What if Deku Had Otsutsuki Powers From Birth

The world, as Izuku Midoriya understood it at four years old, was a brilliantly simple place. It was a world illuminated by the bright, primary colors of comic books, scored by the booming, triumphant laughter of heroes, and governed by a singular, unshakeable law: all men are not created equal, but anyone with a brave heart and a strong Quirk could become a hero.

 

It was spring in Musutafu, Japan. The air was thick with the scent of blooming cherry blossoms and the distant, ozone-tinged smell of a world rapidly evolving. Eighty percent of the global population possessed a superhuman ability, a "Quirk." To a four-year-old boy whose bedroom was plastered wall-to-wall in red, blue, and yellow merchandise dedicated to the Symbol of Peace, All Might, the manifestation of a Quirk was not just a biological milestone. It was a golden ticket to destiny.

 

Izuku was a small child, possessing a round face dotted with a constellation of freckles and a chaotic mop of forest-green hair. His eyes, large and equally green, held a terrifyingly pure innocence. They were eyes that looked at the world and saw only its potential for goodness.

 

But as the days ticked by, pushing him further past his fourth birthday, a quiet anxiety had begun to settle over the Midoriya household.

 

His mother, Inko, watched him with a hidden, trembling fear. She saw the way Izuku stared at the computer monitor, watching the same grainy video of All Might's disaster rescue debut until the pixels burned into his retinas. She saw his hopeful glances at his own small, unblemished hands, waiting for a spark, a flame, a telekinetic tug—anything. But nothing came.

 

Katsuki Bakugo, Izuku's childhood friend and the boy they all called "Kacchan," had already blossomed. Katsuki’s palms cracked and popped with the volatile, sweet-smelling power of nitroglycerin. He was a prodigy, a star burning bright in the center of their small, suburban universe. And as Katsuki’s star rose, his ego swelled, casting a long, dark shadow over those who had yet to ignite. Especially Izuku.

 

It happened on a Tuesday. The sky was an unforgiving, cloudless blue, and the heat of the impending summer was beginning to bake the playground dirt into a hardened crust.

 

The local park was a sanctuary for the neighborhood children, but today, it had become a tribunal. At the center of the playground, standing before the large wooden play structure, was Katsuki Bakugo. He was flanked by his two usual sycophants—a boy with leathery, bat-like wings and another whose fingers could extend like long, wooden dowels.

 

Cowering in the dirt at the base of the slide was a boy holding a scraped knee, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his cheeks.

 

Standing between the weeping child and the explosive prodigy was Izuku Midoriya.

 

Izuku’s small frame was trembling so violently it looked as though his bones were vibrating. His knees knocked together, and his fists were clenched so tightly by his sides that his fingernails bit half-moon crescents into his palms. Yet, despite the all-consuming terror freezing his blood, he had stepped forward.

 

"T-That’s mean, Kacchan," Izuku stammered, his voice cracking, pitching up an octave in his fear. He forced his arms up, adopting a flimsy, trembling fighting stance. "Can't you see he's crying? If you keep going... I-I-I'll never forgive you!"

 

Katsuki paused, his crimson eyes narrowing. The ash-blonde boy tilted his head, a cruel, predatory smirk spreading across his face. He punched his palm, and a sharp CRACK of an explosion echoed across the playground, kicking up a small cloud of white smoke.

 

"You want to pretend to be a hero, Deku?" Katsuki sneered, using the derogatory nickname he had coined months ago—the word for a useless wooden doll. "You don't even have a Quirk! You're just a Quirkless nobody! What are you gonna do?"

 

Izuku swallowed hard. The logic of the situation was entirely against him. Katsuki was bigger, faster, and armed with miniature bombs in his hands. Izuku had nothing. No armor, no fire, no strength. But the boy behind him was crying. And heroes didn't wait until they were stronger to act; they acted because someone needed them.

 

"I... I won't let you hurt him!" Izuku cried out, shutting his eyes tight.

 

Katsuki’s smirk vanished, replaced by a scowl of pure, insulted rage. To be defied by someone so weak was an affront to his very existence. "You're asking for it, Deku!"

 

Katsuki lunged forward. The distance between them vanished in a second. Katsuki pulled his right arm back, the sweat on his palm igniting. A localized, fiery explosion bloomed in the air, aimed directly at Izuku’s fragile chest.

 

In that fraction of a second, time seemed to dilate for Izuku.

 

He saw the orange and yellow tendrils of the explosion unfurling in the air like blooming flower petals. He saw the manic, confident gleam in Katsuki’s crimson eyes. He felt the wave of scorching heat rushing toward his face. His tiny heart hammered in his chest, a frantic rhythm of absolute terror. I'm going to die, his childish mind supplied. It's going to burn.

 

But deep within the microscopic architecture of Izuku Midoriya’s cells, something ancient was listening.

 

It was not a Quirk. Quirks were biological mutations, spontaneous evolutionary hiccups that had appeared a mere century and a half ago. What lay dormant inside Izuku was something vastly older, a genetic echo from a time before history, a remnant of a cosmic lineage that had seeded life and harvested worlds. The stress, the absolute peak of mortal terror, acted as the catalyst. The biological lock, rusted by thousands of generations of human dilution, suddenly shattered.

 

The air around Izuku dropped by ten degrees in a microsecond.

 

Before the explosion could touch his shirt, a pulse of invisible, overwhelming pressure erupted from Izuku’s core. It wasn't wind. It wasn't telekinesis. It was an emission of pure, dense, raw energy—Chakra.

 

BOOM!

 

The force of the pulse collided with Katsuki's explosion, snuffing out the flames instantly and hitting the blonde boy like a solid wall of concrete. Katsuki was violently thrown backward, his feet lifting off the ground as he flew through the air, crashing into the sandbox ten feet away. His two lackeys shrieked and fell backward onto the grass, completely bowled over by the shockwave.

 

Silence descended on the playground. The birds stopped singing. The rustling of the leaves seemed to freeze.

 

In the sandbox, Katsuki groaned, clutching his ribs, his breath knocked out of his lungs. He blinked away the stars in his vision and looked up, fury burning in his chest. "What the hell was that, you damn nerd?!" he barked, expecting to see Izuku crying in the dirt.

 

Instead, Katsuki froze. His breath hitched in his throat.

 

Izuku was still standing in the exact same spot. But he wasn't looking down. His head was tilted up toward the sky, his small hands clutching the sides of his head. The boy was letting out a low, whimpering sound, like a wounded animal.

 

"Deku?" Katsuki whispered, the anger draining from his body, rapidly replaced by an alien, primal sensation he had never felt before: dread.

 

Izuku slowly lowered his hands and looked at Katsuki.

 

Katsuki recoiled, shuffling backward in the sand like a crab trying to escape a predator.

 

Izuku’s eyes were wrong. The warm, bright forest green was gone, entirely erased. In its place was a stark, pale lavender—a white so absolute it looked like the blinding core of a dying star. There were no pupils. Just blank, milky voids. Radiating outward from the corners of his eyes, thick, grotesque veins bulged against his pale skin, pulsing with a sick, blue-purple rhythm. They crept up his temples and down his cheekbones, looking as though a monstrous root system was trying to break through his flesh.

 

But it wasn't just how Izuku looked that terrified Katsuki. It was the feeling radiating off him. The air around the green-haired boy felt heavy, cold, and suffocating, like the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. It was a presence that commanded absolute subservience. It felt vast, ancient, and entirely inhuman.

 

For the first time in his young life, Katsuki Bakugo looked at another human being and felt the undeniable instinct of prey.

 

 

 

Inside Izuku’s mind, the universe had just torn itself apart.

 

When the ancient sequence activated, the pain in his skull was blinding. It felt as though two hot iron spikes had been driven into his optic nerves. But the pain was quickly drowned out by the deluge of sensory information that violently flooded his infant brain.

 

The Byakugan. The All-Seeing White Eye.

 

Izuku’s vision didn't just change; it exploded. The narrow, forward-facing cone of human sight was instantly shattered. Suddenly, Izuku could see everything.

 

He could see the frightened boy sobbing behind him, not by turning his head, but simultaneously alongside his view of Katsuki in front of him. He could see the leaves on the trees above, the worms burrowing in the dirt fifty feet below him, the cars driving on the street a block away. His vision expanded outward in a perfect, 360-degree sphere, passing through wood, metal, concrete, and soil as if they were made of thin glass.

 

Make it stop! his mind screamed, reeling from the geometric impossibility of seeing in every direction at once.

 

But the horror didn't end with the scope of his vision. It was what he was seeing.

 

He didn't see the world in its comforting, solid colors anymore. The world was stripped of its skin. When he looked at Katsuki sitting in the sandbox, he didn't see the boy's clothes or his skin. He saw a terrifying, anatomical nightmare. He saw the white cage of Katsuki’s ribs expanding and contracting. He saw the sickening, rhythmic pulsing of the boy's red, muscular heart. He saw the gray matter of his brain sparking with electricity.

 

Worse still, layered over the grotesque anatomical view was a complex, glowing network of blue pathways running through Katsuki’s body. It looked like a secondary nervous system, carrying a bright, volatile red energy—the energy of his Quirk, of his life force—pooling heavily in his palms.

 

Izuku looked around frantically. The two lackeys were the same—walking skeletons wrapped in glowing blue veins and pulsating organs. The ants on the ground were tiny, glowing dots of life. The trees pulsed with a slow, sluggish green energy.

 

He could see everything. Every heartbeat. Every muscle twitch. Every secret of the physical world for a mile in every direction. He could see through the walls of the nearby apartments, seeing hundreds of glowing, skeletal figures moving, eating, sleeping.

 

It was too much. It was agonizingly intimate, grotesquely revealing, and overwhelmingly loud.

 

"Ah..." Izuku gasped, the sound barely escaping his throat. "Ahhh..."

 

"Deku?" Katsuki’s voice sounded muffled, distorted by the sheer volume of visual data flooding Izuku’s brain.

 

Izuku squeezed his pale, vein-bulging eyes shut, throwing his hands over his face in a desperate attempt to block it out. But closing his eyelids did nothing. The Byakugan saw through his eyelids. He saw the bones of his own fingers pressing against his skull. He saw his own glowing, blue chakra network burning with an intensity that dwarfed everything else around him. It was a sun raging inside his tiny chest, cold and terrifyingly powerful.

 

"NO!" Izuku finally shrieked. It was a blood-curdling, desperate scream that tore at his vocal cords. "NO! MOMMY! MAKE IT STOP! PLEASE!"

 

He collapsed onto the dirt, curling into a tight fetal position, clutching his head, sobbing and screaming uncontrollably. The sensory overload was short-circuiting his nervous system.

 

Katsuki, completely unnerved and stripped of his usual bravado, scrambled to his feet. He didn't say a word. He didn't throw an insult. He simply turned and ran away as fast as his legs could carry him, leaving his lackeys to stumble after him.

 

Izuku lay alone in the dirt, screaming, trapped in a prison of absolute, inescapable sight, waiting for a mother he could see sprinting frantically from their apartment building five blocks away, her skeleton glowing with panic, her heart beating at a terrifying, frantic pace.

 

 

 

The fluorescent lights of the Musutafu General Hospital emergency room were usually bright and sterile, but to Izuku, who lay on the examination table with his eyes tightly wrapped in thick, white medical gauze, the world was still a chaotic storm of glowing blue lines and pulsating organs.

 

Even with the gauze, the blindfold, and the doctor’s hands waving in front of his face, the Byakugan remained active. He couldn't figure out how to turn it off. It was like a muscle he had flexed and now didn't know how to relax.

 

Inko Midoriya sat in the hard plastic chair beside the bed, holding Izuku’s small hand in both of hers. She was weeping silently. To Izuku’s vision, she was a skeleton wrapped in a beautiful, warm pink chakra, her heart fluttering like a trapped bird.

 

"I don't understand, Doctor," Inko’s voice was thick with unshed tears and exhaustion. "I was watching him from the apartment window. One second he was confronting Katsuki, and the next, there was this... this force. It shattered the park lamps. And his eyes... God, his eyes."

 

Dr. Tsubasa, a bald, rotund man with round spectacles and a bushy mustache, stood at the foot of the bed, studying a clipboard of x-rays and blood tests with deep, visible confusion.

 

To Izuku, Dr. Tsubasa looked strange. His chakra network was dim, sluggish, but there were odd, dark patches in his energy, like stagnant water.

 

"Mrs. Midoriya," Dr. Tsubasa began, adjusting his glasses. "In the century since Quirks first manifested, medical science has documented millions of variations. We have categories: Emitters, Transformers, Mutants. We understand the biological mechanisms that allow a child to sweat nitroglycerin, or a mother to attract small objects."

 

The doctor lowered the clipboard, his brow heavily furrowed. "But your son... this defies all our current biological models."

 

Inko’s grip on Izuku’s hand tightened. "What do you mean? Is he sick? Is his Quirk hurting him?"

 

"He isn't sick, Mrs. Midoriya. In fact, physically speaking, he is terrifyingly healthy," the doctor said, rubbing his bald head. "We ran a full body scan. Izuku's bone density is roughly three times that of a normal human child. His muscle fibers are bound together in a way that suggests physical strength that shouldn't be mathematically possible for his mass. But that isn't the strangest part."

 

The doctor stepped over to a lightbox on the wall and flicked it on, sliding a full-body MRI scan into the clips.

 

"Take a look at this."

 

Inko stood up, wiping her eyes, and looked at the scan. Her breath hitched. Alongside the usual dark shadows of veins, arteries, and the nervous system, there was something else. A vast, intricate web of thousands of microscopic pathways weaving through Izuku's entire body, converging at 361 distinct points, with a massive cluster in his abdomen.

 

"What... what is that?" Inko whispered. "Are those nerves?"

 

"They aren't nerves, and they aren't blood vessels," Dr. Tsubasa said, his voice hushed with scientific awe. "They are... biological conduits. An entirely secondary circulatory system. And they are currently coursing with an unknown, highly concentrated form of bio-energy. It's not electricity, and it's not radiation. When we tried to draw blood, the needle broke against his skin until we found a soft spot. And his eyes..."

 

The doctor sighed, looking at the small boy huddled under the hospital blanket. "His optical nerves have mutated. They are drawing upon this internal energy. From what he has managed to tell us between panic attacks, he is experiencing omnidirectional x-ray vision. He is seeing the world on a microscopic and energetic level."

 

"Omnidirectional?" Inko gasped, looking at her son in horror. "You mean he can see everything?"

 

"Yes. Through walls. Through flesh," the doctor confirmed grimly. "His brain is currently processing more visual information every second than a supercomputer. It is a miracle he hasn't suffered a massive seizure."

 

"How do we stop it?" Inko pleaded, tears spilling over her cheeks. "How do we help him?"

 

Dr. Tsubasa shook his head slowly. "I don't know, Mrs. Midoriya. It’s a Mutation-class Quirk of an unprecedented scale. If I had to name it, considering the glowing white eyes and the pure, starry energy in his blood... I'd register it as 'Celestial'. But as for turning it off... it's a part of his body now. Like a limb. He has to learn how to relax the muscle. Until then, the sensory deprivation blindfolds will at least keep him from seeing standard light, though it won't stop his penetrating vision."

 

Izuku squeezed his mother's hand. He was terrified, but hearing his mother cry made his chest ache more than the pounding in his head.

 

"Mommy," Izuku whispered, his voice hoarse from screaming earlier.

 

Inko immediately dropped back into her chair, leaning over him. "I'm here, baby. I'm right here."

 

"Mommy... you have a little crack in your bone," Izuku murmured blindly, pointing a small finger toward Inko's left forearm. "Right there. It's glowing a little weird."

 

Inko froze. She looked down at her left arm. Three years ago, she had fractured her ulna slipping on ice. It had healed perfectly, leaving no outward mark. There was no possible way Izuku could have known that.

 

She stared at the thick white bandages wrapping her son's eyes, realizing with a cold shudder that beneath that gauze, those pale, alien eyes were looking right through her skin, right through her muscle, observing the microscopic scar tissue on her skeleton.

 

A profound, sorrowful realization washed over Inko Midoriya. Her beautiful, innocent, green-eyed boy was gone. The world of Quirks had not just blessed him; it had rewritten him into something entirely separate from normal humanity.

 

She swallowed her fear, forcing a brave, maternal smile into her voice, though she knew he could probably see the physical manifestation of her fear in her wildly beating heart. "Thank you for telling me, Izuku. You're so observant. You're going to be such a smart hero."

 

Hero.

 

The word echoed in Izuku’s mind. Heroes were strong. Heroes didn't cry because they saw skeletons. All Might smiled no matter what.

 

Izuku took a deep, trembling breath, focusing entirely on the warmth of his mother's hand. He focused on that feeling, the love radiating from her. Deep inside his chest, the raging sun of cold blue chakra seemed to respond to his calming emotions. The energy pulsing through his optic nerves began to recede, draining back into the pathways of his body.

 

Slowly, the glowing skeletons vanished. The 360-degree sphere of vision collapsed. The x-ray sight faded back to darkness.

 

The throbbing veins on his temples smoothed out, vanishing beneath his skin.

 

"It's gone," Izuku whispered, his body going completely limp with exhaustion. "Mommy, the monsters are gone. It's just dark now."

 

Inko let out a sob of relief, burying her face into Izuku's chest, wrapping her arms around his small body. "Oh, thank God. Thank God, Izuku."

 

As he lay there, exhausted and blindfolded, Izuku felt something else. A strange, lingering sensation in his limbs. A feeling of weightlessness. He was so tired he didn't care to investigate it, but as he drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep, he didn't realize that the mattress beneath him was no longer supporting his weight.

 

Izuku Midoriya was hovering a solid inch above the hospital bed, suspended in mid-air by the innate, unconscious power of his new biology.

 

 

 

Three weeks passed.

 

The transition back to normal life was arduous, terrifying, and profoundly isolating for Izuku. The Midoriya apartment had been modified. Thick blackout curtains were drawn over every window. The lights were kept dim.

 

Izuku had quickly learned how to activate and deactivate the Byakugan. It was, as the doctor suggested, like flexing a muscle. But the fear of what he saw when he opened those eyes made him terrified to use it. Even when deactivated, his eyes remained permanently changed. The warm, inviting green irises were gone forever, replaced by the startling, blank pale-lavender of the Otsutsuki dojutsu.

 

When he looked in the mirror, he didn't see himself. He saw a stranger. He looked like a ghost, or an alien masquerading as a child.

 

His physical capabilities had also skyrocketed into the realm of the absurd. He accidentally ripped the handle off the refrigerator when he tried to open it too quickly. When he stubbed his toe on the coffee table, the solid oak table splintered in half, while his toe felt absolutely nothing.

 

And then there was the floating.

 

He discovered it one evening while reaching for a toy on a high shelf. Instead of jumping, his feet simply left the floor. He had floated effortlessly to the ceiling, hovering there like a balloon until Inko came in and nearly fainted from shock. He could manipulate the invisible energy inside him to defy gravity, to push and pull objects without touching them. He could form a thin, invisible armor of this energy over his skin, making him practically invulnerable to household accidents.

 

To anyone else, this would be a dream come true. Flight, telekinesis, super strength, x-ray vision. He was a living god among children.

 

But Izuku didn't feel like a god. He felt cold.

 

Whenever he used the energy—the chakra—a strange, apathetic chill crept into his mind. It was an instinctive detachment. When he hovered above the ground, looking down at his toys, an invasive thought would whisper in the back of his mind: They are beneath you. Everything is beneath you.

 

It terrified him. He didn't want to look down on anyone. He wanted to save people. He wanted to hold their hands, to smile at them, to tell them everything would be alright. But his power felt like it was designed to conquer, to analyze, to dissect, to destroy.

 

His first real test of this new reality came when he finally returned to preschool.

 

Inko walked him to the gates, her hand clutching his tightly. Izuku wore a pair of thick, dark sunglasses to hide his pale eyes from the other children. He kept his head down, his shoulders hunched.

 

"Have a good day, sweetie," Inko said, kneeling down to kiss his cheek. "Remember what we practiced. Gentle hands. Keep your feet on the ground."

 

"I will, Mom," Izuku murmured.

 

He walked into the classroom. The usual chaotic din of four-year-olds playing with blocks, showing off minor Quirks, and yelling was deafening. But as Izuku walked in, the noise slowly died down.

 

Word had spread about what happened at the park. The children didn't understand the details, but they understood the playground hierarchy. Katsuki Bakugo was the king, and Izuku had knocked the king into the dirt without even touching him.

 

Izuku found his way to a small table in the corner and sat down, pulling out a notebook and some crayons. He just wanted to be invisible.

 

A shadow fell over his table.

 

Izuku stopped drawing. He didn't need to look up. Even with the Byakugan deactivated, his spatial awareness had heightened drastically. He could feel the volatile, aggressive heat radiating from the person standing in front of him.

 

"Deku," Katsuki’s voice growled.

 

Izuku slowly raised his head, pushing his dark sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. Katsuki stood there, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his red eyes narrowed into slits of intense, conflicted emotion. Behind Katsuki, the rest of the class watched in hushed anticipation, waiting for the explosive boy to exact his revenge.

 

But Katsuki didn't raise his hands. He didn't spark an explosion.

 

Katsuki remembered the park perfectly. He remembered the feeling of being hit by an invisible truck. But more than the physical pain, he remembered the absolute, pants-wetting terror of looking into those white, bulging eyes. He had nightmares about those eyes. In his dreams, Izuku was a towering, pale demon, looking down at Katsuki as if he were nothing more than a bug to be crushed.

 

Katsuki hated feeling like a bug. He hated it more than anything in the world. And to feel it from Deku, the Quirkless weakling who always followed him around like a lost puppy? It made Katsuki's blood boil with a toxic mixture of pride, anger, and undeniable fear.

 

Katsuki slammed both hands onto Izuku's table, leaning in close. Izuku flinched back, expecting a blast.

 

"You think you're better than me now, huh?" Katsuki hissed, his voice low enough that only Izuku could hear. "You think because you got some creepy, freaky Quirk that you can look down on me?"

 

Izuku’s eyes widened behind his glasses. "N-No! Kacchan, I don't—"

 

"Shut up!" Katsuki snapped, though there was a slight tremble in his voice. He leaned closer, trying to intimidate the green-haired boy, but finding it difficult when he couldn't see Izuku’s eyes. "I don't know what the hell that power is. I don't know how you did it. But I'm not scared of you, Deku! You hear me? I'm not scared of some freak!"

 

Izuku stared at his childhood friend. He could hear the lie in Katsuki’s voice. He could see the slight tremor in the boy’s hands resting on the table. Katsuki was terrified.

 

And that realization broke Izuku's heart.

 

He had always admired Katsuki. Katsuki was brave, confident, and strong—everything a hero should be. Izuku had followed him because Katsuki was like a shining star. To realize that his new power had turned that star into a frightened, defensive animal made Izuku feel monstrous.

 

"Kacchan," Izuku said softly, his voice remarkably steady. "I... I don't want to fight you. I don't want to hurt anyone."

 

He reached up and, with trembling fingers, pulled his sunglasses down, exposing his pale, blank, lavender eyes directly to Katsuki.

 

Katsuki’s breath hitched. He physically recoiled, taking half a step back, his instincts screaming at him to get away from the predatory gaze. But Katsuki forced his feet to stay planted, biting his lip so hard it almost bled.

 

"I'm still Izuku," the boy pleaded, his blank eyes welling up with very human, very normal tears. "I'm still your friend. I don't look down on you. You're amazing, Kacchan. You're going to be an amazing hero. I just... I want to be a hero too."

 

Katsuki stared at the tears streaming from those terrifying, alien eyes. The cognitive dissonance was staggering. The eyes belonged to a monster, but the tears, the trembling lip, the desperate need for validation—that was just Deku. The same crying, pathetic, hero-obsessed nerd.

 

The primal terror in Katsuki’s chest began to subside, replaced by a fierce, burning competitive fire. Deku wasn't a god. He was just a nerd with a ridiculously strong Quirk. And Katsuki Bakugo would never let a nerd be better than him.

 

Katsuki stood up straight, crossing his arms over his chest, adopting a scowl of supreme arrogance.

 

"You? A hero?" Katsuki scoffed loudly, ensuring the rest of the class could hear him. "Don't make me laugh, Deku. A creepy Quirk doesn't make you a hero. It just makes you a freak. I'm going to be the Number One Hero, and I'm going to surpass All Might. You’re just going to be a stepping stone on my way to the top. Got it?"

 

It was an insult, a challenge, a dismissal. But to Izuku, it was the greatest relief in the world.

 

Katsuki didn't see him as a monster anymore. He saw him as a rival. He saw him as human.

 

Izuku wiped the tears from his pale eyes and managed a small, wobbly smile. "I'll do my best, Kacchan."

 

"Whatever," Katsuki grunted, turning around and marching back to his table. "Just stay out of my way, you damn nerd."

 

As Katsuki walked away, Izuku put his sunglasses back on. His heart felt lighter than it had in weeks. The cold, apathetic feeling of his chakra seemed to recede, warmed by the fire of human connection. He realized in that moment that he couldn't let the power dictate who he was. The power was cold, yes. It was terrifying, yes. But Izuku Midoriya was not cold.

 

 

 

That night, the Midoriya apartment was quiet. Inko was in the kitchen, washing the dishes after dinner, humming a soft, comforting tune.

 

In the living room, Izuku sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the television, the screen glowing brightly in the dim room. On the screen, a familiar, chaotic scene was playing out.

 

It was the old internet video. The disaster in the city. The fires, the collapsing buildings, the panicked civilians. And then, the booming, boisterous laughter that cut through the despair like a knife.

 

“Fear not, citizens! Hope has arrived!”

 

The massive, muscular form of All Might strode through the wreckage, a dozen people carried safely in his massive arms. His blonde hair stood up like a v-shaped antenna, but it was his face that always commanded attention. A wide, fearless, utterly reassuring smile.

 

“Because I am here!”

 

Izuku watched the screen, his pale eyes unblinking behind the dark tint of his glasses. He had watched this video ten thousand times. He knew every frame, every soundbite. But tonight, he watched it with a different perspective.

 

He didn't just see the smile; he understood the purpose of it.

 

All Might was unimaginably strong. He could destroy cities with a single punch if he wanted to. He was a force of nature. To a normal person, a man that powerful should be terrifying. He was terrifying to villains. But to the innocent, to the weak, to the frightened... he was a beacon of safety.

 

Why? Because he smiled. Because he lowered himself to their level. Because he used his god-like power not to conquer, but to serve.

 

Izuku slowly reached up and took his sunglasses off, placing them gently on the floor.

 

He closed his eyes and breathed in. He focused on his core. He reached out to that dormant, ancient energy pooling in his stomach. He didn't shy away from it this time. He didn't let the coldness frighten him. He grabbed hold of the chakra, pulling it through the 361 tenketsu points of his body, letting it flow through his veins like a roaring river.

 

Byakugan.

 

He opened his eyes. The veins bulged instantly around his temples. The world exploded into its 360-degree, anatomical, energetic reality. He saw the wiring in the walls. He saw his mother in the kitchen, her skeletal hands scrubbing a plate, her pink chakra flowing calmly. He saw the neighbors upstairs.

 

It was overwhelming. It was scary. The cold, apathetic whisper crept into the back of his mind, telling him he was above all of this meat and bone, that he was something elevated, pristine, and cosmic.

 

No, Izuku thought fiercely, clenching his small fists. I am Izuku Midoriya. I am a human being. And I am going to be a hero.

 

He focused on the TV screen. With the Byakugan, the pixels were separated into tiny, flashing dots of red, blue, and green light. But he forced his brain to synthesize the image, to focus on the smile.

 

Slowly, deliberately, Izuku let go of the floor.

 

He engaged his chakra, allowing the energy to lift his physical mass. He floated up, his legs still crossed in a lotus position, rising one foot, two feet, three feet off the ground, until he was hovering perfectly level with the television screen.

 

The power was immense. If he wanted to, he could point his finger at the television and blast it through the wall and into the street with a vacuum palm. If he wanted to, he could strike the pressure points on a person’s body and shut down their organs in seconds. He possessed an arsenal of violence that belonged to a god of war.

 

But as he floated there, bathed in the glow of All Might's triumphant rescue, Izuku made a vow.

 

He reached his small hands up and grabbed the sides of his face, forcing the corners of his mouth up into a wide, trembling smile.

 

Tears began to spill from his stark white, vein-bulging eyes, tracing hot lines down his cheeks. The contrast was absurd—the terrifying visage of an ancient alien conqueror, weeping softly while forcing a clumsy, hopeful smile.

 

"Mom!" Izuku called out, his voice thick with emotion, but steady with a newfound resolve.

 

In the kitchen, Inko dropped the towel she was holding and hurried into the living room, her heart leaping into her throat. "Izuku? What's wrong? Are the eyes hurting—"

 

She stopped dead in her tracks.

 

Her four-year-old son was floating three feet in the air in the middle of the living room. His Byakugan was fully activated, the terrifying white eyes and pulsing veins on full display. But he wasn't screaming. He wasn't crying in terror.

 

He was looking at her, and he was smiling. It was a watery, trembling, impossibly brave smile.

 

He pointed a small finger at the television screen, where All Might was laughing victoriously.

 

"Mom," Izuku said, his voice ringing with a startling clarity that belied his age. "My power is scary. I know it is. When I look at people, it feels cold. It makes me feel like... like I'm far away from everyone."

 

Inko put her hands over her mouth, tears instantly springing to her eyes. "Oh, Izuku..."

 

"But I won't let it," Izuku continued, his small hands clenching into determined fists. He floated down, his feet touching the carpet with a soft thud. He walked over to his mother and wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his face in her apron.

 

Inko immediately dropped to her knees, enveloping him in a desperate, loving hug, completely ignoring the terrifying appearance of his eyes.

 

"I'm going to be a hero, Mom," Izuku whispered fiercely into her shoulder. "I'm going to train. I'm going to learn how to use this. I'm going to be so strong that nobody will ever have to be scared when I'm around. Not Kacchan. Not you. Not anyone."

 

He pulled back slightly, looking directly into his mother's eyes. With his Byakugan, he could see her heart beating, a beautiful, frantic drum of pure love.

 

"I'm going to save people with a smile, Mom," Izuku vowed, the pale void of his eyes shining with undeniable human spirit. "Because I am here."

 

Inko pulled him back in, burying her face in his chaotic green hair, sobbing openly. They weren't tears of sorrow anymore. They were tears of overwhelming, bursting pride. Her son had been given the power of a monster, the eyes of an alien god, and the terrifying burden of absolute sight.

 

But his heart—his beautiful, fragile, indomitable heart—was entirely human.

 

"You will, Izuku," Inko wept, holding him tighter than she ever had before. "You're going to be the greatest hero the world has ever seen."

 

Outside, the spring wind blew through Musutafu, scattering cherry blossom petals into the night sky. The world continued to spin, ignorant of the fact that a celestial seed had just taken root in its soil.

 

The Otsutsuki were a clan that traveled the cosmos, draining worlds of their life, seeking power, seeking godhood, viewing all other life as inferior sustenance. They were cold, perfect, and immortal.

 

But the ancient DNA that had awakened in Izuku Midoriya had made a critical miscalculation. It had awakened in a boy who loved heroes. It had awakened in a boy who knew what it felt like to be weak, to be bullied, to cry for help.

 

Izuku Midoriya would master the power of the gods. He would wield the Byakugan, he would master Chakra, and he would one day awaken the Rinnegan. He would possess the power to shatter mountains and control gravity itself.

 

But he would never become an Otsutsuki.

 

He was a human. He was a hero.

 

He was Deku. And this was the story of how he became the world's greatest Symbol of Peace.

 

 

 

Ten years is a long time to keep a secret. It is an eternity when that secret is screaming in your blood, demanding to be let out, demanding to conquer.

 

Izuku Midoriya was fourteen years old, and he was tired.

 

Not physically tired. His biology did not allow for something as mundane as physical fatigue. The energy that coursed through his secondary circulatory system—the chakra network—sustained him with terrifying efficiency. He rarely slept more than four hours a night. His muscles did not ache after exercise; they simply rebuilt themselves stronger, denser, faster than humanly possible. If he wanted to, he could run a marathon at a dead sprint and not shed a single drop of sweat.

 

No, Izuku was mentally exhausted. He was tired from the constant, never-ending war he waged against his own instincts.

 

He sat at his desk in the back of his third-year classroom at Aldera Junior High, staring out the window. The sky was a pale, overcast gray, threatening rain. To the other students, the window offered a view of the city skyline, the distant shapes of hero agencies, and the bustling traffic below.

 

To Izuku, if he relaxed his focus for even a fraction of a second, the view was entirely different.

 

He wore thick, custom-made glasses with heavily tinted, polarized lenses. They weren't just to hide his eyes—though concealing the stark, pupil-less lavender voids was essential—they were a physical grounding mechanism. Over the past decade, Izuku had mastered the activation and deactivation of his Byakugan, but the temptation to use it was always there. It was like having a sixth sense bound and gagged; his brain constantly yearned to untie it, to see the world in its true, energetic state.

 

Don't look down, the mantra echoed in his mind. Keep your feet on the floor. Keep your eyes in the room.

 

He pressed his feet firmly against the linoleum floor. Sometimes, if he didn't actively force his chakra to remain stagnant, he would unconsciously begin to float. The Otsutsuki biology within him viewed gravity as a suggestion, an archaic law meant for lesser creatures. Izuku hated that feeling. He hated the subtle, cold whisper in the back of his mind that told him the people in this room were nothing more than fragile bags of meat and sluggish energy, insects buzzing in the dirt while he belonged to the sky.

 

To combat that coldness, Izuku wrote.

 

He opened a heavily worn, scorch-marked notebook on his desk. On the cover, written in messy handwriting, were the words: Hero Analysis for the Future, Vol. 13.

 

Izuku flipped to a fresh page and began sketching a detailed breakdown of a hero he had seen on the news that morning—Kamui Woods. He didn't write about the hero's chakra signature. He didn't write about the structural weaknesses of the hero's wooden tendrils, or the exact pressure points that could cripple him. His alien instincts could have calculated all of that in a microsecond.

 

Instead, Izuku wrote about the man. He wrote about Kamui Woods’ dedication, his clever use of the environment to minimize property damage, the way he reassured a hostage with a calm, steady voice. He wrote about the human effort. He wrote about the struggle.

 

Because struggle was beautiful. It was the one thing Izuku’s power tried to steal from him. The Otsutsuki did not struggle; they dominated. Izuku wrote these notebooks to remind himself of the beauty of human fragility, of the incredible courage it took to stand up and fight when your bones could break and your blood could spill.

 

"So," the teacher’s voice cut through his thoughts, loud and grating. "As third-year students, it's time to start thinking seriously about your futures and what you want to do with your lives. I could pass out some career aptitude tests, but..." The teacher suddenly grabbed the stack of papers on his desk and threw them into the air, laughing. "Why bother? I know you all want to go to the hero track!"

 

The classroom erupted. Teenagers cheered, showing off minor Quirks—fingers elongating, small puffs of smoke, a girl whose hair turned into water. It was a cacophony of youthful exuberance.

 

Izuku didn't cheer. He simply raised his hand, a small, polite gesture, his face impassive beneath his dark glasses.

 

"Hey, teach!" a loud, arrogant voice boomed over the chaos. "Don't lump me in with this bunch of losers. I'm the real deal. These guys will be lucky to end up as sidekicks to some busted D-lister!"

 

The class groaned in collective outrage, hurling insults at the boy sitting near the front. Katsuki Bakugo leaned back in his chair, his feet resting casually on his desk. He was bigger now, his ash-blonde hair spikier, his muscles coiled with the dangerous, explosive tension of a predator.

 

"You've got a good Quirk, Bakugo," the teacher noted, looking at a clipboard. "You're aiming for UA High, aren't you?"

 

The class fell silent. UA High was the pinnacle, the gold standard of heroism. The acceptance rate was abysmal.

 

"That's exactly why it's the only place for me," Katsuki scoffed, standing up on his desk. "I aced all the mock tests! I'm the only one at this school who stands a chance. I'm going to surpass All Might and become the top hero, and I'll be one of the richest, most famous—"

 

Katsuki’s monologue cut off abruptly. He slowly turned his head, his crimson eyes locking onto the back of the classroom.

 

Izuku hadn't moved. He hadn't said a word. He was just sitting there, quietly looking back at Katsuki through his tinted glasses. But Katsuki could feel it. He always could.

 

Over the last ten years, Katsuki’s bullying had completely evaporated. You do not bully a mountain; you climb it, or it crushes you. Katsuki’s fear of Izuku’s awakening at age four had morphed into a fanatical, obsessive rivalry. Katsuki trained like a man possessed. He pushed his Quirk, his body, and his mind to the absolute breaking point, all because he knew that in the back of the classroom sat a boy who could probably kill him with a single finger.

 

Izuku never flaunted his power. He kept his Quirk registered as "Celestial," citing enhanced strength and sensory abilities. But Katsuki knew it was a lie. Katsuki knew it was something deeper.

 

"Oh, right," the teacher said, adjusting his glasses and looking at his clipboard. "Midoriya, you're applying for UA too, aren't you?"

 

The classroom went dead silent. Nobody laughed. Nobody mocked him.

 

In a normal world, an introverted kid who wore dark glasses indoors and mumbled to himself would be prime target material for bullying. But Aldera Junior High had learned a hard lesson during their first year. An older student from a rough neighborhood had cornered Izuku in the hallway, trying to extort him for lunch money. The older boy had a Quirk that turned his skin to solid stone. He had punched Izuku in the face.

 

Izuku hadn't even flinched. The older boy’s wrist had shattered into four pieces against Izuku's cheek. Izuku had immediately apologized, panicked, and carefully carried the sobbing bully to the nurse's office without breaking a sweat. Since that day, Izuku Midoriya was treated with a wide, respectful, and slightly terrified berth.

 

"Yes, sir," Izuku said softly, his voice calm and even.

 

Katsuki jumped down from his desk and marched down the aisle, stopping right in front of Izuku. He slammed his hand onto Izuku’s desk, smoke curling from his palms.

 

"Listen to me, Deku," Katsuki growled, leaning in close. "You might be holding back. You might think you're some untouchable god hiding out with the mortals. But I'm going to drag you into the light. At UA, you won't be able to hide. I'm going to make you go all out, and then I'm going to crush you. I will prove I'm better."

 

Izuku looked up at Katsuki. Beneath the aggressive bravado, Izuku’s latent sensory abilities could feel Katsuki’s chakra. It was burning hot, volatile, but beautifully driven. There was no malice in Katsuki anymore, only an unyielding, desperate need to prove his own worth.

 

Izuku offered a small, genuine smile. "I'm looking forward to it, Kacchan. Let's both do our best."

 

Katsuki clicked his tongue, turning away in frustration. He hated that smile. It wasn't mocking, which somehow made it worse. It was the smile of an older brother humoring a toddler. "Whatever, nerd. Just don't die before the entrance exam."

 

 

 

The final bell rang, dismissing the students into the humid afternoon air.

 

Izuku took the long way home. He always did. The walk was his time to practice his sensory suppression. The city of Musutafu was a chaotic web of life, and the sheer volume of chakra signatures moving through the streets was deafening if he wasn't careful.

 

He walked with a purposeful, measured stride. He kept his hands in his pockets, his posture perfect, projecting an aura of absolute calm.

 

Breathe in. Suppress. Breathe out. Anchor.

 

He passed a busy intersection, ignoring the glowing, pulsing auras of the crowd that bled through the edges of his vision. He turned down a quieter street, heading toward a large underpass that bypassed the main commercial district. It was darker here, cooler, and thankfully devoid of crowds.

 

As he walked into the shadow of the bridge, a strange sound echoed off the concrete walls. It was a wet, sloshing sound, accompanied by the distinct smell of raw sewage and rotting garbage.

 

Izuku stopped walking. He didn't turn around, but his posture shifted imperceptibly.

 

Behind him, bubbling up from the grate of a manhole cover, was a massive, amorphous blob of dark green sludge. It shifted and writhed, forming into a towering, gelatinous figure with two large, bulbous eyes and a jagged mouth filled with crooked teeth.

 

"Well, well, well," the Sludge Villain gurgled, his voice a wet, echoing rasp. "A medium-sized meat suit. Perfect. I just need a place to hide for a bit. Don't fight it, kid. It'll only hurt for about forty-five seconds, and then it'll all be over!"

 

The villain lunged, a tidal wave of suffocating muck rushing toward Izuku's back, aiming to force itself down the boy’s throat and hijack his central nervous system.

 

For a normal teenager, this would be the end. The sludge was liquid; you couldn't punch it, you couldn't kick it. It was a suffocating death trap.

 

Izuku didn't panic. His heart rate did not elevate by a single beat.

 

Time seemed to slow down. The cold, ancient instinct at the base of his skull awoke, assessing the threat with mathematical apathy. Threat Level: Insignificant. Composition: Liquid, highly acidic, low chakra density. Solution: Dispersal.

 

Before the sludge could touch the fabric of Izuku’s school uniform, a thin, entirely invisible layer of highly compressed chakra erupted from Izuku’s pores, coating his entire body like an airtight skin.

 

SPLAT.

 

The sludge hit Izuku, but it didn't envelop him. It splashed against the invisible chakra armor, sliding off the boy as if he were coated in an impermeable layer of oil.

 

"What the—?" the Sludge Villain gasped, pulling his tendrils back in confusion. "Why can't I grab you? What's wrong with your skin?!"

 

Izuku finally turned around. He reached up and slowly pulled his dark glasses off, folding them and placing them carefully into his breast pocket.

 

He opened his eyes. The Byakugan was active.

 

The stark, pale-lavender voids locked onto the villain. The thick, grotesque veins bulged violently around Izuku's temples, pulsing with a terrifying blue light. To the Sludge Villain, looking into those eyes was like staring into the cold, uncaring vacuum of deep space. It was the gaze of a being that looked at him not as a threat, but as a minor, slightly disgusting inconvenience.

 

"You... what the hell are you?" the villain stammered, his liquid body trembling unconsciously as the sheer, suffocating pressure of Izuku's chakra saturated the air under the bridge. The temperature plummeted. The concrete beneath Izuku's feet began to crack under the invisible weight.

 

"You are composed entirely of fluid, held together by a central nervous cluster located just behind your left optical nerve," Izuku said. His voice was no longer the polite, soft-spoken tone of a middle schooler. It was chillingly resonant, vibrating with a multi-layered timber that commanded absolute silence.

 

Izuku raised his right hand, extending his index and middle fingers, tucking the others against his palm. He took a fluid, graceful stance, his left foot sliding forward, his right knee bending slightly. The air around his right hand began to distort, warping like heat rising from asphalt.

 

"Liquid cannot be punched," Izuku stated calmly, his white eyes tracking the frantic, sluggish flow of the villain's meager chakra. "But it can be displaced by pressure."

 

"D-Die!" the villain shrieked, terrified by the predator he had accidentally ambushed. He whipped a massive tendril of solidifying sludge directly at Izuku's head.

 

Izuku didn't dodge. He simply thrust his right palm forward, aiming at the dead center of the villain's mass.

 

"Eight Trigrams..." Izuku whispered, releasing the compressed chakra in a hyper-focused, directional burst. "Vacuum Palm."

 

It wasn't a blast of wind. It was a localized concussive shockwave of solid chakra.

 

BOOOOOOM!

 

The sound was like a cannon firing inside a cathedral. The shockwave hit the Sludge Villain with the force of a high-speed freight train. The sheer atmospheric pressure of the attack caught the villain's liquid body and violently blew it backward.

 

The villain didn't even have time to scream. The impact instantly ruptured his surface tension, scattering his liquid form into a million useless, splattering droplets across the tunnel walls, the ceiling, and the street behind him. The central nervous cluster—the villain's true body—was knocked completely unconscious by the concussive force, landing with a wet thud against a concrete pillar fifty feet away.

 

A massive gust of wind, the aftershock of the Vacuum Palm, tore through the tunnel, blowing the villain's scattered remains dry and rattling the streetlamps outside.

 

Then, silence returned.

 

Izuku stood in the same position, his hand extended. Slowly, he lowered his arm. The veins around his eyes receded, vanishing beneath his pale skin. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and suppressed the chakra back into its dormant state. When he opened his eyes again, they were still the pale lavender of the Byakugan, but the terrifying pressure was gone.

 

He pulled his glasses from his pocket, slid them back on his face, and sighed. The coldness lingered in his chest. It was too easy, the whisper mocked him. You swatted a fly. They are all flies.

 

"Stop it," Izuku muttered to himself, clenching his fists. "He was a person. A criminal, but a person."

 

Suddenly, the grating of a manhole cover slamming open echoed from the far side of the tunnel.

 

"HAVE NO FEAR, CITIZEN!" a booming, legendary voice echoed, shaking the very dust from the ceiling. "FOR I AM—"

 

Izuku turned around, his heart leaping into his throat.

 

Emerging from the sewers, clad in a plain white t-shirt and cargo pants, was a mountain of a man. He was over seven feet tall, his muscles bulging with impossible mass. His blonde hair was slicked back, two distinctive tufts standing up like a V. His smile was blinding, a beacon of absolute assurance.

 

All Might. The Symbol of Peace. Izuku's idol, his inspiration, the very reason he fought to retain his humanity.

 

All Might froze mid-pose, one foot on the manhole cover, one hand on his hip. He blinked, looking around the tunnel. He saw the scattered, unconscious remains of the Sludge Villain plastered against the walls like a burst water balloon. Then, he looked down at the small, green-haired boy in the school uniform standing calmly in the center of the destruction, completely unharmed, completely clean.

 

"Ah," All Might boomed, though his smile faltered into genuine confusion. "It appears... the situation is already resolved?"

 

Izuku’s hands began to tremble. Not with fear, but with the overwhelming, star-struck awe of a fourteen-year-old fanboy. Ten years of stoic, alien conditioning evaporated in a second.

 

"A-A-All Might!" Izuku stammered, his voice pitching up into a squeak. "You're... you're really here! In person! Oh my gosh, my notebook—I need an autograph, I need—"

 

Izuku reached into his backpack, frantically searching for his Hero Analysis notebook.

 

All Might chuckled, a deep, booming sound, stepping fully out of the sewer. "Aha! A fan! And quite a capable young man, it seems! Did you apprehend this villain all by yourself, my boy?"

 

"I, um, I just used my Quirk to push him away," Izuku mumbled, blushing furiously behind his glasses. He pulled out the notebook and a pen, holding it out with trembling hands. "Please! It would mean the world to me!"

 

"Of course! A hero never ignores a fan!" All Might laughed, taking the notebook. He signed it with a massive, sweeping signature that took up an entire two-page spread. He handed it back, his smile brilliant. "There you go! Keep up the good work, young man. But remember to leave the villain-catching to the professionals in the future!"

 

All Might reached into his pockets, producing two large plastic soda bottles. In a blur of speed, he gathered the unconscious, scattered globs of the Sludge Villain, stuffing them into the bottles and sealing the caps tight. He tucked the bottles into his cargo pants pockets.

 

"Well, I must be off! I have to deliver this foul fellow to the police!" All Might declared, crouching down, his massive leg muscles coiling like steel springs. "Stay safe, young man!"

 

"Wait!" Izuku blurted out.

 

His Byakugan was deactivated, but his base sensory perception was still thousands of times more sensitive than a normal human's. As All Might had moved, as he had laughed, Izuku had felt something deeply, terrifyingly wrong.

 

The chakra.

 

Izuku couldn't help it. He flexed the muscle. Underneath his dark glasses, the veins bulged. He activated the Byakugan for a split second, looking at All Might's energetic signature.

 

What he saw made his breath completely stop in his lungs.

 

He had expected to see a sun. He had expected to see a chakra network so vast, so powerful, it would blind him. And he did see power. He saw a golden, roaring inferno of energy that felt distinctly different from normal chakra—it felt like multiple lifeforces combined, passed down, burning with the heat of a nuclear reactor.

 

But the reactor was broken.

 

On the left side of All Might's torso, a massive portion of his respiratory system and his entire stomach were simply... missing. There was a horrifying, gaping void of scar tissue where organs should have been. The golden energy was bleeding out from that wound like water from a cracked dam. The man’s internal network was collapsing. He wasn't a sun at its peak; he was a dying star, burning the last of its fuel to maintain the illusion of absolute strength.

 

"Wait," Izuku whispered, the fanboy awe completely vanishing, replaced by a cold, heavy sorrow. "Your side. Your stomach. It's... it's gone."

 

All Might stopped. The coiled tension in his legs vanished.

 

The Symbol of Peace slowly stood up straight. His booming smile did not waver, but the light in his blue eyes sharpened into something incredibly dangerous, incredibly focused. He looked at the teenage boy in the dark glasses.

 

"What did you say, young man?" All Might asked. His voice was no longer booming. It was quiet, serious, and laced with an intimidating authority.

 

Izuku swallowed hard. He knew he had just spoken a secret that was likely guarded by the highest echelons of the government. But he couldn't take it back.

 

"Your injury," Izuku said, pointing to All Might's left side. "Your respiratory system is heavily damaged, and your stomach is missing. You're... you're running out of energy. The power inside you is leaking."

 

All Might stared at the boy. The wind blew through the tunnel, ruffling Izuku's green hair.

 

Suddenly, a violent cough racked All Might's massive frame. He brought a hand to his mouth, and a spray of blood splattered against his palm. Steam began to billow from his skin. The massive muscles deflated, his height shrank, and in a matter of seconds, the towering Symbol of Peace was replaced by a skeletal, emaciated man with sunken eyes and clothes that hung off his frame like a scarecrow.

 

All Might wiped the blood from his mouth, letting out a long, ragged sigh.

 

"Well," the skeletal man rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves. "That is... quite a Quirk you have there, kid. X-ray vision? Aura reading?"

 

Izuku took a step back, shocked by the physical transformation, but not surprised by the anatomy. He had already seen the frail skeleton hiding beneath the golden energy.

 

"Both, I guess," Izuku said softly.

 

All Might looked around the tunnel, then up at the sky. "We can't talk here. If you can see this, then you understand the severity of the situation. Come with me."

 

 

 

Ten minutes later, they were sitting on the roof of a nearby commercial building. The overcast sky had finally begun to weep, a light, misty rain falling over the city of Musutafu.

 

All Might sat against the chain-link fence, his long, bony legs stretched out. Izuku sat a few feet away, cross-legged, staring at the concrete.

 

"Five years ago," All Might began, breaking the silence. He lifted his shirt, revealing a massive, grotesque scar that looked like a jagged, purple spiderweb covering his entire left side. "An enemy did this to me. My respiratory system was nearly destroyed. I lost my whole stomach. All the surgeries have worn me out. I can only do hero work for about three hours a day now."

 

Izuku stared at the scar. With his Byakugan deactivated, it was just ruined flesh. But the memory of the bleeding golden energy made Izuku's chest ache.

 

"The public doesn't know," Izuku stated. It wasn't a question.

 

"No. They can't know," All Might said, looking out over the city. "The Symbol of Peace must be undaunted. He must be a pillar. If the world knew I was breaking, the villains would rise, and society would crumble. I smile to show the pressure of heroes, and to trick the fear inside of me."

 

All Might turned to look at Izuku. "You have a powerful Quirk, kid. I saw what you did to that sludge villain. You didn't just push him away. The concussive force you generated... it was surgical. Precise. Devastating. You took down a villain that would have given seasoned pros trouble, and you didn't even break a sweat. Who are you?"

 

Izuku looked down at his hands. He took his dark glasses off, letting the light rain fall on his face. He kept his eyes closed.

 

"My name is Izuku Midoriya," he said quietly. "My Quirk is registered as 'Celestial'. But... I don't think it's a Quirk, All Might."

 

All Might raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

 

Izuku took a deep breath. It was time. He had never spoken this aloud to anyone except his mother, and even then, he spared her the darkest parts. But this was All Might. The one man who might understand the burden of carrying a power that was larger than a human life.

 

Izuku opened his eyes. The Byakugan flared to life, the pale voids staring directly at All Might, the veins pulsing fiercely.

 

All Might instinctively flinched, his breath hitching. The sheer, overwhelming, predatory pressure of Izuku's chakra washed over the roof. It was cold. It felt ancient, heavy, and completely devoid of human warmth.

 

"When I was four, I manifested," Izuku explained, his voice taking on that chilling, resonant quality. "But it didn't feel like a mutation. It felt like an awakening. It's like I have a second body layered over my physical one, made entirely of energy. And my eyes... I can see everything, All Might. I can see through the city. I can see the heartbeats of everyone in a mile radius. I can see the microscopic fractures in their bones."

 

Izuku closed his eyes tightly, the veins receding. The pressure vanished, leaving the roof feeling suddenly empty.

 

"But that's not the worst part," Izuku whispered, wrapping his arms around his knees, suddenly looking very small, very much like a frightened fourteen-year-old boy. "The worst part is how it makes me feel."

 

All Might leaned forward, his skeletal face etched with concern. "How does it make you feel, Young Midoriya?"

 

"Cold," Izuku choked out, a single tear mixing with the rain on his cheek. "When I use it... when I float, or when I strike... there's this instinct in the back of my mind. It tells me that humans are fragile. It tells me that they are insignificant. It tells me that I don't need to care, because I am above them. It feels like... like the power belongs to a monster. An alien god who just wants to conquer and destroy."

 

Izuku looked up, his pale, pupil-less eyes filled with a desperate, agonizing vulnerability.

 

"I've spent ten years hiding, All Might," Izuku cried softly. "I write these notebooks, I study heroes, I force myself to act normal, all because I'm terrified. I'm terrified that if I let go, if I embrace this power... I'll lose my humanity. I won't care about saving people anymore. I'll just look down on them."

 

Izuku wiped his eyes, his voice cracking. "All my life, I wanted to be a hero like you. I wanted to save people with a smile. I wanted to make them feel safe. But how can I? When they look at me, they feel scared. Kacchan is terrified of me. Villains are terrified of me. My power is violent, precise, and apathetic."

 

Izuku slammed his fists against his thighs, bowing his head.

 

"Can someone with the power of a monster... can someone who struggles to feel human... ever become a Symbol of Peace?"

 

The rain fell silently on the rooftop.

 

Toshinori Yagi—the man beneath the mantle of All Might—stared at the sobbing boy. He was struck dumb.

 

He had spent his entire life looking for a successor, someone to inherit the golden torch of One For All. He had been searching for someone with a strong body, a brave heart, someone willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Sir Nighteye had recommended a boy named Mirio Togata, a bright, shining example of standard heroism.

 

But looking at Izuku Midoriya, Toshinori saw something entirely different. He saw a boy who possessed a power that likely rivaled—or perhaps even exceeded—his own prime strength. A power that was innate, terrifying, and seemingly boundless.

 

Yet, this boy wasn't corrupted by it. He wasn't arrogant. He wasn't cruel.

 

He was crying because he was afraid of losing his empathy. He was fighting a daily, psychological war against his own god-like biology just to remain a kind, human boy who wanted to help people.

 

He doesn't need One For All to be strong, Toshinori realized, a profound sense of awe washing over him. If he gave in to that power, he could probably rule the world. But he chooses to sit in the rain and cry because he wants to smile like me.

 

Toshinori slowly pushed himself up from the fence. His body was weak, his bones ached, and his stomach wound burned. But he stood tall. He walked over to the shivering, crying boy, and placed a large, bony hand on Izuku's head, ruffling the wet green hair.

 

Izuku sniffled, looking up.

 

"Young Midoriya," Toshinori said gently, his voice soft, but filled with an unwavering conviction. "A Quirk, a power, a mutation... these are just tools. They do not dictate the shape of your soul. Fire can burn a house down, or it can keep a family warm in the winter."

 

Toshinori knelt down, bringing his face level with Izuku's.

 

"You are right. Your power is terrifying. I felt it. It is heavy, and it is cold," Toshinori admitted honestly. "But the fact that you fear it? The fact that you fight so desperately to hold onto your humanity? That tells me everything I need to know about the man you are going to become."

 

Izuku stared at him, his breath trembling. "You... you don't think I'm a monster?"

 

"I think you are a hero, Izuku Midoriya," Toshinori smiled, a genuine, warm smile that rivaled the boisterous grin of his muscular form. "Anyone can smile when they are naturally brave. But to smile when your very biology tells you to be cold? To force yourself to care when it would be easier to look away? That is the mark of a true savior."

 

Toshinori stood back up, pointing a finger at the sky.

 

"You asked if you can be a Symbol of Peace. I say yes. Yes, you can. But you cannot do it alone. If you hide from your power, you will never master it. If you suppress it, it will eventually consume you."

 

Izuku scrambled to his feet, looking up at his idol, his heart hammering in his chest. "But how? How do I use it without losing myself?"

 

"By tethering your heart to the ground, even when your body belongs to the sky," Toshinori said firmly. "You don't need strength training, young man. You don't need a Quirk to be passed down to you. You already have the power of a god. What you need is a mentor for your spirit. You need someone to teach you how to be human while wielding the power of the divine."

 

Toshinori placed his hands on his hips, coughing once, but standing proud.

 

"I have been looking for a successor to my legacy. And while there is another who may inherit my physical power... I want you to inherit my spirit. Izuku Midoriya... will you let me train you? Will you let me teach you how to smile, how to reassure, and how to become the hero this world needs?"

 

Izuku stood frozen in the rain.

 

The cold, apathetic whisper in the back of his mind—the Otsutsuki instinct that had plagued him for ten years—screamed in protest. It told him he was above this frail, dying man. It told him he needed no master, no mentor, no human tether.

 

For the first time in his life, Izuku Midoriya told the whisper to shut the hell up.

 

He didn't suppress his power. He let the chakra flow naturally through his body, warming him against the rain. But instead of letting it dictate his emotions, he channeled his overwhelming gratitude, his relief, and his human joy into it. The energy didn't feel cold anymore. It felt vibrant. It felt alive.

 

Izuku bowed, bending at the waist so quickly he almost headbutted the concrete.

 

"Yes!" Izuku shouted, his voice cracking with emotion, the tears flowing freely from his pale eyes. "Yes, All Might! Please! Teach me how to be a hero!"

 

Toshinori looked down at the bowing boy, feeling a massive weight lift off his own tired shoulders. He had found something incredible today. Not just a hero, but a guardian.

 

"Very well, Young Midoriya," Toshinori smiled. "Our work begins tomorrow. The entrance exam for UA is in ten months. In that time, we are going to forge your heart into something unbreakable. We are going to show the world that even a god can cry."

 

The rain began to clear, a single ray of sunlight piercing through the gray clouds, illuminating the rooftop. Izuku stood up, wiping his face, a small, genuine smile gracing his features. For the first time in ten years, he wasn't afraid of the sky.

 

He was ready to fly.

 

 

 

 

The Dagobah Municipal Beach Park was no longer a graveyard of rusted appliances and rotting tires. It was a pristine stretch of white sand, kissing the edge of a sparkling, sunlit ocean.

 

Ten months. That was how long it had taken.

 

But Izuku Midoriya had not cleared the beach through sheer physical exertion, not in the way Toshinori Yagi originally intended for his successor. Had Izuku wanted to, he could have stood at the edge of the boardwalk, extended his palms, and vaporized the entire mountain of trash with a single Shinra Tensei—an almighty push of gravity that would have sent the debris flying into the horizon. He could have cleared it in three seconds.

 

Instead, he did it entirely by hand, lifting each rusted refrigerator, each shattered television, and carrying them one by one to the recycling trucks.

 

Toshinori—in his skeletal, deflated form—sat on the seawall, the cool morning breeze ruffling his oversized clothes. He watched the fourteen-year-old boy set down a massive, waterlogged truck tire as gently as if it were made of fragile glass.

 

"You're holding back the chakra again, Young Midoriya," Toshinori called out, taking a sip from a thermos of green tea.

 

Izuku wiped a non-existent bead of sweat from his forehead. With his alien biology, he didn't perspire from physical labor, but the human gesture was a habit he actively cultivated. "I have to, All Might. If I use it to lift the heavy things, I stop feeling the weight. And if I stop feeling the weight... I forget the effort it takes for a normal person to move it."

 

Toshinori smiled softly, his sunken blue eyes filled with immense pride.

 

Over the last ten months, Toshinori had realized that mentoring Izuku was entirely different from mentoring a normal hero student. Izuku didn't need to build muscle. His Otsutsuki biology made his body infinitely adaptable, his flesh as dense as titanium when reinforced with chakra, and his speed unfathomable.

 

What Izuku needed was an anchor.

 

Toshinori had taught him the philosophy of heroism. They didn't practice combat; they practiced restraint. They practiced smiling. They practiced walking through crowds without Izuku unconsciously levitating. Toshinori taught Izuku how to look at a crying child and feel empathy rather than the cold, analytical detachment his power tried to force upon him.

 

"You've done brilliantly, my boy," Toshinori said, standing up and walking down the steps to the sand. He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a long, sleek strip of dark fabric. It looked like a high-tech visor or a sleep mask, made of a thick, carbon-weave material.

 

Izuku looked at the fabric, tilting his head. The pale, blank lavender of his eyes remained steady, though the dormant veins beneath his temples twitched at the sudden movement.

 

"What's that, All Might?"

 

"A handicap," Toshinori said, holding it out. "I had a friend of mine, a support gear specialist named David Shield, make this. It's interwoven with lead and a specialized optical-dampening mesh."

 

Izuku took the visor, running his thumbs over the smooth material. "A blindfold?"

 

"A filter," Toshinori corrected gently. "You've told me how overwhelming the Byakugan is. How seeing the skeletons, the energy, the microscopic details... how it isolates you. It makes you feel like a god looking down on mortals. Today is the UA Entrance Exam. You will be surrounded by hundreds of stressed, panicked teenagers. Their chakra will be erratic. If you walk in there with your eyes wide open, that coldness will try to consume you."

 

Toshinori placed a bony hand on Izuku's shoulder. "Wear this. It will completely block standard light, and it will muffle your x-ray vision. You will have to rely on your base chakra sensing to navigate. It will force you to stay grounded. It will force you to be a part of the world, rather than standing above it."

 

Izuku looked at the blindfold, then up at his mentor. He understood immediately. It wasn't just to hide his terrifying eyes from the other students; it was a psychological shield. A barrier to keep his humanity intact.

 

Izuku smiled, a genuine, warm expression that reached his cheeks. He tied the band around his head, the sleek, black visor covering his eyes completely.

 

Instantly, the world plunged into a comfortable, muffled darkness. The sharp, overwhelming glare of a million microscopic details faded. He couldn't see the individual grains of sand anymore. Instead, he simply felt the world. He felt the warm, golden ember of All Might's fading life force standing before him. He felt the sluggish blue energy of the fish swimming in the ocean behind him.

 

It was quiet. It was peaceful.

 

"How does it feel?" Toshinori asked.

 

"Like I'm human," Izuku whispered, adjusting the strap. "Thank you, All Might."

 

"Don't thank me yet," Toshinori chuckled, coughing slightly into his fist. "The practical exam is today. You have the heart of a hero, Izuku. Now, you must show them that you have the power to protect. Go out there and show them the strength of a god who chooses to be a man."

 

 

 

The front gates of UA High School were colossal, towering arcs of metal and glass that seemed to touch the sky. To the thousands of hopeful teenagers swarming the paved courtyard, the gates represented the threshold of their dreams.

 

Izuku Midoriya stood at the back of the crowd, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his black middle-school uniform.

 

He drew quite a few stares. It was hard not to. In a sea of anxious, chattering students, Izuku stood perfectly still, his posture impeccably straight, his face completely obscured from the nose up by the sleek, black carbon-weave visor. He looked like an enigmatic monk, or a blind swordsman from a bygone era.

 

Beneath the visor, his Byakugan was active, but heavily suppressed. The lead-lined mesh did its job beautifully. Instead of seeing the horrifying skeletal anatomy of the teenagers around him, he only saw their auras—soft, glowing silhouettes of color against a dark canvas.

 

He sensed a massive, volatile mass of crimson and orange approaching from behind. It crackled like a bonfire.

 

"Out of my way, Deku," a familiar, aggressive voice growled.

 

Izuku didn't turn around, but he stepped gracefully to the side, giving Katsuki Bakugo a wide berth. Bakugo marched past, his shoulders tense, his crimson eyes glaring daggers at the back of Izuku’s head. Over the past ten months, Bakugo had grown even more intense. He treated Izuku not as a rival, but as an apocalyptic threat that he needed to dismantle.

 

"Good luck, Kacchan," Izuku said softly.

 

Bakugo scoffed, a tiny spark of nitroglycerin popping in his palm. "I don't need luck, you freak. Keep that blindfold on. I want everyone to see me beat you when you're fighting blind."

 

As Bakugo stomped away, Izuku let out a quiet sigh. He took a step forward to follow the crowd toward the main auditorium.

 

However, his mind was still slightly distracted by the sheer volume of auras surrounding him. Because his focus was split, he failed to notice his own foot catching the edge of a raised paving stone.

 

His body pitched forward. The ground rushed up to meet his face.

 

For a fraction of a second, the ancient Otsutsuki instinct flared. Gravity is an illusion. Nullify the fall.

 

Before Izuku could actively suppress the instinct, a microscopic burst of chakra coated his skin. The gravitational pull on his mass simply... vanished. He froze, suspended in mid-air, hovering exactly two inches above the concrete, completely defying physics.

 

"Whoa! Are you okay?" a bright, cheerful voice called out.

 

Izuku felt a sudden, warm touch on his shoulder. A new aura blossomed beside him—a beautiful, soft, cherry-blossom pink, vibrating with a light, airy energy.

 

"I caught you!" the girl said happily.

 

Izuku immediately dropped the remaining two inches, his feet touching the ground. He stood up straight, turning his head toward the girl. She had short, bobbed brown hair, wide, friendly eyes, and permanent pink blush on her cheeks.

 

To Izuku's sensory perception, her Quirk was fascinating. When she touched him, she had released a specific frequency of energy that temporarily erased the gravitational effect on his body. She thought she had caught him with her Quirk, entirely unaware that Izuku’s own god-like biology had already stopped his fall before she even touched him.

 

Izuku decided to let her have the victory. It was the human thing to do.

 

"Thank you," Izuku said, offering a polite bow. "I guess my nerves got the better of me. I wasn't paying attention."

 

"That's okay! I'm Ochaco Uraraka!" she beamed, holding her hands together. "It's super nerve-wracking, isn't it? But we're gonna do our best! Oh, um, are you okay? With the, uh, blindfold?"

 

She waved a hand gently in front of his visor.

 

"It's a medical necessity for my Quirk," Izuku explained smoothly, a lie he had rehearsed a thousand times. "It helps me focus my sensory abilities without getting overwhelmed by light."

 

"Whoa, that's so cool! Like a bat, or a ninja!" Uraraka giggled. "Well, good luck, um..."

 

"Izuku Midoriya," he replied, the corners of his mouth lifting into a small smile. Her pink aura was soothing. It didn't feel competitive or aggressive; it felt purely kind. It was a wonderful contrast to the coldness he constantly fought.

 

"Good luck, Midoriya-kun! See you inside!"

 

Izuku watched her pink aura bounce away toward the massive double doors. For a moment, the world didn't feel so heavy.

 

 

 

The orientation in the massive auditorium was loud, bombastic, and deeply unpleasant for Izuku's sensitive hearing. The Voice Hero, Present Mic, shouted the rules of the practical exam at a volume that made Izuku's chakra flare defensively.

 

The exam was simple: a massive, simulated cityscape. Examinees would be dumped into the city and forced to destroy robotic "villains" to earn points. There were one-point, two-point, and three-point robots.

 

"Excuse me!" a tall, broad-shouldered student with glasses and a rigidly stiff posture stood up, a glowing blue aura of strict, kinetic energy radiating from him. Tenya Iida. "On the printout, there are four types of villains! If this is a misprint, then UA, the top hero agency in Japan, should be ashamed!"

 

Iida then turned, pointing a rigid finger directly at the dark corner where Izuku was sitting silently.

 

"And you! In the back!" Iida barked. "You have been sitting there with a blindfold on this entire time! Are you sleeping? Are you treating this sacred institution as a joke? If you are not prepared to take this seriously, leave at once!"

 

The entire auditorium turned to look at Izuku. Whispers broke out.

 

Izuku didn't flinch. He didn't even shift in his seat. The cold instinct whispered in his ear to crush the insolent boy with a wave of gravitational pressure, to teach the mortal a lesson in hierarchy. Izuku took a deep breath, burying the instinct beneath ten months of All Might's teachings.

 

Izuku stood up. The silence in the room became absolute. There was something deeply unsettling about the boy in the visor; his posture was too perfect, his breathing too still.

 

"My Quirk processes visual and sensory information at a rate that can be incredibly destructive to my surroundings if not properly managed," Izuku spoke. His voice wasn't loud, but it possessed a strange, multi-layered resonance that seemed to vibrate directly in the chests of everyone in the room. "The visor acts as a dampener. It ensures the safety of everyone in this room. I assure you, examinee number 7111, I am taking this very seriously."

 

Iida blinked, suddenly feeling an oppressive, heavy chill wash over the room, as if the air conditioning had been cranked to absolute zero. He swallowed hard, his righteous indignation faltering. "I... I see. My apologies for the assumption!" Iida bowed stiffly and sat down.

 

Present Mic cleared his throat, feeling the bizarre shift in the room's atmosphere. "R-Right! Good looking out, examinee! As for the fourth robot, it's a Zero Pointer! An obstacle! My advice? If you see it, run away! Now, get out there and say PLUS ULTRA!"

 

 

 

Battle Center B was a breathtaking feat of engineering. It was a fully functional, multi-block cityscape enclosed within towering concrete walls.

 

Izuku stood at the front of the massive crowd of examinees, waiting before the giant metal gates. He could sense Uraraka nearby, her pink aura fluttering with anxiety. He could sense Iida, his blue aura revving like a car engine.

 

Breathe in. Suppress. Breathe out. Anchor.

 

Izuku focused his chakra inward. He didn't need the Byakugan for this. His base sensory perception was enough to map the entire city, tracking the electrical signatures of the massive robots waiting inside.

 

"START!" Present Mic's voice screamed from a loudspeaker.

 

The other examinees hesitated, confused by the lack of a countdown.

 

Izuku did not hesitate.

 

He didn't run. Running was a human mechanic. Izuku utilized a basic application of chakra—the Shunshin, the Body Flicker technique. He channeled a dense burst of energy into the soles of his feet.

 

CRACK.

 

The concrete beneath Izuku's shoes spider-webbed, and he simply vanished.

 

He didn't sprint away; he became a blur of motion, a gust of wind that blew the hair back from the faces of the stunned examinees. By the time Iida and the others realized what had happened, Izuku was already three city blocks deep into the testing center.

 

"What are you waiting for?!" Present Mic yelled. "There are no countdowns in a real battle! Go, go, go!"

 

The teenagers surged forward, screaming battle cries.

 

Deep within the city, Izuku came to a sudden, silent halt in the middle of a wide intersection. His blindfold remained firmly in place.

 

From the alleyways on his left and right, three massive, tank-treaded robots rolled out. Two Two-Pointers and one Three-Pointer. They swiveled their mechanical heads, their red optical sensors locking onto the solitary boy in the black uniform.

 

"TARGET ACQUIRED," the robots droned in unison, raising their massive, dual-barreled machine guns.

 

Izuku raised his right hand, extending his index and middle fingers.

 

Gentle Fist.

 

It was a martial art designed by his alien ancestors, meant to inject chakra directly into the tenketsu (energy nodes) of an opponent. But applied to machinery, it was even more devastating. A robot didn't have a chakra network, but it had a power core, wiring, and delicate internal motherboards.

 

The Three-Pointer fired a volley of rubber bullets.

 

Izuku didn't dodge. His body moved with a terrifying, liquid grace. He simply swayed, leaning an inch to the left, a millimeter to the right. The bullets tore through the space where he had been a fraction of a second prior. To the cameras watching him, it looked like he was dancing through a rainstorm without getting wet.

 

In a burst of speed, Izuku closed the distance, appearing directly beneath the towering chassis of the Three-Pointer.

 

His two extended fingers tapped lightly against the thick metal armor. It wasn't a punch. There was no kinetic impact. It looked like a gentle caress.

 

But from his fingertips, a needle-thin, highly condensed spike of blue chakra shot directly through the armor, bypassing the physical defense entirely, and struck the robot's internal battery core.

 

BZZZT—POP.

 

The Three-Pointer froze. Its red optical sensors flickered and died. A small wisp of black smoke curled from the seams of its armor. The internal circuitry had been completely, instantly fried by the electromagnetic surge of raw chakra.

 

The massive machine tipped backward, crashing onto the pavement with a deafening metallic screech.

 

Izuku didn't even watch it fall. He was already moving. He pivoted on his heel, his left hand striking the side of a Two-Pointer. Tap. It died instantly. He vaulted backward into the air, spinning over the head of the final robot, tapping the back of its mechanical neck. Tap. It collapsed into a heap of useless scrap.

 

Three robots. Seven points. It had taken exactly 4.2 seconds.

 

There were no explosions. There was no shouting. There was only the terrifying, silent efficiency of a predator dismantling its prey on a microscopic level.

 

Izuku landed softly on the pavement, his breath perfectly even. He turned his blindfolded head, sensing the electrical signatures of five more robots two blocks away. He vanished again.

 

 

 

High above the Battle Centers, hidden within a darkened observation room, the faculty of UA High School sat before a massive bank of glowing monitors.

 

Pro Heroes like Midnight, Snipe, and Cementoss watched as the hopeful teenagers unleashed their Quirks upon the simulated cities. Explosions rocked Center A, courtesy of Katsuki Bakugo. Ice froze entire blocks in Center C.

 

But the monitor displaying Sector B had drawn the undivided, deeply unsettled attention of nearly every teacher in the room.

 

In the center of the room sat Principal Nezu, a highly intelligent chimera of a mouse, bear, and dog, sipping tea from a delicate porcelain cup. Beside him stood Shota Aizawa, the Underground Hero: Eraserhead. Aizawa looked like a homeless insomniac, wrapped in a yellow sleeping bag, his bloodshot eyes narrowed intensely at the screen.

 

Toshinori Yagi, in his muscular All Might form, stood in the back of the room, his arms crossed, an immensely proud but somewhat nervous smile on his face.

 

On the screen, Examinee 7111—Izuku Midoriya—was walking down a street. He wasn't running. He was strolling with his hands in his pockets, his blindfold firmly in place.

 

A barrage of missiles shot from a building above him. Izuku simply raised a hand without looking up. An invisible force—a localized, microscopic Vacuum Palm—collided with the missiles in mid-air. They detonated prematurely, showering the street in harmless debris. Izuku walked through the smoke, completely untouched, appearing beside a massive robot and tapping its leg. The robot immediately violently shut down, its internal gears grinding to a halt so fast the machine tore itself apart from the inside.

 

"What in the world are we watching?" Snipe muttered, adjusting his cowboy hat. "Is it telekinesis? No, he's destroying them with physical contact too. And he's doing it blindfolded."

 

"His registration file says his Quirk is 'Celestial'," Midnight read from a glowing tablet. "Categorized as a Mutation. Enhances physical attributes and sensory perception. But this... this is beyond enhancement. It's like he's barely trying."

 

Aizawa unzipped his sleeping bag and stepped closer to the monitors, his eyes tracking the green-haired boy's fluid, impossible movements.

 

"It's not just that he isn't trying," Aizawa said, his voice raspy, laced with a rare, genuine caution. "Look at his posture. Look at his breathing. When a teenager has a destructive Quirk, they throw their weight into it. They scream. They use momentum. This kid isn't using momentum."

 

Aizawa pointed a finger at the screen as Izuku effortlessly sidestepped a crushing blow from a robot and tapped its chest, instantly killing it.

 

"He's using internal disruption," Aizawa analyzed. "He's bypassing the armor entirely and striking the critical components. It's surgical. But more than that... it feels ancient."

 

"Ancient?" Nezu squeaked, lowering his teacup.

 

"There's no teenage ego in his movements," Aizawa explained, a shiver running down his spine. "It's pure, unfiltered lethality masquerading as martial arts. If he were tapping human beings instead of robots... he'd be stopping their hearts instantly. Who trained this kid?"

 

In the back, All Might coughed into his fist, hiding a smile. Nobody trained him, Aizawa, Toshinori thought. He was born with the power of the gods. I'm just teaching him how not to act like one.

 

"He has seventy-four points," Nezu observed cheerfully, pulling up the leaderboard. "Tied for first place with Katsuki Bakugo in Center A. It seems this year's crop is quite extraordinary! But heroism isn't just about destroying villains. It's time to test their true mettle."

 

Nezu reached out a small, furry paw, and flipped a large, red switch on the console.

 

"Let's see how they handle true despair."

 

 

 

In the heart of Battle Center B, Izuku stood amidst a graveyard of silent, sparking machinery. He had lost count of his points. The combat was meaningless to him; a distraction to keep his body busy while his mind practiced remaining calm.

 

Suddenly, the ground beneath his feet violently shuddered.

 

It wasn't a localized tremor. The entire simulated city was shaking. The pavement cracked, and the glass in the surrounding buildings shattered, raining down onto the streets.

 

Izuku tilted his head. Through the dampening mesh of his blindfold, he felt a massive, overwhelming mechanical signature rising from the center of the sector. It was heavy. Absurdly heavy.

 

A shadow fell over the city blocks.

 

Izuku turned toward the center of the city. Looming over the five-story buildings was a machine straight out of a nightmare. The Zero Pointer. It was a colossal, olive-green behemoth, easily the size of a skyscraper, rolling forward on treads the size of houses. With a single swing of its massive arm, it obliterated an entire row of buildings, sending a tidal wave of concrete, steel, and dust cascading through the streets.

 

Panic instantly erupted.

 

"Run!" a student screamed.

 

"It's a monster! Why did they put this in the exam?!"

 

The examinees abandoned their fights, turning and sprinting toward the exit gates in a desperate, terrified stampede.

 

Izuku stood still. The wind from the destruction whipped at his uniform. The Zero Pointer was massive, yes. But to Izuku, it was just a larger toy. He could use a full-power Vacuum Palm to blow a hole through its chest, or leap up and dismantle its core with a Gentle Fist strike.

 

He took a step backward, preparing to simply leave. There were no points to be gained here. Present Mic had said to run.

 

“Ow! Help!”

 

The voice was faint, barely audible over the roaring engines of the behemoth, but Izuku's enhanced hearing caught it.

 

Izuku stopped. He focused his base sensing, sweeping the area near the base of the Zero Pointer.

 

A familiar aura flashed in his mind. Pink. Warm, cherry-blossom pink, but it was currently vibrating with intense pain and absolute terror.

 

Ochaco Uraraka. She was trapped beneath a massive slab of concrete rubble, her leg pinned, completely unable to move. The Zero Pointer’s colossal tread was rolling forward, crushing the street. In less than ten seconds, it would roll directly over her, crushing her to paste.

 

The human students were running away. They didn't see her. They were too blinded by their own fear.

 

Izuku's heart hammered in his chest. A very human surge of adrenaline flooded his system.

 

She's going to die.

 

The thought shattered the calm, serene state he had maintained for the entire exam. The human boy inside him, the boy who had cried on a rooftop, the boy who worshipped All Might, seized control. He had to save her. He had to be the hero.

 

But as Izuku assessed the situation, a cold, terrifying mathematical reality set in.

 

He was too far away to run and pull her out in time. If he used a Vacuum Palm from this distance to push the robot back, the concussive shockwave would turn the rubble on top of Uraraka into shrapnel, killing her instantly. A Gentle Fist strike required physical contact; he didn't have the time to scale the machine and shut it down before the treads crushed her.

 

He needed to stop the robot instantly, from a distance, without causing a shockwave.

 

He needed pure, absolute control over the physical space.

 

I can't do it with the blindfold on. I need to see it. I need the full power.

 

Izuku reached up and gripped the carbon-weave fabric of his visor. He hesitated for a microsecond, terrified of the coldness that would flood his mind, terrified of the monster he might become if he unleashed the full depth of his alien biology.

 

Do it, Toshinori's voice echoed in his memory. Show them the strength of a god who chooses to be a man.

 

Izuku ripped the blindfold off, throwing it to the ground.

 

He opened his eyes.

 

The Byakugan roared to life. The veins around his temples bulged violently, throbbing with a sickly, bright blue light. The world exploded into a terrifying, omnidirectional sphere of microscopic detail and glowing energy. He saw the intricate wiring of the colossal robot, he saw the terrified skeletons of the fleeing students, he saw Uraraka’s pink chakra flickering frantically in pain.

 

But it wasn't enough. The Byakugan gave him sight, but he needed force. He needed the world to bend to his will.

 

Izuku’s emotions—his desperate, agonizing, human need to save the girl—collided violently with the cold, ancient alien DNA that powered him. The Otsutsuki biology did not understand human empathy, but it understood the desire to protect a chosen territory, to exert absolute dominance over a threat.

 

The two opposing forces crashed together inside Izuku's skull. The pain was blinding.

 

Izuku let out a guttural, terrifying roar, a sound that shook the very air, carrying a multi-layered, demonic resonance that made every student in a three-block radius freeze in absolute terror.

 

Deep within Izuku's right eye, the pale, milky void of the Byakugan began to burn.

 

The veins around his right temple darkened, turning from blue to a deep, bruising purple. The pale lavender iris warped, stretching and rippling. Concentric black rings rippled outward from the center of his right eye, filling the sclera with a deep, majestic, and utterly terrifying violet hue. Six small, comma-shaped tomoe markings spun wildly within the rings.

 

The Rinnegan. The Eye of Samsara. The ultimate dojutsu of the celestial gods.

 

The moment the eye manifested, the air pressure in Battle Center B completely collapsed. The sky above seemed to darken. The gravity within a hundred-yard radius of Izuku Midoriya warped, causing loose debris, rocks, and shattered glass to float silently into the air.

 

Up in the observation room, the monitors tracking Izuku's vitals and energy output exploded in a shower of sparks, the sensors completely overloaded.

 

"What... what is happening?!" Present Mic screamed, leaping out of his chair.

 

Aizawa stared at the screen, his mouth slightly open, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. The boy on the screen... the right eye was glowing with a purple light so intense it distorted the camera lens.

 

"That's not a Quirk," Aizawa whispered, his Erasure activating instinctively, his hair standing on end. "That is... something else."

 

In the simulated city, Izuku raised his right arm, extending his palm toward the towering chest of the Zero Pointer.

 

The coldness didn't just whisper; it screamed. It told him he was the god of this world. It told him that life and death were his to decide, that the laws of physics were merely toys for him to break.

 

Izuku forced the human tears to stream from his left, pale eye, anchoring his soul to the terrified girl trapped beneath the rubble.

 

I am a hero! Izuku's mind roared against the alien god inside him. Move!

 

"Bansho Ten'in," Izuku commanded. Universal Pull.

 

He didn't push. He grasped the very fabric of space and gravity surrounding the upper torso of the colossal machine, and he violently ripped his arm backward.

 

The result was cataclysmic.

 

The Zero Pointer didn't just stop. It didn't fall. The entire upper half of the skyscraper-sized machine—thousands of tons of reinforced steel and circuitry—was violently, cleanly severed from its treads by a localized singularity of gravitational force.

 

The agonizing screech of tearing metal drowned out everything else.

 

The torso of the massive robot was yanked forward through the air, completely defying gravity, flying toward Izuku like a toy pulled by an invisible string.

 

The students watching from a distance screamed in horror, believing the boy was about to be crushed by the falling mass of the robot he had just ripped apart.

 

But as the colossal torso flew over Uraraka's trapped body and approached Izuku, the boy simply swiped his hand to the side.

 

The gravitational pull shifted. The thousands of tons of metal sharply changed trajectory in mid-air, flying to the right, crashing into an empty row of simulated buildings with the force of a meteor strike. A massive cloud of dust and fire erupted into the sky, shaking the earth so violently that several examinees were thrown to their knees.

 

Silence descended on the Battle Center.

 

The lower treads of the Zero Pointer stood perfectly still, sparking uselessly, a few feet away from the trapped, wide-eyed Uraraka. The upper half of the machine was completely gone, reduced to a burning crater a block away.

 

Izuku stood in the center of the street, his right arm still extended.

 

Slowly, the overwhelming, suffocating pressure in the air dissipated. The loose rocks that had been floating around Izuku clattered back to the pavement.

 

The deep, majestic purple of the Rinnegan in his right eye flickered, the rings dissolving. The eye faded back to the stark, pale lavender of the Byakugan, then the bulging veins finally receded beneath his skin.

 

A single drop of blood leaked from the corner of his right eye, tracking down his cheek like a crimson tear.

 

The sheer toll of forcing the unawakened Rinnegan to manifest through sheer emotional distress, combined with the catastrophic energy output of the Bansho Ten'in, hit his body like a sledgehammer. His vision blurred.

 

Izuku swayed on his feet. The coldness retreated, leaving him feeling incredibly human, incredibly exhausted, and wonderfully warm.

 

He stumbled forward, dropping to his knees beside the slab of concrete trapping Uraraka.

 

Uraraka stared at him, her chest heaving, her eyes wide with an emotion caught somewhere between absolute awe and primal terror. She had seen his eye. She had felt the gravity bend.

 

"Are... are you okay?" Izuku asked, his voice returning to the soft, trembling tone of a fourteen-year-old boy. He reached out and effortlessly lifted the massive slab of concrete off her leg with one hand, tossing it aside as if it were styrofoam.

 

Uraraka blinked, tears welling in her eyes. The terrifying monster who had just ripped the sky apart was gone. In his place was just a boy, bleeding from one eye, looking at her with profound, genuine concern.

 

"You... you saved me," she whispered, her voice shaking.

 

Izuku managed a weak, exhausted smile. "I'm glad. That's... what heroes do."

 

His vision finally swam, the world tilting sideways. Izuku pitched forward, collapsing onto the cracked pavement, his consciousness fading into a deep, dreamless dark.

 

 

 

In the observation room, the silence was absolute.

 

None of the teachers spoke. Midnight had a hand over her mouth. Snipe was staring at the blank monitor where the camera had been destroyed by the sheer gravitational distortion.

 

Principal Nezu slowly set his teacup down. The porcelain rattled against the saucer.

 

"Eraserhead," Nezu said softly. "Did you see that?"

 

Aizawa's eyes were wide, his Erasure still unconsciously active, though it had done absolutely nothing to stop the event. "He didn't emit a gravitational wave. He didn't use a telekinetic push. He grabbed the space itself. The energy output... if he had aimed that at the ground, he would have cracked the tectonic plate."

 

Aizawa turned to look at All Might, who was gripping the edge of a console, looking fiercely proud, yet deeply concerned for the boy's physical state.

 

"Yagi," Aizawa said, his voice deadly serious. "Who is that kid?"

 

Toshinori stood up straight, his massive, muscular form casting a long shadow over the room. He remembered the boy crying in the rain, terrified of the coldness, terrified of losing his humanity. He remembered the boy asking if a monster could be a hero.

 

"That kid," All Might boomed, his voice echoing with undeniable certainty, "is the one who is going to save us all."