What If Deku Was More Powerful Than Superman

 

The world is made of wet tissue paper.

 

That was the conclusion Izuku Midoriya reached at the tender age of four. Most children at that age viewed the world as something impossibly large, a grand and unyielding playground of sturdy oaks, unbreakable concrete, and towering adults who could fix anything. But Izuku learned very early, and very violently, that the world was not sturdy. It was impossibly, terrifyingly fragile.

 

It started on a Saturday. Inko Midoriya had taken her son to a nature reserve in the Shizuoka Prefecture, far from the bustling noise of Musutafu. The pediatrician had diagnosed Izuku as Quirkless just three days prior. The extra joint in his pinky toe was the undeniable biological marker of an evolutionary dead end. Inko, heartbroken for her son whose dreams of heroism seemed dashed, thought a weekend hiking trip would lift his spirits.

 

They were walking along a designated trail near the base of Mount Fugi-no-yama, a modest peak known for its jagged rock formations. Izuku had been quiet, his small red sneakers kicking up dust. He was carrying an All Might action figure, his grip tight, his mind trying to process the doctor’s words.

 

Then, he tripped.

 

It was a standard, clumsy stumble of a toddler. A protruding tree root caught the toe of his shoe. Izuku pitched forward. He threw his hands out to catch himself against the large, moss-covered boulder lining the trail.

 

When a four-year-old child falls against a rock, they are supposed to scrape their palms, cry, and be swept up into their mother's comforting arms. But when Izuku Midoriya’s small, chubby hands made contact with the granite, the laws of physics violently rewrote themselves.

 

There was no sound of a slap. There was a sound like a thunderclap—a deafening, concussive BOOM that ripped through the quiet forest.

 

The boulder didn't crack. It simply ceased to exist. It atomized into a cloud of blinding white dust. But the kinetic energy of Izuku’s stumble didn’t stop there. The force traveled through the atomized boulder, into the earth, and straight into the bedrock of the mountain itself.

 

The ground bucked. Inko screamed, thrown from her feet by a localized seismic shockwave. Trees bowed violently, their leaves stripped instantly by a gale-force wind radiating from her son's palms.

 

When the dust finally settled, ringing silence returned to the forest. Inko coughed, waving her hands through the haze, her heart hammering in her throat. "Izuku?! Izuku!"

 

She found him sitting on his bottom, perfectly unharmed, staring at his hands with wide, terrified green eyes.

 

Then, Inko looked past him.

 

The mountain was gone.

 

Where the modest, jagged peak of Mount Fugi-no-yama had stood just three seconds ago, there was now a smooth, concave crater stretching for two miles. The landscape had been scooped out as if by an invisible, divine spoon. The sky, previously obscured by the mountain, was now entirely visible, clouds parting in a perfect ring from the sheer atmospheric pressure of the impact.

 

Izuku looked down at the All Might figure in his hand. He had squeezed it when he fell. The indestructible, high-grade plastic toy wasn't just broken; it was fused into a dense, unrecognizable diamond-hard marble of compressed atoms.

 

"Mommy..." Izuku whispered, his voice trembling.

 

Inko couldn't speak. She could only stare at the geological catastrophe her four-year-old son had just accidentally created.

 

The doctor had been wrong. The extra joint in Izuku's toe wasn't the sign of a Quirkless human. It was the sign of a physiological mutation so severe, so utterly alien to standard human biology, that standard medical science had misread the data entirely. Izuku didn't have a Quirk. He had an ascension. His cells were perfectly designed living solar batteries, absorbing ambient stellar radiation and multiplying it to an infinite degree.

 

He was practically a god. And he was terrified.

 

 

 

Ten years later, Izuku Midoriya sat perfectly still at his desk in Aldera Junior High.

 

Perfectly still.

 

To the casual observer, Izuku looked like a nervous, timid teenager. He kept his head down, his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on his notebook. But the stillness was an illusion. It was an active, grueling, agonizing performance of cosmic restraint.

 

Every second of every day, Izuku was doing calculus in his head. He had to calculate the exact amount of micro-newtons of force required to hold his pencil so it wouldn't disintegrate into graphite dust. He had to calculate the precise angle to rest his elbows on the wooden desk so he didn't accidentally drive them through the floorboards, through the school's foundation, and into the Earth's mantle.

 

Breathing was the hardest part. If he sighed too heavily, he could shatter the windows. If he sneezed without pinching his nose, he could level the school block. He lived in a world made of wet cardboard, surrounded by people made of fragile, blown glass.

 

His senses were just as burdensome. If he didn't actively suppress his hearing, the cacophony of the planet would drive him insane. Even now, with his hearing tightly muffled, he could hear the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump of his teacher's heart at the front of the room. He could hear the blood rushing through the veins of the girl sitting three rows ahead of him. If he focused enough, he could hear a tsunami forming in the Pacific Ocean.

 

He could see through the desk, through the floor, down into the tectonic plates shifting miles beneath Japan. He had to force his eyes to perceive only the visible light spectrum.

 

"Since you're all third years, it's time for you to think seriously about your future," the teacher announced, holding a stack of career aptitude papers.

 

Izuku didn't flinch, but he felt the sudden spike in adrenaline in the boy sitting directly in front of him. Katsuki Bakugo.

 

"I'll hand out these printouts for your desired life paths, but... you all want to be heroes, don't you?!" the teacher yelled, throwing the papers into the air.

 

The classroom erupted in cheers. Students showed off their Quirks—stretching limbs, minor elemental manipulations, glowing skin. To Izuku, it was like watching children play with sparklers.

 

"Hey teach, don't lump me in with these bunch of losers," Bakugo sneered, leaning back in his chair, his feet resting on his desk. "I'm the real deal. These guys will be lucky to end up as sidekicks to some busted D-lister."

 

The class erupted in angry protests, but Bakugo laughed them off, small sparks popping in his palms. Izuku watched the sparks. To him, they moved in slow motion. He could see the chemical reaction, the ignition of nitroglycerin-like sweat, the expansion of gases.

 

"Oh, if I remember correctly, you want to go to UA High, right, Bakugo?" the teacher noted.

 

The class went silent. UA was the national tier.

 

"That's exactly why you guys are just extras!" Bakugo crowed, jumping onto his desk. "I aced the mock test! I'm the only one at this school who could possibly get into UA. I'll surpass All Might and become the top hero!"

 

"Oh yeah," the teacher added, looking at his clipboard. "Midoriya wants to go to UA, too, right?"

 

The silence that followed was absolute. Then, the entire class burst into hysterical laughter.

 

"Midoriya?! No way!"

"You can't get into the hero course just by studying!"

"He doesn't even have a Quirk!"

 

Izuku kept his eyes on his notebook. He didn't say anything. The school administration, his classmates, everyone believed he was Quirkless. Inko and Izuku had falsified his medical records after the mountain incident. The government thought the crater was the result of an uncharted meteor strike. Izuku wanted it that way. The alternative was a life locked in a government bunker, studied like a weapon of mass destruction.

 

Suddenly, a shadow fell over Izuku's desk. Bakugo slammed his hand down on the wood.

 

BOOM!

 

A point-blank explosion engulfed Izuku’s desk. Smoke billowed to the ceiling. The other students cheered, expecting Izuku to fall backward out of his chair, terrified and singed.

 

As the smoke cleared, Izuku was still sitting there. He hadn't moved a millimeter. His uniform was slightly scorched, but his skin was pristine. He looked up at Bakugo.

 

Bakugo was glaring down at him, his red eyes blazing with fury. "Listen up, Deku. You're even worse than these rejects. You're completely Quirkless. Do you really think you can rub shoulders with me?!"

 

Izuku felt a profound, overwhelming sense of pity.

 

When Izuku looked at Katsuki Bakugo, he didn't see a bully. He saw a fragile, delicate soap bubble. He could see the microscopic fractures in Bakugo's bones from the recoil of his own explosions. He could hear the slight arrhythmia in Bakugo's heart when he got too angry. If Izuku were to simply stand up too fast, the air pressure would snap Bakugo's neck. If Izuku tapped him on the chest, Bakugo's ribcage would turn to powder.

 

Izuku’s fear of Bakugo wasn't born from a lack of power; it was born from a terror of his own.

 

"I-I'm not trying to compete with you, Kacchan," Izuku stuttered, his voice carefully modulated to perfectly mimic a scared teenager. "Believe me. It's just... it's been my dream since I was little. And... there's no harm in trying, right?"

 

"Try?! What can you even do?!" Bakugo snatched Izuku's hero analysis notebook off the desk. He held it up between his palms and blasted it with another explosion.

 

Izuku watched the notebook burn. He could have snatched it back before the neurons in Bakugo's brain even fired the signal to his hands. He could have moved faster than light itself. But he sat still.

 

Bakugo tossed the scorched notebook out the open window. "Most top-tier heroes have stories about them from their school days. I want the shine of being able to be called the only student to make it into UA from this mediocre city dump. So, forget UA, nerd."

 

Bakugo turned to leave, pausing at the door. "If you really want a Quirk that badly, there might be another way. Take a swan dive off the roof and hope for a Quirk in your next life."

 

The cruelty in the words hung in the air. Izuku just stared at Bakugo's retreating back. He didn't feel anger. He only felt an immense, crushing loneliness.

 

 

 

Walking home was an exercise in meditation. Izuku walked under the bridge, his mind wandering. He was trying to figure out how to navigate the UA Entrance exam without accidentally killing anyone. The exam involved combat robots. If he punched a robot, the resulting shockwave would atomize the other examinees. He'd have to find a way to dismantle them gently.

 

He was so deep in thought that he let his guard down. He stopped actively scanning his environment.

 

A gurgling sound echoed from the manhole behind him.

 

"A medium-sized invisibility cloak," a wet, raspy voice hissed.

 

Izuku turned around. A massive amalgamation of dark green sludge was rising from the sewers. The Sludge Villain. Its yellow eyes locked onto Izuku, filled with malicious glee.

 

Before Izuku could even process the intent, the villain lunged. The sludge wrapped around Izuku's body, pouring into his mouth and nose, violently trying to force its way into his respiratory system.

 

"Don't worry," the villain laughed, his liquid body writhing. "I'm just going to take over your body. It'll only hurt for about 45 seconds. You're my hero!"

 

For a normal human, this would be the end. The sludge was thick, suffocating, and impossible to grip.

 

But Izuku wasn't a normal human.

 

The sludge entered his throat and stopped dead. It felt like trying to pour mud into a blast furnace. Izuku’s internal body temperature was regulated, but his cellular structure was so unimaginably dense that the sludge villain couldn't force its way down his trachea.

 

Izuku didn't panic. He just felt mildly annoyed and terribly dirty.

 

He needed to get this guy off him, but he couldn't just flex his muscles. If he flexed, the kinetic energy would turn the villain into a spray of atoms and likely destroy the concrete bridge above them.

 

Okay, gentle, Izuku thought. Very, very gentle.

 

Izuku reached up with one hand. He didn't grab the sludge. He just pinched his thumb and forefinger together right in front of the villain's main mass. He generated a micro-vacuum.

 

The air pressure inverted.

 

SCHLOOOOOP.

 

The villain was violently sucked backward, ripped off Izuku's body in a fraction of a second, completely unable to fight the sudden, localized black hole Izuku had just created with two fingers. The sludge slammed into the concrete wall of the underpass, held in place by the sheer gravitational pressure Izuku was exerting simply by staring at him.

 

The villain's eyes were wide with a terror he didn't understand. He couldn't move. He felt like a mountain had been dropped on him.

 

Just then, the manhole cover burst open completely.

 

"HAVE NO FEAR, YOU ARE SAFE!" a booming voice echoed through the tunnel. "NOW THAT I AM HERE!"

 

All Might. The Symbol of Peace.

 

He stood there, imposing and muscular, rearing back a fist to unleash a Texas Smash. But he paused, blinking in confusion.

 

The Sludge Villain wasn't attacking the boy. The villain was plastered against the far wall, writhing helplessly in the air, seemingly pinned by absolutely nothing. The green-haired boy was standing perfectly still, casually wiping some residual slime off his school uniform.

 

Izuku looked at All Might. He immediately recognized the Number One Hero, but beneath that... Izuku's eyes automatically activated their microscopic vision.

 

Izuku saw the horrifying scar on All Might's left side. He saw the missing respiratory organs. He saw the stomach completely destroyed. He saw the failing lattice of muscle tissue, held together only by sheer willpower and a strange, glowing, stockpiled energy that felt like a tiny, flickering candle in a hurricane.

 

He's dying, Izuku realized instantly.

 

"Young man..." All Might rumbled, lowering his fist slightly. "Did you... do this?"

 

Izuku panicked. He had shown too much. "Oh! Um! No! I don't know what happened! He just... got stuck! You should probably catch him!"

 

Izuku dropped the micro-vacuum. The villain immediately slumped to the ground, gasping for air he didn't have. All Might, ever the professional, quickly scooped the villain up into two large plastic soda bottles, securing them tightly.

 

"WELL, MY BOY, I APOLOGIZE FOR GETTING YOU CAUGHT UP IN MY VILLAIN HUNT!" All Might laughed, though Izuku could hear the immense pain the laugh cost him. "BUT THANKS TO WHATEVER MIRACLE OCCURRED HERE, HE IS CAPTURED!"

 

All Might turned to leap away.

 

"Wait!" Izuku called out. He couldn't help himself. He saw how fragile the Symbol of Peace was. "You... you shouldn't push yourself so hard. Your left lung is barely functioning."

 

All Might froze. The hero's perpetual smile faltered for a fraction of a second. Slowly, he turned back to look at the unremarkable teenager.

 

"What did you say, young man?"

 

Before All Might could question him further, an explosion rocked the city in the distance. The sound was muffled to a normal person, but to Izuku, it was distinct. The chemical signature of the smoke...

 

Kacchan.

 

Izuku looked toward the shopping district. His telescopic vision zoomed through miles of concrete, steel, and glass. He saw the alleyway. He saw the Sludge Villain—who must have left a piece of himself behind, or perhaps All Might had dropped the bottle in his shock. The villain had completely engulfed Bakugo. Fires were raging. Pro heroes were standing around, useless. Death Arms, Kamui Woods, Mt. Lady—none of them could get close without risking Bakugo's life.

 

Bakugo's heart rate was at 180 beats per minute. He was suffocating. He had about forty seconds before brain death.

 

"I have to go," Izuku said softly.

 

"Wait, young man, how do you know about my—"

 

All Might didn't get to finish his sentence.

 

Izuku Midoriya disappeared.

 

There was no sound of a footstep. No shockwave of displaced air. Izuku had consciously suppressed his own kinetic wake, moving his body through the space between air molecules. To All Might, the boy simply ceased to exist.

 

 

 

In the shopping district, chaos reigned.

 

"I can't get a grip on him!" Death Arms yelled, thrown back by another massive explosion from the struggling Bakugo.

 

"My quirk is useless against fire!" Kamui Woods grunted, shielding civilians.

 

Bakugo was drowning in sludge. His lungs burned. His vision was going dark. He couldn't breathe. The explosions from his palms were getting weaker. Is this it? he thought, terror finally piercing his immense pride. Am I going to die in this filthy sewer trash?

 

He opened his mouth to scream, but sludge rushed in.

 

And then, a blur of green lightning.

 

It was so fast that the human eye couldn't register the movement. The news cameras broadcasting the event live only caught a single frame of green static.

 

Suddenly, Izuku Midoriya was standing directly in front of the Sludge Villain.

 

The pro heroes gasped. "Kid! What are you doing?! Get out of there!" Death Arms roared.

 

The Sludge Villain recognized the boy from under the bridge. "YOU! I don't know what trick you pulled back there, but I'll kill you for it!" the villain screeched, rearing back a massive, sludge-formed fist to crush the teenager.

 

Izuku didn't assume a fighting stance. He didn't clench his fists. He just looked at the villain, his green eyes glowing with a faint, terrifying, ethereal light.

 

If I punch him, Izuku calculated in a millisecond, the shockwave of my fist moving through the air will ignite the atmosphere, vaporize the villain, vaporize Kacchan, and instantly level three city blocks in a concussive blast of superheated plasma.

 

Punching was out of the question.

 

Izuku needed to extract Bakugo without applying blunt force.

 

Izuku opened his mouth. And he inhaled.

 

He didn't just take a deep breath. He contracted his diaphragm with the force of a jet turbine, creating a localized, highly directional vacuum tunnel perfectly targeted at the Sludge Villain's liquid mass.

 

The sound was apocalyptic. A deafening roar of rushing air, like a localized category-five hurricane, erupted in the alley. The fires in the buildings surrounding them were instantly extinguished, sucked into the vortex of Izuku's breath.

 

The Sludge Villain shrieked as his liquid body was violently ripped away from Bakugo. The villain wasn't just pulled; he was completely stripped atom by atom from the blonde boy. The sludge funneled directly into a compressed sphere of air pressure Izuku held between his hands.

 

Within two seconds, the alley was completely clear of sludge. The villain was trapped in a marble-sized sphere of ultra-dense, pressurized air, floating just above Izuku’s palm.

 

Bakugo fell to his knees on the asphalt, violently coughing up the remaining slime, gasping for sweet, cool air.

 

Silence fell over the alleyway. The roaring fires were gone. The villain was gone.

 

The pro heroes stared, their jaws on the asphalt. They hadn't seen the boy move. They hadn't seen him throw a punch. He just stood there, and the villain was defeated.

 

All Might arrived just in time to see the end of it, landing heavily on a nearby roof. He looked down at the green-haired boy, his blue eyes wide with absolute, unadulterated shock.

 

Izuku knelt down next to the gasping Bakugo. He didn't touch him—he rarely touched anyone if he could help it.

 

"Are you okay, Kacchan?" Izuku asked softly.

 

Bakugo looked up, his eyes bloodshot, coughing violently. He stared at Izuku, confusion, rage, and profound shock warring on his face. "Deku... what the hell... did you just..."

 

Before the pro heroes could swarm him, before the cameras could focus, Izuku knew he had to leave. He couldn't deal with the questions.

 

He looked up, locking eyes with All Might on the roof.

 

In a fraction of a blink, Izuku was gone from the alleyway, reappearing directly behind All Might on the rooftop.

 

All Might spun around, staggering back, coughing up a spatter of blood as his muscular form suddenly hissed in a cloud of steam. The Number One Hero shrank, deflating into a skeletal, emaciated man in baggy clothes.

 

Izuku didn't look surprised. "I saw your injuries earlier. Your time limit is up, isn't it?"

 

Toshinori Yagi wiped the blood from his chin, staring at the teenager as if looking at a ghost. "Who... what are you?"

 

"My name is Izuku Midoriya," Izuku said, looking down at his own hands. "I'm just a kid from Aldera Junior High."

 

"That speed... that power... it's not normal," Toshinori rasped. "I am the Number One Hero, and I couldn't even track your movements. You subdued a villain without throwing a punch. You just... breathed."

 

"If I had punched him, I would have killed everyone in the city," Izuku said plainly, without an ounce of arrogance. It was a simple, mathematical fact.

 

Toshinori felt a chill run down his spine. He had possessed One For All for decades. He knew what ultimate power felt like. But the aura radiating from this boy... it wasn't a stockpiled energy. It felt like standing next to the sun. It was vast, ancient, and utterly overwhelming.

 

"You have a Quirk," Toshinori said.

 

"I don't think it's a Quirk," Izuku confessed, his shoulders slumping. The facade of the timid schoolboy fell away, revealing an exhausted, deeply lonely god. "Quirks have limits. They have biological drawbacks. Bakugo sweats nitroglycerin, but his wrists hurt if he fires too much. Uraraka manipulates gravity, but she gets nauseous. My body... it doesn't have limits. It absorbs solar radiation. Every second I stand in the sun, I get stronger. I haven't slept in three years because my body doesn't need to rest. I hear every heartbeat in Musutafu. I spend every waking moment holding myself back so I don't accidentally shatter the planet."

 

Izuku looked up at Toshinori, tears welling in his green eyes. "I want to be a hero, All Might. I want to save people. But how can I be a hero when I'm a monster? How do you save a world made of cardboard without crushing it in your hands?"

 

Toshinori was utterly speechless. He had come to Musutafu looking for a successor. He had planned to find a worthy vessel to inherit One For All, to continue the legacy of the Symbol of Peace.

 

But looking at Izuku Midoriya, Toshinori realized something profound. One For All was irrelevant to this boy. Giving this child One For All would be like pouring a cup of water into the ocean. Izuku didn't need power. He had more power than All For One could ever dream of possessing.

 

What Izuku needed was a guide. A father figure. Someone to teach him how to be human when he was built like a god.

 

Toshinori walked forward, his skeletal frame fragile, and placed a gentle hand on Izuku's shoulder. Izuku stiffened, terrified his shoulder blade might accidentally break the man's arm.

 

"You are not a monster, Young Midoriya," Toshinori said, his voice soft but filled with unwavering conviction. "A monster does not cry for the people he might hurt. A monster does not restrain himself. The fact that you fear your own power is the very proof of your humanity."

 

Izuku looked up, the tears finally spilling over.

 

"I cannot give you power," Toshinori smiled, a genuine, warm smile. "But I have been the Symbol of Peace for a long time. I know the burden of carrying the world on your shoulders. I know the isolation of the mountaintop. If you will allow me, I will teach you how to control it. I will teach you how to smile in the face of fear. I will teach you how to be a hero."

 

For the first time in ten years, Izuku Midoriya didn't feel entirely alone.

 

 

 

Ten months later, the gates of UA High School loomed large.

 

The ten months of training with All Might had been completely unorthodox. Toshinori didn't have Izuku lift weights or run laps; physical training was meaningless for someone who could bench-press an aircraft carrier without sweating.

 

Instead, Toshinori trained Izuku in restraint. He had Izuku clean the Dagobah Municipal Beach Park. But he wasn't allowed to just throw the trash into orbit. He had to pick up every rusty refrigerator, every broken tire, every piece of shattered glass with the utmost delicacy, moving at normal human speed, treating every object like it was a fabergé egg. It was grueling psychological conditioning, teaching Izuku’s muscles muscle-memory restraint.

 

Now, Izuku stood before the massive gates of the legendary hero academy.

 

He was still nervous. The written exam had been a joke. With his brain processing information at faster-than-light speeds, he had read the entire test, cross-referenced the answers with his photographic memory of the entire Japanese educational curriculum, and finished the exam in 0.003 seconds. He spent the remaining fifty-nine minutes staring at the ceiling, carefully regulating his breathing so he didn't accidentally blow the test papers away.

 

Present Mic’s orientation was loud, but Izuku had tuned his hearing down to a manageable level. The objective was simple: destroy villain robots in a faux city to earn points.

 

Just break robots, Izuku thought, stretching his arms. I can do that. Just... very, very gently.

 

"START!" Present Mic's voice boomed from the speaker towers. "WHAT'S WRONG? THERE ARE NO COUNTDOWNS IN REAL BATTLES! RUN, RUN, RUN!"

 

The massive gates swung open.

 

The hundreds of examinees, including a very angry Bakugo and a determined girl with a gravity quirk named Uraraka, surged forward into the faux city.

 

Izuku didn't run. He took a deep breath, isolating the mechanical whirring of the robots within the city from the heartbeats of the students.

 

He stepped over the starting line.

 

To the outside world, to the cameras monitoring the exam, and to the teachers sitting in the observation room, what happened next made absolutely no sense.

 

One second, the faux city was swarming with hundreds of massive, heavily armored one-pointer, two-pointer, and three-pointer robots.

 

The next second, the city was perfectly quiet.

 

Every single robot in Sector B simply fell apart.

 

They didn't explode. They didn't crash. They just neatly, cleanly disassembled into their base components. Screws unscrewed themselves. Armor plating detached and folded neatly on the pavement. Wires disconnected. Microchips were laid gently on the ground.

 

The examinees stopped running, staring around in absolute bewilderment.

 

"What... what just happened?" a boy with hardened skin asked, looking at a pile of neatly sorted metal parts that used to be a three-pointer.

 

"Did a hero do this?" another student asked.

 

In the observation room, the teachers of UA were in an uproar.

 

"Nezu, did the system malfunction?!" Vlad King yelled, leaning over the control console.

 

"No," Principal Nezu said, his beady eyes locked onto the primary monitor. "The robots were manually dismantled. Look at the high-speed playback from Camera 4."

 

Aizawa Shota, Eraserhead, leaned in closely.

 

Nezu slowed the footage down. Slower. Slower. To one-thousandth of a second.

 

There.

 

A blur of green.

 

At a speed that defied the laws of physics, Izuku Midoriya was moving through the city. He wasn't running; he was practically teleporting. He approached a robot, his hands moving with surgical precision. He unbolted armor, disconnected wires, and placed the pieces on the ground, before moving to the next robot. He did this to sixty robots in the span of one second.

 

"Impossible," Aizawa whispered, his tired eyes widening. "No speed Quirk is that fast. The friction alone should have burned his clothes off and ignited the air. How is he moving without a kinetic wake?"

 

"He's manipulating his own localized gravity and atmospheric pressure to negate friction," a voice said from the shadows of the room. Toshinori Yagi stepped forward, wearing his oversized yellow suit. "He is... something else entirely, Aizawa."

 

Back in the testing ground, Izuku was standing in an alleyway, taking a deep breath.

 

Okay, I think I got enough points, he thought. Sixty robots. That should be passing.

 

Suddenly, the ground began to shake. Not a localized quake from Izuku, but a massive, mechanical rumble.

 

At the center of the faux city, a towering monstrosity rose above the buildings. The Zero Pointer. It was the size of a skyscraper, crushing buildings under its massive treads. Dust and debris rained down.

 

The examinees screamed in terror, turning and running back toward the gates.

 

"It's a monster!"

"Run away!"

 

Izuku watched the robot. It was large, yes. But to him, it was just a big tin can. He was about to turn and walk away, knowing it was just an obstacle to be avoided, when his super-hearing picked up a sound.

 

A gasp of pain. A racing heartbeat.

 

Izuku’s telescopic vision snapped toward the source. Beneath the rubble of a crushed building, right in the path of the Zero Pointer's massive treads, was the nice girl from the entrance. Uraraka. Her leg was trapped under a concrete slab.

 

The Zero Pointer raised a massive fist to smash the street, completely unaware of the girl below.

 

Izuku didn't think. He acted.

 

In the observation room, the teachers watched in awe as the green blur reappeared.

 

Izuku materialized directly in front of the trapped girl. He didn't even look at the concrete slab trapping her leg; he just swiped his hand through the air, and the concrete vaporized into dust, freeing her.

 

Uraraka stared up at him in shock, tears in her eyes. "You..."

 

Izuku looked up at the descending fist of the Zero Pointer. The fist was the size of a house, cast in reinforced steel, dropping with thousands of tons of force.

 

Izuku didn't brace himself. He didn't take a fighting stance.

 

He just stood between the girl and the descending fist.

 

He raised his right hand. He didn't clench it into a fist. He extended his index finger and his thumb, pressing them together.

 

Just a flick, Izuku thought. At 0.0001% power. Just a flick.

 

Izuku flicked his finger upward.

 

The resulting release of kinetic energy was catastrophic.

 

A localized hurricane of air pressure erupted from Izuku's finger. It wasn't just a shockwave; it was a vertical column of pure, unadulterated force that defied the laws of aerodynamics.

 

The column of air struck the descending fist of the Zero Pointer.

 

The steel fist didn't just stop. It shattered. The shockwave traveled up the arm of the colossal robot, ripping the steel plating apart like wet tissue paper. The sheer atmospheric pressure blew through the robot's central chassis, tearing its internal mechanisms to shreds.

 

But the force didn't stop there. The shockwave blew straight through the robot and parted the clouds in the sky above the city for miles in every direction, creating a perfect circle of clear blue sky in the overcast afternoon.

 

The colossal body of the Zero Pointer hovered in the air for a fraction of a second, completely hollowed out by the wind pressure, before the remains crashed backward, raining harmlessly into the empty streets.

 

Silence descended on the faux city.

 

The wind died down.

 

The other examinees, who had been running away, stopped and turned back. Their jaws hit the floor. The skyscraper-sized robot was completely annihilated.

 

Uraraka sat on the ground, her hair blown back, staring at the back of the boy who had just saved her.

 

Izuku slowly lowered his hand, his finger slightly smoking from the sheer friction of the air he had displaced. He turned around, offering a gentle, timid smile to the girl.

 

"Are you okay?" he asked softly, his voice barely above a whisper.

 

In the observation room, absolute silence reigned.

 

Nezu dropped his teacup. It shattered on the floor.

 

Aizawa Shota stared at the monitor, his erasure quirk activating subconsciously, his hair floating. But he knew, instinctively, looking at the boy on the screen, that erasing his quirk would be like trying to erase the sun with an eraser.

 

"All Might," Aizawa said, his voice trembling slightly. "Who is that kid?"

 

Toshinori Yagi watched the screen, pride and a deep, profound sorrow swelling in his chest.

 

"That," Toshinori said quietly, "is Izuku Midoriya. And we had better pray to whatever gods are listening that he never, ever loses his temper."

 

 

 

Later that evening, Izuku sat on the roof of his apartment building.

 

The letter from UA wouldn't arrive for another week, but he already knew he passed. He could hear the teachers talking about him from across the city. He could hear Nezu filing the paperwork.

 

He looked up at the night sky. The stars were bright, unhindered by the city lights. To his eyes, the stars weren't just points of light; he could see the swirling vortexes of plasma, the distant planets, the vast, empty expanse of the cosmos.

 

He was of this earth, born to Inko Midoriya, raised in Musutafu. But he knew he didn't belong here. He was a creature of the stars, trapped in a world made of cardboard.

 

He raised his hand, looking at the finger he had used to destroy the robot.

 

He had saved the girl. That felt good. It felt right.

 

But the fear remained. The constant, crushing anxiety of living among fragile things.

 

I will be a hero, Izuku promised the silent sky. I will be the greatest hero this world has ever seen. Not because I can defeat any villain. But because I will never, ever let myself break this world.

 

He lowered his hand and closed his eyes, tuning out the noise of the universe, and focused on the rhythmic, comforting sound of his mother's heartbeat sleeping peacefully in the apartment below.

 

As long as he could hear that heartbeat, he would hold the world together.

 

The air in the courtyard of U.A. High School tasted like dust, ozone, and fragile expectations.

 

For Izuku Midoriya, the first day of high school was not a stepping stone toward greatness; it was an exercise in walking through a minefield while wearing lead boots. The U.A. uniform, a crisp gray blazer and red tie, felt no different on his skin than a suit of gossamer. He was acutely aware that if he shrugged too aggressively, the fabric would violently combust from the friction of his own musculature moving.

 

He stood in the center of the training field, surrounded by his new classmates of Class 1-A. They were a colorful, boisterous group. There was the girl who could alter gravity, the boy with engines in his legs, a boy with dual-temperature regulation, and Katsuki Bakugo, who was currently glaring holes into the back of Izuku’s head.

 

"A Quirk Apprehension Test?!" the class echoed in unison, staring at their homeroom teacher.

 

Shota Aizawa, the underground hero Eraserhead, looked like a man who hadn't slept in a decade. He stood before them, wrapped in a yellow sleeping bag, exuding an aura of absolute, uncompromising authority. To a normal teenager, Aizawa was intimidating. To Izuku, Aizawa was a fascinating, terrifyingly delicate mechanism of biology and willpower. Izuku could hear the slight rasp in the teacher's lungs, the precise rhythm of his heartbeat, and the strange, fascinating bio-electric current that traveled to Aizawa’s eyes whenever he used his Quirk.

 

"Bakugo," Aizawa drawled, stepping out of his sleeping bag. "You finished first in the practical exam. What was your best result for the softball throw in middle school?"

 

"Sixty-seven meters," Bakugo grunted.

 

"Try doing it with your Quirk."

 

Izuku watched closely as Bakugo stepped into the chalk circle. Bakugo stretched, a feral grin spreading across his face. Izuku immediately began running calculations. Nitroglycerin sweat ignition. Arm trajectory at a forty-five-degree angle. Atmospheric resistance. The explosive yield will likely displace enough air to deafen anyone within a three-meter radius if they aren't prepared. Izuku adjusted the internal pressure of his eardrums, locking them in place so they wouldn't vibrate, effectively turning his hearing off for the duration of the throw.

 

"DIE!" Bakugo roared.

 

BOOM!

 

The explosion was spectacular, a blooming flower of orange fire and black smoke. The ball shot into the sky on a pillar of compressed kinetic energy. Aizawa held up his tracking device: 705.2 meters.

 

The class erupted into cheers, marveling at the sheer power. Izuku just blinked. It was a good throw for a human. But it highlighted Izuku’s primary problem: how was he supposed to participate in this test without revealing that he could casually lob the softball through the moon?

 

The tests progressed. The fifty-meter dash. Izuku didn't run; he simply allowed himself to fall forward and caught himself at the finish line, moving in the space between the digital timer's milliseconds. It registered as a blur and a time of 0.01 seconds. Iida looked like his reality had been fractured.

 

The grip strength test. Izuku held the digital dynamometer. He knew the machine maxed out at 999 kilograms. He calculated the structural integrity of the plastic and steel. He applied exactly 998 kilograms of force. He didn't want to break the school's equipment on the first day.

 

Then came the ball throw.

 

"Midoriya," Aizawa called out, his dark eyes narrowing. "You're up."

 

Izuku swallowed hard, stepping into the circle. The softball felt like a soap bubble in his hand. If he gripped it normally, his fingers would sever the dense rubber like a hot knife through butter. He had to cradle it with the utmost delicacy.

 

If I throw it normally, I'll shatter my arm—not because my bones will break, but because the air resistance will sheer my uniform off and the sonic boom will shatter the windows of the main building, Izuku thought, panicking slightly. I need to throw it hard enough to get a good score, but soft enough not to trigger a localized weather event.

 

He reared his arm back. He calculated a throw of exactly eight hundred meters.

 

Suddenly, a strange sensation washed over him. Aizawa’s hair had defied gravity, standing on end, and his eyes were glowing red. Izuku felt a strange, bio-electric field brush against his skin. It felt like a gentle breeze trying to push against a concrete dam.

 

Aizawa’s Quirk, Erasure, was attempting to shut down the Quirk Factor in Izuku's DNA.

 

Nothing happened.

 

Izuku stopped his throwing motion, looking at Aizawa in confusion. Aizawa’s eyes widened, a flicker of genuine shock breaking his stoic facade.

 

"I erased it," Aizawa muttered, stepping forward. "I'm looking right at you. I activated my Quirk. But... nothing changed. You still have that... pressure around you." Aizawa’s scarf unravelled, floating aggressively around his shoulders. "What kind of trick are you pulling, Midoriya?"

 

The class murmured in confusion.

 

Izuku sighed, carefully setting the softball on the ground so he wouldn't accidentally crush it. He stepped out of the circle, looking directly into Aizawa's dry, bloodshot eyes. He needed to be honest, at least with his teacher, or this would happen constantly.

 

"Mr. Aizawa," Izuku said, his voice quiet, perfectly modulated to reach only Aizawa’s ears using a directed sound wave. "You can't erase my Quirk because I don't have a Quirk Factor. Not like the others."

 

Aizawa frowned. "Explain."

 

"Your Quirk targets the genetic switch in a person's DNA that allows them to emit energy or transform their bodies," Izuku explained politely. "It cuts off the biological mechanism. But I don't have a mechanism. I don't 'activate' anything. My mutation is entirely physiological and passive."

 

"Passive?" Aizawa challenged. "Like a mutant type? I can still temporarily disable the functions of mutant Quirks."

 

"It's deeper than that, sir," Izuku said softly, looking down at his hands. "My cells are fundamentally different from a human's. They are perfect solar batteries. I absorb stellar radiation constantly. My bones, my muscles, my organs—they are dense to a point of infinity. To erase my power, you would have to erase the sun, or instantly rewrite my entire atomic structure back to a baseline human. You can't erase me, Mr. Aizawa, because there is no 'on' switch to turn off. I am always on."

 

Aizawa stared at the boy. The sheer, terrifying implications of what Midoriya was saying washed over the seasoned underground hero. This wasn't a child with a strong Quirk. This was a biological anomaly. A god standing in the dirt.

 

"If what you're saying is true," Aizawa whispered, the hair dropping to his shoulders as he deactivated his Quirk. "Why are you holding back?"

 

"Because if I don't hold back, Mr. Aizawa," Izuku said, his eyes filled with a weary sorrow that belonged to a man ten times his age, "I will accidentally destroy everything you have ever loved."

 

A heavy silence stretched between them. Aizawa looked into the boy's green eyes and saw no arrogance, no deceit. He only saw the paralyzing fear of a caretaker holding a fragile bird with hands made of iron.

 

"Throw the ball, Midoriya," Aizawa finally said, stepping back. "Pass the test."

 

Izuku nodded. He picked up the ball, stepped into the circle, and threw it. He didn't use a fraction of a percent of his strength. He merely flicked his wrist.

 

The ball vanished. There was a sharp crack of breaking the sound barrier, but Izuku managed to contain the shockwave to a small cone directed upward.

 

Aizawa looked down at his device. The screen had glitched, unable to track the object as it left the Earth's atmosphere. It simply read: ERROR: TARGET OUT OF RANGE.

 

Aizawa showed the screen to the class. The students stood in stunned silence. Bakugo’s jaw was clenched so tight his teeth were audibly grinding.

 

"He... he threw it into space?" Uraraka whispered.

 

"That's our Deku," a voice in Izuku's head mocked him. He ignored it. He had passed. That was all that mattered.

 

 

 

The true test of Izuku's restraint came the next day during the Battle Trials.

 

Standing in Ground Beta, the mock city bathed in the afternoon sun, Izuku felt a deep sense of dread. All Might stood before the class in his Silver Age costume, his booming voice echoing off the concrete walls.

 

Izuku had opted out of a flashy hero costume. The support company had tried to measure him for armor, but the needles had snapped against his skin, and the measuring tape had dissolved when he accidentally generated a micro-frictional heat wave. Instead, he wore a simple, durable green tracksuit made of advanced carbon-weave—the only thing that wouldn't instantly disintegrate if he moved fast. He looked painfully ordinary.

 

"THE SITUATION IS THIS!" All Might boomed. "THE VILLAINS HAVE HIDDEN A NUCLEAR WEAPON IN THE HIDEOUT! THE HEROES MUST FOIL THEIR PLANS!"

 

Izuku drew his lot. Team A. He was paired with Ochaco Uraraka.

 

Their opponents: Team D. Tenya Iida and Katsuki Bakugo.

 

Izuku could hear Bakugo's heartbeat spike from fifty yards away. It wasn't the rhythmic thumping of pre-battle excitement; it was the violent, erratic hammering of pure, unadulterated rage. Bakugo felt humiliated by the Quirk Apprehension Test. He felt his entire worldview—that he was the apex predator of their generation—crumbling.

 

"Deku," Bakugo hissed, walking past Izuku toward the villain building. "I don't know what kind of cheat code you found, but I'm going to expose you. I'm going to break you."

 

Izuku said nothing. He just watched the fragile soap bubble walk away.

 

Ten minutes later, Izuku and Uraraka stood outside the building.

 

"Okay, Midoriya," Uraraka said, slapping her cheeks to hype herself up. "What's the plan? Bakugo is definitely going to come straight for you. He seemed really mad."

 

"He will," Izuku agreed softly. He used his X-ray vision. He looked through the concrete walls, the steel beams, the drywall. He saw Iida on the fifth floor, pacing around the fake weapon. He saw Bakugo lurking on the second floor, his palms already sweating nitroglycerin, waiting in ambush.

 

"Uraraka," Izuku said, turning to her. "When we go in, I want you to go straight up the stairwell to the fifth floor. Bypass the second floor entirely."

 

"What about Bakugo?"

 

"I will handle Kacchan. I just... I need to do it alone. If you're near him, you might get caught in the crossfire." Or I might miscalculate and the shockwave of me stopping him will turn you into mist, Izuku added internally.

 

"Right! Leave the weapon to me!" Uraraka saluted.

 

They stepped through the window. The building was dark, smelling of dust and old concrete. Izuku signaled for Uraraka to move to the stairs. She nodded and crept away, floating herself slightly to silence her footsteps.

 

Izuku walked down the center of the hallway. He didn't try to hide. He made his footsteps heavy enough to be heard.

 

Three... two... one...

 

From around the corner, Katsuki Bakugo erupted.

 

He didn't yell. He didn't waste time with banter. He launched himself off the wall using a massive explosion, rocketing down the hallway like a human missile. His right hand was outstretched, a terrifying buildup of glowing, orange heat coalescing in his palm, aimed directly at Izuku's face.

 

In the observation room, the class gasped.

 

"He's going to kill him!" Kirishima yelled.

 

"All Might, stop the match!" Mina screamed.

 

All Might stood silently, his eyes fixed on the screen, a bead of sweat rolling down his cheek. Show them, my boy, he thought. Show them the gap.

 

Bakugo’s palm connected with Izuku's face.

 

BOOOOOOOOM!

 

The explosion was deafening. It tore through the hallway, shattering the windows on the second floor, sending a plume of fire and black smoke billowing out into the mock city. The concrete floor cracked and buckled under the sheer force of the blast. Bakugo poured everything into it, screaming as his Quirk ignited the oxygen in the enclosed space, creating a miniature thermobaric blast.

 

For five seconds, a localized inferno raged in the corridor.

 

Then, Bakugo dropped back, panting heavily, his gauntlets smoking. A feral grin stretched across his face as the smoke began to clear. "That's what you get, you damn nerd. Thinking you can look down on me..."

 

The smoke parted.

 

Izuku Midoriya stood exactly where he had been.

 

He hadn't raised his arms to block. He hadn't taken a step backward. His green tracksuit was perfectly intact, the carbon-weave having withstood the heat, though it was covered in soot.

 

But what terrified Bakugo to his very core was Izuku's face.

 

Izuku’s eyes were wide open. He hadn't even blinked.

 

Bakugo stared, his breath catching in his throat. Izuku's retinas, the delicate, fragile spheres of water and tissue in a human eye, had taken a point-blank, thousands-of-degrees explosion... and they hadn't even watered.

 

Izuku looked at Bakugo, his expression perfectly neutral, utterly devoid of fear, anger, or adrenaline.

 

"Was that it, Kacchan?" Izuku asked. His voice wasn't mocking. It was a genuine, horrifyingly polite question.

 

"You..." Bakugo took a step back, his hands trembling. "What... what the hell are you?!"

 

Bakugo let out a primal scream and charged again. He unleashed a flurry of explosions, a relentless barrage of right hooks and left jabs, each one punctuated by a massive detonation.

 

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

 

Izuku stood still. The explosions washed over him like a warm summer breeze. He watched Bakugo’s fists strike his chest, his shoulders, his face. To Izuku, it felt less impactful than a toddler throwing cotton balls.

 

But Izuku wasn't looking at the explosions. He was looking inside Bakugo’s arms.

 

With his microscopic vision, Izuku saw the muscle fibers in Bakugo’s forearms tearing. He saw the micro-fractures forming in the radius and ulna bones from the violent recoil. He saw the cartilage in Bakugo's shoulders grinding down. Bakugo was destroying his own body to try and hurt something that was fundamentally unhurtable.

 

"Stop, Kacchan," Izuku said gently. He didn't raise his voice over the explosions. He merely vibrated his vocal cords at a frequency that bypassed the sound of the blasts, speaking directly into Bakugo's inner ear. "You're hurting yourself."

 

"SHUT UP!" Bakugo screamed, preparing to pull the pin on his massive grenadier bracer. "I'LL REDUCE YOU TO ASHES!"

 

Izuku realized Bakugo wasn't going to stop. If Bakugo fired the massive blast in this enclosed space, the building would collapse, and Bakugo would be crushed under the rubble. Izuku would be fine, but Bakugo would die.

 

It was time to end it.

 

Izuku moved.

 

To the cameras, there was a glitch. Frame one: Izuku standing still. Frame two: Izuku standing behind Bakugo.

 

Bakugo didn't even register the movement. He just felt a sudden displacement of air, a chilling vacuum that sucked the breath from his lungs. He spun around, raising his gauntlet.

 

Izuku raised his hand. He extended his index finger. He calculated the exact force required to bypass the human skull's natural shock absorption, temporarily disrupting the electrical signals in the brain without causing a concussion, brain bleed, or long-term neurological damage.

 

It was a calculation of one hundred-thousandth of a micro-newton.

 

Izuku gently tapped Bakugo in the center of the forehead.

 

Tap.

 

It sounded like a raindrop hitting a puddle.

 

Bakugo’s eyes rolled back in his head. The explosions ceased instantly. His body went limp, and he collapsed to the concrete floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

 

Silence descended on the hallway.

 

Izuku looked down at his childhood bully. He felt no triumph. He felt no vindication. He carefully picked Bakugo up, lifting him with two fingers under his uniform collar so he wouldn't accidentally crush his ribs, and laid him gently against the wall in the recovery position.

 

In the observation room, the silence was absolute.

 

Kirishima’s jaw was hanging open. Momo Yaoyorozu had dropped her clipboard. Shoto Todoroki stared at the screen, his heterochromatic eyes narrowed in profound, unreadable contemplation.

 

"Did he... did he just one-shot Bakugo with a finger?" Kaminari whispered, terrified.

 

"He didn't even use a Quirk," Sero gulped. "He just... tapped him."

 

All Might pressed the microphone button. "BAKUGO IS INCAPACITATED! MIDORIYA, PROCEED!"

 

Upstairs, Uraraka had successfully secured the weapon while Iida was monologuing. The match was over. The Heroes had won.

 

But as Izuku walked back to the observation room, the victory tasted like ash. When he opened the door, the class instinctively took a collective step backward. It was a subtle movement, an unconscious biological response to the presence of an apex predator.

 

They were looking at him the same way they would look at an unexploded bomb.

 

Izuku kept his head down, walking to the back of the room, isolating himself in the corner. He closed his eyes, tuning out their panicked whispers, and listened to the comforting, steady rotation of the Earth beneath his feet.

 

 

 

A week passed. The atmosphere in Class 1-A shifted. Izuku was not an outcast, but he was undeniably isolated. His classmates were polite, but there was a palpable distance. They had seen what he did to the Zero Pointer. They had seen what he did to Bakugo.

 

They were teenagers trying to learn how to be heroes. They didn't know how to socialize with a deity.

 

Even Bakugo had gone eerily silent. Since the Battle Trial, he hadn't yelled at Izuku once. He mostly stared at his own hands, trapped in an existential crisis, realizing that his absolute best was less than a gentle tap from Deku.

 

On Wednesday, the class piled into a bus heading for the Unforeseen Simulation Joint (USJ) for rescue training.

 

Izuku sat near the back, staring out the window.

 

"Hey, Midoriya," Tsuyu Asui croaked, turning in her seat. "I always say whatever comes to my mind."

 

"O-oh, really, Asui?" Izuku stammered, putting on his best harmless-teenager act.

 

"Call me Tsu. Your power... it's completely unbelievable. It's like All Might's, but... scarier. You didn't even flinch when Bakugo blew you up."

 

The bus went quiet. Everyone was listening.

 

"Ah, well," Izuku rubbed the back of his neck, carefully making sure not to scratch hard enough to cause a sonic boom. "My biology is just... very dense. It's a passive thing."

 

"Still," Kirishima chimed in, holding up his hardened fist. "Having a power that makes you basically invincible must be awesome! You can do any flashy hero work you want!"

 

Izuku offered a sad, thin smile. "Invincibility isn't as awesome as it sounds, Kirishima. If you can't be hurt, you forget how fragile everything else is. You forget what it feels like to be human."

 

The philosophical weight of his words silenced the bus. Todoroki stared at Izuku from across the aisle, recognizing a kindred spirit of burden, though on an entirely different scale.

 

The bus arrived at the massive, domed USJ. Inside, the space hero Thirteen greeted them, delivering a poignant speech about how Quirks can be used to save, but can also easily be used to kill. Izuku listened intently. It was the truest thing he had heard since joining U.A.

 

"Now," Thirteen pointed toward the different disaster zones. "Let's begin the—"

 

The lights in the dome flickered. The power grids groaned.

 

Izuku’s head snapped toward the central plaza. His superhuman senses flared. He didn't just see the purple warp gate opening; he felt the spatial distortion, the tearing of the localized dimensional fabric. He heard the chaotic, malicious heartbeats of dozens of men pouring out of the void.

 

"Gather together and don't move!" Aizawa barked, his scarf unfurling, his goggles snapping over his eyes. "Thirteen, protect the students!"

 

"What is that?" Kirishima asked, pointing at the plaza. "Is this like the entrance exam where the lesson has already started?"

 

"Don't move!" Aizawa yelled again. "Those are real villains."

 

From the purple mist, a lanky man covered in disembodied hands stepped forward. Tomura Shigaraki. Beside him, a massive, bird-headed monstrosity with an exposed brain stood perfectly still. The Nomu.

 

Izuku’s eyes immediately locked onto the Nomu. His X-ray vision pierced the creature's skin. He saw the bio-engineered nightmare. Multiple Quirks spliced into a single, agonizing existence. Muscle fibers intertwined with shock-absorbing foam-like tissue. A hyper-regenerative cellular structure.

 

It's a sponge, Izuku realized. A living sponge designed to absorb blunt force.

 

"Eraserhead and Thirteen," Shigaraki scratched his neck violently. "According to the schedule we retrieved, All Might should be here. Where is he? I went through all this trouble to bring all these friends to play."

 

Aizawa prepared to jump down the stairs. "Thirteen, evacuate them. Try to contact the school."

 

Before Aizawa could move, the purple mist villain, Kurogiri, expanded. "I cannot allow that. We are the League of Villains. We have come to extinguish the Symbol of Peace."

 

Kurogiri surged forward, a massive wave of dark, warping mist aimed directly at the students, intended to scatter them across the facility.

 

Kirishima and Bakugo lunged forward to attack the mist.

 

"No!" Aizawa yelled.

 

But Izuku was faster.

 

In the time it took a neuron to fire in Kurogiri's mist-form brain, Izuku crossed the distance from the back of the group to the front. He didn't throw a punch. He didn't use a blast of air.

 

He clapped his hands.

 

He suppressed the kinetic shockwave, focusing entirely on a localized manipulation of atmospheric pressure. By bringing his dense hands together at Mach 5, he created a sudden, violent vacuum directly in front of Kurogiri.

 

The sound was a sharp, implosive CRACK.

 

Kurogiri’s mist body was violently sucked into the vacuum, tearing his spatial coordinates apart. The villain shrieked as his mist was dispersed, revealing the metal neck brace hiding his physical body. Kurogiri collapsed to the ground, heavily disoriented, the warp gate completely collapsing.

 

The students, Aizawa, and Thirteen stared at Izuku, who was now standing in front of them, his hands still clasped together.

 

Down in the plaza, Shigaraki stopped scratching his neck. He stared up at the stairs.

 

"What... what just happened?" Shigaraki whispered. "Kurogiri? Hey, Kurogiri, get up! What did that NPC just do?"

 

Izuku turned to Aizawa. "Mr. Aizawa, you need to stay here with the students."

 

Aizawa frowned. "Midoriya, this is not a training exercise. Do not act on your own."

 

"Sir," Izuku said, his voice laced with a terrifying authority that belonged to a king, not a teenager. "That bird creature in the plaza. It's bio-engineered. It has multiple Quirks. Shock absorption and hyper-regeneration. It is physically stronger than All Might."

 

Aizawa’s blood ran cold. "How do you know that?"

 

"I can see its DNA," Izuku said plainly. "If you go down there, it will kill you. If All Might comes, it might kill him. I am the only one who can touch it."

 

Without waiting for permission, Izuku stepped off the landing. He didn't jump. He simply stepped into the air and allowed gravity to pull him down, landing softly in the center of the plaza, fifty feet below, kicking up a small cloud of dust.

 

The army of low-tier villains surrounded him, laughing.

 

"Look at this kid!"

"He thinks he's a hero!"

"Let's kill him!"

 

Izuku ignored them. He kept his eyes locked on Shigaraki and the Nomu.

 

"Hey, kid," Shigaraki sneered through the hand on his face. "You ruined my warp gate. You're a buggy piece of code. Nomu. Crush him."

 

The bird monster shrieked, a horrifying, mechanical sound, and launched itself at Izuku. It was fast. Faster than anything the students had ever seen. It crossed the plaza in a microsecond, raising a massive, muscular arm.

 

The Nomu slammed its fist directly down onto Izuku's head.

 

The sheer force of the blow shattered the concrete plaza beneath Izuku’s feet, creating a crater twenty meters wide. A shockwave rippled out, knocking the low-tier villains off their feet and forcing Aizawa to shield his eyes on the stairs above.

 

"MIDORIYA!" Uraraka screamed.

 

Shigaraki laughed maniacally. "That's what happens when a low-level mob tries to fight the final boss! Nomu is built to kill All Might! His shock absorption is—"

 

Shigaraki choked on his words.

 

The dust cleared.

 

Izuku Midoriya was standing in the center of the crater. The Nomu's massive fist was pressed flat against the top of Izuku's green hair.

 

Izuku hadn't raised his arms to block. He hadn't bent his knees. He hadn't moved a single millimeter. The concrete beneath him had shattered because the Earth had given way. Izuku had not.

 

Izuku slowly looked up at the towering monstrosity above him.

 

The Nomu, lacking higher brain functions, simply raised its other fist and began to pummel Izuku.

 

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

 

The punches fell like artillery shells. Each blow generated a shockwave that cracked the dome of the USJ.

 

Izuku stood there, letting the monster hit his face, his chest, his shoulders. He didn't blink. He didn't flinch. He was running calculations.

 

Shock absorption, Izuku thought. It absorbs kinetic energy. If I hit it, no matter how hard, the energy will just disperse through its cellular structure. If I punch it with enough force to overload the absorption, the resulting blast radius will atomize Mr. Aizawa and my classmates.

 

Physical strikes were out of the question.

 

"Why isn't he dying?!" Shigaraki shrieked, scratching his neck so hard blood began to draw. "Nomu! Hit him harder! Tear him apart!"

 

The Nomu roared, grabbing Izuku by the shoulders and attempting to rip him in half.

 

Izuku sighed. It was a soft, sad sound.

 

"You're a tragic thing, aren't you?" Izuku whispered to the brain-dead monster. "You were human once. I'm sorry they did this to you."

 

Izuku reached up. He moved his hands with deliberate, agonizingly calculated slowness. He gripped the Nomu by its massive, thick wrists.

 

The Nomu pulled, trying to free its arms. It couldn't. It felt as though its wrists had been encased in the event horizon of a black hole. It shrieked in confusion.

 

"You're designed to absorb blunt force," Izuku said, looking past the Nomu to Shigaraki. "But how do you handle zero-gravity displacement?"

 

Izuku let go of the Nomu's wrists and dropped down, sliding beneath the monster's legs. In one fluid motion, he grabbed the Nomu by its ankles.

 

"What is he doing?" Shigaraki muttered, stepping back.

 

Izuku stood up, lifting the massive, heavily muscular creature upside down by its legs as effortlessly as a man lifting a feather.

 

Izuku looked up at the glass dome of the USJ. He looked past the glass, past the clouds, past the Earth's atmosphere, into the infinite, cold vacuum of space. He charted a trajectory. He calculated the Earth's rotation, the gravitational pull of the moon, and the orbital path of the nearest celestial body massive enough to contain this monster.

 

The Sun.

 

"Mr. Aizawa!" Izuku yelled, his voice echoing with absolute authority. "Tell everyone to hold onto something heavy!"

 

On the stairs, Aizawa didn't hesitate. "GET DOWN! GRAB THE RAILING!" he roared.

 

Shigaraki stared, a primal, evolutionary terror finally overriding his video game delusions. "Nomu... kill him! Do it now!"

 

Izuku tightened his grip on the Nomu's ankles.

 

He didn't spin to build momentum. He didn't use a Quirk. He just pulled his arms back, and he threw.

 

The USJ didn't just experience a shockwave. It experienced a cataclysm.

 

When Izuku’s arms moved forward, they broke the sound barrier, the thermal barrier, and approached relativistic speeds. The sheer physical displacement of air created a sonic boom so catastrophic it instantly shattered every pane of glass in the USJ dome.

 

The Nomu was launched from Izuku’s hands.

 

It didn't fly upward; it was violently expelled from the Earth.

 

The creature tore through the steel framing of the USJ dome, vaporizing the metal on contact from sheer friction. A column of fire and displaced air shot into the sky, tearing a hole through the clouds.

 

For a fraction of a second, everyone in the USJ was lifted off their feet, sucked upward by the massive vacuum left in the Nomu’s wake. Aizawa and the students clung desperately to the stair railing, screaming as the gale-force winds threatened to pull them into the stratosphere.

 

And then, just as quickly as it happened, it was over.

 

The wind died down. The deafening roar was replaced by the sound of falling glass and settling dust.

 

Shigaraki lay flat on his back, thrown thirty feet by the vacuum. He slowly pushed himself up, his eyes wide behind the hand on his face. He looked up at the roof.

 

There was a perfectly circular hole punched through the dome, glowing red hot at the edges.

 

The Nomu was gone.

 

"Where... where did you send him?" Shigaraki whispered, his voice trembling.

 

Izuku stood in the plaza, brushing a speck of dust off his shoulder. "Escape velocity is 11.2 kilometers per second," Izuku explained calmly. "I threw him at approximately three hundred kilometers per second. He exited the Earth's atmosphere in less than a second. His shock absorption will protect him from the friction of space, and his regeneration will keep him alive."

 

Izuku pointed up at the sky.

 

"He's currently halfway to the sun. He'll be there in a few hours. The gravity well will pull him in. I imagine even hyper-regeneration has a limit against fifteen million degrees Celsius."

 

Shigaraki stared at the boy. The gamer terminology, the arrogance, the grand plans of the League of Villains—they all shattered like glass against the immovable, unfathomable reality of the creature standing before him.

 

This wasn't an NPC. This wasn't a boss.

 

This was a God.

 

"Kurogiri," Shigaraki whimpered, completely broken. "Kurogiri, get us out of here. Now."

 

Kurogiri, having recovered just enough to open a small portal, materialized next to Shigaraki. The misty villain didn't offer a dramatic exit speech. He was equally terrified. They stepped into the portal and vanished, leaving their army of low-tier thugs behind to cower in the presence of the green-haired boy.

 

Up on the stairs, the students of Class 1-A slowly stood up, brushing glass from their hair.

 

They looked down at the plaza. They looked at the massive crater, the destroyed dome, and the boy standing completely unharmed in the center of it all.

 

Bakugo stared at Izuku, his pride finally, completely shattering. He realized now that Izuku had never been looking down on him. Izuku had been trying to keep him alive.

 

Aizawa Shota gripped the railing, his knuckles white. He had thought he understood the scope of Midoriya's power during the apprehension test. He had been wrong.

 

He didn't just throw that monster into space, Aizawa realized, a cold sweat breaking out on his neck. He did it without breaking the planet. The amount of localized gravitational control, the sheer mathematical precision required to launch a mass into orbit without ripping the continent apart with the backdraft...

 

All Might burst through the doors of the USJ, no longer smiling. "I AM HERE!" he roared, ready to face the villainous threat he had been warned about.

 

He stopped, looking at the devastation. He looked at the hole in the roof. He looked at the terrified villains surrendering on the floor.

 

He looked at Izuku Midoriya.

 

Izuku looked back at All Might. The boy didn't look triumphant. He looked exhausted. He gave All Might a small, sad wave, and walked slowly toward the stairs, wrapping his arms around himself.

 

In the days that followed, the criminal underworld would not whisper about All Might's weakness. They would whisper about a new terror. They would whisper about a boy with green hair who could throw nightmares into the sun.

 

And Izuku Midoriya would return to his desk at U.A., calculating the exact micro-newtons required to hold a pencil, living in his fragile, cardboard world, more isolated than ever before.

 

 

 

The footage did not come from a news helicopter. It came from the Himawari-9 geostationary weather satellite, orbiting 35,786 kilometers above the Earth’s equator, supplemented by classified orbital telemetry from the United States Space Force.

 

In a subterranean, lead-lined briefing room beneath the Hero Public Safety Commission headquarters in Tokyo, President Yokumiru Mera sat at a long mahogany table. Surrounding him were military generals, intelligence directors from allied nations, and the American Secretary of Defense, who had flown in on a supersonic jet the moment the anomaly was detected.

 

The room was silent, save for the hum of the projector.

 

On the screen, a thermal imaging video played on an endless loop. It showed the roof of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint dome. Suddenly, a streak of red—registering at a temperature that momentarily blinded the satellite’s sensors—blasted upward.

 

"Playback at one-ten-thousandth speed," an American general ordered, his voice tight.

 

The video slowed. The red streak resolved into a shape. A massive, bird-like creature, its body already igniting into plasma from atmospheric friction.

 

"This creature," the HPSC intelligence director began, tapping a laser pointer on the screen, "was a bio-engineered weapon deployed by the League of Villains. Our analysts estimate its physical strength was on par with All Might. Its density and shock absorption were unprecedented."

 

The director clicked a button. The screen split, showing a trajectory map of the inner solar system. A dotted red line extended from Earth, passing the orbit of Venus, and terminating at the Sun.

 

"Twenty-four hours ago," the director continued, his voice trembling slightly, "this creature was launched from the surface of the Earth. It achieved escape velocity in less than zero point two seconds. It is currently hurtling toward the sun at approximately one-thousandth the speed of light. It will impact the solar photosphere in roughly two days."

 

The American Secretary of Defense leaned forward, steepling his fingers. "And you are telling this committee, definitively, that this was not a railgun? Not an experimental orbital defense platform?"

 

President Mera took a slow, agonizing drag from his cigarette. "It was a boy, Secretary. A fifteen-year-old high school student."

 

Silence descended again, heavy and suffocating.

 

"A biological human cannot generate that kind of kinetic energy without an equal and opposite reaction," a Russian military attaché argued, his face pale. "If he threw a mass of that size at that speed, the backdraft should have leveled the Japanese archipelago. The continental shelf should have cracked. The Earth’s rotation should have been perceptibly altered!"

 

"We know," Mera said softly. "Our physicists have been weeping since Tuesday. The boy didn't just throw the creature. He subconsciously manipulated localized gravity and atmospheric pressure to entirely negate the recoil. He built a frictionless corridor through the atmosphere just by thinking about it, specifically so he wouldn't destroy the planet when he sneezed the villain into space."

 

Mera leaned forward, extinguishing his cigarette. "Gentlemen. We are no longer discussing a Hero. We are not discussing Quirks. We are looking at a localized extinction-level event in a school uniform. If he so chooses, Izuku Midoriya could push the Earth out of its orbit. He could crack the mantle. He could boil the oceans by taking a deep breath."

 

"How do we control him?" the American general demanded. "Suppressor collars? Black site containment? We need a contingency."

 

"There is no contingency for God," Mera replied, a hollow laugh escaping his lips. "Eraserhead's Quirk does not work on him. Conventional weapons, nuclear weapons—they are meaningless. Our only contingency, our only hope, is that his mother continues to make him breakfast every morning, and that he genuinely wants to be a hero. Because if he ever decides he doesn't like us anymore... we won't even have time to scream."

 

The screen flickered, changing to a live broadcast feed. The U.A. Sports Festival was about to begin.

 

"May God have mercy on us," the Secretary of Defense whispered, watching the green-haired boy on the screen nervously adjusting his sleeves. "Because he certainly doesn't have to."

 

 

 

Inside the Class 1-A waiting room, the atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife.

 

Izuku Midoriya sat in the corner, his eyes closed. He was wearing the standard U.A. P.E. uniform. He hated it. The fabric was rough, and he had to be hyper-aware of the micro-movements of his shoulders so he didn't accidentally tear it to shreds.

 

More than the fabric, he hated the noise.

 

The stadium was packed with millions of people—tens of thousands in the seats, and millions more watching on television. Izuku could hear all of them. He could hear the hot dog vendors complaining about their feet. He could hear the journalists speculating about All Might's successor. He could hear the frantic heartbeats of international spies planted in the audience.

 

He took a slow, measured breath, visualizing a dial in his mind, and turned the volume of the world down. It never went completely silent, but it became a manageable hum, like the sound of an ocean inside a seashell.

 

"Midoriya."

 

Izuku opened his eyes. Shoto Todoroki was standing in front of him.

 

The room went completely silent. Kirishima, Kaminari, and even Bakugo looked over. Ever since the USJ, Bakugo had been unnervingly quiet, staring at Izuku with a complex mixture of horror, awe, and shattered pride.

 

"Yes, Todoroki?" Izuku asked gently.

 

Todoroki’s heterochromatic eyes were cold, masking a deep, swirling tempest of trauma and resentment. "Looking at things objectively, I think I'm stronger than you."

 

The class held its collective breath. Kirishima winced. Bro, did you not see what he did to the Nomu? Kirishima thought frantically.

 

"But," Todoroki continued, his left side dropping in temperature, frosting the air around him, "you've got All Might's eye on you, don't you? I'm not trying to pry into that. But I'm going to beat you. I'm going to prove that my ice is enough. I will reach the top without ever using his power."

 

Izuku looked at Todoroki. To anyone else, Todoroki was a formidable powerhouse, the undeniable prodigy of the class. But to Izuku, looking through the layers of skin and muscle, Todoroki was breaking.

 

Izuku could see the frostbite creeping into Todoroki’s own cellular structure. His right side was lowering to dangerous temperatures. Because he refused to use his left side to regulate his internal body heat, Todoroki was slowly, deliberately giving himself hypothermia. It was a slow suicide by stubbornness.

 

Izuku didn't feel challenged. He felt a profound, aching pity.

 

"Todoroki," Izuku said softly, his voice devoid of any competitive edge. "You are incredibly strong. And you're carrying a terrible burden. I can see that."

 

Todoroki narrowed his eyes. "You don't know anything about my burden."

 

"No, I don't," Izuku admitted, looking down at his own hands—hands that could snap the continent in half if he clenched them too hard in his sleep. "But I know what it feels like to be afraid of your own body. I know what it feels like to hate a part of yourself. But Todoroki... this is a sports festival. It's supposed to be a place to show the world who we are."

 

Izuku stood up. He was shorter than Todoroki, but the moment he stood, an invisible, crushing weight seemed to settle over the room. It wasn't intentional. It was just the sheer, terrifying gravity of his existence.

 

"I will not hold back," Izuku lied. He would hold back 99.9999% of his power. "Because if I don't give you my best, it would be an insult to your resolve. But please... don't destroy yourself just to prove a point to someone who isn't even in the ring."

 

Todoroki clicked his tongue, turning away. "We'll see, Midoriya."

 

As the class filed out into the tunnel leading to the stadium, Uraraka fell into step beside Izuku.

 

"Hey, Deku," she whispered, bumping her shoulder lightly against his.

 

Izuku flinched, immediately calculating the impact of her shoulder, softening his own muscles to the consistency of marshmallow so he wouldn't accidentally shatter her clavicle upon contact.

 

"Are you okay?" Uraraka asked, oblivious to the fact that she had just bumped against a being harder than a neutron star. "You looked really sad just now."

 

Izuku looked at her. Her round face, her bright eyes, the absolute lack of terror in her posture. She, along with Iida, were the only people who still treated him like a human boy named Deku, rather than a walking natural disaster.

 

"I'm okay, Uraraka," Izuku smiled, and for a moment, it reached his eyes. "Just... trying to remember how to walk."

 

She laughed, assuming it was a joke about nerves. Izuku wished it was.

 

Present Mic’s voice boomed over the stadium as Class 1-A emerged into the sunlight. The roar of the crowd was a physical force, but Izuku absorbed the acoustic energy, nullifying it around his immediate vicinity so he wouldn't get a headache.

 

Midnight cracked her whip on the center stage. "The first game is a qualifier! An Obstacle Race! All eleven classes will participate. The course is a four-kilometer ring around the stadium. As long as you stay on the course, anything goes!"

 

The massive gates opened. Hundreds of students crowded into the narrow starting corridor.

 

"START!" Midnight yelled.

 

Immediately, the corridor became a crush of bodies. Todoroki didn't hesitate. He slammed his hands on the ground, sending a massive wave of ice surging through the tunnel, freezing the feet of nearly every student, trapping them in place.

 

Todoroki surged ahead, leading the pack into the open air.

 

I should probably get going, Izuku thought.

 

He didn't run. Running required pushing off the ground. If he pushed off the ground with even a fraction of his strength, the concrete would explode like a landmine, shredding the students behind him with shrapnel.

 

Instead, Izuku manipulated his own mass. He decreased his personal gravity, making himself lighter than air, and hovered exactly one millimeter off the ground. Then, he applied a micro-burst of thrust from his pores.

 

To the cameras, Izuku Midoriya simply glided forward. His feet moved in a walking motion, but he was covering fifty meters per second without kicking up a single speck of dust. He bypassed the frozen students, sliding smoothly past them like a ghost.

 

"AND WHAT'S THIS?!" Present Mic screamed from the booth. "MIDORIYA IS GLIDING ALONG THE ICE! HE'S BARELY TOUCHING THE GROUND! WHAT A WEIRD BUT EFFECTIVE TECHNIQUE!"

 

Aizawa, sitting next to him, stared at the monitor. He's not touching the ice at all, Aizawa realized. He's walking on the air molecules.

 

Izuku caught up to Todoroki just as the first obstacle appeared: the Robo-Inferno. Dozens of Zero Pointers from the entrance exam blocked the path.

 

Todoroki exhaled a breath of cold air and unleashed a massive, sweeping glacier, freezing a Zero Pointer in a precarious, off-balance position. "I froze them when they were unbalanced. They'll fall."

 

Todoroki darted through as the massive robot collapsed behind him, intended to block the rest of the runners.

 

Izuku approached the falling robot. Thousands of tons of steel were crashing down directly onto the path.

 

Izuku didn't slow his pace. He didn't raise a hand. He just kept walking forward.

 

As the colossal steel chassis of the robot struck Izuku's head, the most bizarre thing occurred. The robot didn't crush him. It didn't bounce off him.

 

It simply sheared apart.

 

The sheer density of Izuku's body was so absolute that the robot's armor passed over him like a block of warm butter passing over a razor wire. Izuku walked straight through the solid steel of the falling robot, leaving a perfectly Izuku-shaped hole right through the center of the machine's torso.

 

The robot crashed to the ground, kicking up dust, completely ruined. Izuku walked out the other side, his hands in his pockets, not a single hair out of place.

 

The stadium went completely silent.

 

"D-Did he just walk through a solid wall of steel?!" Present Mic stammered.

 

Aizawa narrowed his eyes. "Midoriya's density... it defies logic. The robot broke itself on him."

 

The second obstacle, the Fall, was a series of canyon pillars connected by tightropes. Izuku didn't use the ropes. He simply kept walking in a straight line, stepping on the empty air, generating microscopic platforms of condensed atmospheric pressure under his soles with every step. He walked across the canyon like he was strolling through a park.

 

Finally, the Minefield.

 

Todoroki and Bakugo, who had caught up, were brawling in the front, carefully trying to avoid the pink landmines.

 

Izuku sighed. He was getting tired of the noise.

 

He increased his speed just a fraction. He glided over the minefield. A few mines triggered beneath him due to the slight air pressure he displaced, exploding upward. The blasts washed over Izuku’s legs, the fire and concussive force completely ignored by his carbon-weave pants and indestructible skin.

 

He crossed the finish line a full twenty seconds before Todoroki and Bakugo, looking incredibly bored.

 

The crowd erupted, not in the wild, screaming cheers they gave to flashy Quirks, but in a strange, murmuring awe. It was eerie. The boy hadn't broken a sweat. He hadn't used a flashy move. He had simply existed, and the obstacles had failed to stop him.

 

"FIRST PLACE, IZUKU MIDORIYA!" Midnight announced.

 

Izuku stood at the finish line, feeling the weight of millions of eyes on him. He felt like an exhibit in a zoo. A caged tiger that the public didn't realize could shatter the glass at any moment.

 

 

 

The Cavalry Battle was announced. Due to his first-place finish, Izuku was assigned the ten-million-point headband.

 

Midnight explained the rules. Teams of two to four. Time limit of fifteen minutes.

 

"Now, find your teams!" she cracked her whip.

 

Instantly, the students scattered. Izuku stood in the center of the field, holding the glowing headband. He looked around.

 

People were actively avoiding his gaze.

 

Even classmates who usually spoke to him—Tsuyu, Kirishima, Mina—were pairing up with others, looking away guiltily. It wasn't just that he was a massive target; it was fear. Teaming up with Midoriya felt dangerous. It felt like strapping yourself to a nuclear warhead. What if he moved too fast and snapped their necks from whiplash? What if he used that terrifying pressure he used on the Nomu?

 

Izuku’s heart sank. He gripped the headband, a cold, familiar loneliness washing over him. The mountaintop was so incredibly cold. He was a god among mortals, and mortals did not play games with gods.

 

He was fully prepared to fight the entire battle alone, standing in the center and just repelling everyone, when a voice called out.

 

"Deku!"

 

Izuku turned. Uraraka was running toward him, a bright smile on her face.

 

"Uraraka?" Izuku blinked, genuinely surprised. "You... you want to team up with me? I'm worth ten million points. Everyone is going to come after us."

 

"So what?" she grinned, putting her hands on her hips. "It's better to team up with friends, right? Plus, if we win, we go to the finals!"

 

"I am also offering my assistance," a stern voice said. Tenya Iida marched up, chopping his arm through the air. "Midoriya, your strategic mind and formidable physical prowess are unmatched. I would be honored to be your engine."

 

Izuku stared at them. They weren't looking at a deity. They weren't looking at a monster. They were looking at Deku. The boy who mumbled too much, who took too many notes, who liked Katsudon.

 

Something hot and tight clamped around Izuku’s chest. He had to rapidly cool his tear ducts so he wouldn't accidentally fire high-pressure steam from his eyes as he held back tears.

 

"Thank you," Izuku whispered, his voice cracking slightly. "Thank you both so much."

 

Mei Hatsume, the pink-haired support course student, practically launched herself into the group, aggressively pitching her babies. Izuku welcomed her gladly.

 

The formation was set. Iida in the front, Uraraka and Hatsume on the sides, Izuku on top as the rider.

 

"START!" Midnight shouted.

 

Immediately, the ground shook as nearly every team charged directly at Izuku. Tetsutetsu’s team, Mineta’s team, even Bakugo rocketing through the air with a feral scream.

 

"Here they come!" Iida warned, his engines revving. "Hold on tight!"

 

"Don't worry, Iida," Izuku said softly, his voice carrying clearly to his teammates despite the chaos. "Just stay still. I won't let them touch us."

 

Bakugo was the first to arrive, launching himself from his human horse, his hands crackling with a massive explosion aimed right at Izuku’s face. "I'M TAKING THAT TEN MILLION, DEKU!"

 

Izuku didn't flinch. He didn't even raise his hand.

 

He simply looked at Bakugo, and exhaled sharply through his nose.

 

The concentrated puff of air hit Bakugo mid-flight like a solid wall of concrete. The air pressure snuffed out Bakugo’s explosions instantly, starving the nitroglycerin of oxygen, and gently but firmly pushed Bakugo backward. Bakugo tumbled through the air, screaming in frustration, before Sero caught him with his tape.

 

Next came a barrage of attacks from other teams. Kaminari unleashed a wave of electricity. Shiozaki sent vines shooting out from the ground.

 

Izuku closed his eyes. He expanded his bio-electric field—the natural aura of solar radiation his body constantly emitted. He usually kept it locked skin-deep to avoid frying electronics. Now, he let it push out exactly three feet in every direction.

 

When the vines and the electricity hit the invisible barrier, they simply stopped. The electricity grounded out harmlessly against the dense aura. The vines withered instantly, unable to penetrate the microscopic heat shield surrounding Izuku’s team.

 

"What's going on?!" Tetsutetsu yelled, punching the air three feet from Izuku, his fist bouncing off an invisible wall. "It's like there's a forcefield!"

 

"Uraraka, Iida, Hatsume," Izuku said calmly. "Just keep your balance. We don't need to move."

 

For the next ten minutes, it was a display of absolute, impenetrable defense. Izuku’s team stood in the dead center of the arena while chaos reigned around them. No matter who attacked, no matter what Quirk was used, the attacks dissipated three feet away from Midoriya.

 

Todoroki’s team finally approached. Todoroki had gathered Kaminari, Yaoyorozu, and Iida—wait, no, Iida was with Izuku. Todoroki had paired with Kaminari, Yaoyorozu, and a general studies student.

 

"I'll take it," Todoroki said coldly. He unleashed a massive wave of ice, intending to freeze Iida's engines and snatch the headband.

 

The ice surged forward, a jagged, terrifying glacier.

 

Izuku didn't use a forcefield this time. He wanted to speak to Todoroki directly. Izuku leaned forward, and with the absolute minimum amount of force required, he blew a breath of air from his lips.

 

The breath met the glacier.

 

It wasn't a windstorm. It was a precise, localized shift in thermal dynamics. Izuku’s breath, heated by his solar-powered core, hit the ice. The glacier didn't shatter; it instantly sublimated, turning from solid ice directly into a harmless cloud of warm steam that washed over Todoroki’s team.

 

Through the mist, Todoroki stared at Izuku, his eyes wide in shock. The ice had just vanished.

 

"Time's up!" Midnight yelled.

 

Izuku’s team had retained the ten million points without taking a single step.

 

Uraraka cheered, pumping her fists. Iida sighed in relief, wiping sweat from his brow. Izuku climbed down, careful not to put his full weight on their shoulders as he dismounted.

 

As the teams dispersed for the intermission, Izuku walked through the concrete tunnels beneath the stadium to get a drink of water. He needed to be away from the noise for a few minutes.

 

As he turned a corner, a massive wall of heat and muscle blocked his path.

 

Endeavor, the Number Two Hero.

 

Flames licked at Endeavor’s costume, his massive frame towering over the fifteen-year-old. His blue eyes glared down with a terrifying intensity.

 

"Izuku Midoriya," Endeavor rumbled, his voice echoing off the concrete walls.

 

Izuku stopped. He looked up.

 

Most people withered under Endeavor’s gaze. The sheer heat radiating from the man was enough to make civilians faint.

 

To Izuku, Endeavor felt like a slightly malfunctioning space heater. Izuku’s baseline body temperature, if he didn't suppress it, was comparable to the surface of the sun. Endeavor’s flames were fundamentally irrelevant to him.

 

But Izuku was polite. He bowed slightly. "Hello, Endeavor-san. Congratulations on Todoroki's performance."

 

Endeavor narrowed his eyes. "You have a formidable Quirk. Power that rivals All Might. But my Shoto will defeat you. It is his destiny. I created him to surpass the Symbol of Peace, and that includes anyone trying to take his place."

 

Izuku’s telescopic vision activated involuntarily. He looked at Endeavor. He saw the burn scars hidden beneath the uniform. He saw the heart struggling to pump blood through a body constantly under severe thermal stress. He saw a man destroying himself for a title that didn't matter.

 

"Endeavor-san," Izuku said softly, standing up straight. He didn't project any power, but his complete lack of fear unsettled the Number Two Hero deeply.

 

"You created him?" Izuku repeated, the words tasting sour in his mouth. "Todoroki is not a creation. He is a person. And he is in pain."

 

Endeavor scoffed. "Pain is necessary for growth. He must learn to use my fire."

 

"Your fire," Izuku murmured.

 

Izuku took a single step forward. He didn't mean to, but for a fraction of a millisecond, his control slipped. Just a fraction.

 

The ambient temperature in the hallway didn't rise. It plummeted. The air grew perfectly still.

 

Endeavor’s flames, the roaring hellfire that defined his existence, suddenly flickered. They shrank back toward his body, desperately trying to cling to him.

 

Endeavor stepped back, his eyes widening in primal, biological terror. He didn't know why, but every instinct in his body was screaming at him to run. The boy in front of him wasn't glaring. He wasn't radiating malice. He was just looking at him.

 

But looking at Izuku Midoriya was like looking over the edge of a bottomless abyss. Endeavor realized, in a sudden, sickening moment of clarity, that if this boy wanted to, he could snuff out Endeavor's fire permanently with a single thought.

 

"Please excuse me," Izuku said politely, stepping around the frozen Number Two Hero. "I have a match to prepare for."

 

Endeavor stood in the hallway for a long time after the boy left, his flames sputtering, a cold sweat breaking out across his back.

 

 

 

The final matches of the festival were underway.

 

Izuku stood in the center of the concrete arena. Across from him stood Shoto Todoroki. The crowd was roaring, the anticipation palpable.

 

"START!" Midnight yelled.

 

Todoroki didn't hesitate. He knew half-measures were useless against Midoriya. He slammed his right foot onto the ground.

 

Heaven-Piercing Ice Wall.

 

A glacier of apocalyptic proportions erupted from the ground. It was hundreds of feet tall, jagged, massive, and expanding at incredible speed. It swallowed the arena, racing toward Izuku, threatening to impale him, freeze him, and crush him all at once. The sheer size of the attack caused a sudden drop in the stadium's temperature, freezing the breath of the audience.

 

The ice consumed Izuku completely, encasing him in a tomb of solid, sub-zero frost.

 

In the stands, the Pro Heroes gasped.

 

"He got him!" Death Arms yelled. "No one could dodge that!"

 

Endeavor watched from the tunnel, his eyes narrowed.

 

Todoroki stood panting, his right side covered in severe frost, his breath pluming in the freezing air. He glared at the massive mountain of ice he had created. "It's over," he whispered.

 

CRACK.

 

Todoroki flinched.

 

CRACK. CRUNCH.

 

From deep within the glacier, a sound echoed. It wasn't the sound of a struggle. It was the sound of footsteps.

 

Calm, measured, heavy footsteps.

 

Suddenly, the front of the glacier began to spiderweb. Massive fissures tore through the ice.

 

And then, Izuku Midoriya walked out.

 

He didn't break out. He didn't punch his way out. He simply walked forward, and the ice occupying the space he wished to occupy was forced to yield. The solid, hyper-dense ice shattered against his skin, turning into fine, sparkling snow as it fell harmlessly off his shoulders.

 

Izuku’s P.E. uniform wasn't even damp.

 

Todoroki staggered back in horror. "How... how are you doing that?! I froze you solid!"

 

"You're shivering, Todoroki," Izuku said, ignoring the question. He continued walking forward, closing the distance. "Your right side is suffering from extreme frostbite. Your movements are sluggish. You are actively destroying your own body."

 

"Shut up!" Todoroki yelled, unleashing another massive wave of ice.

 

Izuku didn't even break his stride. The ice hit him and shattered instantly, bursting into a cloud of mist upon contact with his indestructible form. Izuku walked through the storm of ice like a man walking through a gentle spring breeze.

 

"Why are you doing this?!" Todoroki screamed, clutching his freezing right arm. "Why are you holding back?! Fight me!"

 

Izuku stopped ten paces away. He looked at Todoroki. He saw the abuse. He saw the tears of a child forced to train until he vomited. He saw the mother who had poured boiling water on her own son's face.

 

Izuku took a deep breath.

 

I need to reach him, Izuku thought. I need to break through the walls Endeavor built in his head.

 

Izuku opened his mouth. He didn't just shout. He harnessed his vocal cords, channeling a fraction of the bio-acoustic energy he kept tightly leashed.

 

"IT'S YOUR POWER, NOT HIS!"

 

The words didn't just echo. They exploded.

 

A localized sonic boom erupted from Izuku's mouth. The soundwave hit Todoroki like a physical blow, blowing his hair back and rattling the ice around him. The force of the shout cracked the concrete arena, rippled up the walls, and shattered the soundproof glass in the broadcaster's booth.

 

Present Mic scrambled for his headphones, wincing in pain.

 

The stadium fell deathly silent, stunned by the sheer concussive force of a single sentence.

 

Todoroki stood frozen. The words reverberated in his skull. Not Endeavor's. His.

 

Suddenly, a spark.

 

On Todoroki’s left side, a flame ignited. It started small, then roared to life with the fury of a dying sun. The ice surrounding him instantly melted, turning into a massive cloud of steam that obscured the arena. The heat was unbearable, washing over the front rows of the audience, forcing Pro Heroes to shield their faces.

 

"Midoriya," Todoroki yelled through the fire, tears finally mixing with the sweat on his face. "You're crazy. You know that? Helping your opponent..."

 

Todoroki raised his right hand, encasing it in ice, and his left hand, wreathed in raging fire. He brought them together, preparing to unleash his ultimate move, a flash-freeze heatwave expansion.

 

"I'll become a hero!" Todoroki roared.

 

Izuku smiled. It was a genuine, beautiful smile. He had saved the fragile thing in front of him.

 

Now, he just had to survive the attack without accidentally killing Todoroki in return.

 

Todoroki unleashed the blast. The superheated air collided with the rapidly cooling air, creating an explosive expansion of pressure. A massive shockwave of fire and concussive force barreled toward Izuku, tearing the concrete arena to pieces.

 

Midnight ripped her sleeve, preparing to use her Quirk. "Cementoss, stop them! They'll kill each other!"

 

Cementoss slammed his hands down, raising five walls of concrete between the boys.

 

The blast tore through the first four walls like paper.

 

Izuku stood his ground. He couldn't dodge, or the blast would hit the audience behind him. He couldn't punch it, or the resulting vacuum would rip Todoroki's lungs out.

 

Gentle, Izuku thought. Just snuff out the candle.

 

Izuku raised his hands. He cupped his palms slightly, aiming them at the incoming inferno.

 

He clapped.

 

Once.

 

The sound was not a boom. It was a sharp, terrifying CRACK, like the sky itself had been fractured.

 

The clap displaced the air in a cone-shaped shockwave directly in front of Izuku. It created a perfect, momentary vacuum. Fire requires oxygen to burn. Concussive force requires a medium to travel through.

 

Izuku’s clap removed both.

 

The inferno hit the vacuum and simply vanished. The fire was extinguished instantly. The shockwave hit the wall of compressed air Izuku had created and bounced backward.

 

The reverse shockwave, though heavily diluted by Izuku, swept across the arena. It hit Todoroki, lifting him off his feet and throwing him gently but firmly backward.

 

Todoroki sailed over the boundary line and landed softly on the grass, unconscious but completely unharmed, save for his exhaustion.

 

The mist cleared.

 

The arena was completely obliterated, reduced to a crater of dust and rubble.

 

In the center of the crater, Izuku Midoriya stood with his hands at his sides. He hadn't moved an inch. His uniform was spotless.

 

Midnight stared, her whip limp in her hand. She looked at Todoroki, then at Izuku.

 

"Todoroki is out of bounds!" Midnight announced, her voice shaking. "Midoriya advances!"

 

The crowd didn't cheer immediately. They were too busy processing the sheer, unfathomable reality of what they had just witnessed. A boy had just clapped away an explosion that could have leveled a city block.

 

Slowly, the clapping started. Then cheering. Then a roaring ovation.

 

But Izuku didn't hear them. He looked down at his hands, his heart heavy. He had won. He would go on to win the entire festival with similar, effortless ease.

 

Standing on the first-place podium hours later, with a gold medal draped around his neck by a deeply concerned All Might, Izuku looked out at the sea of faces. Millions of people cheering for him. Millions of fragile, delicate glass dolls.

 

He had never felt so alone.

 

When the festival ended, Izuku retreated to the Class 1-A waiting room. It was empty. The others had gone home to celebrate. He packed his bag slowly, the silence oppressive.

 

He was a god. And gods were meant to be worshipped, or feared, but never befriended.

 

The door creaked open.

 

Izuku turned. Uraraka and Iida stood in the doorway. Uraraka was holding a plastic bag that smelled strongly of fried pork.

 

"Hey," Uraraka smiled, walking in and dropping the bag on the table. "You left before we could catch you. My parents sent me some money, so I bought Katsudon. We figured you'd be hungry after standing around all day."

 

Iida pushed his glasses up his nose. "Indeed! Though your performance was physically remarkable, you must still maintain proper nutrition, Midoriya! Skipping meals is unbefitting of a U.A. student!"

 

Izuku stared at them. They had watched him break the laws of physics. They had watched him casually dismantle the most powerful student in their class.

 

And they had brought him Katsudon.

 

"You guys..." Izuku's voice broke. He couldn't help it. The tears he had been holding back for hours finally spilled over, hot and salty, tracing paths down his cheeks.

 

Uraraka panicked, rushing forward. "Ah! Deku, are you okay? Was the meat too greasy?! I'm sorry!"

 

"No," Izuku sobbed, wiping his eyes carefully. "No, it's perfect. Thank you. Thank you."

 

He sat down at the table with his friends. For a few minutes, he wasn't the boy who threw monsters into the sun. He wasn't the anomaly terrifying world governments. He was just Izuku Midoriya, sharing a meal with the only people brave enough to remind him that he was human.

 

And for the first time in a long time, the mountaintop didn't feel quite so cold.