What If Deku Had the Speed Force Like The Flash

 

The wind howling across the rooftop of the nondescript apartment building was a hollow, empty sound. To fourteen-year-old Izuku Midoriya, it sounded exactly like the sudden, echoing void inside his chest.

 

A few moments ago, he had been standing before his idol, the Symbol of Peace, the towering mountain of muscle and unyielding optimism known as All Might. Izuku had clung to the man’s leg, soared through the sky, and finally, desperately, asked the question that had haunted him since he was four years old.

 

“Can someone without a Quirk be a hero like you?”

 

He had closed his eyes when he asked it, bracing for the answer. But when he opened them, the invincible god of heroics was gone, replaced by a frail, skeletal man coughing up blood in a cloud of steam. The reality of All Might’s hidden injury had been a shock, yes, but it was nothing compared to the devastation of the words that followed.

 

“Pro heroes are always risking their lives,” Toshinori Yagi said, leaning heavily against the railing, his sunken blue eyes looking anywhere but at the trembling boy before him. “Some villains just can't be beaten without powers. So, can you be a hero without a Quirk? I honestly don't think you can.”

 

Izuku felt his jaw slacken. His eyes, usually so bright and full of manic, desperate hope, glazed over.

 

“If you want to help people,” the skeletal man continued, his voice gentle but brutally firm, “there are other ways. You can become a police officer. They get mocked for having villains delivered to their doorstep, but it’s a fine profession. It’s not bad to have dreams, young man. Just... make sure they’re realistic.”

 

And with that, the Symbol of Peace turned, opened the heavy metal door of the rooftop access, and descended the stairs, leaving Izuku alone with the wind.

 

Izuku didn't move. He couldn't. His feet felt as though they had been cast in concrete. The yellow, charred edges of his hero analysis notebook—ruined by Katsuki Bakugo just an hour prior—dug into his palm. He had clung to that notebook like a life preserver in a raging ocean, but now, the ocean had swallowed him whole.

 

Realistic.

 

The word echoed in his skull, bouncing around painfully. It was the same word his mother had used when she cried and apologized to him in the dark of his bedroom ten years ago. It was the same sentiment Bakugo expressed with every explosion to his shoulders. It was the same reality the doctor had delivered along with the X-ray of his double-jointed pinky toe.

 

You don't have power, Izuku. You are fragile. You are slow. You are nothing.

 

He didn’t know how long he stood there. The sun began its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the sky over Musutafu in bruised shades of purple and orange. Eventually, the cold seeped into his bones, forcing his body into motion.

 

His descent down the stairwell was mechanical. Left foot. Right foot. Turn at the landing. Left foot. Right foot. His mind was entirely blank, wiped clean by the sheer, absolute finality of his dream dying. He walked out of the building and onto the bustling streets, just another face in the crowd, just another Quirkless nobody heading home to a life of mediocrity.

 

He didn't know where he was walking. He let his muscle memory guide him, his eyes locked onto the pavement. He was so detached from reality that he didn’t even register the sound at first.

 

BOOM.

 

The ground vibrated slightly beneath the soles of his red sneakers. Izuku blinked, his head snapping up. In the distance, a plume of thick, acrid black smoke was rising over the Tatooin Shopping District.

 

A villain attack, his brain automatically supplied.

 

For a fraction of a second, the old Izuku flared to life. His hand tightened on his notebook. He needed to go see. He needed to take notes. What heroes were there? What were their Quirk parameters?

 

Then, he remembered the rooftop. He remembered All Might’s sunken eyes.

 

Right, Izuku thought, his shoulders slumping. I’m not... I can't be a hero. My notes are useless. I should just go home.

 

Despite his internal resignation, his feet moved on their own. Ten years of deeply ingrained habit could not be broken in an afternoon. Before he knew it, he was standing at the back of a massive crowd of onlookers, cordoned off by police tape. The heat rolling off the intersection was oppressive. The smell of burning rubber, shattered asphalt, and sulfur choked the air.

 

Izuku forced his way to the front of the crowd, peering past a burly man with a mutation quirk. When he saw the center of the chaos, his breath hitched in his throat.

 

It was the Sludge Villain. The exact same amorphous, liquid-based villain that had attacked him under the bridge earlier that day. The villain that All Might had captured in a soda bottle.

 

Did he drop it? Izuku thought, a cold sweat breaking out over his neck. When he jumped away from me... when I grabbed his leg... the bottle must have fallen. This... this is my fault.

 

Guilt crashed into him like a physical weight, dropping him to his knees. He gripped his hair, staring at the destruction. Fires raged out of control, licking the sides of the buildings. Pro heroes were on the scene, but they were doing absolutely nothing.

 

Death Arms was holding up a piece of falling debris, yelling at the crowd to stay back. Kamui Woods was saving civilians from the collapsing structures, his wood quirk useless against the roaring flames. Mt. Lady was standing two streets over, complaining that she didn't have enough room to transform.

 

"Why aren't they attacking?" a civilian next to Izuku asked.

 

"The villain has a hostage," another replied. "And the kid he grabbed has a crazy strong Quirk. He's setting off explosions everywhere. The heroes can't get close!"

 

Izuku lifted his head. His green eyes locked onto the towering mass of dark green sludge. The villain was laughing, a horrible, gurgling sound, while violent explosions detonated randomly from within its body, fueling the fires around them.

 

Then, the smoke cleared just enough for Izuku to see the hostage.

 

Trapped within the suffocating, foul-smelling liquid was a face Izuku had known his entire life. Ash-blonde hair. Crimson eyes.

 

Kacchan.

 

Bakugo was drowning. The sludge was forcing its way down his throat, into his nose. For all of Bakugo's immense power, for all his pride and explosive fury, he was dying. And as Izuku looked at him, Bakugo’s eyes shifted. They locked onto Izuku in the crowd.

 

There was no anger in Bakugo's eyes. There was no pride. There was only raw, unadulterated terror. He was begging for his life.

 

He's looking at me, Izuku realized.

 

Time seemed to dilate. The roaring flames faded into a low hum. The shouting of the pro heroes—“Wait for a hero with a suitable Quirk!” “We can’t do anything!”—became nothing more than white noise.

 

My fault. It's my fault he's there.

 

Izuku’s legs acted before his brain could process the command. He vaulted over the yellow police tape, dropping his ruined notebook onto the asphalt.

 

"Hey, kid! Stop!" Death Arms roared, reaching out, but his fingers only grazed the back of Izuku's middle school uniform.

 

Izuku was sprinting. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't have a plan. He was just a Quirkless, frail boy running headlong into an inferno, armed with nothing but the desperate, overriding need to save a life.

 

He reeled his arm back, tearing his backpack off his shoulders and hurling it at the villain with all his might. The bag unzipped mid-air, scattering textbooks and pencils. A thick math textbook miraculously struck the Sludge Villain right in his liquid eyeball.

 

The villain roared in pain, its grip loosening just a fraction of a millimeter. Bakugo gasped, pulling his mouth free.

 

"Deku?!" Bakugo coughed, hacking up vile tasting mud. "What the hell are you doing?!"

 

"I don't know!" Izuku screamed, his arms frantically clawing at the thick, gelatinous muck, trying to pry it away from Bakugo's chest. It was like trying to dig through wet concrete with his bare hands. "My legs just moved on their own! You looked like you were asking for help!"

 

The Sludge Villain recovered, its liquid mass shifting and boiling with rage. "You little brat!" it gurgled. "I'll kill you!"

 

A massive, hardened tendril of sludge reared back, ready to crush Izuku into a bloody paste.

 

Izuku looked up at the descending strike. He looked at Bakugo, still trapped, still suffocating. He looked at the pro heroes, still too far away. He looked at the distance between himself and safety.

 

I'm too slow, Izuku thought.

 

The realization hit him with agonizing clarity. It didn't matter how much courage he had. It didn't matter that he had moved when no one else would. Courage couldn't cross the distance. Courage couldn't break the laws of physics. His body was weak, and his muscles were painfully, pathetically slow.

 

I need to save him. I need to move. I need to be faster. FASTER.

 

He screamed it in his mind. He screamed it from the very depths of his soul. A desperate, primal demand to the universe to rewrite the rules of his reality just this once.

 

FASTER!

 

High above Musutafu, beyond the smoke and the flames, the atmosphere abruptly changed.

 

There was no buildup. No gathering of storm clouds. The clear late-afternoon sky suddenly violently warped, as if space itself was folding. A localized pressure drop shattered the windows of the top three floors of a nearby skyscraper. The air grew impossibly heavy, tasting sharply of copper and ozone.

 

Death Arms felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Bakugo, despite his terror, felt a strange, static vibration hum through his teeth.

 

From the clear blue sky, a single, jagged bolt of lightning descended.

 

It was not blue or white like normal lightning. It was a searing, blinding, incandescent yellow-green. It did not strike the tallest building, nor did it aim for a metal pole. It arched through the sky, defying gravity and atmospheric resistance, tearing through the smoke, and struck Izuku Midoriya squarely in the chest.

 

There was no thunder. There was only a sound like a tuning fork struck against the fabric of reality itself—a high-pitched, vibrating VMMMMM that rattled the bones of everyone present.

 

When the lightning hit Izuku, the world stopped.

 

Literally.

 

Izuku gasped, his eyes flying open. His chest arched backward from the impact of the strike, but there was no pain. Instead, a sensation of absolute, overwhelming euphoria flooded his veins. It felt as though he had been asleep his entire life, and someone had just injected pure, unadulterated energy directly into his heart. His cells sang. His blood roared.

 

He blinked, panting heavily, and looked around.

 

The first thing he noticed was the silence. The deafening roar of the fire, the screams of the crowd, the explosions—they were all gone.

 

The second thing he noticed was the air. It felt incredibly thick, like walking at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Izuku turned his head. To his right, a tongue of fire was erupting from a shattered storefront. But it wasn't moving. The flames were suspended in mid-air, frozen in intricate, sharp crests of orange and red, looking like jagged pieces of sculpted glass.

 

He looked back at the villain. The tendril of sludge that was about to crush him was halted a mere two inches from his forehead. He could see the individual droplets of moisture suspended in the air around the villain's body.

 

He looked at Bakugo. The ash-blonde boy’s eyes were wide, the tears of frustration and fear paused on his cheeks. A bead of sweat was hanging halfway off his chin, completely motionless.

 

"What... what is this?" Izuku whispered.

 

To his shock, his voice sounded strange—deep, distorted, and incredibly slow, like a vinyl record played at the wrong speed.

 

He looked down at his hands. Bright, crackling arcs of yellow-green lightning were dancing across his skin, weaving between his fingers, running up his arms, and sparking off the brass buttons of his middle school uniform. His entire body was vibrating at a microscopic level, producing a soft, barely audible hum.

 

Did I awaken a Quirk? he thought, his analytical mind trying to kick into gear despite the impossibility of the situation. A time-stopping Quirk? No... no, I can feel it. I can feel my heart beating. It's beating so fast it feels like a single continuous tone.

 

He wasn't stopping time. He was moving so fast that time appeared to stand still.

 

The lightning... it changed me.

 

Izuku looked at Bakugo. He didn't have time to analyze the mechanics of whatever cosmic miracle had just occurred. He needed to get his friend out.

 

Izuku took a step forward.

 

The moment his sneaker touched the pavement, he realized how difficult this was going to be. Friction at this velocity was monstrous. Pushing his leg through the air felt like wading through thick mud, but when he pushed harder, his foot slipped, tearing a chunk of asphalt right out of the street.

 

Focus, he told himself. Calculate the force. Lean into it.

 

He stepped again, adjusting his weight, letting the electric current in his veins guide his muscles. He reached up, grasping the frozen tendril of sludge hovering over his head. To his touch, the liquid didn't feel wet; at this speed, the surface tension made it feel like solid rubber.

 

With a grunt of exertion, Izuku pushed the tendril aside. He stepped closer to Bakugo, grabbed the thick collar of the boy's middle school uniform, and pulled.

 

The sludge resisted, but with the strange, vibrating energy coursing through Izuku's arms, he possessed a strength he had never known. The sludge stretched and tore like taffy. Slowly, agonizingly, Izuku pulled Bakugo out of the villain's main body.

 

He threw Bakugo's arm over his shoulder. The boy was heavy, completely dead weight in this frozen state of time. Izuku turned back toward the pro heroes. They were still frozen fifty feet away.

 

I have to move him, Izuku thought.

 

He tightened his grip on Bakugo and ran.

 

He didn't run fast—not yet. He just jogged toward the heroes. But even at a jog, the friction was immense. Izuku noticed the soles of his red sneakers beginning to smoke, the rubber melting and leaving dark streaks on the pavement. The wind resistance felt like sandpaper against his cheeks.

 

He crossed the fifty feet in what felt to him like ten seconds. He carefully laid the frozen Bakugo down on the ground right at the feet of Death Arms.

 

Izuku stepped back. He was panting, his chest heaving, his muscles beginning to burn with an intense, agonizing heat. The yellow lightning around his body was flashing erratically, violently. He could feel his grip on this hyper-accelerated state slipping. His body, completely untrained for this level of metabolic output, was giving out.

 

I have to let go, Izuku realized.

 

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and stopped vibrating.

 

He let time catch up.

 

 

 

To the rest of the world, it happened in a microsecond.

 

One moment, the Quirkless boy was standing in front of the Sludge Villain, about to be crushed. The next moment, there was a flash of blinding yellow-green light, and the boy simply ceased to be there.

 

Then came the boom.

 

When Izuku dropped out of his hyper-accelerated state, the laws of physics aggressively reasserted themselves. The air that he had rapidly displaced by moving himself and Bakugo collapsed back in on itself.

 

KA-THOOOOOM!

 

A massive, concussive sonic boom detonated in the center of the intersection. A visible shockwave of compressed air exploded outward. The sheer wind pressure was apocalyptic. The raging fires on the buildings were snuffed out instantly, starved of oxygen and blown away like candle flames.

 

The Sludge Villain, caught at ground zero of the vacuum collapse, didn't even have time to register what had happened. The wind shear caught its liquid body and violently blew it apart, scattering thousands of gallons of foul-smelling muck across a three-block radius, completely incapacitating it.

 

The windows of the surrounding shops, already weakened by the fire, shattered inward, raining glass down on the street. The pro heroes and the crowd were thrown off their feet, tumbling backward against cars and streetlamps from the sheer force of the gale.

 

All Might, who had been hiding in the alleyway, gripping his bleeding side and hating himself for his weakness, was blown back into a trash dumpster, his jaw dropping in absolute shock.

 

For ten seconds, the street was entirely silent, save for the tinkling of falling glass and the hissing of extinguished fires.

 

Death Arms groaned, pushing himself up off the asphalt, his ears ringing terribly. He looked down and jumped back in shock. Lying right at his feet, covered in soot and coughing violently, was Katsuki Bakugo.

 

"The hostage?!" Death Arms yelled, looking around wildly. "How did he get over here?!"

 

"Look!" Kamui Woods shouted, pointing toward the center of the cratered street.

 

The smoke was clearing. Standing in the epicenter of a web of cracked asphalt was Izuku Midoriya.

 

He was not okay.

 

The friction of his movement had taken a severe toll. The soles of his iconic red sneakers were completely melted away, leaving his socks smoking on the hot pavement. His black middle school trousers were singed, and the cuffs were on fire, though the flames were quickly dying out.

 

Yellow-green lightning still sparked faintly across his skin, arcing from his cheek down to his collarbone before fizzling out into nothingness.

 

Izuku swayed on his feet. He looked down at his hands, then over at Bakugo, who was staring at him with wide, terrified, and bewildered eyes.

 

Izuku opened his mouth to speak, but his throat was drier than a desert. A wave of exhaustion, so profound and absolute that it felt like his organs were shutting down, hit him. His metabolism, having just burned tens of thousands of calories in a fraction of a second, crashed.

 

His eyes rolled back in his head. The last thing he saw before darkness claimed him was the sky above, no longer warped, but painted a peaceful, twilight blue.

 

He collapsed face-first onto the shattered street, dead to the world.

 

 

 

Beep. Beep. Beep.

 

The sound was agonizingly slow.

 

Izuku’s consciousness swam up through a thick, murky fog. The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor next to his bed felt like it was happening an hour apart. He twitched his fingers, feeling the crisp, clean cotton of a hospital bedsheet.

 

He opened his eyes, squinting against the harsh fluorescent lights of the room.

 

"Izuku!"

 

Before his vision could even clear, a blur of green hair and tears collided with his chest. His mother, Inko Midoriya, wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his hospital gown and sobbing so hard her entire body shook.

 

"Mom?" Izuku croaked. His voice sounded like sandpaper rubbing against gravel.

 

"Oh, my baby! My poor baby!" Inko wailed, squeezing him tighter. "The police called me! They said you ran into a villain attack! They said you were struck by lightning! I thought I lost you, Izuku! I thought you were dead!"

 

Izuku patted her back weakly, his mind struggling to catch up. The sludge villain. Bakugo. The lightning. The frozen world. It rushed back into his brain like a tidal wave.

 

He sat up slightly, wincing as his muscles screamed in protest. Every inch of his body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder. But more than the pain, there was a gnawing, hollow void in his stomach.

 

"Mom," Izuku rasped. "Food."

 

Inko pulled back, wiping her tear-stained face. "W-What?"

 

"I need food. Please. I'm so hungry I can't think."

 

An hour later, the nurses at Musutafu General Hospital were staring in open-mouthed shock.

 

Izuku was sitting up in bed, surrounded by a small mountain of empty trays. He had consumed four bowls of katsudon, three plates of yakisoba, a dozen rice balls, two loaves of bread, and a gallon of milk. He was currently tearing into a family-sized bag of potato chips with a ferocity that bordered on feral.

 

"He's... he's going to burst," a young nurse whispered to the attending doctor.

 

The doctor, a middle-aged man with a clipboard, pushed his glasses up his nose. "His charts don't make any sense. His resting heart rate is hovering around three hundred beats per minute, yet his blood pressure is perfectly normal. His cellular regeneration is operating at a speed I've never documented. The burns on his feet have already scarred over."

 

Izuku swallowed a handful of chips and looked at his hands. He could feel it. The hum. It was fainter now, settled deep inside his chest, but it was there. Like a coiled spring of pure energy waiting to be released.

 

The doctor stepped into the room. "Midoriya-kun. How are you feeling?"

 

"Better," Izuku said, reaching for a banana. "Really sore. But the food helps."

 

"I would imagine so. Your body is burning energy at an astronomical rate to repair your muscle tissue. Izuku, your mother informed us that you were Quirkless."

 

Izuku paused. He looked at Inko, who was sitting in a chair in the corner, wringing her hands nervously.

 

"I was," Izuku said quietly. "Until today."

 

"Late awakenings are extraordinarily rare, but not unheard of," the doctor mused, scribbling on his clipboard. "Usually brought on by extreme physical or emotional trauma. Given the lightning strike, it seems your body underwent a massive bio-electric mutation. The police reported that you moved so fast you broke the sound barrier, displacing enough air to neutralize the villain. We're classifying it as a hyper-speed mutation. We'll need you to register the Quirk once you're discharged."

 

A Quirk.

 

Izuku stared at his palm. He had a Quirk. After ten years of mockery, of sorrow, of shattered dreams. He finally had power.

 

Before the doctor could continue, a heavy knock echoed through the room. The door opened, and a towering, incredibly thin man with messy blonde hair stepped inside, wearing an oversized trench coat.

 

"Excuse me," Toshinori Yagi said, offering a polite bow. "May I have a moment alone with the young man?"

 

Inko stood up, looking confused. "I'm sorry, who are you?"

 

"He's... he's someone I met earlier," Izuku interjected quickly, his heart rate spiking (which set the monitor into a frantic trill). "It's okay, Mom. He's a friend."

 

Inko looked unsure, but the doctor nodded. "We need to run his bloodwork again anyway. We'll give you five minutes. Come along, Mrs. Midoriya."

 

Once the door clicked shut, the silence stretched between Izuku and the skeletal form of the Symbol of Peace.

 

Toshinori walked slowly to the foot of the bed, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He looked at the mountain of food trays, then up at Izuku's bandaged face. The man looked incredibly old, tired, and deeply ashamed.

 

"I came here to apologize," Toshinori said, his voice quiet but echoing with sincerity.

 

Izuku stopped eating. "Apologize? For what?"

 

"For my hypocrisy. And for my blindness." Toshinori gripped the metal railing of the bed. "I told you to be realistic. I told you that without power, you couldn't save anyone. I stood in an alleyway, clutching my wound, using my time limit as an excuse to do nothing while a middle schooler suffocated to death."

 

Toshinori lowered his head, staring at the linoleum floor. "But you... you didn't hesitate. You, who had no power, possessed the heart of a true hero. You ran in when the pros stood by. Your actions, your bravery... it was the catalyst that ignited the heavens."

 

Izuku felt a lump form in his throat. This was the man he had worshipped his entire life. To hear these words from him... it was overwhelming.

 

"I didn't think," Izuku whispered. "My legs just moved on their own."

 

Toshinori snapped his head up, his blue eyes flashing. "That is what makes a top hero! Every great hero in history has one thing in common: their bodies moved before they had a chance to think!"

 

Izuku gasped, tears instantly pricking the corners of his eyes. That was it. Those were the words. The words he had waited his entire life to hear. The words he had wanted his mother to say, the words he had begged All Might to say on that rooftop.

 

"I came here," Toshinori continued, stepping closer, "originally intending to offer you a proposition. I have a power, a Quirk, that can be passed down. I wanted to make you my successor."

 

Izuku’s eyes widened in shock. "Passed down? That's impossible..."

 

"It is the truth. But," Toshinori offered a wry, almost disbelieving smile, "it seems the universe had other plans for you, young Midoriya."

 

Toshinori pointed a bony finger at Izuku's chest. "Whatever happened out there today... that lightning strike... I have fought villains and seen Quirks for forty years. I have never felt an energy like that. It wasn't just a Quirk awakening. It felt like the air itself was screaming."

 

Izuku looked down at his chest. He thought about the frozen world. The yellow lightning. The profound, terrifying realization that he could outrun time itself.

 

"It's dangerous," Izuku admitted quietly. "When I ran, I couldn't stop right. I couldn't control the friction. I almost burned my own legs off. And the shockwave... I could have hurt people."

 

"Power without control is just destruction," Toshinori agreed, nodding seriously. "You have been handed the keys to a fighter jet, but you don't know how to fly. You will need to train. You will need to tear your muscles down and build them back up to handle the G-forces your body is now capable of producing."

 

Toshinori stood up straight, offering a hand to the boy in the bed.

 

"You asked me if a Quirkless boy could be a hero. You proved to me today that the spirit of a hero exists independently of a Quirk. But now, you have the power to match that spirit."

 

Toshinori smiled, a genuine, radiant expression that looked completely out of place on his gaunt face.

 

"Young Midoriya. You can become a hero."

 

Izuku took the man's hand. As their skin touched, a tiny, microscopic spark of yellow lightning arced between their fingers. Toshinori’s eyes widened slightly at the static shock, a brief look of awe crossing his features.

 

Tears streamed freely down Izuku’s face, dropping onto his hospital gown. But for the first time in ten years, they were not tears of sorrow or frustration.

 

They were tears of velocity.

 

"The U.A. Entrance Exam is in ten months," Toshinori said, letting go of his hand. "You have a lot of work to do. And a lot of calories to consume, by the look of it."

 

Izuku wiped his eyes, a determined, fiery grin spreading across his face. The hum in his chest pulsed, vibrating in time with his racing heart.

 

"I'll be ready," Izuku said. "I'm going to be the fastest hero alive."

 

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.

 

The heart monitor trilled wildly in the background, unable to keep up with the boy who was already leaving the world behind.

 

The mountains of illegal garbage at Dagobah Municipal Beach Park cast long, jagged shadows across the sand in the early morning light. Rusted refrigerators, stripped car chassis, and towering piles of forgotten domestic rot created a metallic labyrinth that smelled of oxidized iron and low tide.

 

For the past three weeks, this wasteland had served as Izuku Midoriya’s personal laboratory and training ground.

 

"Alright, young Midoriya," the skeletal form of Toshinori Yagi called out, sitting atop a relatively clean microwave, a stopwatch in his oversized hand. "Remember the theory. It's not just about pushing your legs. It's about regulating the energy output. You have to ease into it, like pressing the gas pedal on a high-performance sports car."

 

Izuku stood fifty yards away, dressed in a standard gray middle school tracksuit. He rolled his shoulders, taking a deep breath of the salty ocean air. He closed his eyes and looked inward.

 

Ever since the incident with the Sludge Villain, Izuku had felt it. A constant, thrumming vibration resting just behind his sternum. It felt like a trapped star, humming with infinite potential. He had spent the first week just trying to walk without accidentally throwing himself into a wall. The energy was so volatile that simply being startled caused him to vibrate through his bedsheets.

 

"Easing in," Izuku muttered to himself. "Right. Smooth acceleration."

 

He opened his eyes. They flashed with a brilliant, emerald-green light.

 

He leaned forward, bending his knees, and tapped into the well of power. The world instantly shifted. The crashing waves of the ocean slowed to a crawl, the droplets of sea spray hanging lazily in the air. The cry of a seagull overhead distorted into a low, demonic groan.

 

Yellow-green lightning erupted from his core, dancing wildly over his gray tracksuit, crackling with the sharp scent of ozone.

 

Izuku pushed off his back foot.

 

He didn't run; he exploded. The sand beneath his feet was instantly superheated into glass from the sheer friction of his launch. He cleared the fifty yards in zero-point-two seconds. To Toshinori, the boy was simply standing there one moment, and in the next, a thunderous crack echoed across the beach, a gust of wind knocked the pro hero backward, and Izuku was standing behind him.

 

"Ah! Amazing!" Toshinori cheered, checking the stopwatch, though human reflexes made the timing completely arbitrary. "You're getting faster!"

 

"Uh, All Might?" Izuku’s voice was high-pitched and strained.

 

Toshinori turned around. Izuku was standing stiffly, patting frantically at his legs. His gray tracksuit pants were engulfed in bright orange flames.

 

"Ah! You're on fire! Drop and roll, my boy! Drop and roll!" Toshinori panicked, frantically waving his arms.

 

Izuku threw himself into the sand, vibrating his body violently to snuff out the oxygen around the flames. He sat up a moment later, coughing on the smoke. His tracksuit pants were completely ruined from the knees down, revealing blackened, singed skin that was already beginning to rapidly knit itself back together. The soles of his running shoes were entirely gone, leaving only the melted rubber uppers clinging to his socks.

 

"That's the fifth pair this week," Izuku sighed, pulling the melted plastic off his heels. He immediately felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. His stomach gave a monstrous, hollow growl that sounded like a dying whale. His vision blurred, the edges going dark.

 

Toshinori, recognizing the signs, immediately reached into a massive duffel bag beside him and tossed Izuku a large, foil-wrapped brick.

 

Izuku caught it and tore into it like a wild animal. It was a dense, specialized nutrient bar Toshinori had ordered from a support company in America, packing roughly four thousand calories into a single brick of concentrated protein, fats, and carbohydrates. Izuku ate three of them in under a minute, washing them down with a two-liter bottle of electrolyte fluid.

 

Only then did the trembling in his hands stop. The color returned to his face.

 

"This isn't going to work," Izuku said, staring at his ruined clothes. "I can regulate my metabolism if I keep eating constantly, but the friction... I can't be a hero if I have to fight naked every time I break the sound barrier. The air resistance tears through standard fabric like tissue paper."

 

"It's a conundrum," Toshinori agreed, rubbing his chin. "My costume is made of poly-carbon fibers to stretch with my muscle mass, but it wouldn't withstand the sheer thermal load of Mach 1. You need specialized support gear. Something highly advanced."

 

"Where am I supposed to get that? I'm just a middle schooler. Support companies don't take requests from unlicensed kids."

 

Toshinori smiled mysteriously. "True. But U.A. has a rather robust Support Course. And while they don't cater to the public, the scrap yards on the edge of the city are a known hunting ground for budding inventors looking for parts. I have a feeling if you look in the right places, you might find someone crazy enough to build you a prototype."

 

 

 

Three days later, Izuku found himself wandering through the chaotic, towering aisles of the Hosu Industrial Salvage Yard. The air here smelled of motor oil, burning flux, and ozone. It was a graveyard for discarded machinery, robotics, and aerospace scrap.

 

He was looking for aerogel, carbon nanotubes, or perhaps discarded thermal plating from space shuttles. Anything that could withstand extreme friction.

 

He was entirely focused on a pile of discarded jet engine turbines when a localized explosion blew him flat on his back.

 

"Dammit! The thermal regulator overloaded again!" a voice shrieked.

 

Izuku coughed, waving away the thick cloud of black smoke. Emerging from the smog was a girl his age with wild, thick pink hair styled into thick dreadlocks, wearing heavy steampunk-style goggles and a grease-stained jumpsuit. She was holding a charred, smoking metal gauntlet.

 

"Excuse me?" Izuku coughed, standing up and dusting off his school uniform. "Are you okay?"

 

The girl’s head snapped toward him. Her eyes, hidden behind the strange crosshair reticles of her irises, narrowed in on him. "Okay? I'm fantastic! My baby just proved that combustion expansion needs a secondary exhaust port! Science requires sacrifice!"

 

She marched up to Izuku, leaning in uncomfortably close. "Who are you? You don't look like a scavenger. You have all your teeth and zero grease stains."

 

"I'm Izuku Midoriya. I'm... looking for materials. For my Quirk."

 

"Ooh! A Quirk user looking for custom gear!" She dropped the ruined gauntlet and grabbed both of his hands, shaking them violently. "I am Mei Hatsume! Future CEO of Hatsume Industries! Tell me about your Quirk! Do you shoot lasers? Acid? Do you need a mech suit? I can build you a mech suit. It might explode, but it'll look incredibly cool!"

 

"No mech suit," Izuku said, utterly overwhelmed by her intense energy. He managed to gently pull his hands back. "I need... clothes. Something that won't burn."

 

Mei blinked. "Burn? Like a fire Quirk? Easy. Asbestos-lined poly-kevlar. Boring, but doable."

 

"No, not fire. Friction." Izuku hesitated. He hadn't told anyone outside of All Might and his mother about the true nature of his Quirk. But he was desperate. "I have a... speed Quirk. When I run, I move so fast that the air resistance generates enough thermal energy to ignite standard fabrics. I melt my shoes off. I need a suit that can withstand extreme G-forces, heat, and aerodynamic drag."

 

Mei’s eyes went perfectly round. The crosshairs in her irises seemed to physically click into focus. "Speed? How fast are we talking? Eighty kilometers an hour? A hundred?"

 

Izuku looked around to make sure no one was listening. He leaned in slightly. "Mach 1. Minimum. I... haven't exactly found my top speed yet."

 

Mei stopped breathing. She stared at him for three full seconds. Then, she let out a high-pitched squeal that shattered the relative peace of the scrapyard.

 

"MACH 1?!" she screamed, grabbing him by the shoulders. "You break the sound barrier?! The kinetic energy! The thermal load! Oh, you beautiful, beautiful crash test dummy! You are exactly what I need!"

 

"Crash test dummy?" Izuku repeated nervously.

 

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to test aerospace friction materials without a wind tunnel?" Mei babbled, already dragging Izuku toward a massive, jury-rigged workshop built out of shipping containers in the back of the lot. "I have blueprints for a frictionless kinetic suit, but I've never had a subject capable of putting it under enough stress! Midoriya, was it? We are going to be best friends. I will make you a suit. For free. Under one condition."

 

"Which is?"

 

"You test my babies. All of them."

 

For the next three months, Izuku's life became a grueling cycle of physical conditioning at Dagobah Beach, eating his body weight in food, and surviving Mei Hatsume.

 

The girl was an absolute genius, bordering on madness. Their first attempt at a suit involved a vulcanized rubber base layered with a tri-polymer synthetic weave. Izuku tested it on a deserted stretch of highway at 3:00 AM.

 

He tapped into the Speed Force, the familiar yellow lightning arcing around him. He took off. The suit held for exactly three seconds before the rubber melted, fusing to his skin and causing excruciating burns. Recovery Girl, whom All Might had introduced Izuku to in utter secrecy, scolded him for an hour while healing the second-degree burns.

 

"Your cells are vibrating at an insane frequency, Midoriya," Recovery Girl had muttered, staring at his medical chart. "The friction isn't just external. Your internal kinetic energy is generating heat. The suit can't just be heat-resistant; it has to be completely breathable, or you'll cook yourself from the inside out in your own sweat."

 

Izuku took the notes back to Mei. She didn't despair; she practically vibrated with excitement.

 

"Breathable thermal dispersal!" Mei had shouted. "Of course! We need micro-ventilation and a frictionless coating!"

 

By month seven, they had a working prototype. It wasn't pretty. It was a skin-tight, dark green bodysuit made from a highly experimental, woven aerogel-carbon nanotube blend. It felt strangely cool to the touch, almost slippery. The boots were the crowning achievement: aerodynamic, high-traction cleats made from the same heat-resistant alloys used on the underbelly of atmospheric re-entry shuttles.

 

Izuku stood on Dagobah Beach at dawn. The trash mountains were still imposing, but over the last half-year, he had manually moved hundreds of tons of smaller debris. He looked down at the dark green suit. Mei had insisted on adding some black accents to make it look "heroic," and she had fashioned a sleek, aerodynamic cowl that covered the top half of his head, leaving his hair free but protecting his ears and eyes with specialized, friction-resistant visors.

 

"Alright, Midoriya!" Mei yelled through an earpiece built into the cowl. She was sitting in a lawn chair fifty yards away, tracking him with a modified radar gun. "Give it everything you've got! Don't hold back!"

 

Toshinori stood next to her, sipping a coffee, watching intently.

 

Izuku breathed in. The air tasted sharp. He let his mind sink into the Speed Force.

 

The yellow-green lightning didn't just arc off his skin this time; it flowed over the dark green suit, illuminating the dark fabric. The suit didn't restrict his movement; it felt like a second skin.

 

He opened his eyes. The world froze.

 

Izuku crouched low and launched himself forward. The acceleration was instantaneous. The sheer force of his takeoff shattered the sound barrier immediately. A massive CRACK echoed over the beach, kicking up a rooster tail of sand and seawater.

 

He didn't run in a straight line. He ran a circuit around the perimeter of the beach.

 

To Toshinori and Mei, Izuku vanished. He was replaced by a continuous, blurred streak of green and yellow light tracing the edge of the beach. A hurricane-force gale swept over them, blowing Mei’s lawn chair backward and forcing Toshinori to plant his feet firmly into the sand.

 

Izuku pushed harder. The world around him was entirely motionless. He ran up the side of a massive pile of crushed cars, gravity utterly failing to catch him before he reached the peak. He leaped off the top, moving so fast that his arc through the air felt perfectly horizontal.

 

He checked the suit. It was hot, yes, but it wasn't burning. The micro-vents Mei designed were channeling the wind pressure over his body, acting as a natural cooling system. The boots were gripping the sand flawlessly, preventing any slippage.

 

He felt a laugh bubble up in his throat. It was absolute, unadulterated freedom. He was untethered from the laws of physics. He was a god of motion.

 

He ran for what felt like hours in his subjective time. He reorganized three entire piles of trash, moving tires and refrigerators across the beach in the blink of an eye.

 

Finally, the metabolic drain began to catch up with him. The warning signs were clear: a sharp pain behind his eyes and a sudden chill in his bones.

 

He began to decelerate, carefully calculating his braking distance. He skidded across the wet sand, the heat from his soles boiling the seawater into steam, before finally coming to a halt right in front of Toshinori and Mei.

 

He dropped to one knee, panting heavily, sweat pouring down his face beneath the cowl. But he was smiling. The suit was completely intact.

 

Mei looked at her radar gun. The screen had cracked, and it was smoking.

 

"Mach 3.2," Mei whispered, her voice trembling with awe. "You hit Mach 3.2 on a curve. My suit held. My baby held against three times the speed of sound!"

 

Toshinori looked at the beach. In the span of ten seconds, Izuku had moved nearly five hundred tons of scrap metal into neat, organized piles.

 

"Incredible," Toshinori murmured. "You've conquered the friction. But you're exhausted."

 

"I need..." Izuku gasped, pulling off the cowl. "I need... a burger. A hundred burgers."

 

 

 

The morning of the U.A. Entrance Exam arrived crisp and clear.

 

Izuku stood before the towering glass H-shaped structure of U.A. High School. He was wearing his standard middle school uniform, though underneath it, he wore Mei's prototype frictionless undersuit, ready to strip down for the practical exam.

 

He felt heavy. Not physically—his body was incredibly lean, packed with dense, ultra-fast-twitch muscle fibers that made him look deceptively thin—but mentally. He had consumed almost 12,000 calories for breakfast just to top off his energy reserves. He felt like a walking nuclear reactor holding back a meltdown.

 

"Out of my way, Deku!"

 

Izuku didn't even flinch. He recognized the voice, and more importantly, his hyper-accelerated perception caught the microscopic shift in the air pressure behind him before the words were even spoken.

 

He turned slowly. Katsuki Bakugo was stalking toward him, hands shoved deep into his pockets, his red eyes glaring with a mixture of intense irritation and something deeply unsettled.

 

Since the Sludge Villain incident, Bakugo had ignored Izuku entirely. There were no more explosions, no more insults. Just a cold, wary distance. Bakugo had seen what Izuku had done. He had seen the lightning, felt the shockwave. He didn't understand it, and that terrified him.

 

"Good morning, Kacchan," Izuku said calmly.

 

Bakugo sneered, stopping a few feet away. "Don't think just because you pulled some flashy trick out of your ass that you're better than me. You're still a pebble in my path. Don't get in my way today, or I'll kill you."

 

Bakugo shouldered past him, marching toward the entrance.

 

Izuku watched him go. He felt no fear. The anxiety that used to cripple him in Bakugo's presence was entirely gone. When you view the world in milliseconds, when you can dismantle a person's defense before their brain even registers the command to blink, bullies lose their power.

 

Izuku turned to follow him but stumbled on an uneven paving stone. He pitched forward, his heavy stomach throwing off his balance.

 

Whoops, Izuku thought, the world already slowing down as his Quirk activated on reflex. He prepared to put a foot out to catch himself.

 

"Gotcha!" a cheerful voice rang out.

 

Suddenly, the gravity acting on Izuku vanished. He floated gracefully in mid-air, righting himself effortlessly. Time sped back up to normal.

 

He looked down to see a girl with a short brown bob and bright pink cheeks pressing her fingertips together.

 

"Sorry I used my Quirk on you without asking!" the girl smiled brightly. "But it would be bad luck if you fell right before the exam, wouldn't it? I'm Ochako Uraraka!"

 

Izuku blinked. He hadn't talked to a girl his age who wasn't Mei Hatsume in months, and Mei mostly just screamed about science. Uraraka was cute, friendly, and completely normal.

 

"Uh, t-thank you!" Izuku stammered, feeling a flush of heat rise to his cheeks. "I'm Izuku Midoriya. I... I wasn't going to fall, I have a... well, anyway, thank you!"

 

"Good luck to both of us!" Uraraka beamed, waving as she headed inside.

 

Izuku touched his chest, feeling the hum of the Speed Force. Right. Focus. The written exam first.

 

The written exam was, frankly, a joke.

 

Izuku sat at his desk in the massive auditorium. When Present Mic shouted "Start!", Izuku tapped his pencil against the paper. He didn't enter full Flashtime—that would burn too many calories—but he accelerated his cognitive processing.

 

His eyes scanned the dense pages of mathematics, history, and hero law. Because his brain processed information at super-speed, his recall was practically photographic. He read a fifty-page test in forty seconds.

 

He vibrated his hand slightly, filling in the bubble sheet in a blur of motion. His pencil lead smoked, and the paper singed slightly at the edges from the friction of his frantic scribbling, but he finished the entire two-hour exam in exactly three minutes.

 

He spent the next hour and fifty-seven minutes staring at the ceiling, eating protein bars hidden in his sleeves, trying desperately not to fall asleep from sheer boredom.

 

The orientation, however, was worse.

 

Present Mic stood on the stage, screaming about the practical exam rules. Izuku was sitting next to Bakugo, dutifully taking notes at a normal human pace. He was eating his eighth nutrient bar of the morning, chewing methodically.

 

"Excuse me!" a tall, blue-haired boy with glasses shouted, standing up rigidly and pointing an accusatory finger. "I have a question! On the printout, there are four types of villains! If this is a misprint, U.A., the top hero agency in Japan, should be ashamed!"

 

The boy then turned, his finger swiveling to point directly at Izuku. "Furthermore, you with the messy hair! You've been loudly chewing on food for the last twenty minutes! If you are not taking this seriously, leave immediately!"

 

Izuku froze mid-chew. The entire auditorium turned to look at him. Bakugo leaned away from him, looking utterly disgusted.

 

Izuku swallowed. "I... apologize. I have a hyper-metabolic Quirk. If I don't consume roughly ten thousand calories before physical exertion, I will pass out. It's medical."

 

The blue-haired boy faltered, his strict posture wavering. "A... medical necessity? I... I see. My apologies for the assumption!" He bowed stiffly and sat down.

 

Present Mic laughed, diffusing the tension. "All right, all right! To answer examinee 7111's question, the fourth villain is a Zero-Pointer! An arena trap! Ignore it and run!"

 

An obstacle, Izuku mentally filed away. Got it.

 

An hour later, Izuku stood in front of the towering gates of Battle Center B. He had stripped off his middle school uniform, leaving him in Mei’s dark green, skin-tight frictionless suit. He adjusted the cowl over his face, snapping the protective amber-tinted goggles over his eyes.

 

He looked around the crowd. The blue-haired boy, Iida, was lecturing someone near the back. Uraraka was doing stretches near the front, looking nervous.

 

"Okay," Izuku whispered, settling into a runner's stance. "No holding back. I need points. I need to disable the robots without breaking my hands."

 

Standard impact forces were a problem for Izuku. If he punched a steel robot at Mach 2, he would deliver the kinetic energy of a bomb, but his own hand would shatter into dust upon impact. Newton's Third Law still applied to his bones. He couldn't smash them. He had to dismantle them.

 

"START!" Present Mic's voice blasted from the speakers above.

 

The massive gates began to slowly creak open. The other examinees tensed, waiting for the gap to widen enough to run through.

 

Izuku didn't wait.

 

He tapped into the Speed Force. The world froze. Yellow-green lightning erupted from his suit, his cells singing with absolute power. The gates, to his perception, were moving outward at the speed of drifting continents.

 

He didn't run. He phased.

 

By vibrating his molecules at the exact frequency of the air around him, he slipped through the six-inch gap in the gates before they had even fully opened.

 

He bolted down the main street of the faux city. A three-pointer robot rounded the corner, its targeting lasers sweeping the street.

 

Izuku approached it at five hundred miles per hour. He didn't punch it. He ran up the chassis of the robot, his hands moving in a blur. He found the main armor plating seams. Vibrating his fingertips, he bypassed the screws, reached into the internal circuitry, and cleanly yanked out the primary motherboard.

 

He hopped off the robot. As time caught up for a fraction of a second, the three-pointer collapsed, completely dead.

 

Izuku didn't stop. He accelerated.

 

Three points, his brain calculated instantly.

 

He tore through the city like a localized hurricane. The other examinees finally poured through the gates, screaming battle cries, only to find a scene of absolute devastation.

 

Every robot in Sector 1 was already dead. But they weren't smashed or blown up. They were neatly dismantled. Their armor plates were unscrewed and stacked neatly on the sidewalks. Their wiring harnesses were tied in bows. Their optical sensors were removed and arranged in the shape of smiley faces on the pavement.

 

"What... what happened here?" Iida gasped, staring at a two-pointer that had been completely disassembled down to its base bolts.

 

High above in the monitor room, the faculty of U.A. High sat in stunned silence.

 

The massive screens displayed dozens of camera feeds, but on camera 4, 7, and 12, all they saw were sudden bursts of static and a green blur, followed by entire squadrons of robots falling apart simultaneously.

 

"What kind of Quirk is that?" the R-Rated Hero, Midnight, gasped, leaning forward. "Is it an invisibility Quirk? Telekinesis?"

 

"Neither," a tired, gruff voice spoke from the corner. Shota Aizawa, the erasure hero, stared intently at the screen. He slowed the playback on camera 7 to one-one-thousandth of a frame per second.

 

On the screen, a faint, ghostly green outline of a boy surrounded by yellow lightning was visible for exactly one frame, his hands deep inside a robot's chassis.

 

"It's a speed Quirk," Aizawa said softly, his eyes narrowing. "Hyper-velocity. He's moving so fast the cameras' frame rates can't capture him. He's operating in the milliseconds."

 

"That's impossible," Snipe muttered. "A human body can't withstand that kind of G-force without exploding."

 

"And yet," Principal Nezu, the chimera mammal, said with a terrifyingly cheerful smile, "he is doing it. He currently has seventy-four villain points. Let us see how he handles something he cannot simply outrun."

 

Nezu pressed a large red button on his console.

 

Back in Battle Center B, Izuku had just finished removing the treads from a one-pointer when the ground beneath him violently lurched.

 

He dropped out of Flashtime, panting heavily. The suit was working perfectly, venting the massive amounts of heat he was generating, but his calorie reserves were dropping fast. He needed to finish soon.

 

A shadow fell over the city block.

 

Izuku looked up. Crushing two entire buildings beneath its treads was a machine of god-like proportions. It was easily the size of a skyscraper, covered in thick olive-drab armor. Its single red optical sensor glowed with malice.

 

The Zero Pointer, Izuku realized, his eyes widening. That's not an obstacle. That's a natural disaster.

 

The examinees surrounding him began to scream, turning and fleeing in absolute terror. The sheer size of the machine made fighting it a suicidal endeavor.

 

Izuku turned to run with them. He had seventy-four points. He had easily passed. There was no logic in staying.

 

"Ow! Help!"

 

The voice was faint, entirely drowned out by the grinding gears of the behemoth, but Izuku's hyper-tuned hearing caught it. He spun around.

 

Half a block away, right in the direct path of the Zero Pointer's descending treads, was Uraraka. Her leg was pinned beneath a massive slab of concrete rubble from one of the destroyed buildings. She was struggling wildly, but she couldn't free herself.

 

The Zero Pointer raised its massive fist, preparing to smash the street into dust.

 

Izuku didn't think. The same instinct that had driven him toward the Sludge Villain flared in his chest, hot and uncompromising.

 

He triggered the Speed Force. The world stopped.

 

He calculated the distance. Two hundred meters. The fist was already descending. In normal time, it would impact in less than two seconds.

 

Izuku bolted. He crossed the two hundred meters in a microsecond, standing beside Uraraka. He grabbed the concrete slab trapping her leg. He vibrated his arms, intending to shatter the concrete, but paused.

 

If I shatter this at super-speed, the shrapnel will rip right through her. I can't break it. I have to lift it.

 

He braced his legs and heaved. The concrete, weighing easily a ton, groaned. Izuku channeled the kinetic energy from his cells into his muscles, amplifying his physical strength. With a massive shout, he hurled the slab off her leg.

 

He looked up. The Zero Pointer's fist was a mere twenty feet above them, descending like a meteor. If time resumed, they would both be crushed instantly.

 

I have to get her out of here. But if I carry her at Mach speeds, the whiplash will snap her neck. I can't run on the ground.

 

Izuku looked at the fist, and then at the massive chunks of debris hovering in the air around them, frozen in mid-fall from the robot's destructive entrance.

 

An insane idea formed in his head.

 

Izuku scooped Uraraka into his arms, holding her tightly against his chest, supporting her neck and spine. He channeled a secondary field of Speed Force aura around them both—a trick he had learned completely by accident when saving a seagull at the beach. The aura would negate the friction and inertia for her.

 

He didn't run away from the robot. He ran toward it.

 

He stepped onto the first piece of falling debris. The yellow-green lightning surged, temporarily altering the gravitational pull on his body. He kicked off the rock, launching himself upward. He stepped onto another piece of debris, then another.

 

To anyone watching, if they could even see him, he was running up an invisible, chaotic staircase of falling rocks, entirely defying gravity.

 

He cleared the descending fist, running straight up the arm of the Zero Pointer. The metal groaned beneath his boots. He reached the shoulder of the massive machine, a hundred feet in the air, completely clear of the danger zone.

 

He dropped out of Flashtime.

 

Time violently resumed. The Zero Pointer's fist slammed into the street below, creating a massive shockwave that threw up a cloud of dust that obscured the entire block.

 

Izuku and Uraraka were safely on the robot's shoulder. Uraraka shrieked in terror, completely disoriented. One second she was trapped on the ground about to die, and the next, she was a hundred feet in the air in the arms of the green-suited boy.

 

"H-How did we get up here?!" she screamed.

 

"Hold on!" Izuku yelled back. The robot was shifting, preparing to back away. They couldn't stay here.

 

Izuku leaped off the shoulder, aiming for the roof of a nearby intact building. They were falling fast. The wind screamed past their ears.

 

I need to brake, Izuku thought wildly. I need to kill the momentum before we hit the roof.

 

They approached the concrete roof. Izuku twisted his body in mid-air, ensuring he was beneath Uraraka to cushion her fall. He activated the Speed Force, his legs vibrating rapidly as he prepared to absorb the kinetic impact.

 

His boots hit the concrete.

 

What Izuku had forgotten in his adrenaline-fueled panic was basic physics. He was carrying an extra hundred and twenty pounds of weight. He was falling from a hundred feet. And he was trying to bring them from a terminal velocity drop to a dead stop in a fraction of a second.

 

The inertia had to go somewhere.

 

When his boots struck the roof, the Speed Force aura protected Uraraka entirely. She felt a gentle thud, as if landing on a soft mattress.

 

Izuku took the full brunt of the kinetic energy.

 

CRACK-SNAP.

 

The sound was sickeningly loud, like a large tree branch snapping in half.

 

The sheer G-force of the abrupt stop, multiplied by Uraraka's mass, overloaded Izuku's skeletal structure. The bones in both of his lower legs—the tibias and fibulas—shattered completely.

 

Izuku screamed, an agonizing, throat-tearing sound. The pain was beyond anything he had ever experienced. It was blinding, white-hot, and absolute.

 

His legs gave way entirely, bending at horrifying, unnatural angles. He collapsed backward onto the roof, dropping Uraraka safely beside him.

 

"Midoriya!" Uraraka screamed, scrambling to her knees. She looked at his legs and clamped a hand over her mouth, her face draining of color. "Oh my god! Your legs!"

 

Izuku couldn't speak. He was hyperventilating, his eyes rolled back, clutching his thighs as his body convulsed with shock. The lightning that normally hummed beneath his skin sparked erratically, violently short-circuiting as his nervous system overloaded.

 

"TIME IS UP!" Present Mic’s voice echoed across the exam centers. A loud buzzer signaled the end of the test.

 

Uraraka hovered her hands over Izuku, terrified to touch him, tears streaming down her face. "H-Help! We need help up here!"

 

 

 

When Izuku woke up, he was entirely numb from the waist down.

 

He blinked, staring at the sterile white ceiling of a medical tent. The smell of antiseptic was heavy in the air.

 

"Ah, you're awake," a crotchety voice said.

 

Izuku turned his head. Sitting on a stool next to his bed was an elderly woman in a nurse's uniform, her hair tied in a bun secured with a massive syringe. Recovery Girl.

 

"My legs," Izuku breathed, his voice barely a whisper.

 

"Are currently healing," Recovery Girl huffed, offering him a small cup of water. "Drink this. I've already performed surgery to set the bones. The breaks were severe, Midoriya. Comminuted fractures. Your bones were essentially turned to powder by the G-forces."

 

Izuku took a sip of the water, wincing. "Am I... going to be able to run again?"

 

Recovery Girl sighed, adjusting her visor. "If you were a normal boy? You'd be in a wheelchair for a year. But your Quirk... it is a medical anomaly. Your cells operate at a hyper-accelerated rate. Your metabolism is constantly working to repair damage. The bones are already fusing back together. You'll be walking by tomorrow, and running by next week."

 

She leaned in, her expression turning incredibly stern.

 

"But heed my warning, boy. Your speed is a weapon, but your body is still human. You tried to halt an immense amount of inertia instantly. The laws of physics do not care how fast you are; if you don't calculate your braking distance, the energy will destroy you from the inside out. You need to learn how to bleed off momentum, or next time, it won't be your legs that shatter. It will be your spine."

 

Izuku swallowed hard. The memory of the pain flashed through his mind, causing a phantom ache in his shins. She was right. He had the speed of a god, but the durability of a teenager. He was a missile without a guidance system.

 

"I understand," Izuku whispered.

 

"Good. Now eat this. You've burned through all your reserves." She shoved a massive bowl of glucose-heavy gelatin onto his lap. "Your mother has been notified. You can go home this evening."

 

A week passed in agonizing suspense.

 

Izuku's legs healed exactly as Recovery Girl predicted. Within a week, he was back to jogging at Dagobah Beach, though he refused to enter Flashtime. He was terrified of the pain, terrified of losing control again. The wild stallion of his power had bucked him, and he was wary to saddle it again so soon.

 

He sat at his desk in his bedroom, staring blankly at his All Might posters. He had scored seventy-four villain points. That was surely enough to pass. But U.A. looked at more than just points. What if they deemed his Quirk too dangerous? What if they saw his reckless self-destruction and failed him on principle?

 

"Izuku!" Inko's voice shrieked from the hallway.

 

She burst into his room, sliding on the hardwood floor in her socks, holding a plain white envelope sealed with the red wax crest of U.A. High School.

 

"It's here! It came!" she panted, her eyes wide with anxiety.

 

Izuku felt his heart rate spike to three hundred beats per minute. He took the envelope with trembling hands.

 

"I'll... I'll open it alone, Mom. If that's okay."

 

Inko nodded frantically, backing out of the room and shutting the door.

 

Izuku sat down at his desk. He stared at the envelope. This was it. The culmination of ten months of agony, fire, sweat, and lightning.

 

He ripped the seal open.

 

Instead of a letter, a small, flat metal disk fell onto the desk.

 

Click.

 

A holographic projector sprang to life, casting a blue light into the dimly lit room.

 

"I AM HERE AS A PROJECTION!"

 

All Might's booming voice filled the room. The massive hero was on screen, wearing a sharp yellow suit.

 

"All Might?" Izuku gasped. "Why are you..."

 

"I know it is surprising, young Midoriya!" All Might laughed on the recording. "I have joined the faculty of U.A. High School! Which is why I have the distinct honor of delivering your results!"

 

All Might cleared his throat, his expression turning serious.

 

"You scored an impressive seventy-four villain points on the practical exam. This alone would have secured your place in the hero course. However, there is another facet to the exam."

 

A video window opened beside All Might's face. It showed the moment Izuku scooped up Uraraka, running up the falling debris in a blur of green lightning to save her from the Zero Pointer.

 

"The Entrance Exam is not just graded on destruction," All Might said softly. "How could a hero course reject someone who risks their own life to save others? It cannot! Rescue points!"

 

The screen updated.

 

Izuku Midoriya:

Villain Points: 74

Rescue Points: 60

Total: 134 Points. (First Place)

 

Izuku stared at the numbers. First place. He had beaten everyone. He had beaten Kacchan.

 

"You possess a power that defies comprehension," All Might concluded, pointing directly at the camera. "But more importantly, you possess the heart to use it right. Welcome, Izuku. This is your hero academia."

 

The hologram fizzled out.

 

Izuku sat in the silence of his room. The hum in his chest, the ever-present vibration of the Speed Force, seemed to purr with satisfaction.

 

He looked down at his legs. He flexed his calves. There was no pain. Only the coiled, infinite potential of kinetic energy waiting to be unleashed.

 

He was going to U.A. He was going to be a hero.

 

But as he looked out his window at the sprawling city of Musutafu, he knew the real test hadn't even begun. He didn't just need to be fast. He needed to be precise. He needed absolute control.

 

He closed his hands into fists, feeling the yellow lightning crackle across his knuckles.

 

"I'll master it," Izuku swore to the empty room. "I have to."

 

The morning of his first day at U.A. High School began the way every morning had for the past ten months: with an overwhelming, ravenous, hollow ache in his stomach.

 

Izuku Midoriya bolted upright in his bed, the sheets tangled around his legs. His heart was hammering a staccato rhythm against his ribs, a rapid, continuous flutter that sounded like a hummingbird’s wings. Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. The golden-green hum of the Speed Force, the cosmic anomaly that had taken up residence in his cellular structure, pulsed in time with his heartbeat.

 

He threw off the covers and moved. He didn't use his Quirk—he had learned the hard way that using super-speed indoors led to shattered lamps, blown-out windows from displaced air, and singed carpets—but his baseline human movements were still uncomfortably jerky and hyper-responsive.

 

He practically teleported to the kitchen. His mother, Inko, was already awake, standing in front of a massive, industrial-sized wok she had purchased just for him.

 

"Good morning, Izuku," she smiled warmly, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. The kitchen smelled of frying oil, savory meats, and eggs. "Your breakfast is almost ready."

 

"Thanks, Mom," Izuku said, taking a seat at the table.

 

For the next twenty minutes, Izuku ate. And ate. And ate. Four bowls of rice topped with grilled salmon and raw eggs. A colossal platter of sausages and hash browns. Three entire loaves of toasted bread slathered in calorie-dense peanut butter. A pitcher of protein shake thick enough to stand a spoon in.

 

His hyper-metabolism was a furnace. The Speed Force demanded fuel. If he didn't consume at least six thousand calories before stepping out the door, a single burst of Mach-level speed would drop his blood sugar so fast he would fall into a comatose state. U.A. had generously offered to subsidize their grocery bills after seeing his medical charts, a blessing that had saved the Midoriya household from bankruptcy.

 

As he swallowed the last bite of toast, the frantic gnawing in his stomach finally subsided, replaced by a warm, coiled energy.

 

He stood up, heading to the bathroom to get dressed. He pulled on his standard U.A. uniform—the crisp gray jacket, the green tie, the dark pants. Underneath it, however, hugging his skin like a secondary epidermis, was the dark green, frictionless compression suit Mei Hatsume had built for him. It was breathable and thermal-resistant, a necessary precaution. If he ever needed to run, he couldn't afford to worry about his clothes catching fire.

 

He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked perfectly normal. Just a teenager with messy green hair and freckles.

 

But as he stared, he let his focus slip. Just for a fraction of a second.

 

The water dripping from the bathroom faucet slowed. The droplet elongated, hanging in mid-air, descending at a glacial, agonizing pace. The hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen stretched into a low, demonic groan. Izuku watched the water droplet for what felt like three full minutes. Finally, it struck the porcelain basin, the splash exploding outward in perfectly frozen, crystalline crowns.

 

Izuku blinked, actively accelerating his cognitive perception back to normal time. The world snapped back to its usual, chaotic pace.

 

Control, Izuku reminded himself, gripping the edges of the sink. Master the mind. Master the body.

 

He grabbed his bright yellow backpack, kissed his mother on the cheek, and stepped out into the crisp spring air.

 

The commute to U.A. was a daily exercise in extreme patience. Riding the train was a psychological trial. To a boy who could cross the city in the blink of an eye, the train felt like it was moving in reverse. He watched the other passengers: a man drinking coffee, a woman typing on her phone. He could see the microscopic twitches of their muscles, the slow-motion blinking of their eyelids.

 

He had to actively suppress his brain's processing speed, forcing himself to exist in their timeframe, otherwise, he would go completely insane from the boredom. It was like living in a world of statues.

 

When he finally arrived at the sprawling U.A. campus, he took a deep breath, grounding himself in the moment, and made his way through the massive labyrinth of hallways.

 

He found the door marked 1-A. It was absurdly large, easily twenty feet tall, designed to accommodate students with gigantification Quirks.

 

Izuku placed his hand on the handle. He could hear voices inside.

 

"Take your feet off of that desk immediately!" a stern, robotic voice demanded.

 

"Huh? What's your problem, four-eyes?" a rough, abrasive voice snapped back.

 

Izuku sighed. Kacchan.

 

He slid the massive door open. The classroom was a chaotic mix of eccentric teenagers, but his eyes immediately locked onto the conflict near the window. Katsuki Bakugo was leaning back in his chair, his feet propped up on his desk, scowling aggressively. Standing over him, chopping the air with rigid, robotic hand gestures, was the blue-haired boy from the entrance exam, Tenya Iida.

 

"It is a matter of respect for the upperclassmen who used these desks before us, and for the craftsmen who built them!" Iida declared.

 

"I don't give a crap about some dead wood," Bakugo sneered. "What middle school did you crawl out of, extra?"

 

"I am Tenya Iida, from Somei Private Academy!"

 

"Somei? So you're an elite prick. I'll enjoy crushing you."

 

Iida gasped, genuinely offended. Before he could retort, his eyes flicked toward the door. He spotted Izuku.

 

Instantly, Iida's demeanor completely shifted. He abandoned Bakugo, marching across the classroom with stiff, elongated strides. He stopped exactly two feet in front of Izuku and delivered a sharp, perfect ninety-degree bow.

 

"Good morning!" Iida boomed. "I am Tenya Iida! I must apologize for my presumptuous behavior during the orientation! I completely failed to recognize your medical needs, and furthermore, I failed to see the true purpose of the practical exam! You realized there was a rescue component, and you executed it flawlessly! You are superior to me!"

 

Izuku waved his hands frantically, deeply embarrassed by the volume of Iida's praise. "N-No! Not at all! I just moved without thinking! And my Quirk is just... it's just fast, that's all. Please stand up, Iida-kun!"

 

"Hey! It's you! The falling boy!"

 

Izuku looked past Iida to see Ochako Uraraka bounding toward him, her bobbed hair bouncing with every step. She had a radiant, infectious smile on her face.

 

"I've been looking for you!" she said, clasping her hands together. "I never got to properly thank you for saving me! Present Mic told me you got rescue points! That's so amazing! Your Quirk is incredible, though your legs... are you fully healed?"

 

"Y-Yeah," Izuku stammered, rubbing the back of his neck. "Recovery Girl patched me right up. It's completely fine now. I'm just glad you weren't hurt, Uraraka-san."

 

Across the room, Bakugo was staring at Izuku. The ash-blonde boy's crimson eyes were narrowed into slits of pure, unadulterated venom. Bakugo's fists were clenched on his desk, small wisps of smoke curling from his palms. He hadn't said a word to Izuku since the exam, but the silence was heavier than any insult.

 

"If you're just here to make friends, you can pack up your things and leave."

 

The voice came from the floor.

 

Izuku, Iida, and Uraraka jumped, looking down. Lying in the doorway, resembling a giant, bright yellow caterpillar, was a man in a sleeping bag. He unzipped the front, revealing a face framed by messy, unkempt black hair and dark, exhausted eyes that looked like they hadn't seen proper sleep in a decade.

 

He stood up, stepping out of the sleeping bag, and pulled a juice pouch from his pocket, slurping it loudly.

 

"It took you lot eight seconds to quiet down. Time is a limited resource. You kids aren't rational enough."

 

The man walked to the front of the classroom, turning to face the bewildered students of Class 1-A. He was wearing a ragged black jumpsuit and a bizarre scarf made of some strange, grey tape-like material wrapped around his neck.

 

"I am Shota Aizawa. I'm your homeroom teacher."

 

The class collectively gasped. This disheveled, homeless-looking man was a teacher at U.A.?

 

Aizawa reached into his sleeping bag and pulled out a stack of blue and white tracksuits. "Right. Let's get to it. Put these on and head out to the P.E. grounds. We're doing a Quirk Apprehension Test."

 

 

 

Ten minutes later, Class 1-A stood on the expansive dirt field behind the main academic building. The spring sun was bright, the air crisp.

 

"A Quirk Apprehension Test?" Uraraka asked, tilting her head. "But what about the entrance ceremony? Or orientation?"

 

"If you want to make the big leagues, you don't have time for useless ceremonies," Aizawa said, his back turned to them as he punched something into a handheld device. "U.A. is known for its unrestricted traditions. That means I run my class however I see fit."

 

He turned around, his dark eyes sweeping over the twenty students.

 

"You've been taking standardized tests your whole lives. Sit-ups, long jumps, fifty-meter dashes. But the Ministry of Education prohibits the use of Quirks in those tests. It's irrational. They're trying to average out the playing field, but the playing field is inherently unequal."

 

Aizawa pointed a finger at Bakugo. "Bakugo. You placed first in the practical exam's villain points. What was your farthest softball throw in middle school?"

 

Bakugo scoffed, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Sixty-seven meters."

 

"Try doing it with your Quirk."

 

Aizawa tossed a baseball to Bakugo and pointed to a white circle painted in the dirt. "Stay in the circle. Anything else goes. Don't hold back."

 

Bakugo smirked. He stepped into the ring, rolling his shoulder. He stretched his arm back, his palm beginning to crackle with small, sharp explosions. He took a deep breath, his face twisting into a feral, competitive grin.

 

"DIE!" Bakugo roared.

 

He hurled the ball, detonating a massive, localized explosion directly behind it. The shockwave blew the dust back over the students, forcing Izuku to shield his eyes. The ball rocketed into the sky, leaving a trail of black smoke behind it, until it disappeared into the clouds.

 

A sharp beep came from Aizawa's device. He held it up for the class to see.

 

705.2 Meters.

 

The class erupted.

 

"Seven hundred meters?! That's insane!" a boy with yellow hair and a black lightning streak yelled.

 

"This looks like awesome fun!" a girl with pink skin and horns cheered. "We can finally use our Quirks as much as we want!"

 

Aizawa's expression darkened. The air around him seemed to drop ten degrees.

 

"Awesome fun?" Aizawa repeated softly. "You have three years to become heroes. You think it's going to be all fun and games?"

 

He smiled, but it was a chilling, predatory expression. "Right. New rule. Whoever comes in last place in all eight tests will be judged as having no potential, and will be expelled immediately."

 

The silence on the field was absolute.

 

"Expelled?!" Uraraka cried out. "But it's the first day! Even if it wasn't, that's completely unfair!"

 

"Natural disasters are unfair," Aizawa shot back coldly. "Villains are unfair. Accidents are unfair. Japan is utterly drenched in unfairness. Heroes are the ones who push back against that unfairness. If you wanted to go talk to your friends at a diner after school, you're in the wrong place. For the next three years, U.A. will throw hardship after hardship at you. Go Plus Ultra. Overcome it."

 

Izuku swallowed hard. The stakes had just skyrocketed.

 

He looked down at his legs. They were fully healed, but the memory of the agonizing snap was still fresh in his mind. He couldn't just go all out. He couldn't enter Flashtime and run at Mach 3. He would destroy the testing equipment, blow away his classmates with the sonic boom, and likely end up in the hospital again.

 

I need to hold back, Izuku thought, beginning to sweat. I have to calculate the exact amount of speed required to win, without breaking the sound barrier. Sub-sonic. I need to stay sub-sonic.

 

"Test one," Aizawa announced, pointing to a track painted on the dirt. "Fifty-Meter Dash."

 

A small robot with a digital camera and a speaker rolled to the finish line.

 

Izuku found himself paired in the first heat. He stepped up to the starting line.

 

To his right, stepping up beside him, was Tenya Iida.

 

Iida crouched into a perfect sprinter's stance. The exhaust pipes on his calves began to hum, emitting a low, vibrating purr as blue flames sparked within the cylinders.

 

"Midoriya," Iida said, keeping his eyes entirely focused on the finish line. "I respect you deeply for your heroism. But speed is my domain. The Iida family has honed the Engine Quirk for generations. I will not hold back. I expect you to do the same."

 

Izuku looked at the fifty-meter stretch of dirt. Fifty meters. To a normal person, a short sprint. To him, it was a distance he could cross before the sound of the starting gun reached his own ears.

 

Speed is your domain, Iida-kun, Izuku thought, taking a deep breath and relaxing his posture. But speed is my entire universe.

 

"Runners, on your marks!" the robot chirped.

 

Izuku didn't crouch. He stood relatively straight, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet. He closed his eyes.

 

He felt the hum. He reached inward, gently grasping the golden-green thread of the Speed Force. He didn't pull on it. He didn't violently yank it like he had against the Zero Pointer. He just nudged it.

 

"Ready!"

 

Yellow-green lightning sparked off his shoulders. The air around him began to warp with heat haze.

 

"GO!" the robot fired a blank shot.

 

Izuku opened his eyes.

 

The world didn't freeze. He didn't drop into total Flashtime. He kept his perception dialed back, letting the world move at roughly five percent of its normal speed.

 

To his left, he saw the blast of blue flames erupt from Iida's engines. He saw the dirt kick up behind Iida's pristine white running shoes. Iida was fast. He was incredibly fast for a human.

 

But Izuku was tapping into something entirely beyond humanity.

 

Izuku took a single step.

 

Keep it under Mach 1, his brain commanded. Don't break the barrier. Just glide.

 

He moved.

 

To the rest of Class 1-A, the gunshot went off, and Iida launched himself forward like a rocket. But before their eyes could even fully track Iida's movement, there was a sharp, hissing ZAP of displaced air. A blur of green and yellow tore down the track, kicking up a rooster tail of dirt and dust that completely engulfed Iida.

 

The wind shear generated by Izuku's movement was immense. It blasted across the starting line, throwing the students' hair back and violently whipping Aizawa's grey capture scarf into the air.

 

Izuku crossed the fifty-meter mark.

 

He dug his heels in, violently vibrating his legs to bleed off the kinetic energy without shattering his bones. He slid for ten feet, throwing up a cloud of dust, before coming to a smooth, controlled halt.

 

He stood up, exhaling a long breath of super-heated air. He looked back.

 

Iida was only halfway down the track. The blue-haired boy was running with perfect form, but his eyes were wide with absolute shock, staring at Izuku waiting at the finish line.

 

Iida crossed the line a moment later, skidding to a halt, panting slightly.

 

The robot's digital voice announced the times.

 

"Three-point-zero-four seconds!" the robot announced for Iida.

 

Iida smiled proudly. "A respectable time. First gear is working flawlessly."

 

Then, the robot turned to Izuku. It paused, its internal processors taking a moment to calculate the telemetry it had barely managed to capture.

 

"Zero-point-zero-five seconds!"

 

The silence on the field was deafening.

 

Iida's jaw unhinged. He slowly turned his head to look at Izuku. "Zero... point... zero... five?"

 

Back at the starting line, the class was in an uproar.

 

"Did you guys even see him?!" the yellow-haired boy, Kaminari, yelled. "He was just a lightning bolt! What the hell kind of Quirk is that?!"

 

"It's like he teleported!" Mina Ashido squealed.

 

Aizawa lowered his clipboard, his eyes narrowed. Zero point zero five seconds for fifty meters. That's roughly 2,200 miles per hour. Mach 2.8. And he stopped cleanly without destroying his legs or blowing a crater in the field. He's learning control.

 

Izuku walked back toward the group, rubbing the back of his neck, trying to ignore the awe-struck stares of his new classmates. He had managed to stay just under the threshold of a massive sonic boom, but the speed was still undeniable.

 

As he stepped back into the crowd, the crowd parted.

 

Everyone except Katsuki Bakugo.

 

Bakugo was shaking. His head was lowered, his spiky ash-blonde hair casting a shadow over his eyes. His teeth were gritted so hard it looked like his jaw might snap. The palms of his hands were sparking rapidly, tiny, violent explosions popping like firecrackers.

 

"Kacchan?" Izuku asked cautiously.

 

Bakugo snapped his head up. His red eyes were bloodshot, completely consumed by a feral, unhinged rage.

 

"YOU BASTARD!" Bakugo roared, his voice cracking with fury.

 

He lunged.

 

It wasn't a schoolyard shove. It was a lethal, hyper-aggressive strike. Bakugo reeled his right arm back, generating a massive buildup of sweat in his palm, aiming a point-blank explosion directly at Izuku's face.

 

"DEKUUUUUU!" Bakugo screamed. "You hid this from me?! For ten years?! YOU'VE BEEN MOCKING ME!"

 

"Bakugo, stop!" Iida shouted, stepping forward.

 

"Aizawa-sensei!" Uraraka panicked.

 

Aizawa reached for his capture scarf, his eyes flashing red, preparing to erase Bakugo's Quirk.

 

But Izuku didn't need their help.

 

As Bakugo's hand thrust forward, the heat of the impending explosion radiating off his palm, Izuku's survival instincts—now permanently hardwired to the Speed Force—took over.

 

Without Izuku consciously commanding it, the world plunged into deep Flashtime.

 

The world froze completely.

 

Izuku sighed. He stood in front of the frozen Bakugo. The explosion was just beginning to bloom from Bakugo's palm, a beautiful, jagged flower of orange fire, suspended motionless in the air.

 

Izuku looked at Bakugo's face. The raw, desperate anger. The shattered ego. Bakugo had built his entire identity on the belief that he was the strongest, the fastest, the best. To him, Izuku had always been a pebble. To see that pebble suddenly launch itself past him at three thousand miles per hour... it had broken his reality.

 

I'm sorry, Kacchan, Izuku thought. But I'm not that fragile kid anymore. You can't hurt me. Not ever again.

 

Izuku didn't attack him. He didn't punch him.

 

He simply took one step to the right.

 

Then, he stepped behind Bakugo. He placed his hands in his pockets, leaned against the air, and dropped Flashtime.

 

BOOM!

 

The explosion detonated with monstrous force, blowing a massive crater into the dirt where Izuku had been standing a microsecond prior. Dust and smoke billowed into the air.

 

Bakugo stood in the smoke, panting heavily, a manic grin on his face. "That's what you get, you Quirkless piece of—"

 

"I'm not Quirkless anymore, Kacchan."

 

Bakugo froze. The voice hadn't come from the crater. It had come from directly behind him.

 

Slowly, agonizingly, Bakugo turned around.

 

Izuku was standing there, completely unharmed, not a speck of dust on his uniform. His green eyes were calm, but they flickered with residual yellow lightning.

 

"How...?" Bakugo whispered, his mind failing to process what had just happened. "I had you. I was looking right at you."

 

"You telegraphed your swing," Izuku said softly. "And compared to me... you're just moving in slow motion."

 

Bakugo let out a primal scream of frustration and raised both hands, preparing a massive, two-handed blast.

 

WHIP.

 

Before Bakugo could fire, thick, grey ribbons wrapped around his torso, binding his arms to his sides. He was yanked backward, struggling wildly against the capture scarf.

 

Aizawa stood a few feet away, his hair floating menacingly in the air, his eyes glowing a vibrant, terrifying red.

 

"What... what the hell is this cloth?!" Bakugo spat, straining against the bindings. "It's completely stiff!"

 

"It's a carbon fiber woven with a special metal alloy," Aizawa growled, his voice low and dangerous. "And I'm using it to stop you from acting like an irrational child. Stop using your Quirk to attack your classmates. My eyes are getting dry."

 

Aizawa blinked. His hair fell, and the red glow faded. The scarf loosened, allowing Bakugo to stumble forward.

 

"This is a test of your potential, not a sparring match," Aizawa addressed the class, glaring specifically at Bakugo. "We're wasting time. Move on to the next test."

 

Bakugo didn't attack again. But he didn't look away from Izuku. He glared at the green-haired boy with a look of profound, existential horror and rage. The rivalry had fundamentally shifted. It was no longer the strong picking on the weak. It was a mortal trying to comprehend a god.

 

The next few tests were a blur.

 

During the grip strength test, Izuku held the digital dynamometer. He couldn't crush it with brute strength, but he vibrated his hand at a specific frequency, destabilizing the mechanical components inside the machine until the digital readout glitched, displaying 999.9 kg before short-circuiting entirely.

 

During the standing long jump, he tapped into the Speed Force just enough to launch himself into the air, clearing the sandbox entirely and landing neatly on the grass thirty feet away.

 

In the repeated side steps, he moved so fast he created three distinct afterimages of himself, looking as though four Izukus were performing the exercise simultaneously.

 

By the time they reached the final test, the softball throw, the class had stopped cheering. They were simply watching Izuku in stunned, absolute silence. He was dominating the physical tests to an absurd degree.

 

"Final test. Pitching," Aizawa announced, holding the baseball. "Midoriya. You're up."

 

Izuku stepped into the white circle. He took the baseball from Aizawa. The leather felt rough against his fingertips.

 

Okay, Izuku thought, looking out at the vast, empty field. I can't just throw it normally. My arm strength is decent from the beach training, but it won't get me a top score. I need to apply the Speed Force.

 

He remembered a lesson he had taken online about physics. Force equals mass times acceleration. His arm didn't have a lot of mass, but his acceleration was theoretically limitless.

 

If I vibrate my arm... no, that won't give it directional momentum. I need to wind up. Like a windmill.

 

Izuku planted his feet firmly into the dirt. He took a deep breath.

 

He raised his right arm and began to spin it in a circle.

 

He tapped into the Speed Force. The yellow-green lightning erupted around his shoulder, traveling down his arm. He spun his arm faster. And faster. The air around him began to violently churn. A miniature tornado of dust kicked up around his feet.

 

To the class, Izuku's right arm had completely vanished, replaced by a blurred disk of green lightning and screaming wind. The sound was deafening, a high-pitched, mechanical whine that sounded like a jet engine preparing for takeoff.

 

Faster, Izuku thought, letting the power flow freely. Build the kinetic energy. Store it in the muscles, then transfer it perfectly into the release.

 

He was winding his arm at Mach 2. The sheer centrifugal force was threatening to pull his shoulder out of its socket, but the Speed Force aura held his anatomy together.

 

Now!

 

Izuku stepped forward, preparing to release the ball.

 

Suddenly, a profound, agonizing emptiness struck him.

 

The hum in his chest vanished. The golden-green lightning completely evaporated. The world, which he had been processing at an accelerated rate, violently snapped back to normal speed.

 

He was cut off from the Speed Force.

 

But physics didn't care that his Quirk was gone.

 

Izuku had just stepped forward, committing the entire momentum of his body into a throw, expecting the frictionless aura to protect him and guide the energy into the ball. Without the aura, his body was just normal flesh, bone, and mass.

 

The kinetic energy had nowhere to go.

 

"Gah!"

 

Izuku's foot caught the dirt. His balance completely failed. Because his arm was still moving at a terrifying velocity from the residual momentum, the sheer force tore the ball from his hand, sending it spiking directly into the dirt two feet in front of him.

 

The rest of his body followed.

 

Izuku pitched forward. He hit the dirt hard. The momentum sent him tumbling violently across the field. He rolled head over heels, gravel and rocks tearing at his U.A. uniform, scraping his elbows and knees raw. He tumbled for twenty feet before finally skidding to a halt, lying flat on his back, staring up at the sky, gasping for air.

 

"Midoriya!" Uraraka shrieked, running forward, but Aizawa held up a hand to stop her.

 

Izuku groaned, sitting up slowly. His uniform was torn, and his arms were bleeding from nasty road rash. He looked at his hands. The Quirk was gone. He felt entirely, hopelessly human.

 

He looked toward the teacher.

 

Aizawa was glaring at him. His hair was floating wildly in the air, his eyes glowing a brilliant, piercing red. The capture scarf writhed around his neck like a nest of angry snakes.

 

"I erased your Quirk," Aizawa stated coldly.

 

Izuku flinched. "Erasure... you're the Erasure Hero, Eraserhead. But... why? I was about to throw it."

 

"You were about to blow your own arm off," Aizawa snapped, taking a step forward. The red glow in his eyes faded, and his hair dropped.

 

Aizawa marched up to where Izuku was sitting in the dirt and loomed over him. The air of exhaustion the teacher usually projected was gone, replaced by a terrifying, intense scrutiny.

 

"I watched the footage of the entrance exam, Midoriya. I saw what you did to your legs. You shattered your own bones trying to stop your momentum. And just now? You were winding your arm up at supersonic speeds. What do you think would have happened when you released the ball?"

 

Izuku swallowed, looking down at his bruised arm. "The ball would have... gone far?"

 

"The ball would have ignited from the friction, and the sheer recoil of transferring that much kinetic energy instantly would have shattered your humerus, your clavicle, and likely dislocated your shoulder," Aizawa said brutally. "You have the most powerful speed-enhancing Quirk I have ever seen. But you treat it like a toy."

 

Aizawa crouched down, forcing Izuku to meet his gaze.

 

"Speed without control is just a missile, Midoriya. A missile without a guidance system. If you miscalculate your braking distance in a populated area, you won't just hurt yourself. You'll turn civilians into red paste. The shockwave of your movement alone could bring down a weakened building. You think you're being heroic by pushing past your limits?"

 

Aizawa pointed a finger at Izuku's chest. "A dead hero is a useless hero. A hero who causes massive collateral damage because they can't control their own brakes is a liability. If you can't figure out how to dial it back, to use your power with precision instead of just raw output, you don't belong at U.A."

 

The words cut deeper than the road rash. Aizawa wasn't being cruel just to be cruel. He was stating an absolute, terrifying fact. Izuku had immense power, but he was piloting a nuclear bomb.

 

Aizawa stood up. He tossed another baseball at Izuku, who caught it clumsily against his chest.

 

"I've returned your Quirk. You have one more throw. Show me you can use it without destroying yourself, or pack your bags."

 

Aizawa turned and walked back toward the class.

 

Izuku slowly got to his feet. He dusted off his ruined uniform, wincing as the dirt scraped against his cuts. He walked back to the white circle.

 

He looked at the ball. He looked at his arm.

 

Precision, Izuku thought. He wants precision. I can't just rely on the Speed Force to do the work. I have to channel it. Not raw output. Controlled bursts.

 

Izuku took a deep breath. He didn't wind up his arm. He simply adopted a standard pitching stance.

 

He didn't drop into Flashtime. He didn't summon the lightning to engulf his body. Instead, he focused entirely on his right hand. He envisioned the Speed Force not as a raging river, but as a laser pointer.

 

He drew his arm back.

 

As he stepped forward to throw, he allowed a single, microscopic burst of kinetic energy to flow exclusively into his fingertips at the exact millisecond he released the ball.

 

CRACK!

 

A miniature sonic boom snapped through the air, sounding like the crack of a whip rather than an explosion. The ball vanished from Izuku's hand. A thin, perfectly straight trail of displaced air traced across the sky, undisturbed by chaotic wind shear.

 

Izuku's arm remained intact. He didn't stumble. He stood perfectly balanced in the circle, his arm extended.

 

Aizawa looked at his device. The machine beeped.

 

Aizawa turned the screen around for the class to see.

 

705.3 Meters.

 

Izuku had beaten Bakugo's score by exactly ten centimeters.

 

Izuku looked at Aizawa and offered a small, determined smile. "Sensei. I didn't break anything this time."

 

Aizawa stared at the boy. The corner of his mouth twitched upward into a microscopic, terrifying grin. "This kid..."

 

 

 

The sun was setting by the time the Quirk Apprehension Test concluded. The sky over U.A. High was painted in brilliant strokes of orange and purple.

 

Class 1-A stood exhausted on the dirt field.

 

Aizawa pressed a button on his remote, and a holographic scoreboard appeared in the air.

 

"Here are the final rankings. I'm not going to read them all out. Find your name."

 

Izuku scanned the list.

 

1. Momo Yaoyorozu

2. Izuku Midoriya

3. Shoto Todoroki

4. Katsuki Bakugo

 

Izuku let out a massive sigh of relief. He hadn't come in last. In fact, he had done incredibly well.

 

"Oh, and by the way," Aizawa said, casually packing his sleeping bag into his backpack. "I lied about the expulsion. It was a rational deception to draw out the upper limits of your Quirks."

 

The entire class stood completely frozen in shock.

 

"Whaaaaaaaat?!" several students screamed simultaneously.

 

Yaoyorozu, a tall girl with a ponytail, sighed. "Of course it was a lie. If you just thought about it logically, it was obvious."

 

No it wasn't, Izuku thought, his heart rate finally returning to a normal resting pace. He was totally going to expel someone if they didn't try.

 

As the class was dismissed, the students began to chatter excitedly, forming groups and heading back to the locker rooms to change. Uraraka and Iida waited for Izuku, waving for him to join them.

 

"That was incredibly stressful, but we survived!" Uraraka beamed.

 

"Indeed! A true test of our mettle!" Iida agreed, chopping his hand.

 

Izuku smiled, walking toward them. But as he did, he felt the hum in his chest pulse. Just once.

 

Without meaning to, his perception slipped again.

 

The world slowed to a crawl. Uraraka's smile froze, halfway formed. Iida's hand remained suspended mid-chop in the air. A leaf falling from a nearby tree hung motionless above the grass.

 

Izuku stopped walking. He stood alone in the frozen courtyard of U.A. High.

 

He looked at his friends. He looked at the setting sun, the light rays seemingly tangible as they crept across the field.

 

The silence was absolute. It was peaceful, yes. But it was also incredibly, profoundly lonely.

 

To live in the Speed Force was to live between the seconds. He could save anyone. He could stop any bullet, catch any falling building. But in doing so, he was fundamentally separating himself from the rest of humanity. Everyone he loved, everyone he cared about, would forever move at an agonizingly slow pace.

 

He was a god of motion, trapped in a world of statues.

 

Aizawa was right, Izuku thought, looking down at his hands, watching the faint, golden-green lightning dance between his fingers. I'm a missile. But I'm not going to be a destructive one. I have to master my mind. I have to learn how to live in their world, while commanding mine.

 

He closed his eyes, focusing his will, and forcefully dialed his perception back.

 

The world snapped back into motion. The sounds of laughter and chatter rushed back into his ears, loud and chaotic and beautiful.

 

"Midoriya? Are you coming?" Uraraka asked, tilting her head.

 

Izuku smiled, jogging over to join them, leaving his lightning behind in the dirt.

 

"Yeah. I'm coming."