"Relax a little. Now, just stand there while I get my designs for the Brain Melt 3000."
Mei cheered excitedly as she darted toward a cluttered corner of the design lab.
"Thankfully, I carried all my stuff from home."
I didn't hear that part.
My mind was still stuck on the name in the first sentence.
Hold on…
Before I could object, she was already digging through a pile of parts. "You're in luck, mystery boy. I've been working on a neural link interface for months for another one of my babies. The Power Suit! It's supposed to read brainwave activity to allow my other baby to run on more than just muscle contractions."
She pointed toward a half-completed suit in the corner.
"Unfortunately, I haven't had any volunteers to test it on, so it's totally experimental, definitely not approved by any ethics board, and may cause mild hallucinations. Or major ones."
"Wait a minute, I think—"
"Aha! Found 'em."
Her voice cut me off as she rolled open a set of blueprints. Watching her get to work, I began to doubt every logical decision that brought me to this point.
This… felt off.
Like way, way off.
"Alright! We'll need a quirk-insulated housing, a modular frequency tuner, and… ooh, triple-layer Faraday shielding. I've been dying to use that on something alive."
"Not very comforting," I said dryly.
She glanced up from behind a magnifying lens. "Oh, relax. It didn't work before, but now I'm repurposing it for entirely different purposes. There's no reason to get cold feet."
"That's… not comforting either."
My brows furrowed in deep thought, a nagging feeling pulsing in my gut I couldn't quite explain.
It died down seconds later as I took a deep breath.
'It's fine. Let's just get this over with.' I thought, feeling a headache coming on.
---
"Now then. You haven't told me what exactly we're filtering."
"Radio waves."
"Radio waves? No wonder you need this. If it's a weakness, you could practically be put out of commission by a well tuned radio tower."
She spun back to her workbench. "Okay. So! You need a cognitive frequency scrambler. Something that filters or nullifies low-to-mid band radio pulses that align with neurological targeting frequencies."
Her next action left me sweating buckets—reaching into a drawer labeled Do Not Use Unless You Want To Get Expelled.
Wires. Plates. A black-lacquered headband frame. A thin, almost transparent mesh layer.
Then she turned back. "Okay. I can make you something wearable. Lightweight, minimal energy signature, disguises itself as sensory enhancement tech. You'll need to wear it regularly. Helmet, visor, or behind-the-ear microplates? I can get the first two ready within the hour. The third's gonna take a lot more time if you want it to be so discreet."
"Visor I guess."
"Perfect." She cackled and got to work.
I let out a slight sigh.
'Why did Transmigration have to be so complicated?'
Regardless, I was now dealing with the catches that came with it. It was clear that my current situation was the result of my "404 Not Found" Ten year backstory.
There was no other logical explanation. My body had certainly been somewhere else during that time.
Hence, anything could have happened to it. Kidnapping was certain by this point. Being sold off overseas. Hell, maybe I'd been part of a slave trafficking ring right here in Japan. Any one of those could have left some kind of… residue. Something buried so deep that I was only now seeing the cracks.
Mental conditioning from torture, enforced using a sort of quirk that emitted radio waves perhaps.
Then there was the nuclear option: All For One. Honestly the biggest and probably most obvious suspect at this point.
He had the resources, the network, the centuries of experience manipulating people from the shadows. But that's what made me hesitate. If All For One had held me for ten years, then how did my body get into that alley in the first place.
My knowledge of MHA was limited to the anime and frankly Season 5 with a lot of reddit and YouTube information.
Why AFO had the body of a child for Ten years was one thing. Why he let that child go was another?
My powers had only manifested the moment I woke up in that alley. If he had me for that long, why did he let me go? Why didn't he put the mental implants initially?
Perhaps to make sure it wasn't noticed during my quirk examination. When a boy suddenly reappears after ten years, intense scrutiny was guaranteed.
However, it still didn't add up.
His documented methods favored overwhelming force, direct theft of abilities, and building an empire through raw power accumulation.
This radio wave manipulation felt too… delicate for his usual approach. Too much like a backup plan rather than a primary strategy.
Plus, if he'd wanted me as a resource, why let me go at all? There was no way he knew what abilities I would awaken, or I would even awaken them at all. So why let me go instead of disposing of me? Why leave me and just implant some dormant command?
It didn't feel right.
Still, I couldn't rule him out entirely. The man had been collecting quirks for over a century. For all I knew, he had dozens of subordinates with mind control abilities, or had acquired something new since the last major intelligence reports.
Maybe had quirks that he never revealed during the Kamino arc. Whatever the case, I wasn't about to run to the teachers with this.
Call it paranoia, but the life of a Transmigrator was built on that one word. If the enemy didn't know I'd caught on, I wasn't going to tip them off. I knew Aoyama was a spy, but that was about it. Whether he was the only one or not was a question I had no answers to.
And honestly? The teachers' reaction was unpredictable. Surveillance, detainment, endless psychological evaluations I couldn't properly answer without revealing my transmigrator status. My missing decade already painted a target on my back. Adding "possible mental conditioning victim" to that file would only make things worse.
This was probably my paranoia talking, and there was a simple fix.
Meet Nezu.
However, while that was a solution, it was also a problem in itself.
Much of my paranoia greatly stemmed from discussing this situation with Nezu, the smartest character in the series. His ability to make calculations and infer countless possible predictions through that, honestly left me feeling uneasy.
Especially when I had a lot of things to hide.
The amount of information I revealed, how I revealed it, and my reactions while revealing it might be able to fool anyone else. But against Nezu? I wasn't at ease. Neither was I mentally ready for it.
Also, telling Nezu wouldn't solve the situation.
If AFO truly was the culprit, then alerting Nezu probably wouldn't change anything.
In the series, the old bastard never showed up until Shigaraki was cornered. Telling Nezu wouldn't solve the fundamental problem. In fact, any actions he took with the information carried the risk of alerting him because Nezu's actions were entirely out of my control.
Unless I told him about the USJ, Summer Camp or Kamino arc ahead of time, nothing would fundamentally change except Nezu growing suspicious about how I knew what I knew.
The only benefit I could get was help with the neural implants. Nezu was the smartest mind in the world after all. Plus, he had greater resources and could most likely help me better than I was currently helping myself.
I didn't doubt his intelligence, but ...
"Done!" Mei's voice snapped me back to the present. She held up a black headband threaded with the silver mesh. "Ta-da! The Neural Static Nullifier Mark 1! Guaranteed to block 99.7% of unwanted radio wave interference, with only a 12% chance of temporary memory loss!"
"Twelve percent?"
"Down from thirty-six! I'm getting better."
She bounded over with the device, practically vibrating with excitement.
"Alright, so—this baby filters incoming EM waves in the neurological range. Think of it like noise-cancelling headphones for your brain. It detects the bad frequencies, generates the inverse, and poof, clean signal."
I eyed it skeptically. "And you're sure it's safe?"
"Of course. Though, I really should test this to make sure it works properly. The frequency calibration needs to be exact, or it might filter out the wrong signals. So why don't you take it for a spin—"
She leaned in closer, her face so close that our lips were nearly touching.
"Oookay ..." I pulled back to regain my personal space. Examining the device as my eyes turned red.
Following which, my brows furrowed. "Yeah ... No thanks."
"Come on. It's completely safe. I'll show you."
She grinned while pressing a button.
The device emitted a low hum that instantly escalated into a sharp, piercing whine. Then—
*CRACK*
A massive electromagnetic pulse burst from the device, sweeping over both of us. The lab's lights exploded in showers of sparks. Every piece of metal in the room vibrated violently.
Mei yelped and switched it off, smoke curling from the mesh.
"Okay, so maybe it needs a teensy calibration," she said cheerfully, waving away the smoke. "But hey, no burns, no fried neurons, no permanent damage—see? Progress!"
She glanced over. "Hey, you okay?"
I didn't respond.
Or rather, I couldn't. In my brain, within specific neural pathways, the radio waves traces flared up like a startled raccoon, thrashing around wildly, sending sparks to every corner of my brain.
Images appeared in my mind. Multitude of flashes moving faster than I could digest.
My eyes turned white.
Then, ....
THUD!
My body fell.
"..." The lab fell into a strange silence.
"Well, that wasn't part of the plan."
___
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