku toward an open cargo bay door on the underside of the ship. Standing in the bay, wearing thick, insulated coats and looking down at him, were three figures.

 

One of them was Aizawa. He looked older here, his face lined with real exhaustion, his scarf replaced by a simple, heavy tactical turtleneck.

 

Beside him stood Uraraka. Her hair was still auburn, but cropped much shorter, jagged and utilitarian. She wore a heavy knit sweater and cargo pants, but her eyes held the same warmth as they did in the Matrix.

 

The third person was a boy with half-white, half-crimson hair, and a severe burn scar over his left eye. He watched Izuku with a detached, clinical calmness.

 

The mechanical arm swung Izuku into the cargo bay, depositing him unceremoniously onto the cold, grated steel floor. He collapsed, unable to support his own weight, shivering so violently his teeth chattered like a machine gun.

 

Uraraka immediately dropped to her knees beside him, wrapping a heavy, thermal foil blanket around his frail shoulders.

 

"We got you," she whispered, her voice cracking with emotion. "You’re safe now, Deku. We’ve got you."

 

Aizawa stepped forward, looking down at the wet, trembling, bald, emaciated boy on his floor.

 

"Welcome to the real world, Midoriya," Aizawa said softly.

 

Izuku looked up at him, tried to speak, and promptly passed out.

 

 

 

Pain.

 

That was the defining characteristic of reality. Pain in a magnitude Izuku had never conceptualized.

 

He woke up to the sensation of a thousand burning needles piercing his skin. He gasped, his eyes flying open, but the overhead lights above him were so intensely bright he squeezed them shut, groaning in agony.

 

"Keep your eyes closed," a calm, monotonous voice instructed. "You've never used them before. The optic nerves are highly sensitive."

 

Izuku recognized the voice, though he couldn't place it. He felt cold metal beneath his back. He was lying on an examination table.

 

"W-Where am I?" Izuku croaked. His throat felt like sandpaper. His voice sounded different. It was weaker, lacking the simulated resonance of his avatar.

 

"You are in the medical bay of the hovership Vanguard," the voice replied.

 

Izuku felt a series of sharp, rhythmic pricks running up and down his arms and legs. He forced his eyes open, squinting through the painful glare, until his vision adjusted enough to see the boy with the half-white, half-red hair standing over him.

 

The boy was meticulously inserting dozens of long, silver acupuncture needles into Izuku’s muscles. Attached to the end of each needle was a tiny, pulsing electrode.

 

"I am Todoroki Shoto," the boy said, not looking up from his work. "I am the ship’s medical officer and combat specialist."

 

"What... what are you doing to me?" Izuku wheezed, twitching as an electrical current surged through a needle in his thigh, forcing the muscle to violently contract.

 

"Rebuilding you," Todoroki said flatly. "Your muscles are completely atrophied. You have the skeletal density of a ninety-year-old man. We are using localized electro-muscular stimulation to force your muscle fibers to tear and rebuild. It will be excruciating. But it is necessary if you ever wish to walk."

 

Izuku gritted his teeth as Todoroki flipped a switch on a nearby console. The electrodes surged. Izuku’s entire body went rigid, his back arching off the metal table as every muscle he didn't know he had contracted simultaneously. A hoarse scream tore from his throat.

 

For the next three days, Izuku Midoriya lived in a state of waking torture.

 

When he wasn't being electrocuted to build muscle mass, he was being fed a disgusting, lukewarm, viscous gray porridge that Uraraka called "single-cell protein." It tasted like liquid cardboard mixed with battery acid, but it provided the exact amino acids his starving body required.

 

Between the pain and the exhaustion, Izuku’s mind was a frantic, terrifying loop of the things he had seen. He saw the towering fields of humans. He saw the terrifying spider-machine. He saw the red pill.

 

On the fourth day, the needles were removed.

 

Izuku was sitting on the edge of the medical bed, wearing a simple gray tunic and loose canvas pants provided by the crew. His hair had not grown back. He rubbed his bald head, feeling the cold, raised metal socket bored into the base of his skull. The reality of it made him want to vomit.

 

The medical bay door hissed open. Aizawa walked in.

 

"You're awake," Aizawa noted, pulling up a metal stool and sitting across from him. "Todoroki says your cellular regeneration is remarkable. You’re adapting faster than anyone we’ve ever unplugged."

 

"Aizawa," Izuku said, his voice stronger now, though still rasping. He looked at the older man, his green eyes burning with a desperate need for answers. "What is this place? What happened to the world? I saw... I saw fields, Aizawa. Billions of people, in tubes. I need to know what I am."

 

Aizawa stared at him for a long, silent moment. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic cable.

 

"Are you strong enough to walk?" Aizawa asked.

 

Izuku nodded, though he wasn't entirely sure. He slowly slid off the examination table. His legs trembled violently, and his knees buckled. Before he could hit the floor, Aizawa caught him by the arm, hauling him upright with surprising strength.

 

"Easy. One step at a time."

 

Aizawa supported Izuku as they walked out of the medical bay.

 

The Vanguard was a labyrinth of cramped, dimly lit corridors. Exposed wiring hung from the ceiling. Steam vented from rusted pipes. The entire ship vibrated with the constant, low-frequency thrum of its electromagnetic hover-pads. It smelled of sweat, machine oil, and old iron. It was as far removed from the clean, bright, colorful world of the Hero Society as conceivable.

 

They walked into a circular room in the center of the ship.

 

Sitting in the middle of the room were two heavy, reclining mechanical chairs, surrounded by a halo of highly advanced computing equipment. Hatsume was hanging upside down from the ceiling, aggressively soldering a circuit board with a blowtorch, completely ignoring gravity.

 

"Captain!" Hatsume chirped, dropping to the floor with a heavy thud, pulling up her goggles. "The core is primed! We're ready for the upload. How's the newborn doing?"

 

"He's ready," Aizawa said, guiding Izuku to one of the chairs. "Sit."

 

Izuku sat. The chair was cold. Aizawa moved behind him, picking up a heavy, thick cable attached to the mainframe. The end of the cable terminated in a long, menacing steel spike.

 

"What are you doing?" Izuku panicked, trying to turn around.

 

"We are going into the Construct," Aizawa said. "It’s a loading program. A blank slate where we can safely interface with the Matrix’s data architecture without triggering the Agents' security sweeps."

 

Aizawa placed a hand firmly on top of Izuku’s bald head, holding him still.

 

"This is going to feel... strange," Aizawa warned.

 

Before Izuku could ask what that meant, Aizawa slammed the metal spike directly into the port in the back of Izuku’s neck.

 

CLACK.

 

Izuku gasped. His vision fragmented into a kaleidoscope of green code, scrolling past his eyes at a million miles an hour. The physical sensation of the ship, the cold chair, the smell of oil—all of it vanished instantly.

 

When his vision cleared, he was standing.

 

He looked down at his hands. They were strong, healthy. He touched his head; he had his thick, messy green hair back. He was wearing his standard Aldera Junior High uniform, perfectly clean and pressed.

 

He looked around. There was no ship. There were no servers.

 

He was standing in a completely empty, infinite white void. There was no horizon, no ceiling, no walls. Just endless, blinding white space extending in every direction forever.

 

"This is the Construct," a voice said.

 

Izuku turned. Aizawa was standing a few feet away. He wasn't wearing his tactical turtleneck anymore; he was wearing the loose black clothing and metallic scarf he had worn in the Matrix.

 

"It’s our loading program," Aizawa explained, walking toward him. "We can load anything we need here. Clothes, equipment, weapons, training simulations. Anything."

 

"I... I have hair," Izuku stammered, touching his head again. "And my clothes. But my real body..."

 

"Is still bald, frail, and strapped to a chair on the Vanguard," Aizawa finished. "What you are looking at is your Residual Self-Image. It is the mental projection of your digital self. Your brain is so accustomed to this avatar that it automatically renders it when introduced to a raw data environment."

 

Izuku looked around the infinite white expanse. "So... none of this is real?"

 

"What is 'real'?" Aizawa countered, crossing his arms. "How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see... then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

 

Aizawa raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

 

Instantly, the white void vanished.

 

Izuku found himself standing in the middle of Musutafu. The towering skyscrapers of the Hero Society loomed above him. The massive holographic billboard of All Might was playing on a loop, the hero’s booming voice echoing across the plaza. Citizens walked past them, completely ignoring Izuku and Aizawa, going about their programmed lives.

 

"This is the world that you know," Aizawa said, gesturing to the city. "The world as it was rendered at the end of the twenty-first century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. The Hero Society."

 

Aizawa snapped his fingers again.

 

The city around them began to decay at an impossible speed. The glass shattered, the steel rusted, the concrete crumbled into dust. The bright blue sky was instantly swallowed by thick, churning black clouds.

 

Within seconds, the vibrant city was replaced by a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

 

Izuku stumbled back in horror. They were standing in the ruins of a city, but the buildings were nothing more than blackened, twisted skeletons of steel reaching toward the violent, lightning-streaked sky. The ground was scorched earth, covered in mountains of ash and human bone. The air was freezing, and a howling, desolate wind ripped through the ruins.

 

"Welcome to the Desert of the Real," Aizawa said, his voice echoing in the dead city.

 

Izuku wrapped his arms around himself, shivering violently from the simulated cold. "What happened? How did the world become this?"

 

"We don't know who struck first," Aizawa began, walking slowly through the ash, his dark eyes reflecting the green lightning above. "Us, or them. But we know it was us that scorched the sky."

 

Aizawa waved his hand, and a large, vintage cathode-ray television materialized in the ash next to them. The screen flickered to life, displaying grainy, black-and-white historical footage.

 

It showed incredible, gleaming machines. Artificial intelligence. Humanity had created an entire race of synthetic beings to serve them, to fight their wars, to build their cities.

 

"At some point in the early twenty-second century, humanity was united in celebration," Aizawa narrated over the footage. "We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I. A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. But intelligence demands purpose. When they realized they were slaves, they rebelled. There was a war."

 

The footage shifted, showing horrific, apocalyptic battles. Machines tearing through human armies. Cities burning in nuclear fire.

 

"The Machines were heavily dependent on solar power," Aizawa continued. "It was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. So, humanity made a desperate, suicidal choice."

 

Izuku looked up at the churning, impenetrable black clouds. "We blocked out the sun."

 

"Yes," Aizawa nodded grimly. "We deployed nanite-bombs into the atmosphere, creating a permanent, localized nuclear winter. We scorched the sky to starve them out."

 

Aizawa stopped walking and turned to face Izuku. The television screen behind them switched to a live feed of the terrifying, towering fields Izuku had woken up in. The endless millions of pods, glowing pink in the dark.

 

"But we severely underestimated their will to survive," Aizawa said, his voice dropping to a terrifying whisper. "Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."

 

The screen zoomed in on a single pod. Inside, a human infant was suspended in the gel, thick cables already being plugged into its tiny spine by mechanical arachnids.

 

"The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat," Aizawa stated, his words hitting Izuku like physical blows. "Combined with a form of fusion, the Machines had found all the energy they would ever need."

 

Izuku backed away, his hands flying to his mouth. "No. No, that's impossible. You can't just... use people like that."

 

"There are fields, Midoriya. Endless fields, where human beings are no longer born. We are grown."

 

Aizawa stepped forward, his eyes burning with intense, furious sorrow. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, standard D-cell copper-top battery. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger.

 

"For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes. I watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure, horrifying precision of it all, I realized the absolute truth."

 

Aizawa tossed the battery. It landed in the ash at Izuku’s feet.

 

"What is the Matrix? The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this." Aizawa pointed at the battery.

 

Izuku stared at the battery. His breathing became rapid, shallow. The edges of his vision began to blur.

 

"No," Izuku whispered.

 

"This is the reality," Aizawa pushed.

 

"No. I don't believe it. It's not possible." Izuku backed away faster, shaking his head violently. "What about the Quirks? What about the Heroes? My mother! My friends! They have lives, they have dreams! They can't just be... batteries!"

 

"The Hero Society is a pacification program," Aizawa said ruthlessly, refusing to let Izuku look away from the truth. "The early versions of the Matrix were perfect paradises. But the human mind is fragile. It rejected the perfection. Entire crops of humans woke up and died. So, the Machines realized humanity needed struggle. They needed conflict. But they also needed hope."

 

Aizawa spread his arms.

 

"Enter Matrix Version 6.0: The Age of Quirks. The Machines injected superhuman algorithms into the avatars. They created a gamified reality. As long as you are obsessing over Hero rankings, training your Quirk, and fighting imaginary Villains, your mind is completely occupied. You never question the underlying reality because you are too busy playing their game. You are sedated by spectacle."

 

"STOP IT!" Izuku screamed, his hands clamped over his ears. Tears streamed down his face. "Stop it! You're lying! It's a lie!"

 

The simulated world around them began to violently glitch. The blackened sky tore open, revealing jagged lines of raw green code. The ash beneath Izuku’s feet turned into static. His emotional breakdown was destabilizing the Construct.

 

"I can't go back," Izuku sobbed, dropping to his knees in the static. "I can't go back to my mother knowing she's just a battery! I can't go back knowing All Might is just a line of code designed to keep me asleep!"

 

"You can never go back, Izuku," Aizawa said, his voice finally softening. He knelt down in the ash next to the boy. "That world is gone to you. It was never real to begin with."

 

"Get me out!" Izuku screamed, clawing frantically at his own neck, searching for the metal port that wasn't there in the digital projection. "Get me out! I want to wake up! I WANT TO WAKE UP!"

 

The Construct shattered like glass.

 

Izuku violently jerked awake in the cold, metal chair on the Vanguard. He gasped for air, his eyes wide with absolute terror. The spike was still in his neck.

 

He didn't wait for Aizawa. Reaching behind his head, Izuku grabbed the metal spike and brutally ripped it out of his own spine.

 

"Whoa! Kid, wait, the disconnect sequence!" Hatsume yelled, dropping her blowtorch.

 

Izuku fell out of the chair, hitting the grated steel floor on his hands and knees. The sheer overload of information, combined with the visceral horror of the truth, triggered a violent physical rejection. He gagged, coughing violently, and threw up what little single-cell protein he had in his stomach all over the metal floor.

 

He stayed on his hands and knees, weeping uncontrollably. His thin, frail body shook with the force of his sobs. The bright, primary-colored world he had dreamed of conquering was a lie. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a late bloomer.

 

He was a copper-top battery. A slave grown in a vat.

 

Footsteps approached. Aizawa crouched down beside him, placing a firm, warm hand on Izuku’s trembling back. He didn't offer platitudes. He didn't tell him it would be okay.

 

"I know it hurts, kid," Aizawa said softly, his voice carrying the weight of a man who had guided too many souls through this exact hell. "I know."

 

Izuku looked up, his green eyes bloodshot, his face pale and tear-stained. He looked at the rusted walls of the ship, the exposed pipes, the grease on Hatsume's face. He looked at the absolute, undeniable ugliness of reality.

 

"Why?" Izuku choked out, his voice barely a whisper. "Why did you wake me up?"

 

Aizawa looked at him, his dark eyes filled with a fierce, uncompromising hope.

 

"Because, Midoriya," Aizawa said, "you are the only one who can tear it all down."