What If Deku Had a Night Vision Quirk but Wanted to Be a Fisherman Instead of a Hero

The world of four-year-old Izuku Midoriya had always been painted in the bright, primary colors of comic books and morning cartoons. It was a world defined by the dazzling crimson, white, and blue of All Might’s Golden Age costume, the blinding yellow of the sun over the neighborhood playground, and the warm, comforting pastels of his mother’s kitchen. Light was synonymous with safety. Light was where the Heroes lived. 

Darkness, on the other hand, was where the villains hid. Darkness was the space under his bed where monsters supposedly lurked, the terrifying void when his mother turned off the hallway lamp at night, and the suffocating blanket that draped over the apartment when the sun went down. 

Until the night Izuku woke up, parched and rubbing his eyes, and discovered that the dark wasn't empty at all. 

It was 2:14 AM. The digital clock on his bedside table glowed a harsh, stinging red. Izuku blinked, his eyelids feeling heavy and sandpaper-rough. A profound thirst scratched at the back of his throat, the kind of dry ache that comes from sleeping with your mouth open after a long day of running around the park imitating Pro Heroes. He needed water. Usually, this meant a terrifying pilgrimage. It meant calling out for his mother, hoping she would hear him from down the hall, or braving the shadows himself, arms outstretched like a blind zombie, shuffling through the apartment and praying he wouldn’t stub his toe on the edge of the coffee table.

Izuku tossed his All Might themed comforter aside and swung his short legs over the edge of the mattress. His bare feet hit the cool hardwood floor. He braced himself for the pitch-black void of his bedroom. 

He opened his eyes. 

Izuku froze. Something was wrong. Or rather, something was entirely right, but completely impossible. 

His bedroom was not dark. It wasn't lit by the sun, either. The world had been washed in an incredibly crisp, hyper-detailed spectrum of silver, grey, and an ethereal, bioluminescent green. It was as if someone had taken a high-definition photograph of his room and applied a strange, glowing filter over it. He could see everything. He could see the intricate grain of the wood on his closet door. He could see the individual threads fraying on the corner of his rug. He could see the dust motes lazily drifting through the air, catching a faint, ambient light that didn't seem to have a source. 

He looked at his hands. They were pale, almost silvery in this new light. He didn't need to reach out and feel for the doorframe; he could see it perfectly. 

Fascinated, his thirst momentarily forgotten, Izuku stood up. The hallway, usually a cavernous tunnel of terrors, was fully illuminated in this strange, cool hue. He could see the framed pictures on the wall, the slight scuff marks on the baseboards, the exact spot where his mother had left her slippers outside her bedroom door. 

He walked into the living room. The large window facing the street was usually just a rectangle of blackness at this hour, but now, looking out, Izuku gasped. The streetlamps outside, which normally cast small, pathetic pools of orange light, were blindingly bright, like miniature suns. He had to squint and look away. The shadows they cast, however, were rich with detail. He could see a stray cat slinking along the top of a brick wall three houses down, its movements fluid and distinct. He could see the individual leaves on the neighbor's bonsai tree shifting in the night breeze.

He made his way to the kitchen. The linoleum floor was cool beneath his feet. He didn't turn on the light. He didn't need to. He dragged his little step-stool to the counter, climbed up, and reached for a plastic cup. He filled it from the tap, watching the water cascade in crystalline, perfect clarity. 

"Izuku?" 

The voice was soft, thick with sleep, but laced with a sudden spike of maternal panic. 

Izuku turned around, the cup of water pressed to his chest. His mother, Inko Midoriya, stood in the hallway archway. She was clutching her robe around her, her hair messy from sleep. She reached out and flicked the kitchen light switch.

Pain. 

Izuku dropped the plastic cup. It clattered to the floor, water splashing over his ankles. He let out a sharp cry and slapped both hands over his eyes. The sudden introduction of the overhead fluorescent light was like a physical blow. It was an agonizing flare, a million flashbulbs going off directly against his retinas. 

"Izuku! Oh my goodness, sweetheart, what's wrong?" Inko rushed forward, her bare feet splashing in the spilled water. She dropped to her knees, pulling his hands away from his face. "Did you hurt yourself? Did you slip?"

"Too bright, Mommy," Izuku whimpered, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, tears leaking from the corners. "It hurts. Make it dark again."

Confused but compliant, Inko reached up and flicked the light back off. The kitchen plunged back into what she perceived as darkness, illuminated only by the faint, ambient glow of the city filtering through the living room window. 

"Okay, okay, it's off," she soothed, rubbing his arms. "Open your eyes, baby. Let Mommy see."

Izuku slowly opened his eyes, blinking away the stinging tears. The room rapidly cooled back down into the comforting, detailed shades of silver and green. He looked up at his mother. Her face was pale, lined with worry, every eyelash visible to him in the dark. 

Inko, however, was not looking at his tears. She had stopped breathing. She was staring directly into her son's eyes, her own eyes wide with shock.

In the dim light of the apartment, Izuku's irises, usually a soft, forest green, were glowing. They were emitting a vivid, piercing, bioluminescent green light, like a pair of high-powered emerald LEDs. They looked like the eyes of a deep-sea predator, catching the ambient light and reflecting it back with intense, terrifying clarity. The pupils were fully dilated, massive pools of black surrounded by rings of neon fire. 

"Izuku..." Inko whispered, her hand trembling as she cupped his cheek. "Your eyes... they're glowing."

Izuku tilted his head, blinking. The glowing after-image of his irises shifted with his gaze. "I can see everything, Mommy. Even in the dark. I can see the dust. I can see the water on the floor. It's like... it's like daytime, but better."

Inko stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then, a massive, watery smile broke across her face. She pulled him into a fierce hug, burying her face in his curls. 

"Your Quirk, Izuku," she cried softly, rocking him back and forth. "It's your Quirk. It finally came."

Izuku hugged her back, staring over her shoulder at the refrigerator. He could read the small print on the magnetic poetry tiles perfectly. A Quirk. He had a Quirk. He wasn't ordinary. He was going to be a Hero. 

But as he stared into the silver-green clarity of the shadows, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, a small, uncharacteristic thought bloomed in the back of his four-year-old mind: Why would I want to fight villains when the world looks this peaceful?

The waiting room of the pediatrician’s office was a cacophony of sound and color. It was brightly lit by large fluorescent panels that made Izuku’s head throb. Even though it was only three days since his Quirk had manifested, he had already learned to hate bright lights. His mother had bought him a pair of dark, polarized sunglasses—the kind adults wore when driving on sunny days—and he stubbornly refused to take them off, much to the amusement of the nurses.

Izuku sat in a hard plastic chair, swinging his legs, a coloring book forgotten in his lap. Behind his dark lenses, the world was tolerable. He watched the other children. One boy was blowing tiny, sparkling bubbles from his nose. A girl in the corner had hair made of writhing, green vines. It was the age of Quirk awakenings, and the clinic was always full.

"Midoriya Izuku?" a nurse called out, smiling kindly. 

Inko took his hand, and they walked down the hallway into Examination Room 3. The doctor, a balding man with a kind smile and a Quirk that made his ears pointed like a bat's, was reviewing a chart on a tablet. 

"Ah, Mrs. Midoriya, Izuku. Good to see you," Dr. Tsubasa said, pulling up a stool. "So, we have a Quirk manifestation! Exciting times. We took a look at the X-rays of his foot. The double joint in the pinky toe is completely absent. He's fully on the next rung of human evolution."

"Thank goodness," Inko sighed, a massive weight lifting from her shoulders. She had been so worried. "We knew he had one, but it's good to have it confirmed. Can you tell us more about it?"

The doctor tapped his tablet, bringing up a close-up image of a human eye. "Izuku's Quirk is quite fascinating. It's classified as a Mutant-type with some minor Emitter properties. We're calling it 'Night Vision' for the official registry."

Izuku leaned forward, adjusting his sunglasses. "Night Vision? Like a cat?"

"Exactly like a cat, young man, but dialed up to eleven," Dr. Tsubasa chuckled. He pointed to the diagram. "Behind the retina of Izuku's eyes, a new layer of tissue has developed. It's similar to the tapetum lucidum found in nocturnal animals. It reflects visible light back through the retina, increasing the light available to the photoreceptors. This is what causes that striking, glowing effect when light hits his eyes in the dark."

"But it's not just reflection, is it?" Inko asked. "He said he can see perfectly in pitch blackness. Not just dim light, but absolute dark."

"That's where the Emitter aspect comes in," the doctor explained, his tone shifting into something more clinical. "Izuku's eyes are passively absorbing and magnifying ambient electromagnetic radiation—microwaves, infrared, things the normal human eye cannot perceive. His brain translates these signals into a visual image. In essence, as long as there is an atom of energy in the air, Izuku's eyes will turn it into a clear picture. To him, midnight is as bright as noon."

"That's... that's amazing," Inko breathed. 

"It is," Dr. Tsubasa agreed, but his smile faltered slightly. He looked at Izuku. "However, there is a trade-off. His photoreceptors are incredibly sensitive. Think of a camera lens stuck on the widest possible aperture. Because his eyes are designed to capture microscopic amounts of light, exposing him to normal, bright daylight is going to be uncomfortable. Intense, sudden light—like a flashbang, or looking directly into a bright flashlight—could cause temporary blindness or severe migraines. He will likely need to wear specialized, tinted lenses during the day for the rest of his life to prevent chronic eye strain."

Izuku touched the rim of his sunglasses. He didn't mind them. They made him look cool, like an action movie star. "So I can see in the dark. That's my power."

"That's your power, Izuku," the doctor smiled gently. 

Izuku fell silent as his mother asked the doctor about specialized eye drops and prescription tints. He looked down at his hands. He could see in the dark. It was a cool trick. But he had watched enough Hero documentaries to know the harsh truth. 

Endeavor could conjure torrents of hellfire. 

Best Jeanist could manipulate thousands of threads with his mind. 

All Might could change the weather with a single punch. 

Izuku could... read a book in a closet without a flashlight. 

He didn't have super strength. He couldn't shoot lasers from his eyes. His skin wasn't made of steel. He was just a normal boy who happened to be an exceptional night owl. 

For a brief moment, sitting in that sterile clinic room, a wave of profound disappointment washed over him. He was a Hero fanatic. He had notebooks filled with sketches and analyses of Quirks. He knew the hierarchy of power. He knew that to be a Pro Hero, you needed an offensive capability, a defensive mechanism, or a rescue-oriented utility Quirk that could be deployed in chaotic environments. 

His Quirk was entirely passive. It offered no protection against a villain's punch. It offered no way to lift a collapsed building off a trapped civilian. If a villain attacked him in broad daylight, his Quirk was entirely useless—in fact, it was a liability, given his light sensitivity. 

I can't be a Hero like All Might with this, Izuku thought, his small hands gripping the edge of his chair. It's not strong enough.

But then, an image flashed in his mind. The terrifying memory of the kitchen light flicking on. The burning, agonizing flash of white that had felt like physical violence against his brain. The noise of his mother's panic, the clattering of the plastic cup. 

He compared that to the moment before the light came on. The quiet, silver-green serenity of the hallway. The profound peace of watching the dust motes drift in the dark. 

A strange, alien thought pushed back against the disappointment. 

Do I even want to be a Hero like All Might?

Heroes were loud. Heroes were explosive. Heroes operated in the bright, blinding light of day, surrounded by screaming crowds and flashing cameras. Heroes were essentially living, breathing flashbangs—the very thing his eyes were now biologically designed to hate.

Izuku pushed his sunglasses a little higher up the bridge of his nose. He didn't say a word. He just listened to the hum of the clinic's air conditioner, wondering if there was a place in the world for someone who just wanted peace and quiet.

The playground was a battlefield. It was always a battlefield when Katsuki Bakugo was around. 

The sandpit was cratered from small, popping explosions. The jungle gym was claimed territory. Katsuki stood at the top of the slide, a four-year-old tyrant with a crown of spiky ash-blonde hair, his hands sparking with the miniature fireworks of his newly awakened Quirk. 

"Look at this!" Katsuki crowed, holding his palms out as tiny, crackling pops of light and smoke erupted from his sweat. The other children clustered around the bottom of the slide, oohing and aahing in reverence. "My Quirk is the best! It's so flashy! I'm gonna be the Number One Hero, even better than All Might!"

"Wow, Kacchan!" one of the extras cheered. "You're so lucky!"

"Yeah, nobody has a Quirk as cool as yours," another agreed. 

Izuku stood at the edge of the playground, under the shade of a large oak tree. He was wearing his dark sunglasses, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts. He watched the explosions. Before, he would have been right there at the front of the pack, stars in his eyes, praising Katsuki's amazing power. 

Now, every time Katsuki's palms popped, Izuku winced. Even behind the tinted lenses, the sharp, sudden bursts of light were deeply irritating. They left lingering, jagged after-images in his vision. The noise, the smoke, the aggressive posturing—it all felt so aggressive, so loud. 

"Hey! Deku!" 

Izuku flinched. Katsuki had spotted him. The blonde boy slid down the slide and marched over, his entourage trailing behind him like ducklings. Katsuki stopped a few feet away, crossing his arms and smirking. 

"Auntie Inko told my hag that you finally got your Quirk," Katsuki said, his red eyes zeroing in on Izuku's sunglasses. "And you're wearing shades like some kind of weirdo movie star. What is it? Do you shoot lasers from your eyes? Can you freeze things by looking at them?"

Izuku shifted uncomfortably. He didn't want to do this. He knew exactly how this conversation was going to end. But there was nowhere to hide, and Katsuki wasn't going to let it go. 

"No," Izuku said quietly. "It's not lasers."

"Well? What is it?" Katsuki demanded, stepping closer. "Show me!"

Izuku sighed. He reached up and pulled his sunglasses down, resting them on top of his head. The afternoon sun, filtering through the leaves of the oak tree, was tolerable, but he still had to squint. He looked at Katsuki. 

Katsuki frowned, leaning in uncomfortably close, staring into Izuku's eyes. "They're just green. They look normal. Are you lying, Deku?"

"I have to show you in the dark," Izuku explained. "Follow me."

Curiosity overriding his natural aggression, Katsuki followed Izuku, the rest of the kids tagging along. Izuku led them to the small, concrete maintenance shed at the edge of the park. The door was slightly ajar, the inside cast in deep shadow. 

"Go inside and close the door," Izuku instructed. 

Katsuki scoffed, puffing out his chest. "I'm not scared of the dark." He marched into the shed. Izuku followed, and one of the other boys pulled the heavy wooden door shut. 

The interior of the shed was plunged into near absolute blackness. The only light was a razor-thin sliver slipping under the crack of the door. The air smelled of old motor oil and damp earth. 

"Okay, so it's dark," Katsuki's voice echoed, sounding slightly less confident than a moment ago. "Now what?"

Izuku didn't say anything. He just opened his eyes wide and looked directly at where he knew Katsuki was standing. 

In the darkness, the tapetum lucidum in Izuku's eyes caught that microscopic sliver of light from under the door. To Katsuki, who was standing in pitch black, it was like a monster had just opened its eyes in a horror movie. Two perfect, glowing rings of brilliant, neon green light suddenly flared in the dark, hovering at eye level. They were intensely bright, cutting through the shadows like twin laser pointers. 

Katsuki yelled, stumbling backward and tripping over a rake. He landed hard on his bottom, his hands sparking defensively. "What the heck is that?!"

"It's me, Kacchan," Izuku said, his voice calm. To Izuku, the room wasn't dark at all. He could see Katsuki perfectly, sitting on the dirt floor, looking genuinely startled. He could see the rake, the lawnmower in the corner, and a spiderweb near the ceiling. "My Quirk is Night Vision. I can see in the dark."

Katsuki scrambled to his feet, quickly masking his momentary terror with anger. He shoved the door open, flooding the shed with painful afternoon sunlight. Izuku immediately slammed his eyes shut and fumbled to pull his sunglasses back down over his nose. 

Katsuki stomped out into the light, brushing dirt off his shorts. He looked back at Izuku, who was rubbing his temples under his shades. The awe that had briefly flashed in Katsuki's eyes vanished, replaced by profound disappointment and a familiar, cruel sneer. 

"Night Vision?" Katsuki mocked, laughing loudly. The other kids, eager to follow their leader, started laughing too. "That's it? You can just see in the dark?"

"I can see perfectly," Izuku defended softly, adjusting his glasses. 

"Who cares?!" Katsuki shouted, sparking his palms again. Izuku winced away from the flashes. "What good is seeing in the dark against a villain? Are you going to stare at them until they give up? Are you going to read a book at them? That's so weak, Deku! It's completely useless for a Hero!"

The word useless hung in the air. Deku. The nickname Katsuki had given him, meaning "one who can't achieve anything." 

Izuku stood there, the chorus of childish laughter ringing in his ears. According to the script of every Hero origin story, this was the moment he was supposed to cry. This was the moment he was supposed to clench his fists, look up at the sky, and vow to work ten times harder than anyone else to prove them all wrong. He was supposed to scream that he would be a great Hero, even with a non-combative Quirk. 

But as Izuku looked at Katsuki—screaming, exploding, desperate for validation and dominance—he felt entirely detached from the situation. 

He didn't feel a burning drive to prove himself. He felt exhausted. He looked at Katsuki's sparking hands, at the manic, aggressive grin on the blonde boy's face, and a profound realization settled over his four-year-old soul like a heavy blanket. 

He's right, Izuku thought, his face completely blank behind his dark glasses. It is useless for a Hero. But I don't care.

Why would he want to spend his life fighting people like Katsuki? Why would he want to subject his incredibly sensitive eyes to the explosions, the flashbangs, the glaring spotlights of the media? Why would he want to be a Pro Hero, shouting catchphrases and destroying city blocks, when all he really wanted was the quiet, silver-green peace he had found in his kitchen at two in the morning?

Izuku didn't cry. He didn't argue. He just turned around, shoved his hands back into his pockets, and started walking away from the playground. 

"Hey! Where are you going, Deku?" Katsuki yelled, annoyed that his target wasn't giving him the satisfaction of tears. "Are you running away because you know I'm better than you?"

Izuku didn't look back. "I'm going home, Kacchan. It's too bright out here."

He left Katsuki standing there, confused and irritated. Izuku walked down the sun-drenched sidewalk, his shadow stretching out behind him. He wasn't going to be a Hero. The dream was dead, murdered not by a villain, but by a simple, quiet epiphany. He was relieved. 

But if he wasn't going to be a Hero in a world obsessed with them, what was he going to do?

The answer came two weeks later. 

Inko, noticing that her son had thrown out all of his All Might action figures and requested to have his hero-themed wallpaper painted over with a dark, soothing navy blue, was worried. She thought the diagnosis had crushed him. She thought he was deeply depressed. To cheer him up, she decided to take him on a weekend trip out of the loud, bustling city of Musutafu, down to the quieter coastal towns of the Shizuoka Prefecture. 

They rented a small room in a traditional ryokan near the ocean. For the first time since his Quirk manifested, Izuku felt genuinely relaxed. The coastal town was far less developed. There were fewer neon signs, fewer screaming sirens, and a pervasive, salty breeze that seemed to carry the tension away. 

It was evening when the epiphany struck. The sun was setting, casting long, purple shadows over the water. The town was quieting down. Inko had let Izuku walk down to the wooden pier just outside their inn while she prepared dinner. 

Izuku stood at the end of the pier, leaning against the wooden railing. He had his sunglasses off, tucked into his shirt collar. The dimming twilight was perfectly comfortable. As the sun dipped below the horizon and the sky bruised into a deep indigo, Izuku's vision seamlessly transitioned. The world didn't go dark; it just shifted filters. The ocean, which had looked like a dark, opaque mass of blue ink moments before, suddenly exploded into a realm of intricate detail. 

He could see the complex patterns of the waves rolling and cresting. He could see the foam popping on the surface. And, most miraculously, as he peered down into the water, he could see through it. The water was clear, illuminating a bustling, silver-green world beneath the surface. He saw a school of small, darting fish moving in perfect synchronicity. He saw a crab scuttling sideways along the barnacle-encrusted pilings of the pier. 

It was beautiful. It was silent. It was alive.

"Fascinating, isn't it, lad?"

Izuku jumped, turning to his right. He hadn't realized he wasn't alone. Sitting on an overturned plastic bucket a few yards away was an old man. He had a weathered face, leathery skin deeply tanned by years in the sun, and a thick, white beard. He was wearing a heavy yellow raincoat despite the mild weather, and he held a long, flexible fiberglass pole in his hands. A thin line descended from the tip of the pole into the water. 

"I'm sorry," Izuku said, bowing slightly. "I didn't mean to intrude."

"No intrusion," the old man grunted, his eyes fixed on the tip of his rod. "Ocean's big enough for the both of us. You got interesting eyes, kid. They glow."

Izuku reached self-consciously for his sunglasses. "It's my Quirk. Night Vision. I can see in the dark."

"Night vision, eh?" The old man chuckled, a rough, gravelly sound. "Mighty handy out here. Most folks are blind as bats when the sun goes down. Miss out on the best part of the day. The night is when the real monsters come out to play."

Izuku's breath hitched. "Monsters?"

"The big ones," the old man clarified, nodding toward the dark horizon. "The ones that hide deep down during the day where the light can't touch 'em. When the sun sets, they come up to feed. Tuna the size of small cars. Marlin with swords that could pierce a ship's hull. Giant squid that could swallow a man whole."

Izuku stared at him, wide-eyed. He had spent his whole life thinking the real monsters were villains in the city. He had never considered the vast, alien world right off the coast. "Are you... are you a Hero? Do you fight them?"

The old man threw his head back and let out a barking laugh. "A Hero? God, no. Do I look like I wear spandex, kid? I'm a fisherman. Have been for forty years. I don't fight the ocean; I work with her. Sometimes I win, sometimes the fish wins."

"But... isn't it dangerous?" Izuku asked, stepping closer, captivated. 

"Course it is," the fisherman said, his tone turning serious. "The sea don't care about Quirks. She don't care if you can breathe fire or lift a building. If you disrespect her, she'll drown you just the same. It takes patience. Takes grit. Takes knowing the tides, the moon, the winds, and the habits of creatures you can't even see."

As if on cue, the tip of the old man's rod violently jerked downward. The reel attached to the base began to scream, a high-pitched zzzzzzzz as line was rapidly stripped away. 

The old man moved with surprising speed. He stood up, planting his boots firmly on the wooden planks, and hauled back on the rod. The fiberglass arched into a terrifying 'U' shape. The man's muscles strained under his raincoat. 

"Gotcha, you bastard," the old man grunted, cranking the reel. 

Izuku watched, utterly spellbound. There were no explosions. There were no flashy catchphrases or screaming crowds. There was only this man, standing alone in the dark, engaged in a silent, primal tug-of-war with an unseen force beneath the waves. 

Izuku looked down into the water. With his glowing green eyes, he didn't have to guess what was on the other end of the line. Deep below the surface, thrashing wildly, was a massive, muscular fish, its scales flashing silver in Izuku's vision. He could see the line pulled taut, tracking the fish's desperate movements. 

"He's going left!" Izuku yelled out, pointing into the dark water. "He's trying to wrap the line around the pier pilings!"

The old man glanced at Izuku, surprised, then immediately shifted his rod to the right, steering the fish away from the wooden beams. "Good eye, kid! Keep calling it!"

For the next ten minutes, Izuku acted as the old man's spotter. He watched the fish's every movement in the dark water, calling out warnings when it dove, when it tried to run, when it rested. Finally, the old man hoisted the exhausted fish onto the pier. It was a massive Japanese seabass, easily over three feet long, thrashing weakly on the wood. 

The old man wiped sweat from his brow, looking at the fish, and then at Izuku. He grinned. 

"You weren't kidding about that Quirk, lad. I've never seen anyone read the water in the dark like that. You've got the eyes of an apex predator. You'd make one hell of a night fisherman."

Izuku looked at the massive fish, then out at the dark, endlessly complex ocean. He felt a thrill course through his veins—a thrill completely different from the anxiety he felt watching Hero fights on TV. This was a battle of skill, of patience, of understanding nature. It was quiet. It was methodical. 

"A fisherman..." Izuku whispered, testing the word on his tongue. 

He didn't need super strength. He didn't need an explosion Quirk. He had the eyes of a cat, perfectly suited for the quiet dark of the ocean. He could navigate the black waters. He could see the schools of fish while everyone else was blind. He could find his own kind of greatness, far away from the blinding lights and deafening noise of heroics. 

Izuku looked up at the old man, his glowing green eyes wide with a new, profound determination. 

"Teach me," Izuku said. 

Ten years passed. 

The world changed, but it also stayed exactly the same. Heroes fought villains in the streets of Musutafu. All Might smiled on billboards. Katsuki Bakugo grew louder, angrier, and more powerful, his explosions shaking the foundations of Aldera Junior High as he prepared for the UA entrance exams. 

Izuku Midoriya grew up, too. He grew taller, his shoulders broadening from years of hauling nets, cranking winches, and battling the ocean currents during his weekend apprenticeships. At fourteen, he was a strange, quiet fixture at Aldera. 

He was known as the "Weird Fish Guy." 

Izuku sat at his desk near the back of the classroom, staring out the window. He was wearing his signature prescription sunglasses—thick, black wayfarers with heavily polarized, dark green lenses that completely hid his eyes from the world. He wore them indoors and outdoors, constantly, to shield his hypersensitive tapetum lucidum from the brutal assault of the school's fluorescent lights. He was wearing a crisp school uniform, but his hands were a dead giveaway of his true passion. They were calloused, scarred from misplaced fishing hooks, and smelling faintly of saltwater and bait, no matter how much soap he used. 

Instead of taking notes on the math lecture, Izuku had a worn, heavily annotated copy of Tide Charts and Lunar Phases of the Pacific Coast hidden behind his textbook. He was currently calculating the optimal window for intercepting a migration of yellowtail snapper off the coast of Chiba this coming weekend. 

"Alright, settle down, everyone," Mr. Suziki, their homeroom teacher, said, clapping his hands. He picked up a thick stack of papers from his desk. "You're all third-years now. It's time to start thinking seriously about your futures. I'm supposed to hand out these career aptitude forms..."

The teacher suddenly smirked, tossing the entire stack of papers over his shoulder. They scattered across the floor like snow. 

"...But why bother? I know you all want to go to the Hero track!"

The classroom erupted. Quirks flashed. A student stretched his neck to the ceiling, another shot a jet of water from his fingertips, a girl turned her hair into stone. The room was a chaotic mess of noise and light. 

Izuku didn't flinch, but he did reach up and press the sides of his sunglasses closer to his face to block out the glare. He just sighed, flipping a page in his tide book. 

"Yes, yes, you all have wonderful Quirks!" the teacher laughed, trying to restore order. "But remember, it's against the rules to use them in school. Settle down."

"Sensei! Don't lump me in with these background characters!" 

The loud, arrogant voice cut through the chatter like a knife. Katsuki Bakugo was leaning back in his chair, his feet resting disrespectfully on his desk. He had a cocky grin on his face, his palms releasing tiny, threatening puffs of smoke. 

"I'm not going to some run-of-the-mill hero agency," Katsuki boasted, ignoring the angry glares of his classmates. "I'm the only one in this dump who has the absolute potential to surpass All Might. I aced the mock tests. I'm going to UA High School, and I'm going to be the Number One Hero. You extras can fight over the scraps!"

The class murmured in awe. UA was the pinnacle of hero education. It had an acceptance rate of less than one percent. 

"Ah, yes, Bakugo, you are going for UA, aren't you?" the teacher noted, looking at his clipboard. He scanned down the list. "Oh, wait. Midoriya. You're not going for a Hero course at all, are you?"

The classroom went dead silent. All eyes turned to the back of the room. Katsuki stopped smirking, turning in his chair to glare at Izuku. 

Over the years, Izuku and Katsuki had drifted into a strange, tense orbit. Katsuki still called him Deku, still thought he was weak, but Izuku’s complete lack of interest in heroics had deeply confused the explosive boy. You can't bully someone for failing to achieve a dream they don't even have. Izuku had become an enigma—a boy who never reacted to insults, never fought back, and seemed entirely content living in his own strange, dark world.

"No, sir," Izuku said calmly, his voice smooth and steady. He didn't look up from his tide book. 

"Let's see here..." the teacher squinted at the clipboard. "You've applied for... Musutafu Maritime & Fisheries Vocational School? The commercial captain's track?"

For a second, nobody said a word. Then, a kid in the front row snorted. Within seconds, the entire class was roaring with laughter. 

"A fisherman?!" 

"Deku wants to catch fish?"

"Is he gonna put the fish in jail?"

"What a loser! He can see in the dark, so he's going to go sit on a boat in the dark!"

Izuku ignored them. He made a note in the margin of his book with a mechanical pencil. Currents shift at 0300 hours. Use heavier sinkers.

Katsuki wasn't laughing. He was staring at Izuku, his red eyes narrowed in absolute fury. He felt a bizarre, irrational rage bubbling in his chest. A fisherman? Bakugo Katsuki was going to be the greatest Hero in history, and the boy who used to follow him around like a shadow was throwing his life away to catch seafood? It felt like an insult. It felt like Izuku was looking down on him, refusing to even participate in the same game. 

The bell rang, signaling the end of the day. The students scrambled to pack their bags, still chuckling about the 'Weird Fish Guy.' 

Izuku carefully packed his tide book and his pencil case into his yellow backpack. He slung it over his shoulder and walked out of the classroom, navigating the crowded hallways with practiced ease. He just wanted to get home. He had a shift down at the docks at 8:00 PM to help Captain Torao untangle the dredging nets. 

He made it out the back doors of the school and was walking down an empty alleyway behind the gymnasium when a hand clamped down on his shoulder. It was hot, smelling of burnt sugar and nitroglycerin. 

Izuku was spun around, shoved hard against the brick wall of the gym. 

Katsuki stood in front of him, his face twisted in a snarl. His left hand was slammed against the brick next to Izuku's head, releasing a small explosion that scorched the wall and made a deafening CRACK.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, Deku?" Katsuki hissed, smoke curling from his palm. 

Izuku didn't flinch. He didn't cower. Thanks to his sunglasses, the flash of the explosion had been manageable. He looked at Katsuki, his hidden eyes perfectly tracking the angry twitch of the blonde boy's jaw. 

"I'm going home, Bakugo," Izuku said evenly. He had stopped calling him 'Kacchan' years ago. It belonged to a childhood that no longer existed. 

"Don't give me that crap!" Katsuki yelled, leaning closer. "A fisheries school? A commercial captain? Are you mocking me? Are you trying to say that my goals are a joke, so you're just going to go do some pathetic, blue-collar job to show how much you don't care?"

Izuku let out a long, slow breath. He reached up and gently, but firmly, pushed Katsuki's smoking arm away from the wall. Katsuki was so surprised by the casual defiance that he actually let his arm be moved. 

"Not everything is about you, Bakugo," Izuku said, his voice quiet but carrying a weight that forced Katsuki to listen. "I'm not mocking you. I'm choosing my life."

"It's a pathetic life!" Katsuki barked. "You have a Quirk! A weak one, yeah, but you could have tried to be a sidekick. You could have done police work. But fishing? You're a coward. You're giving up without even fighting."

Izuku tilted his head. He reached up and slowly pulled his sunglasses down, letting them rest on the bridge of his nose. He looked Katsuki directly in the eyes. 

The alleyway was heavily shaded by the surrounding buildings, dim enough that the tapetum lucidum in Izuku's eyes activated. Katsuki instinctively took a half-step back as those two piercing, glowing green rings stared into his soul. They weren't the eyes of a coward. They were cold, calm, and unfathomably deep. They were the eyes of a predator that didn't need to roar to prove it was dangerous.

"You think fighting villains makes you strong?" Izuku asked softly. "You think screaming and blowing things up is the only way to prove your worth?"

"It's the only way that matters!" Katsuki spat back, though he couldn't break eye contact with those glowing emeralds. 

"You want to know what I think is strong?" Izuku took a step forward. Now he was the one invading Katsuki's space. "I think heading out into the Pacific Ocean in a thirty-foot fiberglass boat in the dead of winter, fifty miles from the coast, in absolute pitch blackness, is strong."

Katsuki opened his mouth to argue, but Izuku didn't let him. 

"I've seen storms out there that would swallow you and your explosions whole, Bakugo. The ocean doesn't care about your test scores. It doesn't care about your ego. Have you ever tried to haul in a three-hundred-pound Bluefin Tuna by hand while the deck of your boat is slick with ice and pitching at a forty-five-degree angle? Have you ever had to untangle a net propeller at two in the morning in freezing water, knowing that if you mess up, you drown in the dark?"

Izuku pushed his sunglasses back up, hiding the glowing eyes, returning to the impenetrable, shaded visage of the 'Weird Fish Guy.'

"You want to be a Hero, Bakugo. You want the applause. You want the cameras. You want everyone to look at you and tell you how great you are." Izuku adjusted the strap of his backpack. "I don't need applause. I like the quiet. I like the dark. Catching a massive fish requires just as much dedication, sweat, and blood as beating up a villain in an alleyway. But when I'm done, I don't have to deal with the press. I just get to go home with a massive paycheck and watch the sunrise in peace."

Katsuki was speechless. His mouth worked, but no words came out. The rage that usually fueled him had been completely doused, smothered by a wave of cold, undeniable conviction from the boy he had always deemed worthless. Izuku wasn't giving up. Izuku had just chosen a different battlefield—one that Katsuki realized he knew absolutely nothing about. 

"Good luck at UA, Bakugo," Izuku said, turning away. He checked his waterproof digital watch. "I have to go. The tide is turning in two hours, and the squid are running."

Izuku walked out of the alley, leaving Katsuki Bakugo standing alone in the shadows. The explosive boy looked at his own palms, normally so full of destructive power, and for the first time in his life, he felt strangely small. 

Izuku merged into the bustling crowd of the afternoon commute. He kept his head down, ignoring the loud chatter, the flashing digital billboards, and the occasional Pro Hero swinging overhead. He ignored it all. 

He was thinking about the ocean. He was thinking about the deep, silent dark, where the real monsters lived, waiting to be caught. 

He smiled. It was going to be a good night for fishing.

The bell above the door of Takahashi’s Marine & Tackle jingled cheerily, a stark contrast to the dim, dusty interior of the shop. To an average person, the store was a claustrophobic maze of narrow aisles packed floor-to-ceiling with pegboards of lures, spools of monofilament line, and racks of heavy-duty rods. To Izuku Midoriya, it was a sanctuary. 

It was 3:15 PM on a Tuesday. Izuku had managed to slip away from Aldera Junior High without drawing the ire of Bakugo, entirely focused on his objective. 

"Midoriya, lad! You're in early," rasped Mr. Takahashi, a retired pro-fisherman whose Quirk gave him a set of functional, albeit dry, gills on his neck. He was hunched over a display counter, sorting through a box of brass swivels. 

"Half-day because of teacher conferences, Takahashi-san," Izuku replied, navigating the tight aisles with practiced ease. His thick, polarized prescription sunglasses were firmly on his face, shielding his hyper-sensitive tapetum lucidum from the buzzing fluorescent tube light near the register. "Did the new shipment come in?"

"Sure did. Aisle four, bottom shelf. Fresh off the truck from Osaka."

Izuku made a beeline for aisle four. He crouched down, his fingers brushing past generic spinners and basic topwater plugs until he found the unassuming cardboard box shoved in the corner. He opened it, and a genuine, rare smile ghosted across his face. 

Inside were the newly patented Lumina-Strike jigs. They were specifically designed for deep-water night fishing, coated in a specialized, military-grade phosphorescent paint that absorbed ambient UV light during the day and emitted a steady, irresistible glow in the pitch-black depths. Izuku picked one up, inspecting the heavy lead head, the razor-sharp treble hooks, and the silicone skirt meant to mimic a fleeing squid. 

Perfect, Izuku thought. The Kuroshio Current is bringing a massive school of Broadbill Swordfish unusually close to the continental shelf this weekend. Captain Torao said we’re heading out past the fifty-mile mark. Standard glow-sticks won't cut it at that depth. I need these.

He selected six of the heaviest jigs—two in neon pink, two in chartreuse, and two in a ghostly, translucent white. He carried them to the counter, pulling a worn leather wallet from his school uniform pants. 

"Going after the big ones this weekend, eh?" Takahashi noted, ringing up the purchase. "Swordfish are stubborn bastards. They'll snap a novice's line in two seconds."

"I've got a spool of 150-pound braided line and a titanium leader," Izuku said, placing the exact change on the counter. "I'm not losing another one."

"Good lad. Tell Torao I said to stop being cheap and buy a new radar array. His boat looks like a floating scrap heap."

"I'll pass it along," Izuku promised, carefully packing the deadly lures into his yellow backpack. He gave a polite bow and stepped back out into the Musutafu afternoon. 

The sun was brutally bright. It was a cloudless spring day, the kind of day that made normal teenagers want to go to the park or grab ice cream. To Izuku, it was an oppressive, glaring wasteland. Even behind his polarized lenses, the reflection of the sun off the pavement and glass building facades made him squint. He pulled his hood up over his unruly green curls and kept his head down, opting for the shadowed route under the city’s complex web of elevated train tracks and overpasses. 

His mind was already miles offshore, calculating drag settings and drag coefficients. He was so immersed in his mental tide charts that he didn't notice the strange, wet squelching sound coming from the manhole cover a few yards behind him. 

He did, however, notice the sudden, absolute silence. 

The ambient noise of the city overhead seemed to muffle, as if someone had thrown a heavy, wet blanket over the alleyway. Izuku stopped, his hand instinctively going to his backpack strap. The air suddenly smelled foul—a putrid mixture of raw sewage, stagnant river water, and rotting garbage. 

Izuku turned his head just in time to see a massive, towering wave of dark green sludge rise from the concrete behind him. 

"A medium-sized meat-suit!" a garbled, liquid voice echoed from the mass. Two massive, bulbous eyes rolled to the surface of the slime, followed by a jagged maw of floating, yellowish teeth. "Perfect! Just my size. Don't fight it, kid. It'll only hurt for about forty-five seconds, and then you'll be my new ride out of town!"

The Sludge Villain lunged. 

Izuku didn't scream. He didn't freeze in terror like the helpless civilians he always saw on the news. His reaction was purely analytical, honed by years of dealing with unpredictable, thrashing creatures on the slick deck of a boat. Threat identified. Fluid composition. High viscosity. Asphyxiation hazard.

The sludge crashed over him, a suffocating, foul-smelling weight. It instantly forced itself into his nose and mouth, cutting off his oxygen supply. The villain chuckled, the vibration traveling through the fluid and rattling Izuku’s bones. 

"That's it, kid. Just let it happen. He's right behind me, I don't have time to be gentle!"

Izuku couldn't breathe, but he didn't panic. Panic was how you drowned when a rogue wave swept you overboard. Panic was how you lost a finger when a winch line snapped. He needed to break the grapple, and physical punches against a liquid body were mathematically useless. 

His right hand, currently encased in slime but still somewhat mobile near his waist, dropped to the specialized utility belt he always wore under his uniform jacket. Fisherman carried tools. Izuku carried tools adapted for his specific... condition. 

Because his eyes were essentially massive light-receptors, sudden brightness was his greatest weakness. Logically, he had realized years ago that the best way to defend himself in the dark alleys of the port was to turn his weakness against others. 

Izuku’s fingers wrapped around the cold, knurled aluminum handle of the Olight X9R Marauder—a military-grade tactical flashlight. It was heavy, about the size of a water bottle, and was capable of outputting a staggering, retina-scorching 25,000 lumens. It was less of a flashlight and more of a handheld sun. 

Izuku squeezed his eyes tightly shut behind his dark sunglasses, pressing his eyelids together until he saw stars. 

He wrenched his arm upward, pointing the bezel of the flashlight directly into the center of the Sludge Villain's mass, right where the bulbous eyes were floating. 

He slammed his thumb onto the turbo-activation switch. 

CLICK.

A beam of pure, unadulterated white light erupted from the device. In the shadowed underpass, the sudden detonation of 25,000 lumens was catastrophic. The air literally seemed to sizzle. 

The Sludge Villain shrieked—a high-pitched, gargling wail of pure agony. "MY EYES! AAAARRRGH! WHAT IS THAT?! IT BURNS!"

The intense heat and blinding light caused the villain to instinctively recoil, his liquid form thrashing violently away from the source of the pain. The pressure around Izuku's chest and face loosened. Izuku gasped, inhaling a ragged breath of air, and violently wrenched himself backward, tearing free from the slime. 

He stumbled, coughing up a mouthful of foul-tasting sludge, but kept his eyes squeezed shut, keeping the flashlight aimed squarely at the screaming villain. 

"Turn it off! Turn it off, you little brat!" the villain wailed, flailing blindly. 

Before the villain could attempt a blind counterattack, a massive gust of wind blew through the underpass, carrying a booming voice that Izuku recognized immediately. 

"FEAR NOT, CITIZEN! FOR I AM HERE!"

Izuku cracked one eye open beneath his sunglasses, instantly wincing at the brightness of his own flashlight, but he managed to see the towering, muscular silhouette of All Might descending from the sky like a golden meteor. 

"TEXAS... SMASH!"

The Pro Hero didn't even need to make physical contact. The sheer, overwhelming air pressure generated by the punch struck the Sludge Villain like a freight train. The liquid body exploded into thousands of harmless, splattering droplets, coating the walls, the ceiling, and the pavement. 

The wind pressure finally died down. Izuku released the turbo switch on his flashlight. The underpass returned to its normal, shady gloom. 

Izuku stood there, wiping a dollop of sludge off his shoulder with a grimace. He coughed twice, clearing his lungs. 

"Ah! Are you alright, young man?" All Might boomed, turning around. He flashed his trademark, blindingly white smile. "Apologies for being late to the party! That villain was quite slippery, but thanks to your... remarkably bright gadget, you held him off just long enough!"

In a typical Hero narrative, this was the moment the protagonist would fall to their knees, weeping tears of joy, begging for an autograph, or asking if they, too, could become a Hero. 

Izuku simply stared at All Might. He analyzed the Pro Hero the same way he would analyze a new brand of fishing rod. Massive build. Incredible explosive power. Terrible for stealth. Way too loud. If he stepped on the deck of The Green Moray, he'd capsize it in two minutes.

"I am fine. Thank you for your assistance," Izuku said, his voice flat, devoid of any fanboyish reverence. He clicked his flashlight off and returned it to his belt. He then crouched down. The wind from All Might's punch had blown his backpack open, and his newly purchased, expensive jigs were scattered across the concrete. 

All Might paused, his heroic smile faltering for a fraction of a second. He was used to screaming, crying, fainting, or at the very least, enthusiastic gratitude. The kid in the dark glasses was casually picking up fishing lures. 

"Uh... yes! Of course!" All Might boomed, recovering his bravado. He quickly began scooping up the remaining sludge into two empty soda bottles he produced from his pockets. "It is my duty to keep the citizens safe! I must be off, to deliver this scoundrel to the authorities!"

Izuku found his last translucent white jig near All Might's massive boot. He picked it up, dusted it off, and placed it back in its box. He zipped his backpack and stood up. 

"Make sure the caps on those bottles are screwed on tight," Izuku advised, adjusting his backpack straps. "Viscous fluids with high surface tension can build up internal pressure if they're agitated. The structural integrity of cheap PET plastic isn't designed to contain compressed, living sludge."

All Might blinked. He looked down at the bottles in his massive hands, then back up at the teenager. "Er... right. Thank you for the tip, young man! Now, stand back! I must take to the skies!"

All Might crouched, power rippling through his legs, preparing for a massive leap. Usually, this was the part where a fan might try to cling to his leg for a ride, desperate for a moment more with their idol. 

Instead, Izuku took three large steps back, pulled out his smartphone, and opened his Navionics app to check the offshore wind predictions for Saturday. 

"Thank you for your hard work, sir. Have a safe flight," Izuku muttered, not looking up from his screen. 

All Might hesitated. He looked at the kid, utterly bewildered. For a brief, terrifying second, Toshinori Yagi wondered if he was losing his touch. Was he no longer cool? Was this how the youth of today reacted to the Symbol of Peace? 

"YES! WELL! GOODBYE!" All Might shouted, perhaps a little too loudly, before launching himself into the air, riding a shockwave of wind out of the underpass. 

Izuku looked up as the wind ruffled his hair. He checked his watch. He still had enough time to get home, shower the disgusting smell off his skin, and get down to the docks before sunset. He put his phone away and continued his walk, completely unaffected by his brush with the world's greatest Hero. 

By 5:30 PM, the sun was finally beginning its descent, painting the Musutafu skyline in bruised shades of orange and purple. The harsh glare of the day was fading, allowing Izuku to swap his heavy, polarized day-glasses for a lighter, amber-tinted pair that he used for dusk. 

He was walking toward the industrial harbor district, dressed in his heavy-duty fishing gear: thick, waterproof boots, a faded yellow slicker jacket to break the coastal wind, and a pair of fingerless gloves. Slung over his shoulder in a protective canvas sleeve was a six-foot telescoping carbon-fiber gaff—a tool consisting of a strong pole with a sharp, heavy stainless-steel hook at the end, used for hauling massive fish over the gunwales of a boat. 

He was a few blocks away from Tatooin Shopping District when he heard the explosion. 

BOOM.

The sound rattled the windows of the street. It was immediately followed by a chorus of screams and a thick, billowing plume of black smoke rising into the evening sky. 

Izuku stopped. He recognized the sound of that explosion. It didn't sound like a gas leak or a car bomb. It had the sharp, percussive crackle of nitroglycerin. 

Bakugo, Izuku thought. 

Normally, Izuku avoided villain attacks like the plague. They were loud, bright, and usually crowded with screaming people and flashing police sirens. But the route to the docks went directly past the shopping district, and if he took the long way around, he’d miss the tide shift. 

With a sigh of profound annoyance, Izuku adjusted the strap of his gaff and jogged toward the smoke. 

When he arrived at the edge of the shopping district, it was a war zone. Several buildings were engulfed in flames. The fire was casting chaotic, flickering light everywhere, but the thick, black smoke pouring into the sky was actually blocking out the last of the setting sun, creating a murky, shadowed environment in the alleyways. 

A crowd of onlookers was pressed against the police barricades. Izuku easily slipped through the gaps in the crowd, his quiet demeanor making him virtually invisible. He reached the front and looked into the disaster zone. 

The Sludge Villain was back. 

He must have dropped the bottles, Izuku deduced, unimpressed by the Symbol of Peace’s cargo-handling skills. 

The villain had grown massive, feeding off the chaos and the localized explosions. And in the center of the writhing, dark green mass, struggling desperately for air, was Katsuki Bakugo. 

Katsuki’s face was red, tears streaming down his cheeks from the smoke and lack of oxygen. He was furiously blasting explosions from his palms, trying to blow the sludge away, but he was only succeeding in setting the surrounding buildings on fire and feeding the villain's chaos. 

"I've got you now, you little firecracker!" the villain roared, laughing maniacally. "What a Quirk! Once I fully take over, I'll be unstoppable!"

Izuku looked around. The Pro Heroes were present, but they were standing at the edge of the destruction, completely useless. Death Arms was holding back the crowd, shouting that he didn't have the right Quirk to grab the fluid. Kamui Woods was busy trying to pull civilians from a burning building. Mt. Lady was complaining that the street was too narrow for her to enlarge. 

They were waiting. They were waiting for someone with a perfect, specialized Quirk to arrive and save the day. 

Izuku adjusted his amber glasses. The smoke was getting incredibly thick, rolling through the alley like a dense fog. The setting sun was now completely obscured. The ambient light dropped drastically. 

Underneath his glasses, Izuku's tapetum lucidum activated. 

The world shifted from a smoky, orange-lit nightmare into a crisp, highly detailed topography of silver, grey, and glowing green. The thick, choking smoke that blinded the Heroes and the civilians was nothing more than a faint, translucent mist to Izuku’s hyper-sensitive eyes. He could see perfectly through it. 

He could see Katsuki's terrified, desperate eyes. He could see the exact viscosity of the sludge. And, most importantly, he could see the Sludge Villain's solid, physical eyes, shifting rapidly within the liquid mass. 

He's panicking, Izuku analyzed. The explosions are hurting the host, but the villain is determined to hold on. The Heroes can't see properly through the smoke. If they rush in, they'll just get hit by Bakugo's friendly fire.

Izuku didn't feel a heroic surge of adrenaline. He didn't feel a burning desire to save his childhood bully for the sake of justice. He looked at the situation the same way he looked at a massive snag in a fishing net. It was a problem. It was blocking his path. And he had the tools to fix it. 

"Hey! Kid, get back!" Death Arms shouted as Izuku ducked under the police tape and stepped into the alley. 

Izuku ignored him. He walked calmly, his heavy waterproof boots thudding softly against the cracked asphalt. The heat from the fires washed over him, but he kept his eyes locked on the villain. 

Katsuki, thrashing in the slime, caught sight of Izuku approaching. Even through his blurry, tear-filled vision, he recognized the green curls and the yellow jacket. Deku? What the hell is he doing? He doesn't have a Quirk for this! He's going to die!

"Get away, you idiot!" Katsuki tried to scream, but it came out as a muffled gurgle through the sludge. 

"Well, well! Look who it is!" the Sludge Villain laughed, his massive, bulbous eyes locking onto Izuku. "The kid with the flashlight! I owe you for that sunburn, you little brat!"

The villain whipped a massive tendril of sludge toward Izuku, aiming to swat him into a brick wall. 

Izuku didn't even break his stride. With his perfect night vision piercing the smoke, the attack seemed agonizingly slow. He simply took one step to the left. The heavy sludge slammed into the pavement where he had been a fraction of a second before. 

Izuku unslung the canvas sleeve from his shoulder. With a flick of his wrist, the sleeve fell away. He gripped the carbon-fiber handle of the gaff. With a sharp, practiced snap of his arms, the telescopic pole extended to its full six-foot length. The heavy, curved stainless-steel hook at the end glinted menacingly in the firelight. 

"What are you gonna do with a stick, kid?" the villain mocked, winding up for another strike. 

Izuku didn't answer. He planted his feet, shifting his weight into a perfect, balanced stance. He held the gaff not like a sword, but like a casting rod. 

He stared deep into the sludge, his glowing green eyes tracking the rapid, erratic movements of the villain's solid right eye. It was a small target, moving wildly within a liquid medium, obscured by smoke and fire. For a Pro Hero, it would be an impossible shot. 

For the Cat of the Docks, who routinely snatched darting squid out of pitch-black water from the deck of a rolling boat, it was Tuesday. 

Izuku exhaled slowly. He let his instincts take over. 

He pulled the gaff back over his shoulder. 

Cast.

Izuku whipped the pole forward with terrifying, explosive speed. He didn't aim for the mass of sludge. He aimed for the single, solid point of vulnerability. 

The heavy steel hook cut through the air, whistling sharply. It plunged into the thick, viscous sludge with a wet thwack.

Izuku's aim was flawless. The point of the stainless-steel hook slipped perfectly under the thick, muscular ridge of the Sludge Villain's right eyelid, embedding itself deeply into the fleshy socket, just bypassing the eyeball itself. 

The villain froze. 

Izuku firmly planted his boots into the asphalt, gripped the pole with both hands, and brutally, violently yanked backward. 

The shriek that tore from the Sludge Villain's throat was so loud it shattered the remaining glass in the storefronts. It wasn't a roar of anger; it was a screech of pure, blinding, visceral agony. A massive, heavy hook was currently tearing at the most sensitive nerve clusters in his body. 

"GAAAAAHHH! MY EYE! LET GO! LET GO!"

The pain was so absolute, so overwhelming, that the villain completely lost control of his liquid form. The sludge destabilized, turning from thick mud into a watery soup. The mass around Katsuki lost its grip. 

Katsuki fell forward, hitting the asphalt on his hands and knees, gasping violently for air, hacking up black slime. 

Izuku didn't let up. He kept the tension on the pole tight, hauling the shrieking villain toward him like he was dragging a stubborn tuna onto the deck. "He's loose!" Izuku yelled over his shoulder, his voice completely calm. "Someone bag him!"

The Pro Heroes, who had been standing frozen in shock at the sheer brutality of the boy's tactic, snapped out of it. 

Suddenly, the wind picked up. The smoke was blown away by a massive downdraft. 

"I AM PATHETIC!" 

All Might, bleeding slightly from the mouth and looking furious with himself, slammed into the alleyway. He didn't hesitate. Seeing the villain pinned and distracted by the fishing gaff, All Might grabbed Bakugo by the collar, throwing him safely behind him. 

"DETROIT... SMASH!"

The sheer force of the downward punch hit the sludge villain. The wind pressure altered the weather, summoning a sudden, localized rain shower. The villain was instantly obliterated, scattered into a million unconscious puddles across the blast radius. 

The force of the wind hit Izuku, snapping his carbon-fiber gaff cleanly in half. He stumbled backward but kept his footing, sighing as he looked at the broken pole in his hand. Damn it. That was a custom grip.

The alleyway was silent, save for the patter of the artificial rain. 

The crowd erupted into cheers. The Heroes rushed in. 

"Are you out of your mind?!" Death Arms roared, marching up to Izuku and grabbing him by the shoulder of his yellow jacket. "You could have been killed! What were you thinking, running into a hostage situation with a stick? That's vigilantism, kid!"

Izuku swatted Death Arms' hand away. He pushed his amber glasses up his nose. 

"I wasn't performing a heroic act, and I wasn't being a vigilante," Izuku said, his voice flat, staring up at the massive Hero without a shred of intimidation. "I was walking to the docks. He was blocking the road. I treated him like a snagged net. If you 'Professionals' had done your job instead of standing around waiting for a camera-ready moment, I wouldn't have had to break a twenty-thousand-yen gaff."

Death Arms was too stunned to reply. Mt. Lady looked equally taken aback by the sheer disrespect. 

Katsuki, sitting on the pavement wrapped in a paramedic's blanket, stared at Izuku. His pride was shattered. He had been saved, not by a towering Pro Hero, but by Deku. And Deku hadn't used a flashy power. He had used a fishing tool, and he had done it with a cold, terrifying precision that Katsuki had never seen before. 

Izuku didn't stick around for the police statements. He threw the broken half of his gaff into a nearby dumpster, ignored the flashing cameras of the arriving press, and walked away into the darkening streets. The tide wasn't going to wait for a police report. 

It was 11:30 PM. 

The docks of Musutafu were silent, save for the gentle slapping of the dark water against the wooden pilings and the distant hum of a freighter out in the bay. The air was cold and smelled heavily of brine and diesel fuel. 

Izuku was sitting on an overturned milk crate at the edge of Pier 4. His yellow slicker jacket was zipped up tight against the chill. He wasn't wearing his glasses. In the darkness of the pier, his eyes were glowing a brilliant, mesmerizing green, tracking the subtle movements of the water below. He was holding a small, specialized rod, jigging for squid to use as live bait for the weekend trip. 

"You have quite the knack for being in the right place at the right time, young Midoriya."

Izuku didn't jump. He had heard the heavy, wheezing footsteps approaching down the wooden pier three minutes ago. He didn't turn around, keeping his eyes on his line. 

"I prefer quiet places, All Might," Izuku said softly. "But loud people seem to keep bringing their noise into my territory."

A dry, hacking cough echoed behind him. "You recognized me, then? Even like this?"

Izuku finally turned his head. Standing a few feet away, illuminated only by the faint glow of Izuku's eyes, was a skeletal, emaciated man with sharp, angular features and a shock of messy blonde hair. He was wearing baggy cargo pants and an oversized white t-shirt. He looked nothing like the towering Symbol of Peace. He looked like a stiff breeze would snap him in half. 

"You have the same gait. You favor your left leg when you walk, likely compensating for an injury on your right side," Izuku noted analytically. "And your breathing is shallow. Diminished lung capacity. A severe injury, likely sustained five or six years ago, judging by the scar tissue I can see through the collar of your shirt. You're operating on borrowed time."

Toshinori Yagi stared at the boy. His skeletal jaw dropped slightly. He felt utterly exposed, dissected by those glowing, predator eyes that seemed to see right through the dark and straight to his soul. 

"You... you are incredibly observant," Toshinori managed to say, stepping closer and sitting down on a nearby wooden piling. "That was... terrifyingly accurate."

"I read the water," Izuku said simply, turning back to his fishing rod. "I notice things others don't."

"I came here to apologize," Toshinori said softly, looking out at the dark water. "And to thank you. Today... I was a hypocrite. I let my time limit expire, and I stood by while a young man was suffocating. I told myself I couldn't act. But then I saw you. A boy with no combative Quirk, charging into a roaring fire, against a villain I was afraid to face."

"I didn't charge in to be a hero," Izuku corrected, lightly twitching the tip of his rod. 

"It doesn't matter why you did it," Toshinori insisted, leaning forward. "What matters is that you acted when the professionals froze. You have the heart of a true Hero. You have the instincts to save others, no matter the danger. I have been looking for someone like you for a very long time."

Izuku stopped jigging. He turned his head slowly, looking at the skeletal man. "Looking for someone?"

Toshinori sat up straight. Despite his frail form, a commanding aura seemed to radiate from him. "My Quirk, young man. It is not an inherent mutation like your eyes. It is a sacred torch, passed down from generation to generation. It is called One For All. It cultivates power, stockpiles it, and passes it on to the next worthy successor."

He pointed a bony finger at Izuku. "You, Izuku Midoriya, have proven yourself worthy. I am offering you my power. I want you to inherit One For All. I want you to become the next Symbol of Peace!"

The words hung in the cold night air. It was the ultimate offer. The dream of millions of children across the globe. The power of a god, handed over on a silver platter. 

Izuku stared at Toshinori for a long, silent moment. His glowing green eyes were unreadable. 

Then, Izuku turned his head, looked back at the dark water, and gave his rod a sharp yank. 

"No thank you."

Toshinori, who had been waiting for tears of joy, a scream of triumph, or at least a stunned gasp, nearly fell off his wooden piling. He choked on his own spit, going into a violent coughing fit that produced a spray of blood. 

"W-What?!" Toshinori wheezed, wiping his mouth. "Did... did you hear me? I am offering you the greatest Quirk in the world! Super strength! Unmatched speed! The power to save millions!"

"I heard you," Izuku said, reeling in a small, pulsing, translucent squid. He calmly unhooked it and tossed it into a bucket of aerated seawater at his feet. "I appreciate the offer, All Might. Really, I do. It's very flattering. But I have to decline."

"But... why?!" Toshinori cried, genuinely baffled. "You have the courage! You have the tactical mind! You could be the greatest!"

Izuku sighed. He set his rod down and turned to fully face the number one Hero. He reached up and tapped the side of his glowing eye. 

"Do you know what my Quirk is, All Might?"

"Night Vision, I presume," Toshinori said, still utterly confused. "The police report mentioned you could see through the smoke."

"My eyes absorb and magnify every single photon of light," Izuku explained, his tone even and instructional. "Right now, to me, this pitch-black pier is as bright as a sunny afternoon. But if I walk out into the actual sun without heavy, polarized glasses, I get a migraine so severe I throw up. If someone shines a flashlight in my face, I go blind for five minutes."

He gestured to Toshinori. "You are the Symbol of Peace. You operate in broad daylight. You smile for flashing cameras. Your very existence is loud, explosive, and bright. I biologically cannot tolerate the environment you work in."

"W-We could get you goggles!" Toshinori countered desperately. "Underground heroes exist! Eraserhead works at night!"

"That's just the physical aspect," Izuku continued, crossing his arms. "The truth is, All Might... I just don't want to. I don't want to fight people. I don't want the pressure of a nation on my shoulders. I don't want to smash buildings. If you gave me a super-strength Quirk, do you know what would happen?"

"You would become a champion of justice!"

"No," Izuku said deadpan. "I would snap my favorite carbon-fiber fishing rod the next time I tried to cast a line. I would crush my lures. I would rip the steering wheel off Captain Torao's boat."

Toshinori just stared at him. The logic was so mundane, so incredibly grounded, that it short-circuited his heroic brain. 

"You... you want to give up being a Hero... to fish?" Toshinori asked, his voice hollow, like he was questioning reality itself. 

"I'm not giving up anything, because I never wanted it in the first place," Izuku replied gently. "I like my life, All Might. I like the ocean. I like the quiet. I am very good at what I do, and I find peace out there in the dark. Giving me a destructive, explosive power wouldn't make me a hero. It would just make me a clumsy fisherman."

Izuku stood up, picking up his bucket of live squid and his rod. "You need someone who wants to stand in the light, All Might. Someone who craves the fight. That isn't me. I'm a creature of the dark."

He bowed politely to the stunned, skeletal man. 

"Take care of your health, Yagi-san. Don't push yourself too hard. Goodnight."

Izuku turned and walked away down the pier, his boots thudding softly on the wood, his glowing eyes scanning the dark water for the next catch. 

Toshinori Yagi was left alone on the cold, dark pier. He sat on the wooden piling, staring blankly at the spot where the boy had been. He looked down at his bony hands. For the first time in his legendary career, the Symbol of Peace had been entirely, unequivocally rejected. Not out of fear. Not out of villainy. 

But because the kid was worried about breaking his fishing rod. 

Toshinori let out a long, slow breath, a hysterical, wheezing chuckle escaping his lips. He looked up at the moonless sky. 

"Well," the Number One Hero muttered to the empty pier, experiencing a profound, quiet existential crisis. "I suppose... everyone needs a hobby."

The Pacific Ocean at three in the morning is not a place for the faint of heart. It is a vast, suffocating void. When the moon is hidden behind thick, rolling banks of offshore clouds, the water and the sky merge into a singular, impenetrable wall of absolute blackness. To the ordinary human eye, looking out over the bow of a ship in these conditions is like staring into a sensory deprivation tank. It is an environment that actively rejects human life. 

Izuku Midoriya thought it was the most beautiful place on earth. 

He stood at the bow of The Rusted Anchor, a forty-five-foot commercial trawler that looked exactly like its name suggested. The sea was angry tonight. A heavy, unseasonable sea fog had rolled in off the coast of the Chiba prefecture, reducing visibility for a normal sailor to less than ten feet. The air was frigid, thick with a damp, briny chill that seeped through standard clothing and settled deep into the bones. 

Izuku was unbothered. He wore heavy rubber overalls, steel-toed deck boots, and a thick, wool-lined waterproof jacket. The hood was pulled back. He didn't need it. He didn't need radar, either, though the boat's ancient, sputtering screen inside the wheelhouse was technically spinning. 

To Izuku, there was no fog. There was no darkness. 

His tapetum lucidum was fully engaged. His eyes, glowing a vivid, piercing emerald green in the dark, captured the microscopic ambient light of the stars hidden miles above the cloud cover. His brain translated it into a crisp, high-definition landscape of silver, grey, and pale blue. The thick sea fog, which blinded the ship’s spotlight and rendered the captain effectively blind, appeared to Izuku as nothing more than a faint, gossamer mist. 

He could see the rolling crests of the black waves. He could see the jagged, treacherous teeth of a rocky shoal three hundred yards to their port side—a shoal the radar had entirely missed due to the interference. 

Izuku raised his left hand, flashing two fingers, then made a sharp sweeping motion to the right. 

Inside the dimly lit wheelhouse, peering through the salt-streaked glass, Captain Torao grunted. Torao was a man carved from driftwood and stubbornness. He had a thick, grey beard, a missing pinky finger on his left hand from a winch accident in the nineties, and a permanent scowl. He spun the heavy wooden wheel hard to starboard. 

The trawler groaned, the diesel engine chugging rhythmically as the bow swung away from the hidden rocks, safely navigating the treacherous channel. 

"Keep 'em peeled, kid!" Torao's gruff voice crackled over the small two-way radio clipped to Izuku's suspenders. "Current's pulling us south! We should be coming up on the drop zone!"

Izuku pressed the button on his shoulder mic. "Copy that, Captain. Bottom contour is dropping off. We're crossing the shelf."

Izuku leaned over the railing, staring directly down into the churning water. This was the part he loved the most. When the boat passed over the continental shelf, the shallow, murky coastal water gave way to the deep, pelagic abyss. 

With his glowing eyes, Izuku could see through the upper layers of the ocean. It was a thriving, chaotic metropolis. He saw the bioluminescent trails of jellyfish drifting like ghostly umbrellas. He saw the frantic, synchronized darting of a massive bait ball of sardines. 

And then, he saw them. 

Deep down, hovering near the thermocline where the warm surface water met the freezing depths, were massive, torpedo-shaped shadows. They were moving fast, their silver scales catching the microscopic light, reflecting it back to Izuku's eyes in brief, tantalizing flashes. 

"Captain," Izuku spoke into the radio, his voice calm, but laced with the sharp focus of a predator. "School of Yellowfin. Fifty meters down, bearing two-one-zero. They're chasing squid."

"You sure, kid? Sonar is a mess right now," Torao replied. 

"I'm looking right at them," Izuku said softly. 

Inside the wheelhouse, Torao grinned, his teeth stained with tobacco. He didn't doubt the kid. He had stopped doubting Izuku Midoriya six months ago, the night the boy had casually pointed out a submerged shipping container that would have torn the hull wide open. 

"Alright, boys! Gear up!" Torao bellowed out the wheelhouse window to the two other deckhands, muscular men in their thirties who were currently huddling near the exhaust stack for warmth. "The Cat sees the mice! Drop the lines! Fifty meters, heavy jigs!"

The deck sprang into organized, brutal chaos. The winch screamed, the heavy hydraulic spools unwinding thick monofilament line into the black water. Izuku stepped back from the bow, moving with a fluid, practiced grace along the pitching, slippery deck to assist with the heavy rigging. 

He wasn't a Hero in training. He wasn't memorizing laws about quirk usage or practicing combat poses in a mirror. He was fifteen years old, standing on a rolling deck in the middle of a freezing ocean, doing a man's job, and he had never felt more alive. 

By contrast, daytime was a chore. 

The sun was a hostile entity. Musutafu Maritime & Fisheries Vocational School was located right on the edge of the industrial harbor. It was a sprawling campus of concrete buildings, dry docks, and massive indoor pools used for safety training. 

It was 10:00 AM on a Tuesday, and the spring sun was glaring off the ocean, turning the windows of the classrooms into blinding sheets of white fire. 

Izuku sat in the front row of his Marine Meteorology class. He was dressed in the school's standard uniform—a crisp, navy blue naval-style suit with brass buttons. But on his face sat his heavy, polarized prescription sunglasses. He had a special medical exemption from the principal to wear them indoors, a fact that had initially drawn stares from his classmates but was now entirely ignored. 

His classmates were a rough-and-tumble bunch. Unlike the students at UA or Shiketsu who dreamed of saving the world, the kids at the Maritime Academy were grounded, pragmatic, and blue-collar. Some had Quirks that helped with the water—gills, webbed fingers, minor hydrokinesis. Others, like Izuku, just had a passion for the sea and a willingness to work until their hands bled. 

"Alright, settle down," barked Instructor Hasekura, a retired coast guard captain with a voice like a foghorn. He tapped a pointer against a massive digital map of the Pacific Ocean displayed on the whiteboard. "Who can tell me the barometric indicators of a rapidly forming extratropical cyclone off the coast of Hokkaido?"

Izuku raised his hand immediately. 

Hasekura sighed. "Someone other than Midoriya."

The room was silent. A boy in the back with barnacles growing on his chin coughed. 

"Fine. Midoriya. Enlighten them."

Izuku didn't stand up; he just adjusted his sunglasses. "A sudden, sharp drop in atmospheric pressure, usually exceeding 24 millibars within a 24-hour period, a phenomenon known as explosive cyclogenesis, or a 'bomb cyclone.' It's preceded by shifting wind vectors from the southeast to the northwest and a rapid drop in sea surface temperature."

"Correct," Hasekura grunted, writing the terms on the board. "If you idiots miss those signs when you're out on the water, your Quirks aren't going to save you. The ocean will swallow you whole, and I'll have to write a very annoying letter to your parents."

Izuku took meticulous notes, his mechanical pencil flying across the page. This was his version of Hero training. He wasn't studying villain tactics; he was studying the greatest, most indifferent villain on earth: nature. 

When the bell rang for lunch, Izuku packed his bag and headed for the cafeteria. He sat at a table near the back, facing away from the large windows. He unpacked a bento box his mother had made him—grilled salmon, rice, and pickled radishes. 

As he ate, a group of upperclassmen sat at the table next to him. One of them pulled out a tablet and propped it up against a milk carton, turning the volume up. 

"Hey, the UA Sports Festival preliminaries are on!" one of the boys said, excitedly digging into his lunch. "My cousin goes to Shiketsu, he says the first-years at UA are freaks this year."

Izuku paused his chopsticks. He glanced over at the screen. 

The camera was panning over a massive, packed stadium. Confetti was falling. Present Mic's booming voice could be heard even through the tinny tablet speakers, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. 

The camera cut to the students of Class 1-A walking out onto the field. Izuku's eyes behind his dark lenses narrowed slightly. 

There he was. Katsuki Bakugo. He looked taller, broader, and absolutely radiating localized hostility. His face was twisted into a permanent scowl, looking exactly like a boy who believed the entire world owed him a trophy. Izuku watched as Katsuki walked up to the microphone to give the student pledge, and simply declared, "I pledge... that I'll be number one."

The crowd booed. The students on the screen looked horrified. 

Izuku just shook his head, taking a bite of his salmon. Still the same, he thought. Still thinking the loudest voice wins.

"Look at that arrogant prick," one of the maritime students muttered. "Who does he think he is?"

"He's the kid who survived the Sludge Villain incident last year," another replied. "And I heard he fought off real villains at that USJ attack last week. He's got an explosion Quirk. He's crazy strong."

Izuku looked away from the screen. He remembered the Sludge Villain. He remembered the smell of the burning buildings, the heat of the fire, the sheer, paralyzing panic in Katsuki's eyes before Izuku had hooked the villain in the eye. 

The media hadn't reported Izuku's involvement. Death Arms and the local police had quietly swept the "vigilante with a fishing pole" aspect under the rug to save face, attributing the villain's sudden release to All Might's overwhelming presence. Izuku preferred it that way. 

He didn't want the spotlight. He watched the screen as a boy with half-white, half-red hair suddenly froze an entire obstacle course into a glacier, causing the crowd to roar. 

Izuku felt completely alienated from that world. The bright lights, the screaming fans, the destructive, world-shaking Quirks. It felt like watching a movie about aliens. He looked down at his own hands. They were heavily calloused, scarred from braided fishing line and sharp dorsal fins. They weren't the hands of a superhero. They were the hands of a worker. 

He finished his lunch in silence, ignoring the cheers of the UA sports festival. He had an exam on celestial navigation in twenty minutes, and knowing how to find the North Star in a storm was much more important to him than knowing who won a high school obstacle race.

If daytime was a chore, the docks at midnight were his kingdom. 

Izuku had rapidly earned a reputation among the local commercial fleets. At first, the hardened sea dogs had laughed at Captain Torao for hiring a fifteen-year-old high school kid to work the dangerous night shifts. They thought the boy was a liability. 

That changed during a violent squall in November. 

A neighboring crab boat, The Iron Maiden, had gotten its primary dredging net severely tangled in its own twin propellers. The storm was thrashing the boat, pushing it dangerously close to the rocky breakwater. The water was pitch black, churning with foam, and near-freezing. Diving down to cut the net loose in those conditions was practically a death sentence. The crew was panicking, preparing to abandon ship. 

Izuku had been on Torao’s boat, moored nearby. Without a word, he had stripped off his heavy coat, grabbed a serrated diving knife in his teeth, and vaulted over the railing into the black, freezing water. 

The crew of The Iron Maiden had screamed, thinking the kid had just committed suicide. 

But Izuku didn't panic in the dark water. His tapetum lucidum flared. Under the waves, immune to the rain and the wind above, it was quiet. To his eyes, the snarled mess of thick nylon netting wrapped around the bronze propellers was illuminated in perfect, glowing green detail. He didn't have to guess where to cut. He didn't have to fumble blindly in the freezing cold. 

Holding his breath, his eyes wide open against the saltwater burn, he systematically and rapidly sliced through the tension points of the net. He worked with terrifying precision, moving like an aquatic predator. Within sixty seconds, the net fell away. 

Izuku breached the surface, gasping for air, his eyes glowing like twin emerald flares in the storm, and yelled for them to hit the engines. The boat roared to life, pulling away from the rocks just in time. 

Since that night, nobody laughed at Izuku Midoriya. 

They called him "The Cat of the Docks." 

It was a Friday night, 11:45 PM. The air was cool and crisp. The week’s shifts were over, and the harbor was relatively quiet, save for the hum of generators and the clinking of rigging against aluminum masts. 

Izuku was sitting at the very end of Pier 7, his favorite spot. He wasn't working. He was simply enjoying the peace. He had a small, cast-iron hibachi grill set up on the wooden planks. The glowing red charcoal provided a gentle, comforting heat that didn't bother his eyes. 

On the grill was a beautiful, freshly caught Pacific mackerel. Izuku had caught it himself an hour ago. He was meticulously brushing it with a glaze of soy sauce, mirin, and a hint of ginger. The smell of the roasting fish, the smoke mingling with the salty ocean breeze, was intoxicating. 

He was entirely relaxed. His heavy sunglasses were tucked into the pocket of his hoodie. In the darkness, his eyes were a soft, ambient green, reflecting the embers of the grill. 

He heard the footsteps before he saw the person. 

They were heavy, dragging, and uneven. They sounded exhausted. 

Izuku didn't turn around immediately. He carefully flipped the mackerel with a pair of wooden tongs. The skin crackled and blistered perfectly. 

"You shouldn't be out here, kid, the docks aren't safe at night," a rough, raspy voice called out. 

Izuku paused. He knew that voice. It was deeper, rougher with fatigue, but he knew the cadence. 

Izuku slowly turned his head. 

Standing ten feet away, illuminated only by the distant, pale glow of a streetlamp and the red embers of Izuku's grill, was Katsuki Bakugo. 

Izuku's glowing eyes took in the sight instantly, processing the details with ruthless clarity. 

Katsuki looked like hell. 

He was wearing his UA uniform, but the blazer was unbuttoned and wrinkled. His tie was missing. But it was his physical condition that made Izuku's brow furrow. Katsuki's left arm was in a heavy sling. There was a thick, white bandage wrapped around his forehead, partially hidden by his spiky ash-blonde hair. He had a dark, purpling bruise along his jawline, and his posture—normally so rigid, aggressive, and dominant—was slumped. 

He looked like a soldier returning from a brutal, losing war. 

Katsuki stopped dead in his tracks as the person at the grill turned around. He saw the green curls. He saw the glowing, terrifyingly calm green eyes staring at him in the dark. 

"Deku?" Katsuki breathed, his voice cracking slightly. 

Izuku didn't say anything for a moment. He evaluated the situation. 

The UA Sports Festival had concluded three days ago. Izuku had seen the headlines. Bakugo Katsuki had won first place. He should have been on top of the world. He should have been boasting to the heavens. Instead, the news had shown him chained to a podium, screaming like a rabid animal because the victory wasn't to his exact specifications. 

And then, just yesterday, the news had broken about the "Hero Killer: Stain" in Hosu City. The details were scarce, but several UA students had reportedly been involved in the violent aftermath. 

Katsuki was currently interning under the Number Four Hero, Best Jeanist. The hero world was chewing him up and spitting him out at a rapid pace. 

Katsuki stared at Izuku, his red eyes wide. He suddenly felt a spike of defensive rage. Of course. Of all the places he could have wandered to escape the flashing cameras, the suffocating expectations, and the lingering phantom pain in his overused arms, he had to run into the one person who had explicitly rejected everything Katsuki was killing himself to achieve. 

"What the hell are you looking at?!" Katsuki snapped, his voice lacking its usual explosive volume. He took a step forward, his good hand balling into a fist. "You got something to say? You want to mock me, hah? Say it!"

Izuku didn't flinch. He didn't rise to the bait. He looked at Katsuki's trembling, bruised fist, and then looked back up into the blonde boy's exhausted, bloodshot eyes. 

"I'm looking at my fish," Izuku said calmly. "It's almost done."

He turned back to the grill. 

Katsuki stood there, his fist still clenched, feeling entirely foolish. The anger drained out of him, leaving nothing but a hollow, crushing exhaustion. His arm throbbed. His head pounded. The silence of the docks, broken only by the sizzling of the fish and the lapping of the water, was deafening compared to the constant screaming of his internship. 

He didn't have the energy to fight. He didn't have the energy to yell. He just wanted the world to stop spinning for five minutes. 

Katsuki walked forward, his boots dragging on the wood. He collapsed onto an overturned bucket a few feet away from Izuku's grill. He leaned forward, resting his good elbow on his knee, burying his face in his hand. 

He expected Izuku to leave. He expected a lecture. He expected a smug "I told you so." 

Izuku did none of those things. 

The two boys sat in silence for five long minutes. The only light was the red glow of the coals and the eerie, steady green luminescence of Izuku's eyes. 

Izuku pulled a small paper plate from a stack in his bag. He carefully lifted the beautifully glazed, perfectly cooked mackerel off the grill and placed it on the plate. He reached into a small cooler, pulled out a chilled bottle of green tea, and set it next to the plate. 

Without a word, Izuku stood up, walked over to Katsuki, and held the plate out. 

Katsuki slowly lifted his head. He looked at the food. The smell was incredible. His stomach, which had been in knots for days, gave a loud, painful rumble. He hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. 

He looked up at Izuku. Izuku's face was completely unreadable. There was no pity in his glowing eyes. Pity would have made Katsuki explode. There was only the calm, practical observation of a man recognizing that another human being was starving and exhausted. 

Katsuki hesitated. Taking food from Deku felt like admitting defeat. It felt like breaking a rule he had established when they were four years old. 

But he was just so tired. 

Katsuki reached out with his good hand and took the plate. He took the bottle of tea. 

Izuku nodded once, walked back to his crate, and sat down. He didn't stare. He looked out at the dark water, pulling a small, waterproof notebook from his pocket and beginning to jot down tide patterns. 

Katsuki picked up the cheap wooden chopsticks provided. He broke off a piece of the mackerel and put it in his mouth. 

His eyes widened slightly. 

It was, without a doubt, the best thing he had ever tasted. The skin was perfectly crisp, salty, and sweet from the glaze. The meat underneath was incredibly rich, oily, and meltingly tender. It tasted like the ocean, but refined, careful, and deliberate. 

It tasted like absolute mastery. 

Katsuki ate. He ate quickly, but silently. He demolished the fish, picking the bones entirely clean. He chugged the cold green tea, the liquid soothing his dry, smoke-damaged throat. 

When he was finished, he set the paper plate down on the pier. He let out a long, shuddering breath. The food hit his stomach like a warm anchor, grounding him, stopping the frantic buzzing in his head for the first time in weeks. 

He looked over at Izuku. 

The green-haired boy was writing in his notebook, completely at ease in the pitch blackness of the night. He looked sturdy. He looked calm. He looked like a man who knew exactly who he was and exactly where he belonged. 

Katsuki remembered the alleyway a year ago. He remembered Izuku telling him that going out into the dark ocean was true strength. 

Looking at Izuku now, bathed in the faint red light of the dying embers, Katsuki finally understood. 

Izuku hadn't run away because he was a coward. He hadn't chosen this life because he couldn't cut it as a Hero. He had chosen it because he was already a master of this domain. In the dark, on the water, Izuku Midoriya was a king. He was in complete control. 

Katsuki was the Number One student at UA. He had a Quirk that could level buildings. But right now, sitting bruised and broken on a bucket, he felt incredibly small compared to the quiet, unshakeable peace radiating from the fisherman. 

"It was good," Katsuki said. His voice was quiet. It lacked any trace of its usual bite. 

Izuku stopped writing. He didn't look up, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward in a microscopic smile. 

"Pacific mackerel is best this time of year," Izuku replied evenly. "They fatten up for the cold currents."

Katsuki looked down at his bandaged hands. "The hero world... it's loud."

It was the closest thing to an admission of vulnerability Katsuki Bakugo had ever made in his entire life. It was a confession dragged out of him by exhaustion, the dark, and the strange, neutral space Izuku provided. 

Izuku closed his notebook. He slipped it into his pocket and finally turned his head to look at Katsuki. His glowing green eyes were softer now, less like a predator's and more like the steady beam of a lighthouse. 

"I know," Izuku said softly. "That's why I left it."

"I'm not leaving," Katsuki said instantly, a spark of his old fire returning, though it was weary. "I'm going to be Number One. I'm going to beat them all. Even if it kills me."

"I know you will," Izuku said, and there was no sarcasm in his voice. It was a statement of absolute fact. "But you're going to burn yourself out before you graduate if you don't learn how to breathe."

Katsuki frowned, looking out at the dark water. "I don't know how."

Izuku stood up. He walked over to the grill, picking up the tongs and moving a few remaining coals around to safely extinguish them. 

"Whenever you need it to be quiet," Izuku said, not looking at him, "the docks are always here. The fish don't care about the news. They don't care about your test scores. They just care about the tide."

Katsuki stared at Izuku's back. The resentment, the anger, the superiority complex he had carried regarding 'Deku' for a decade completely dissolved into the cold ocean breeze. 

Izuku packed up his grill, slinging his bag over his shoulder. He looked back at Katsuki one last time. 

"Get some sleep, Bakugo. You look like a zombie."

Izuku turned and walked away down the pier, his silhouette disappearing into the shadows, his glowing eyes the last thing to fade into the night. 

Katsuki sat alone on the bucket for a long time. He listened to the water slapping against the wood. He felt the cold air on his face. For the first time since the Sludge Villain incident, his heart wasn't racing. His palms weren't sweating nitroglycerin. 

He was just a boy, sitting by the ocean. 

Katsuki stood up. He left the paper plate in the nearby trash can and began the long walk home. He was still going to be the Number One Hero. He was still going to conquer the world. 

But as he walked away from the docks, he knew, with absolute certainty, that he didn't need to conquer Izuku Midoriya. 

Because the Cat of the Docks had already won.

There is a profound, terrifying difference between the darkness of a bedroom closet and the darkness of the open ocean. 

In a city, darkness is never truly absolute. There is always the ambient, sickly orange glow of sodium streetlamps reflecting off the cloud cover, the distant sweep of a car's headlights, or the blinking red beacon of a cell tower. City darkness is merely a shadow, a temporary absence of direct illumination. 

Ocean darkness is a physical weight. When you are ten miles off the coast of Tokyo Bay in the dead of winter, beneath a sky choked by a thick, moonless overcast, the darkness does not just surround you; it swallows you. It presses against your eardrums. It erases the horizon, blending the freezing black water and the freezing black sky into a singular, infinite void. It is an environment that aggressively reminds humanity that they are a terrestrial species, entirely unwelcome in the deep.

For a normal sailor, this kind of night was a white-knuckle experience, entirely reliant on the glow of the radar screen and the sweep of the ship's spotlight. 

For seventeen-year-old Izuku Midoriya, it was just another Tuesday at the office. 

Izuku stood at the starboard rail of The Rusted Anchor, his gloved hands resting lightly on the cold, salt-pitted aluminum. He had grown significantly in the past two years. The awkward, scrawny frame of his early teens had been broadened and hardened by thousands of hours of grueling, physical labor. His shoulders were wide, built from hauling heavy, waterlogged dredging nets and fighting against the pull of massive, pelagic predators. He wore a state-of-the-art, insulated neoprene wetsuit beneath a heavy set of high-visibility yellow waterproof overalls, though the high-visibility aspect was currently moot in the pitch blackness. 

He didn't wear a headlamp. He didn't need one. 

His tapetum lucidum was fully dilated, his irises glowing a vivid, piercing emerald green in the dark. To Izuku, the terrifying void of Tokyo Bay was a breathtaking, high-definition landscape of silver and pale blue. He could see the intricate, foaming crests of the freezing waves. He could see the ghostly, drifting fog banks miles away. And, most importantly, he could see down into the water. 

"How's it looking down there, kid?" 

The voice of Captain Torao crackled from the small, waterproof radio clipped to Izuku’s shoulder strap. Torao was inside the wheelhouse, navigating solely by instruments and trusting his First Mate’s miraculous eyes to handle the rest. 

Izuku pressed the transmit button. "Water temperature is holding at four degrees Celsius, Captain. Thermocline is stable at forty meters. The current is pushing strong from the southeast. We’re in the perfect pocket."

"Good," Torao replied, the satisfaction evident even through the static. "The buyers at Tsukiji Market are paying a massive premium for Watasenia scintillans this week. If we hit the school, we'll make our monthly quota in one night."

Watasenia scintillans. The Firefly Squid. 

They were a deep-water species, famous for their brilliant blue bioluminescence. They usually stayed hundreds of meters below the surface, but during specific, moonless winter nights, massive schools would migrate upward to feed. Catching them required absolute darkness. Any artificial light on the surface would spook them back into the abyss. Hence, The Rusted Anchor was currently running "dark"—all exterior lights extinguished, the engine idling at a low, barely audible hum. 

Izuku leaned over the rail, his glowing eyes penetrating the black water. He was entirely at peace. His classmates back at the Maritime Academy were likely asleep in their warm dormitories. Katsuki Bakugo, now a highly publicized third-year at UA High School, was probably patrolling some brightly lit city street, fighting villains for the cameras. 

Izuku didn't envy them for a second. The ocean was quiet. It made sense. It operated on rules of pressure, temperature, and tides, not egos and ideologies. 

"Wait," Izuku murmured, his brow furrowing beneath his dark green curls. 

He squinted, looking past the immediate zone of the boat and out toward the eastern shipping lane. The shipping lanes of Tokyo Bay were heavily regulated. Massive cargo freighters moved through them like floating steel islands, always brightly lit, always broadcasting their AIS (Automatic Identification System) coordinates. 

But Izuku was looking at a shadow. 

About two miles out, a massive vessel was cutting through the water. Izuku could see the displacement of the waves, a massive V-shaped wake trailing behind it. But the ship itself was entirely unlit. No running lights. No bridge lights. It was a complete blackout. 

"Captain," Izuku said into the radio, his voice dropping its relaxed tone, shifting into a tight, professional clip. "We have an unauthorized vessel in the eastern lane. Looks like a mid-sized freighter. Completely dark. No lights, no transponder signal."

Inside the wheelhouse, Torao frowned at his radar screen. "I'm not painting anything on the radar, kid. You sure?"

"Positive," Izuku replied, his eyes narrowing. "They're using a localized jamming field or some kind of stealth Quirk. The water displacement is massive. They're moving fast, too. Twenty knots."

A dark ship running at high speed in the middle of the night without transponders meant only one thing in Tokyo Bay: Smugglers. 

The maritime borders of Japan were notoriously difficult to police. Pro Heroes focused on the cities. The Coast Guard was underfunded and stretched thin. Villains had long ago realized that moving illegal support items, Trigger drugs, or exotic animal parts was infinitely easier on the open ocean than through a heavily guarded airport. 

"Not our problem, Midoriya," Torao said gruffly. "We're here for squid, not justice. Let the Coast Guard handle it. I'll patch a message through on the scrambled frequency."

"Copy that," Izuku agreed. He had no desire to play Hero. He reached for a heavy, lead-weighted jigging line, preparing to drop it into the water to test the depth. 

BOOM.

The sound hit Izuku before the light did. It was a concussive, chest-rattling shockwave that traveled perfectly across the flat expanse of the water, vibrating through the aluminum hull of The Rusted Anchor and rattling Izuku’s teeth. 

A split second later, a massive fireball erupted from the deck of the dark freighter two miles away. 

The explosion was blinding. In the pitch-black night, the sudden detonation of high explosives was like a miniature sun igniting. Izuku hissed in pain, instantly squeezing his eyes shut and violently turning his head away. His tapetum lucidum, designed to magnify microscopic light, was scorched by the sudden influx of photons. Bright, jagged purple after-images danced across his closed eyelids. 

"What the hell was that?!" Torao yelled over the radio, the boat rocking violently as the physical shockwave reached them, churning the water. 

Izuku kept his eyes shut for three long seconds, waiting for the painful flare in his retinas to subside. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his specialized, amber-tinted night-goggles, snapping them over his eyes before turning back to look. 

The freighter was no longer dark. A raging chemical fire was spreading across its aft deck, casting a hellish orange glow over the churning ocean. 

But it wasn't just a fire. Izuku’s enhanced vision, even through the tinted goggles, picked up the rapid, chaotic movements on the deck. 

He saw flashes of secondary Quirks. A burst of pressurized water. A sweeping arc of something that looked like solid shadow. 

And then, he saw the figures falling. 

The explosion had blown a massive hole in the starboard railing of the freighter. Izuku watched, his heart rate remaining meticulously steady, as four distinct human silhouettes were thrown outward by the blast, plummeting the sixty feet down into the freezing, black waters of Tokyo Bay. 

"Captain," Izuku reported, his voice devoid of panic, operating purely on tactical assessment. "Explosion on the smuggler vessel. Looks like a firefight. We have four men overboard."

"Dammit all to hell," Torao swore loudly. "I'm calling the Coast Guard. ETA is gonna be at least fifteen minutes from the mainland."

Izuku looked down at the water. "Water temp is four degrees, Captain. With the wind chill and the current, they don't have fifteen minutes. They have maybe five before hypothermia induces muscular paralysis, and then they drown."

Silence stretched over the radio for two seconds. Torao knew the math just as well as Izuku did. 

"Do it," Torao ordered. "I'm bringing us in. Cutting the engine at two hundred yards so we don't chop them up in the props."

Izuku didn't hesitate. He spun away from the railing. He didn't run to a locker to grab a Hero costume. He ran to the heavy-duty marine supply chest bolted to the deck. 

He threw open the lid. Inside was a fisherman’s arsenal, adapted for survival. He grabbed a heavy-duty climbing harness and rapidly buckled it over his wetsuit. He attached two thick, coiled lengths of high-tensile braided nylon rope to his carabiners. He grabbed a pair of specialized, carbon-fiber diving fins, and finally, a compact, compressed-air rebreather mask designed for emergency underwater welding. 

He moved with terrifying efficiency. Every motion was practiced, stripped of all wasted energy. 

The engine of The Rusted Anchor roared to life, fighting the current as Torao pushed the throttle, steering them directly toward the burning freighter. As they closed the distance, the details of the disaster became clearer. 

It was a Pro-Hero sting operation gone horribly wrong. 

Izuku could see the remaining figures on the deck of the burning ship. He recognized the bulky, muscular silhouette of Selkie, the maritime Pro-Hero, swinging a massive fist at a group of heavily armed smugglers. But Selkie was outnumbered, and more importantly, some of his team had been caught in the blast. 

"Engine cut!" Torao yelled as they reached the two-hundred-yard mark. The heavy diesel rumble died, leaving only the sound of the crackling fire in the distance and the wind howling over the water. 

Izuku stood at the edge of the diving platform at the stern of the boat. He strapped the rebreather over his mouth. He pulled his amber goggles down tightly, securing the watertight seal around his eyes. 

He didn't look at the burning ship. He looked at the black water below. 

Somewhere in that freezing, churning abyss, four people were dying. 

Izuku’s eyes flared a brilliant, unnatural green behind his goggles. He didn't strike a heroic pose. He didn't shout a catchphrase to reassure the victims. 

He simply stepped off the platform and vanished into the dark water without a splash. 

Fifty feet below the surface.

Tsuyu Asui was going to die, and it was entirely her fault. 

The UA third-year student, known to the world as the Rain-Season Hero: Froppy, was a master of aquatic environments. Her frog mutation gave her incredible leg strength, massive lung capacity, and unparalleled maneuverability in the water. She was currently interning under Selkie, participating in a high-stakes raid on a suspected Trigger smuggling ring. 

The intelligence had been wrong. 

The smugglers weren't low-level thugs. They were heavily armed, and their leader possessed a devastating, highly lethal Quirk: Abyssal Murk. It allowed him to generate an impossibly dense, viscous black fluid that absorbed all light and sound. 

When the raid commenced, the villain had flooded the deck with the murk, blinding the Heroes, before detonating a localized explosive charge. 

Tsuyu, Selkie's sidekick Sirius, and two police officers had been blown off the ship. 

Normally, falling into the ocean was a tactical advantage for Tsuyu. But this wasn't the warm, clear water of a training pool. This was Tokyo Bay in winter. 

The moment she hit the water, the four-degree temperature struck her like a physical blow. Because her mutation made her partially cold-blooded, the extreme cold was her ultimate weakness. Her body immediately went into a state of severe thermal shock. Her muscles locked up. Her powerful legs, capable of leaping buildings, felt like they were cast in lead. 

Worse, the villain had followed them down. 

The smuggler leader, a hulking man wearing a specialized diving suit, had dove into the water after them, his Quirk bleeding out into the bay like ink from a colossal squid. 

Tsuyu was sinking. She couldn't move her arms. Her lungs burned. The water around her was an impenetrable wall of absolute blackness. She couldn't tell which way was up. The villain's Quirk had neutralized all sound, leaving her in a silent, freezing void. 

She felt a heavy hand grab her ankle. 

Panic, raw and primal, flared in her chest. The villain was pulling her deeper. He was going to drown her in the dark. She tried to kick, tried to deploy her long tongue to wrap around anything, but her cold-blooded body was shutting down. Her vision was starting to tunnel. 

This was it. The Hero Froppy, defeated not in a blaze of glory, but suffocating silently in the dark, cold water. 

Suddenly, the grip on her ankle was violently ripped away. 

Tsuyu blinked slowly, her consciousness fading. Through the freezing, ink-black water, something impossible appeared. 

Two glowing rings of vivid, emerald green light pierced the absolute darkness. 

They weren't flashlights. They were eyes. 

They moved with a fluid, terrifying speed, darting through the black water like an apex predator perfectly at home in the abyss. The glowing eyes swooped down toward the shadow of the villain. 

Tsuyu couldn't hear the struggle, but she felt the displacement of the water. 

Izuku Midoriya didn't fight the villain. Fighting underwater was a waste of oxygen and energy. He approached the hulking smuggler from his literal blind spot. The villain’s own Abyssal Murk Quirk, which made him invisible to normal human eyes, was entirely useless against a tapetum lucidum that forcefully extracted ambient light. To Izuku, the villain’s dark ink looked like a faint, grey mist, and the villain himself was a glowing thermal target. 

Izuku moved behind the man. His hands, calloused from years of tying complex knots in freezing rain, went to work. 

He didn't throw a punch. He unclipped a heavy, tungsten-weighted dredging net from his belt—a net designed to hold three hundred pounds of thrashing crabs. With a flick of his wrists, he cast the net directly over the villain's head. 

The villain panicked, thrashing wildly. But every movement only caused the high-tensile nylon to draw tighter. Izuku smoothly swam around the struggling man, wrapping the thick braided rope around the villain's arms and torso, tying a rapid, inescapable bowline knot, pinning the man's arms to his sides. 

The villain was neutralized in exactly eight seconds. 

Izuku didn't linger to gloat. He turned his glowing eyes upward. 

He saw Tsuyu sinking, her body limp. He saw Sirius a few yards away, struggling weakly against the cold. And deeper down, the two police officers, their lungs rapidly giving out. 

Izuku kicked his carbon-fiber fins, propelling himself upward with massive force. He reached Tsuyu first. He didn't grab her gently; there was no time. He grabbed the collar of her hero costume with one hand, unclipped a spare carabiner from his harness with the other, and hooked it securely to her belt. 

He did the same for Sirius, clipping the sidekick to his secondary line. 

He was out of clips for the officers. He swam down, grabbed the first officer by the tactical vest, and threw the man's arm over his shoulder. He grabbed the second officer with his free hand. 

Izuku was now carrying the dead weight of four people, plus the drag of the netted villain dragging below them. It was easily over eight hundred pounds of resistance in freezing water. 

A Pro-Hero with super strength would have tried to swim them all to the surface using pure muscle. 

Izuku was a fisherman. He relied on physics, leverage, and gear. 

He reached down to his belt and pulled the cord on his emergency maritime deployment bag. Instantly, a massive, heavy-duty commercial lifting balloon shot out, rapidly inflating with pressurized CO2. 

The balloon, capable of lifting a sunken engine block off the ocean floor, rocketed upward. Izuku, securely tethered to the balloon along with the Heroes and the villain, was violently yanked toward the surface. 

They breached the water with a massive, gasping splash. 

The sudden transition from the silent, pressurized deep to the chaotic surface was jarring. The air was freezing, filled with the smell of the burning freighter and the roar of the ocean wind. 

Izuku spat out his rebreather, taking a massive gulp of the cold night air. 

"Torao! Starboard winch! Now!" Izuku roared, his voice cutting through the wind with absolute, commanding authority. 

Ten yards away, the massive silhouette of The Rusted Anchor loomed in the dark. A heavy, steel-cabled hook swung out over the water, operated by Captain Torao in the wheelhouse. 

Izuku swam, dragging the mass of bodies through the rolling waves. He reached the heavy hook, instantly wrapping the lifting balloon's main tether around the steel and snapping the safety latch shut. 

"Haul it up!" Izuku shouted. 

The hydraulic winch screamed. The thick steel cable went taut. 

Tsuyu, shivering violently, her lips blue, felt herself being hoisted out of the freezing water. She was dragged over the aluminum gunwale of the trawler, collapsing onto the deck alongside Sirius and the two sputtering police officers. 

A moment later, the heavily netted villain was hauled over the side, dropping onto the deck like a massive, thrashing sack of potatoes. 

Finally, a hand reached over the railing. Izuku hauled himself up, water pouring off his yellow overalls. He didn't collapse. He didn't shiver. He stood tall on the pitching deck, his glowing green eyes scanning the survivors. 

"Blankets," Izuku ordered, pointing to the massive supply chest. "Foil thermal wraps. Get them out of those wet costumes immediately or they'll go into cardiac arrest. Captain, get the engine running, we need the cabin heater on maximum." 

Torao didn't question him. The captain killed the winch and rushed out of the wheelhouse, throwing heavy, silver mylar blankets over the freezing Heroes. 

Tsuyu huddled under the blanket, her teeth chattering so violently it hurt her jaw. She looked up at her savior. 

Izuku had pulled his goggles off to check the deck. In the dim, ambient light of the distant burning freighter, his irises were ablaze with that terrifying, beautiful emerald light. He was calmly checking the tension on the villain's net, completely unbothered by the fact that he had just single-handedly rescued four people from a freezing, pitch-black grave. 

"Y-You're..." Tsuyu stammered, her voice weak. "You're... the Cat... of the Docks." 

She had heard the rumors from the water-rescue agencies. An urban legend about a boy who could see perfectly in the dark, who navigated the treacherous harbor waters with terrifying ease. She had thought it was just a tall tale. 

Izuku didn't look at her. He pulled a heavy wrench from a tool rack and casually tapped the thrashing villain on the side of the head, instantly knocking the man unconscious to stop him from rocking the boat. 

"I'm a First Mate," Izuku corrected softly, reaching for a thermos of hot coffee Torao had left on the console. He poured a cup and knelt down, offering it to Tsuyu. "Drink this slowly. Don't gulp it, or you'll throw up."

Tsuyu took the cup with trembling hands. The warmth of the coffee seeping into her frozen palms was the best thing she had ever felt. "Thank you," she whispered. 

"Don't thank me yet," Izuku muttered, his glowing eyes turning back toward the burning freighter. "Your boss is still over there, and he's losing."

Selkie was indeed losing. Through the flames and the smoke, Izuku could see the hulking maritime Hero being pushed back by three smugglers armed with heavy, military-grade assault rifles. Selkie's quirk gave him the attributes of a spotted seal, but he wasn't bulletproof. 

"Captain," Izuku said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, icy calm. "Bring us alongside the freighter. Port side."

"Kid, they've got guns," Torao warned, though he was already throttling the engine. 

"They have guns," Izuku agreed, reaching back into the supply chest. "I have a pneumatic harpoon cannon."

Izuku lifted a massive, heavy piece of machinery. It looked like a cross between a bazooka and a heavy-duty rifle, attached to a thick spool of braided steel cable. It was a commercial whaling tool, designed to penetrate a foot of solid blubber at fifty yards. 

"Keep your heads down," Izuku told the shivering Heroes. 

The Rusted Anchor surged forward, closing the distance to the burning freighter. The flames were roaring now, illuminating the water. Izuku slammed his tinted goggles back over his eyes to protect his tapetum lucidum from the intense glare. 

As they pulled within thirty yards, one of the smugglers on the deck spotted them. 

"We got company! A fishing boat!" the smuggler yelled, turning his rifle toward The Rusted Anchor. 

He didn't even get to pull the trigger. 

Izuku braced his boots against the gunwale, hefted the heavy pneumatic cannon onto his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. 

The sound was a deafening, compressed-air THUNK.

A four-foot-long, solid steel harpoon rocketed across the gap between the ships. It didn't aim for the smuggler. Izuku wasn't a murderer. He aimed for the environment. 

The harpoon slammed entirely through the heavy steel base of the cargo crane directly above the smugglers, embedding itself deep into the ship's bulkhead with a massive crash. 

The smugglers froze, looking up at the steel spear vibrating above their heads. 

Izuku didn't give them a chance to recover. He slammed his hand down on the electronic winch control bolted to the deck of his boat. 

The heavy steel cable attached to the harpoon violently tightened. The Rusted Anchor, a heavy, forty-five-foot vessel currently riding a strong ocean swell, acted as a massive, unstoppable counterweight. 

The sheer physical force of the boat pulling against the cable ripped the heavy cargo crane entirely off its mounting. 

The massive steel structure shrieked, collapsing downward. It crashed onto the deck of the freighter, entirely crushing the weapons of the three smugglers and pinning them to the deck in a tangle of steel girders. 

Selkie, panting and covered in soot, stared in shock at the collapsed crane, and then looked over at the small, battered fishing trawler bobbing in the water. 

Izuku stood at the rail, the pneumatic cannon resting casually on his shoulder. He reached up and pulled his goggles down, his glowing green eyes locking onto the Pro Hero. 

"Need a lift, Hero?" Izuku called out over the roar of the fire. 

Selkie didn't hesitate. He dove off the burning freighter, swimming the short distance to The Rusted Anchor, and hauled himself aboard. 

"My team!" Selkie gasped, looking around frantically. "Sirius! Froppy! They fell—"

"They're inside the cabin, wrapped in thermal foil, drinking coffee," Izuku interrupted, pointing his thumb toward the wheelhouse. "Your target is tied up in a dredging net on the aft deck. He's currently unconscious."

Selkie blinked, water pouring off his spotted face. He looked at the heavily secured villain, then at his recovering sidekicks through the wheelhouse window, and finally at the seventeen-year-old boy in the yellow overalls. 

"You... you did all this?" Selkie asked, utterly dumbfounded. "Are you an underground Hero? What agency are you with?"

"I'm with the Musutafu Fishermen's Cooperative," Izuku said dryly, turning away to begin reeling in the harpoon cable. "And you people owe me a lot of money."

Before Selkie could ask what he meant, the distant, thumping sound of heavy rotor blades echoed through the night sky. 

"Finally," Captain Torao grunted, stepping out of the wheelhouse. "The cavalry arrives after the war is over."

Three massive Coast Guard helicopters, flanked by a sleek, high-tech Pro-Hero transport chopper, descended through the cloud cover. 

And then, the worst possible thing happened. 

The Hero transport chopper, eager to secure the scene and capture the chaos for the inevitable press release, activated its primary searchlights. 

Four massive, fifty-thousand-lumen spotlights snapped on simultaneously. They swept across the dark water, illuminating the burning freighter, and then violently locked directly onto the deck of The Rusted Anchor. 

The sudden, overwhelming influx of pure, blinding white light was catastrophic for Izuku. 

He didn't have time to pull his goggles up. The light hit his highly dilated, hyper-sensitive eyes like a physical punch to the optic nerve. 

Izuku let out a sharp cry of pain, dropping the harpoon cable and slapping both hands over his eyes. He stumbled backward, collapsing against the wheelhouse bulkhead, his vision completely blown out, replaced by a searing, agonizing white flare that felt like a migraine exploding inside his skull. 

"Midoriya!" Torao yelled, rushing over and shielding the boy with his coat. "Hey! Turn those damn lights off! You're blinding my crew!"

The helicopters didn't listen. They hovered closer, the downdraft whipping the water into a frenzy. A loudspeaker crackled to life from the Hero chopper. 

"THIS IS THE HERO PUBLIC SAFETY COMMISSION! ALL CIVILIANS REMAIN CALM! WE ARE SECURING THE AREA!"

A rope ladder dropped from the chopper, and a flashy, brightly colored Pro Hero—one Izuku couldn't see, but could hear landing heavily on the deck—slid down. 

"Excellent work holding the line, citizens!" the Hero boomed, striking a pose for a camera drone that hovered down behind him. "We'll take it from here! You can rest easy knowing that—"

"Shut up." 

The Hero blinked. The camera drone zoomed in. 

Izuku slowly pushed himself off the bulkhead. He was heavily squinting, tears of pain streaming down his face from the brutal light exposure. He forcefully shoved his dark, polarized day-glasses onto his face, breathing heavily through his nose. 

He didn't look like an awe-struck civilian. He looked incredibly, violently angry. 

Izuku marched directly up to the flashy Pro Hero, completely ignoring the camera drone. He pointed a trembling, calloused finger directly at the man's chest. 

"Tell your pilot to turn off those fifty-thousand-lumen halogen searchlights right now," Izuku demanded, his voice a low, terrifying growl that carried clearly over the wind. 

"Now, son, I understand you've been through a traumatic event—" the Hero started, putting on a patronizing smile. 

"I am not traumatized!" Izuku yelled, stepping into the Hero's personal space. "I am pissed off! Do you have any idea what you just did?!"

Izuku spun around, pointing blindly out into the ocean where the searchlights were currently sweeping across the surface. 

"I have been tracking a massive migration of Watasenia scintillans for three weeks!" Izuku shouted, the sheer fury of a thwarted fisherman replacing any lingering pain. "They are highly photo-sensitive deep-water squids! You just blasted a million candle-watts of artificial light into their feeding ground! You just spooked a school of fish worth roughly two million yen back down into the Mariana Trench!"

The Pro Hero stared at him, completely lost. "Squid? Son, we are here to arrest villains—"

"I ALREADY ARRESTED THE VILLAINS!" Izuku roared, gesturing wildly to the netted, unconscious man on the deck and the crushed smugglers on the burning freighter. "I pulled your drowning colleagues out of the water! I secured the perimeter! The only thing you've accomplished since you got here is ruining my catch and giving me a severe ocular migraine!"

The camera drone hovered silently, broadcasting the entire dress-down live to a late-night news station. 

Selkie, standing nearby wrapped in a blanket, covered his mouth to hide a massive grin. Tsuyu, looking out the wheelhouse window, let out a soft, frog-like "Ribbit" of pure amusement. 

"You are in violation of maritime light discipline codes," Izuku continued, aggressively stepping forward and forcing the Pro Hero to actually take a step backward. "Captain Torao has the registration number of your chopper. You can expect an itemized bill for the fuel we wasted coming out here, the cost of a ruined dredging net I had to use to tie up that idiot, and the estimated market value of the two million yen squid harvest you just destroyed!"

Izuku crossed his arms, staring down the Hero through his dark lenses. 

"Now, load your villains, take your wet Heroes, and get off my boat so I can go find a dark patch of water in peace."

The Pro Hero, realizing he was being publicly humiliated by a teenager in a yellow raincoat, frantically gestured to his earpiece. "Uh... Command, cut the searchlights. I repeat, cut the searchlights."

The massive, blinding beams snapped off. 

The ocean returned to its natural, shadowy state, illuminated only by the dying fires of the freighter. 

Izuku let out a long sigh of relief, rubbing his temples beneath his sunglasses. He turned his back on the Hero and walked over to the winch, calmly beginning to organize the ropes he had used for the rescue. 

The Coast Guard began the tedious process of transferring the prisoners and the rescued Heroes. 

As Tsuyu was being helped onto a Coast Guard cutter, she looked back at The Rusted Anchor. Izuku was standing near the stern, his back to the chaos, casually preparing a new set of deep-water jigs. He had just saved multiple lives, defeated a high-level smuggling ring, and completely humiliated a top-tier Hero on live television, and he looked entirely bored by the whole affair. 

"Midoriya-kun!" Tsuyu called out. 

Izuku paused, turning his head slightly. 

"You would have made an amazing Pro Hero," she said, her voice sincere. 

Izuku pushed his sunglasses down, revealing his glowing green eyes to the dark night one last time. He gave her a small, genuine smile. 

"I'm exactly what I want to be, Asui-san," Izuku replied gently. "Stay warm."

He turned back to the water. The Heroes flew away in their noisy helicopters. The Coast Guard towed the burning freighter back to port. 

And Izuku Midoriya, the Cat of the Docks, stayed out in the deep, silent dark, waiting patiently for the squid to return.

The Toyosu Fish Market at 4:30 in the morning was a sensory overload of organized chaos. It was a sprawling, freezing, brightly lit cathedral of commerce where the ocean’s bounty was weighed, judged, and violently haggled over by the most cutthroat chefs and distributors in Japan. 

The air was frigid, kept at a strict temperature to preserve the meat, and smelled sharply of salt, ice, and raw life. The cavernous warehouse echoed with the ringing of handbells, the rapid-fire auctioneer chants that sounded like a foreign language, and the thud of heavy rubber boots on wet concrete. 

To Izuku Midoriya, it was just the final step of a long night’s work. 

Izuku stood at the very back of the main auction floor, leaning casually against a frosted steel pillar. He was twenty-two years old now. The years of battling the ocean had stripped away any lingering traces of the soft, anxious boy he had once been. He was tall, his shoulders broad and corded with the dense, functional muscle of a man who moved heavy gear on a pitching deck for a living. He wore a thick, dark green fisherman’s sweater, heavy denim, and a faded black beanie pulled down over his unruly green curls. 

Despite the early hour, a pair of thick, polarized wayfarer sunglasses rested securely on his nose, shielding his hyper-sensitive tapetum lucidum from the brutal assault of the market’s overhead halogen lights. 

A respectful, almost reverent hush had fallen over Auction Block C. 

Lined up on the wooden pallets were five massive Pacific Bluefin Tuna. They were breathtaking specimens—sleek, torpedo-shaped giants, their silver and blue scales gleaming under the lights. The smallest weighed in at three hundred pounds; the largest was easily pushing six hundred. They were gutted, cleaned, and packed with crushed ice, perfect red meat exposed at the tail cuts to show the incredible marbling of fat. 

"Look at the otoro on that monster," whispered a Michelin-starred sushi chef from Ginza, adjusting his scarf as he peered closely at the tail cut of the largest fish with a small flashlight. "The fat distribution is flawless. It’s like wagyu beef. And no net damage. Not a single bruise."

"Of course there isn't," muttered a rival distributor from Osaka, crossing his arms. "It’s a Midoriya catch. The kid doesn't use nets for the big ones. He pulls them up by hand."

"Hand-lined? A six-hundred-pounder? In the dark?" 

"That's why they call him the Cat of the Docks, you idiot. The fish don't even know they're being hunted until they're already on the deck."

The auctioneer, a stout man with a booming voice, stepped up to the wooden podium. He rang his brass bell sharply. 

"Alright, gentlemen! Moving on to the premium lot! Lot 42, caught at 0100 hours off the Izu Peninsula by The Green Moray. We all know the quality of Captain Midoriya’s holds. We’ll start the bidding for the prime six-hundred-pounder at two million yen! Do I hear two million?"

The bidding exploded. Hands shot up. Shouts echoed across the freezing floor. The price skyrocketed past three million, then four, the chefs of Tokyo’s elite culinary scene fighting tooth and nail for the right to serve the legendary night-catch. 

Izuku watched the frenzy from the shadows with a mild, detached amusement. He didn't care about the bidding war. He cared about the fact that he had predicted the migration pattern perfectly, adjusting for a slight shift in the Kuroshio current. The money was excellent, of course—it paid for the boat's upkeep, his crew's generous salaries, and the comfortable, quiet house he had bought for his mother in the suburbs—but the money was just a byproduct. The real reward had been the silent, primal battle in the dark, the way the braided line had sung under the tension, the sheer perfection of the ocean at midnight. 

"Five point five million! Sold to Sushi Saito!" the auctioneer bellowed, slamming his clipboard down. 

The crowd exhaled, a mixture of cheers and disappointed groans. The winning chef immediately walked past the fish, making a beeline straight for the back of the room. He stopped in front of Izuku and offered a deep, respectful bow. 

"Midoriya-san," the master chef said, his voice laced with absolute reverence. "It is an honor to serve your catch. The quality is, as always, beyond peer. Your eyes see what the rest of the world misses."

Izuku pushed himself off the pillar, returning the bow with a fluid, measured grace. He reached up, tipping his sunglasses down just a fraction. Even in the blinding light of the market, the vivid, unnatural emerald glow of his eyes briefly flashed, a silent testament to his title. 

"The ocean provides, Saito-san," Izuku said, his voice a low, steady rumble. "I just know where to look. Treat it well."

"With my life," the chef promised. 

Izuku pushed his glasses back up and walked out of the auction house. He stepped out into the crisp, pre-dawn air of Tokyo. The sky was just beginning to bruise with the first hints of purple and gold. The city was waking up, the distant hum of traffic building, the flashing neon signs of the Hero agencies switching off as the day shift took over. 

Izuku pulled his beanie down lower and walked toward the docks. He had a boat to clean.

The Green Moray was not a typical commercial fishing vessel. 

Moored at the end of a private slip in the Musutafu harbor, the fifty-five-foot custom trawler looked more like a military stealth insertion craft than a fishing boat. Izuku had commissioned it two years ago, sinking almost his entire life savings into its construction, and it was his pride and joy. 

The hull was constructed of lightweight, reinforced carbon-composite and painted in a matte, radar-absorbent black that made the vessel virtually invisible against the dark ocean. The engines were state-of-the-art, modified electric-diesel hybrids that ran with a ghostly silence, producing almost no wake and zero vibration to spook deep-water targets. There were no bright exterior floodlights. The interior wheelhouse and deck were illuminated only by low-intensity, red LED strips—the only color of light that didn't scorch Izuku’s hyper-sensitive retinas and ruin his night vision. 

Izuku stepped onto the deck, breathing in the familiar, comforting scent of salt, ozone, and clean fiberglass. 

"Morning, Captain!" 

A young man with gills on his neck and a mop of messy blue hair popped his head out from the lower cargo hold. It was Kenji, Izuku’s first mate and a recent graduate of the Maritime Academy. Izuku had personally recruited him. 

"Morning, Kenji," Izuku replied, grabbing a high-pressure hose and beginning to spray down the already immaculate deck. "How's the chiller system holding up?"

"Running perfectly, sir," Kenji beamed, climbing out of the hatch. "And the accounts are settled. The Toyosu buyers already wired the funds. We broke our own monthly record again."

"Good. Set aside twenty percent for the maintenance fund, distribute the crew bonuses, and take the weekend off. The tide is turning against us for the next three days anyway. I want the boat empty."

Kenji blinked, wiping his hands on a rag. "Empty, sir? But the squid migration..."

"The squid will wait," Izuku said, his tone leaving no room for argument, though it wasn't unkind. "I have a special charter tonight."

Kenji’s eyes went wide. He lowered his voice, looking around the empty docks as if expecting spies. "A charter? One of the... quiet ones?"

Izuku just kept spraying the deck, the water hissing against the fiberglass. "Go home, Kenji. Get some sleep."

Kenji didn't need to be told twice. He grabbed his duffel bag, gave a sharp salute, and hurried off the boat. The crew of The Green Moray knew better than to ask questions when the Captain booked a "special charter." 

Izuku finished washing the deck, coiled the hoses with practiced precision, and retreated into the red-lit dimness of the wheelhouse. He took off his sunglasses, letting his eyes adjust. The world blossomed into its true, silver-green brilliance. He pulled out a specialized coastal map and began charting a course through a treacherous, jagged reef system located fifty miles north, entirely devoid of lighthouses or buoys. 

At exactly 11:45 PM, the harbor was dead silent. The sky was overcast, choking out the stars. 

Izuku was sitting in the captain’s chair, drinking a mug of black coffee, when he heard the faint, nearly silent sound of footsteps on the wooden pier. He didn't turn around. 

"You're early, Eraser."

The door to the wheelhouse slid open. A tall, haggard man stepped into the red-lit cabin. Shota Aizawa, the Underground Hero: Eraserhead, looked exactly the same as he had five years ago, perhaps with a few more grey hairs buried in his messy, shoulder-length black mane. He was wrapped in his signature capture weapon, his eyes heavily bagged. 

Trailing behind him was a young man with striking purple hair, wearing a specialized stealth suit and a voice-modulating mask strapped to his neck. Hitoshi Shinsou, the Pro Hero: Mindjack. 

"Traffic was light," Aizawa grunted, stepping into the wheelhouse and immediately slumping against the bulkhead. He looked around the dim, red-lit interior with profound appreciation. "I love this boat. No flashing lights. No reporters. Just darkness."

Izuku took a sip of his coffee. "That’s the service I provide. Double the standard charter rate, plus a hazard fee for navigating the Devil's Teeth reef at midnight. Payable upfront to the cooperative’s account."

Shinsou, who had never been on The Green Moray before, stared at the young captain. He had heard the rumors from his mentor. A civilian who operated in the shadows better than most Underground Heroes. 

"Captain Midoriya," Shinsou said, offering a polite nod. "Thank you for the transport."

"Don't thank me, Hero, I'm just your taxi driver," Izuku said dryly, spinning his chair around. His eyes glowed a mesmerizing, predatory green in the dim light. Shinsou instinctively took a half-step back. "I drop you off. I pick you up. Whatever you do on the land is your business. Just don't bleed on my deck, and don't use any flashy Quirks near my boat. If you blind me while I'm navigating a reef, we all drown. Understood?"

"Understood," Shinsou said, swallowing hard. The civilian had an aura of authority that rivaled Aizawa's. 

"What's the target?" Izuku asked, turning back to the helm. 

"A heavily fortified coastal compound," Aizawa said, pulling a tablet from his utility belt. "A splinter cell of the Shie Hassaikai. They're using the cliffs as a natural barrier. The coast guard can't get within ten miles without popping on their radar, and the waters are heavily mined and laced with jagged reefs. Air insertion is impossible due to their anti-air Quirks."

Izuku glanced at the tablet. He didn't need the GPS. He knew the coastline like the back of his hand. 

"They have underwater sensors?" Izuku asked, his hands flying across the control panel. The silent electric engines hummed to life. 

"Acoustic and thermal," Aizawa confirmed. "Can you bypass them?"

Izuku scoffed softly. "Please. I sneak up on Blue Marlin for a living. A bunch of Yakuza thugs looking at a thermal screen won't see a thing. The hull is chilled to match the ambient water temperature, and we run silent. We’ll take the western approach through the Devil's Teeth. The reef is too shallow for their sensors, and the currents will mask our wake."

Aizawa smirked, pulling a jelly pouch from his pocket. "This is why I pay your extortionate rates, Midoriya."

"Cast off the bowline, Mindjack," Izuku ordered smoothly. "Next stop, villain headquarters."

The journey took an hour. It was a masterclass in maritime navigation that left Shinsou entirely speechless. 

As they approached the Devil's Teeth—a notorious stretch of jagged, submerged rocks that had claimed dozens of ships over the centuries—Izuku cut the radar entirely. He killed the sonar. He turned off the GPS. 

"Captain?" Shinsou asked nervously, gripping the railing as the pitch-black ocean roared outside the glass. "Are we flying blind?"

"You are," Izuku corrected. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the console, his glowing eyes locked on the black void beyond the windshield. 

To Shinsou and Aizawa, the ocean was a terrifying wall of black. To Izuku, it was a perfectly illuminated highway. He could see the jagged rocks resting just inches below the foaming surface. He could read the swirling eddies that indicated hidden shoals. 

Izuku manipulated the helm and the dual throttles with the casual, fluid grace of a concert pianist. The Green Moray slipped through the deadly maze of rocks like a ghost. They passed so close to a massive, jagged spire of granite that Shinsou could have reached out the window and touched it. 

Izuku didn't even blink. He was entirely in his element. The danger wasn't dangerous if you could see it coming. 

"Target is three hundred yards ahead," Izuku announced, pulling back on the throttles. The boat slowed to a crawl, drifting silently into a small, shadowed cove at the base of a massive cliff face. 

High above them, spotlights swept the horizon, and armed guards patrolled the perimeter. They were completely oblivious to the matte-black vessel sitting directly beneath them in the dark water. 

Izuku engaged the silent anchor system, the heavy weight dropping into the sand below without a single clank of metal. 

"We're here," Izuku said, turning his chair around. "I will wait exactly two hours. If you aren't back by then, the tide drops too low for me to clear the reef, and I leave without you."

Aizawa pulled his goggles down over his eyes. "Two hours is plenty. Let's go, Shinsou."

The two Underground Heroes slipped out of the wheelhouse, moving silently across the deck. They fired specialized grappling hooks, the muffled thwip barely audible over the crashing waves, and began their ascent up the sheer cliff face. 

Izuku watched them go. He respected Aizawa. The man understood the value of silence. He understood that not all strength needed to be shouted from the rooftops. 

But Izuku didn't envy them. They were going to fight, bleed, and struggle in the mud for the sake of a society that barely knew they existed. 

Izuku turned his chair around, opened a small compartment under the console, and pulled out a lightweight carbon-fiber fishing rod. He stepped out onto the aft deck, breathing in the cold night air. 

He cast his line into the dark water of the cove. 

While the Heroes fought their war above, the Captain of the Moray went fishing. 

Miles away, on a coastal highway overlooking the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, a sleek, heavily armored Pro-Hero patrol vehicle coasted to a halt at a scenic overlook. 

The doors opened, and two of Japan’s top Pro Heroes stepped out into the biting sea wind. 

Dynamight and Red Riot. Katsuki Bakugo and Eijiro Kirishima. 

They were twenty-two now, seasoned veterans of the Hero Billboard Chart. Kirishima was massive, a literal wall of muscle clad in his crimson, gear-heavy costume. Bakugo was leaner, but tightly coiled, practically vibrating with latent, explosive energy. His gauntlets were smaller and more streamlined than in his high school days, reflecting a master's control over his devastating Quirk. He wore his winter jacket over his costume, his spiky hair blowing wildly in the wind. 

They walked to the edge of the guardrail, looking out over the dark water. 

"Man, what a shift," Kirishima sighed, rolling his broad shoulders until a series of loud pops echoed over the cliff. "Three bank robberies, a villain with a minor gigantification quirk, and that press conference for the new agency merger. I am completely beat."

Bakugo grunted, leaning his forearms against the cold metal rail. "Press conferences are a waste of time. Talk doesn't stop villains."

"Yeah, yeah, we know, actions speak louder than words, Mr. Number Two," Kirishima chuckled, elbowing his friend. "Todoroki really edged you out this month in the approval ratings. You gotta smile more for the cameras, Bakugo."

"I'm not here to be a damn idol," Bakugo scowled, his red eyes narrowed at the horizon. "I'm here to win. The rankings will sort themselves out when people realize who actually gets the job done."

Despite the harsh words, there was a settled maturity in Bakugo’s voice. The rabid, insecure anger of his youth had been refined into a cold, unbreakable drive. He knew who he was. He knew his strength. 

Kirishima looked out at the ocean. The sky was still heavily overcast, the water a churning black abyss. 

"You know, speaking of getting the job done without the cameras..." Kirishima mused, pointing out toward the distant, invisible horizon. "Have you heard the rumors going around the underground agencies? About the 'Ghost Ship'?"

Bakugo didn't look at him, but his jaw twitched. "I don't listen to rumors, Shitty Hair."

"Come on, it's a cool story," Kirishima grinned. "They say there's this captain out of Musutafu. No offensive Quirk, just some kind of mutation. But they say he's the greatest navigator in the world. Smugglers are terrified of him because he can spot them in pitch blackness from miles away. Heroes like Aizawa and Mirko use him for black-ops insertions. They call him the All-Seeing Captain."

Kirishima leaned over the rail, trying to peer into the dark. "They say he has glowing green eyes. Like a demon."

Bakugo let out a sharp, genuine bark of laughter. It startled Kirishima; Bakugo rarely laughed unless he was blowing something up. 

"A demon?" Bakugo smirked, shaking his head. "He’s not a demon. He's just a stubborn nerd who likes fish more than he likes people."

Kirishima blinked. "Wait. You know him?"

Bakugo looked out at the dark ocean. He remembered a playground when they were four years old. He remembered a dark alleyway behind their junior high. He remembered a plate of perfect, grilled mackerel on a wooden pier when he was at his absolute breaking point. 

"Yeah. I know him," Bakugo said quietly. The explosive Hero’s voice softened, carrying a rare, profound undercurrent of respect. "We grew up together. Everyone told him his Quirk was useless. I told him he was a failure. He just looked at us, told us we were loud, and walked away into the dark."

Kirishima stared at his best friend, amazed. "Why isn't he a Hero, if he's that good?"

Bakugo turned his head, looking down the dark coastline. "Because he realized something the rest of us took years to figure out. You don't have to put on a cape and beat people up to be a master of your world. He didn't want to conquer society. He wanted to conquer the ocean." 

Bakugo pointed out toward the black water. 

"He's out there right now. I guarantee it. While we're standing here worrying about billboard rankings and press conferences, he's out there in the freezing dark, perfectly happy, hauling in monsters we can't even see."

Kirishima looked out at the vast, terrifying expanse of the sea. "Man. That’s... that's kind of badass, actually. A different kind of strength."

"Yeah," Bakugo agreed softly, a small, genuine smile touching his lips. "It is."

Bakugo pushed himself off the railing. "Come on. Break's over. We've got a patrol route to finish."

As the two Pro Heroes walked back to their armored vehicle, returning to the bright, loud, demanding world of Hero society, the ocean crashed against the cliffs below, vast, indifferent, and keeping its secrets. 

Ten miles offshore, far beyond the sight of the coastal highway, the ocean was anything but empty. 

The Aizawa charter had concluded smoothly. The Shie Hassaikai cell had been dismantled, the Underground Heroes had returned to the cove with ten minutes to spare, and Izuku had deposited them safely at a secure port in Chiba. 

Now, at 3:00 AM, The Green Moray was alone on the open water. 

Izuku had cut the engines. He was drifting over the deep trench of the continental drop-off. The sea state was relatively calm, a gentle, rolling swell that rocked the boat like a massive cradle. The heavy overcast had finally begun to break, revealing a brilliant, sprawling tapestry of winter stars. 

Izuku stood at the stern of the boat. He was wearing his heavy green sweater, the sea breeze ruffling his curls. His sunglasses were tucked away in the wheelhouse. 

He looked up at the sky, his tapetum lucidum taking the faint starlight and turning the heavens into a breathtaking, blindingly beautiful display of swirling galaxies and silver dust. 

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the cold, clean air of the deep ocean. It was perfectly silent. No sirens. No explosions. No cameras. 

Just the man, the boat, and the sea. 

He looked down into the water. In the ambient starlight, the ocean was a crystal-clear, glowing green universe. He could see hundreds of feet down. He watched a massive manta ray glide silently through the depths like an underwater spaceship. He saw the shimmering, bioluminescent trails of deep-sea jellies. 

And then, he saw the shadow. 

It was deep. Very deep. Moving with the slow, arrogant confidence of an apex predator that knew it had no equal. It was massive—easily over eight hundred pounds. A grander. The kind of fish that snapped heavy-duty rods like twigs and dragged careless men to a watery grave. 

Izuku didn't flinch. His heart rate didn't spike. A slow, predatory smile spread across his face. 

He didn't go for the heavy winches. He didn't go for the mechanized gear. 

He walked over to the gunwale and picked up his hand-line. It was a simple, ancient tool—a massive spool of ultra-high-tensile braided cord, terminating in a titanium leader and a heavy, phosphorescent jig. It was a pure test of strength, skill, and will. No gears to aid him. Just his calloused hands against the monster in the deep. 

Izuku stepped up to the edge of the boat. He braced his boots against the deck. 

He swung the heavy jig in a wide arc, the movement perfectly fluid, and launched it into the dark water. 

Plunk.

Izuku closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the vibration of the line sliding through his heavy leather gloves. He tracked the descent perfectly in his mind. One hundred feet. Two hundred. 

He opened his glowing green eyes, looking down into the water. He watched his glowing jig flutter past the massive shadow. 

The shadow stopped. It turned. 

Izuku gave the line one sharp, agonizingly precise twitch. 

The shadow lunged. 

The strike was violent enough to rip the arms off a normal man. The heavy braided cord instantly went taut, singing a high-pitched, terrifying note of extreme tension. 

Izuku was dragged forward, his boots skidding an inch on the fiberglass deck, but he dropped his center of gravity, planting his feet wide. He wrapped the line around his heavily padded forearm, locking his muscles. 

The battle had begun. 

The fish dove, trying to sound, trying to drag Izuku down into the abyss. Izuku groaned, the muscles in his back and shoulders screaming as he hauled backward, fighting the creature inch by agonizing inch. 

This was his fight. This was his heroism. 

He wasn't saving a city from a megalomaniac. He wasn't inspiring millions with a flashy smile and a golden cape. 

He was out here, in the dark, engaging in the oldest, most primal struggle on earth. Man against nature. He was providing food for thousands. He was living entirely on his own terms, mastering a domain that terrified the rest of the world. 

The fish surged to the left, trying to wrap the line around the propellers. Izuku saw the movement in the water before it happened. He rapidly stripped line, stepping to the corner of the deck, steering the massive creature away from the hazard. 

"Not tonight," Izuku whispered into the wind, his glowing eyes locked on the silver flash in the deep. "You're mine."

For an hour, the man and the monster danced in the dark. It was a grueling, agonizing test of endurance. Sweat poured down Izuku’s face, freezing in the winter air, but he never yielded an inch. He anticipated every run, every dive, every desperate thrash, reading the water with absolute, infallible clarity. 

Finally, the resistance began to fade. The massive fish was exhausting itself against the immovable, unrelenting force of the captain. 

Izuku began to pull hand over hand, his breath coming in heavy, rhythmic gasps. 

The water broke. 

The massive Bluefin Tuna breached the surface, its incredible, metallic body reflecting the starlight. It was a leviathan, a true king of the ocean. 

Izuku secured the line to a heavy deck cleat. He reached for his gaff, his hands steady despite the exhaustion radiating through his bones. With one smooth, practiced motion, he secured the catch. 

He leaned against the gunwale, his chest heaving, staring down at the massive, beautiful creature he had just bested. 

He looked up at the stars. He looked out at the endless, dark horizon. 

Izuku Midoriya, the boy who was told he was useless, the boy who was born into a world of blinding lights and deafening noise, let out a long, quiet breath. 

He wasn't the Symbol of Peace. He would never have a bronze statue in a city square. 

But as he stood on the deck of his ship, surrounded by the beautiful, silver-green silence of the night ocean, Izuku knew the truth. 

He was exactly where he was meant to be. He was the Cat of the Docks. The All-Seeing Captain. 

And he was completely, utterly content.