Chapter 1: The Man Who Will Surpass God Has Arrived
Name: Fukidashi Manga
Age: 14
Occupation: Wannabe Student Hero
Points: 0
Techniques: Comic (Basic), Fitness (Basic), Study (Basic)
The fist went straight up like a declaration of war against the sky itself.
"The man who will surpass God has arrived!!!"
His voice bounced off of the U.A. High School's front gate, carrying across the crowd of examinees gathered outside like a stone thrown into still water. Several heads turned. Then came the laughter, the kind people tried to swallow and failed, snorting through their noses or hiding their mouths behind their sleeves. A girl with a short bob of hair nearly choked on her own spit. Two boys in identical uniforms nudged each other in the ribs.
Fukidashi Manga noticed all of it, and he took absolutely none of it to heart. As he was now, of course it would be funny. If he didn't know who he was, he'd laugh at them too.
He lowered his fist and tilted his head back to look up at the H-shaped building sitting on its hill like something carved out of a children's dream of importance. Every window. Every rooftop. Every antenna and concrete overhang. All of it radiating an aura of this is where the greats are made, and the sight of it sent something warm and fizzing climbing through his chest until it nearly burst out of the speech bubble that was his head.
This is where it starts.
A small floating panel drifted at the corner of his vision, invisible to everyone around him. The way it had been since the first time it appeared a little bit ago.
He didn't look at it. He already knew what it said.
He'd checked in, eaten a proper breakfast, and drunk enough water to properly hydrate a high school boy. He was ready.
U.A. High School. The number one hero school in the country. The place that produced All Might, produced Endeavor, produced legends who had their names on the tongues of every child in Japan. Manga had tried the easy path first. The recommendation route, where a Pro Hero vouched for you and you skipped the entrance queue entirely. The Pro Hero who'd tested him had sent his rejection letter with the kind of diplomatic wording that meant: this kid is too much. The letter had said, in professional language, that his psychological evaluation gave the review board cause for concern.
The psychological evaluation, for the record, had involved Manga telling the interviewer that he intended to become the greatest hero in human history and that the process was already inevitable.
He stood by every word.
The rejection didn't sting. Because a man who intended to surpass God did not stay down over someone's misjudgement.
"Excuse me."
Someone bumped past his shoulder. Not hard, just the casual brushing nudge of someone navigating a crowd without enough space to do it. Manga turned. The guy was around his age, average height, with shaggy dark hair that looked like it had been slept on sideways and never fully recovered.
"No problem," Manga said. "Are you excited for the exam?"
The guy glanced at him, a quick look that flickered over the speech bubble where a head should have been and then back to somewhere around Manga's collarbone. "I wouldn't say excited... but I'm not nervous either, I guess." He shrugged with his whole upper body.
"That's better than a lot of mortals." Manga fell into step beside him, because walking alone was wasteful when you could be meeting people. He pointed ahead toward a girl with mushroom-shaped hair who was vibrating like a phone left on a hard surface. "You see that girl over there shaking like a leaf?"
"...Mortals?" the guy repeated.
Manga blinked, or at least, the expression in his speech bubble shifted to the wide-open lines of mild realization. "Yeah? Oh, my bad. I'm Fukidashi. Fukidashi Manga." He turned around mid-stride, walking backwards, and held out his hand. "The man who will surpass God."
The guy looked at the hand for exactly one second. Then he took it. "Kaibara Sen." He shook it once, firm and clean. "Just a regular mortal, I guess." His gaze drifted back up to the speech bubble with the helpless pull of someone trying very hard not to stare.
"I can tell you want to ask something," Manga said all-knowingly.
"Uh." Kaibara rubbed the back of his neck. "So, how does your head...work?"
"My dad has a mutant quirk. I think I got it from him or it's from my own quirk." Manga shrugged. The honest answer was that he wasn't completely sure. His head displayed his thoughts, shifted shape with his moods, and had been doing both since before he could form complete sentences. It was simply part of being him.
"No, I meant like-" Kaibara paused. "Can you eat? Where does it go? How are you talking right now?"
Manga laughed, A bright HA! popped up inside the bubble. By the time they'd passed through the examination building's doors, he was mid-explanation, hands moving, the bubble above his neck cycling through little cartoon punctuation marks of enthusiasm.
It was a good morning.
…
The written exam was held in a room big enough to make the ceiling feel ambitious. Long rows of desks. The scratch of pencils. The smell of eraser dust and nervous sweat.
Manga worked through it with ease because there was no version of the greatest hero in history who couldn't pass a test. He took his time. He checked his answers. He drank from the water bottle he'd brought.
The floating panel drifted in his peripheral vision as he handed in his paper.
[Reasonable testing +5 pts]
[Reasonable hydration +5 pts]
Name: Fukidashi Manga
Age: 14
Occupation: Wannabe Student Hero
Points: 0
Techniques: Comic (Basic), Fitness (Practiced), Study (Basic)
He spent the ten points before he'd even left the building.
Fitness: Practiced. The practical exam wasn't going to be a written test. He didn't need better studying technique. He needed his legs and lungs to keep up with his quirk, and they were going to.
When Present Mic bounded onto the stage at the front of the auditorium like a man who had been waiting all morning for someone to pay attention to him, the room shifted. Students sat up straighter. Manga sat up straighter too.
The rules were simple. Beautiful in their simplicity, actually.
A simulated city. Villain-bots with point values. One-pointers, two-pointers, three-pointers. Find them, wreck them, collect your score. Zero-pointers were obstacles, not targets. No points for fighting them. The exam ended when Present Mic said it ended.
A boy in the front row with a perfectly ironed uniform raised his hand and asked about the zero-pointers. Present Mic told him they were big, they were dangerous, and they were not worth fighting.
Outside, the city waited.
It was enormous. Manga stood at the starting line with a few hundred other examinees pressed in around him. Some with their hands crackling, some growing extra limbs, some visibly holding their breath, and looked out at the maze of streets and buildings and the places where things were already moving between the structures in the distance.
"Hey. Isn't that the guy who was screaming about being a god or whatever at the front gate?"
"The man who will surpass God." Manga pointed at himself with his thumb, and a little sketch of himself materialized in the bubble, standing triumphant atop the word God. "That's me. Fukidashi Manga."
A silver-haired boy appeared at his shoulder like someone stepping up to a starting block. His teeth were very sharp and his grin was sharper.
"Hoo!" The silver-haired boy looked genuinely delighted. "Another rival wanting to reach the peak?! You want to have a bet?! See who smashes the most robots?!"
"I won't stop you from making a losing bet."
He laughed at that, a big honest laugh. "I admire your spirit! I'm Tetsutetsu! Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu!"
"Spirit?" Another voice, smoother, slid in from the left. A blond boy with slicked-back hair and a polite smile. He held out his hand to Manga with a small, genuine smile. "That's a strong word. My name is Monoma."
"Confidence?" Manga shook his hand. "No. Even God believed in Himself. What I have goes beyond than that."
Something shifted in Monoma's eyes. "Truly," he said, measured but not unkind. "With a quirk like yours, I suppose I can understand where that type of thinking comes from."
"You know my quirk? From a handshake?"
"Just a feeling." The smile didn't waver. "You seem like the type of person with an absolutely powerful quirk."
"-Hey! My quirk is pretty good too!" Tetsutetsu grabbed Monoma's shoulder. "Don't forget about me!"
"I have no doubt, Tetsutetsu." Monoma gently removed Tetsutetsu's hand from his shoulder.
"You bastards aren't forgetting about me, are you?!" A third voice, rough-edged and grinning. A boy who looked like he'd been built for the express purpose of cutting things: pale green skin, a fluffy mohawk, hook-shaped blades jutting from his cheekbones. "Kamakiri Togaru! And don't you bastards forget it! I'm gonna slice up so many robots there won't be any left for you guys!"
"Hold on," Monoma said. "If we're making bets-" He reached out and shook Kamakiri's hand. "What are we betting with? Money?"
An exclamation point blazed inside Manga's bubble. "Losers have to do that dance that's going around on social media."
"...The girlie one or the other embarrassing one?" Tetsutetsu asked.
"The dwerking one."
The look on Kamakiri's face could have powered a small city. "There is absolutely no way I'm losing now."
"I'd rather avoid that as well," Monoma said pleasantly. "I'll do my best."
[Reasonable socializing +5 pts]
"AND BEGIN!!!" Present Mic's voice hit the crowd like a starter pistol and everything exploded into motion at once.
Manga took one step forward and spoke.
"Hyuu."
The word erupted from his mouth as solid physical letters, enormous and ink-black, streaking out ahead of him across the pavement. A swift sharp blade of compressed air slicing through still space. He stepped onto it without breaking stride and launched forward.
The street blurred. Wind screamed past the edges of his speech bubble. He was moving faster than running, faster than sprinting, skimming the asphalt twenty centimeters above it as the onomatopoeia carried him forward in a single long, vicious arc.
The two-pointer didn't see him coming.
It was a scorpion-shaped machine, bulky and stupid with point value stamped onto its pincers in orange paint, and it was still in the process of turning toward the nearest examinees when Manga's Hyuu smashed into its front chassis with a sound like something expensive breaking. The robot folded sideways, sparks spitting from the joints where its front legs connected, one pincer clanging off the road with a horrible metallic screech before the whole thing exploded.
Manga landed in a run, barely pausing.
He heard the missile before he saw it. There was a Three-pointer on top of a rooftop aiming a launcher arm toward him two streets over. The second launcher pod opened like a ribcage.
He had maybe a second.
"Toro-toro."
The letters bloomed outward around him, soft and thick, a field that turned the air itself into something like honey. The missiles crossed the lip of the rooftop and hit the field at full speed and then didn't. They hung there, crawling, their exhaust trails stretching and twisting in place, the heat of them stuttering in the thickened air. Manga watched them from beneath the field with pride.
He turned to face the three-pointer.
It was reloading. Its arms were coming up. Its targeting system was sweeping.
"Gusha."
The letters left his mouth in a tight, controlled flight and flew straight at the robot's center mass. When they hit, the effect wasn't loud, at first. Just a deep, metallic creaking that started at the machine's torso and radiated outward through every joint and strut. Then the creaking became a grinding. Then the grinding became a crunch. The robot's housing folded inward at its midsection like a fist closing, its legs buckling under a compression force that had nowhere to go but inward, until the whole thing exploded in a shower of machine parts and sparking circuit-board shards.
Manga dropped the Toro-toro field. The missiles finished their arc and hit empty pavement where he'd been standing.
He was already gone.
The city was a mess of destruction, and he had a seat in the first row.
He moved block to block at a pace that felt almost playful, leaping a Byuun (Fast zooming/streaking) to cover half a street in one jump, dragging a one-pointer face-first into the asphalt with his hand. Then using a well-placed Zudon (Deep heavy thud/gunshot) to finish it off, flinging a Gusha (Crushing/squishing) at a two-pointer's legs and watching it crumple mid-charge. The robots were awesome. They weren't more awesome than him though. He could see some people struggling to deal with the robots. Occasionally shooting off Zudons for anyone struggling to help them. The words piercing through the robots and either causing an explosion or helping the person finish off the robot with an assist.
He stopped on a rooftop to catch his breath and drink from the small water bottle he'd tucked into his costume pocket, because he knew his quirk's weakness, and fighting through a sore throat was exactly the kind of preventable mistake he didn't intend to make.
Movement in his peripheral vision.
A street below, Monoma was fighting a three-pointer.
Manga watched without announcing himself. He raised one hand, shaped his fingers, and shouted, "Zuba!", and an onomatopoeia formed out of thin air: an enormous, dark-edged slash that cleaved the three-pointer's upper body clean in half, the two pieces toppling in opposite directions.
Copy quirk, Manga thought. He copied my quirk just by shaking my hand.
It was a genuinely good ability. Maybe a great one. Not the easiest thing to counter, either. The more techniques a person knew, the more dangerous their copy became.
Monoma glanced up and found him watching. He gave a small, composed bow and turned to find the next target.
Manga turned too.
He had more robots to wreck.
Sometime later. It appeared.
Manga was standing on the roof of a parking structure near the center of the test site.
Then the ground shook.
This was a building-shaking, teeth-rattling, biblical tremor that made every person within three blocks stop moving and look for the source. The sound came first, a deep, grinding roar like the earth clearing its throat, and then the zero-pointer rounded the far end of the street.
Manga had watched the briefing. He'd heard Present Mic's explanation. Understanding explanations and seeing it were two different things. The zero-pointer was enormous. Its head alone was the size of a small building. Its footsteps cracked the road like tissue paper. Its eight eyes burned orange in the deep hollows of its face, and its right arm already raising, already swinging toward the cluster of fleeing examinees below.
Students ran. Of course they ran. The smart play was to run. Zero points, zero reason to engage. Manga watched them go with complete understanding.
And then he floated up to meet the machine's eyes.
"Fuwa-fuwa."
The letters took shape beneath his feet, soft and buoyant, and he rose on them until he was level with the zero-pointer's face, thirty meters off the ground, the wind pushing the edges of his speech bubble like it was trying to turn a page.
He pointed at it.
"Consider yourself lucky, scrapheap." His voice was cheerful, raw-edged from an hour of shouting onomatopoeia but still carrying. "Not many get the chance to witness a full-powered strike from myself."
He looked around. The nearest examinees were three blocks away and sprinting. The buildings in the immediate area looked stable enough to handle what came next, he'd picked this spot. He'd been picking it since he saw where the zero-pointer's walking path was going, twenty minutes ago. Couldn't get innocents involved.
A hero's job is to save people. Not defeat villains.
The zero-pointer's fist rose. Slow, so slow. The fist was the size of a transit bus. The air pressure coming off it alone was flattening the street below.
If that hit him, he thought, there wouldn't be a body to find. Just a fine red mist and a lot of scattered speech bubble pieces.
He found the thought funnier than it probably was.
"Dokkaan."
The word left his mouth in a near-whisper and erupted from his lips as something massive and dark and seething, letters that caught fire even as they formed, blazing at the edges, growing wider with every meter of distance they covered. He was already moving.
"Byuun!"
He dropped from the Fuwa-fuwa word and hit the Byuun in a dead sprint, riding it like a comet away from the blast radius, the acceleration nearly ripping him sideways as the onomatopoeia screamed across the urban canyons below at speeds that made buildings blur.
Behind him, the Dokkaan hit.
Massive explosion was what the word meant. Dokkaan. There were words in the Japanese language for every kind of destruction, every caliber of impact, every register of force and Dokkaan was not subtle. It was not small. It was the word you wrote in the biggest, most dramatic lettering a manga page could hold, the word that earned its own full-page spread, and when Manga's quirk gave it form and launched it at a machine the size of a building…
The shockwave hit him in the back like a wall of air.
Even riding the Byuun at full tilt, the force spun him sideways, tore at the edges of his speech bubble, sent him skidding across a rooftop as the onomatopoeia dissolved beneath him. He tucked, rolled, came up on his feet with his knees skinned and his hands scorched at the palms and his throat absolutely wrecked, raw from the inside out like he'd swallowed sandpaper.
He turned around.
The zero-pointer was still standing. Most of them, half of them — the torso was intact and the legs were intact and the left arm. The right arm, the arm that had been swinging toward him, the arm attached to the fist that could have scattered him to red mist.
Gone. The shoulder was a twisted, sparking ruin. The armor plating across the front of its chest had peeled back like a blooming flower made of metal, and fires were burning in the exposed wiring, and the machine's orange eyes had gone dark on the right side.
Manga cackled.
He couldn't help it. His throat screamed at him for it and he did it anyway, bent forward with his hands on his knees on top of a broken rooftop, cackling at the smoking ruin of the most dangerous thing in the testing field like a man who'd expected this all along and was simply pleased to have been right.
"That!" He straightened up, voice cracking magnificently. "That is the power of a man who will surpass God!"
"IT'S ALL OVER!!!"
Present Mic's voice came down from somewhere high and distant like a bell being rung at the end of the world, and around the test site, the sound of running and explosions and metal against metal all began to wind down at once.
Manga looked at the floating panel.
[Reasonable testing +5 pts]
[Reasonable exercising +5 pts]
He looked at the zero-pointer. Still burning. Still standing, but barely, its left arm twitching against nothing.
He hadn't beaten it.
He'd made it worthless.
He straightened up, rolled his shoulders, and started picking his way back down to street level. His palms ached. His throat felt like he'd tried to gargle gravel. His knees were going to bruise in a cool way.
"First place… gotta be mines…" He croaked.