Alexander's Point of View
The desert smelled of fire and steel.
Gunfire rattled like an endless drum, bullets snapping past my ears as sand sprayed up in continuous bursts. My platoon held the line, backs against the crumbled remains of an old stone wall. The air reeked of gunpowder and blood.
We were trained for this. We knew how to move, how to cover each other, how to survive. But training only went so far when you were outnumbered and outgunned.
"Keep your heads down!" I shouted, spraying suppressive fire over the ridge. My voice was hoarse, throat raw from shouting over the chaos.
And then I saw it.
The small, spinning blur arcing through the smoke.
A grenade.
In my eyes time slowed to a crawl.
"Grenade!" someone yelled, voices cracking with panic. My men scrambled for cover, boots pounding against the dirt, eyes wide with the kind of fear that cuts straight into your bones. But it was too late and I knew they weren't going to make it.
Unless—
My chest tightened, but my body moved before my mind could catch up. I surged forward, every muscle burning. The world narrowed to that single metal sphere rolling in the dust, seconds away from ripping everything I loved apart.
I threw myself down on top of it.
The blast timer clicked in my ears, louder than the gunfire, louder than my heartbeat. My brothers and sisters-in-arms stared at me, frozen in horror, disbelief carved into their faces.
I smiled. The calmest I had ever been.
"You better live after this you idiots," I told them, voice steady, unshaken.
And then—
White.
Blinding, endless white.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Then air raked my throat like broken glass as I tore upright, dragging breath after breath into my lungs that somehow felt two sizes too small. My palm slapped my chest and stayed there, feeling the hard rhythm—fast, and skittering. I counted. In for four. Hold. Out for four. Do it again. I told myself I was fine, the way you talk a rookie through their first firefight—keep your mouth steady and your eyes level so they borrow your calm. It's Fine, I thought. You're fine you got to calm down.
My fingers slid up to my scalp out of habit—check the cut line, make sure no hot metal is lodged where I can't see it—and then my hand sank into hair that wasn't mine. It was too soft and way too long. I pulled a lock down into my view.
And all I saw was green.
I blinked at it. The color stuck there like a flare afterimage. My hand suddenly looked wrong too—small, smooth, pale. No webwork of scars from bad landings, no calluses from metal rungs, no crease at the base of the thumb where the rifle stock lived. My hands were clean and untouched.
I forced my eyes up and finally took in the room that I found myself in.
Not the cinderblock and footlockers that I was used to. Not even my steel trunk with its busted hinge and my name scuffed by years sand. Instead: glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling; a tiny bookcase with picture books and two action figures frozen mid-heroic pose; a night-light pulsing faint blue from an outlet shaped like a smiling cloud. A blanket covered in comic panels lay half-kicked to the floor. The room was a literal shrine to one man: a grinning tower of muscle, cape billowed like a flag that I recognized.
All Might.
For a second I thought I was still dying. That felt easier than whatever the hell is happening to me right now.
My platoon and I watched this anime like our own little tradition—My Hero Academia—back home, back when "home" was a canvas of dust and my platoon called itself the Heroics because we pulled bodies out of hell and kept count by names, not numbers unlike our command. On our downtime, we'd crowd around a flickering tablet, boots off, passing protein bars as if it was popcorn. We watched kids with catchphrases run toward danger because someone had to. Everyone in my unit came to my unit because they wanted to be that kind of soldier—search and rescue first, shoot last, and bring people home. They gave me a codename because soldiers do that when the world is breaking and you need a myth to stand inside. They called me Avenger, after the Avengers from Marvel. They Said it fit because of the way I planned, the way I fought, the way I refused to leave anyone in the dirt. If we lost one of ours, they said the enemy didn't sleep again. One man army, they joked, and I let them joke because it kept them believing I could not be killed. That just Like just any avenger from the marvel universe, especially just like Captain America I would always stand back up and fight.
I loved that codename. Maybe a little too much. I love the team it came from, the stories behind it—the blueprints under the fiction aspect of it. In the quiet hours in my room I sketched my own version of the marvel designs. Could a powered exosuit redistribute recoil and let a human hand do what comic books promised? Could a gauntlet stack electromagnets to mimic a repulsor's shove? Nothing finished. But the work gave shape to hope that the impossible could become possible.
I pushed off the sheets and slipped to the floor. The boards were cold against my bare feet—I mean - the feet of this child I was somehow in. This body moved on its own already knowing where I should be without my input. The night-line of the digital clock read 11:52 PM in flat red numbers. Late. The city thrummed gently outside: a distant train, a car door, someone laughing and someone cursing, wind against glass.
Through the blur of toys and tiny furniture, a dark panel glinted in a wardrobe. Mirror.
I staggered to it on legs that didn't stride so much as wobble, every motion a step off a familiar map. The mirrored boy lifted his hand when I did. Round cheeks flushed from crying earlier, eyelids puffy. Hair green as bottle glass, messy. The smallness hit me first. Then the mouth—that hesitant line I'd seen a hundred times on a screen. Freckles like dropped pepper.
Recognition crawled across my skin.
Izuku Midoriya.
"No," I said, because a man in his thirties doesn't just wake up inside of a four-year-old body and mind, because deserts don't end in bedrooms with smiling lamps. I opened my mouth to say my name and a hammer of images cut me off.
Memories that definitely were not mine—except the more memories rushed into my head the more they felt like mine.
A bowl of curry steaming on a low table and a woman's hands setting chopsticks in the table; the smell of ginger and dish soap; a warm laugh that folded a room into something safe, something foreign to me. Inko, the memory said, and my chest seized around the word mother like a wound healing too fast for comfort. I didn't have one before. Not really. Something empty in me lunged toward that laughter and tried to claim it. "No—she's—" I stopped. Then I tried again. "She is my mother." The correction clicked into place. Not a tactical choice. Like a vow I never knew I needed to take.
The flood kept coming, not even caring about my state of mind or what I was feeling.
A preschool hallway painted with cartoon vegetables and hero's; tiny shoes lined like a parade; a blond kid with dynamite in his palms and a grin sharp enough to draw blood. Katsuki Bakugo. First it was games and boasts, friendly rough-and-tumble. Then came the name—Deku—and the weight it gathered each time it fell. The day he barked it at me like an order; the way others learned to laugh. I tried to tell myself I was Alexander and this was Izuku's pain not mine, it was recorded and replayed. The line wavered every time I tried to draw it. My knuckles itched to return fire and found nothing to swing.
A small park. A smaller kid. Bakugo with that swaggering lean. I… I mean Izuku—stepped in. Words stuck in a soft throat, and all that came out was a stand, unsteady as a paper shield. The beating wasn't cinematic; it was clumsy and mean. I watched it from inside the skull that took it, fury percolating, helplessness heavier than any rucksack I'd carried. Quirk-fueled ego, the battlefield's oldest poison: the belief that power makes you more than human and everyone else less.
The room tilted. I grabbed the wardrobe door and slid down until my back found the wall. I shut my eyes—and saw a different room.
White walls. A skeleton chart. The sharp-soap sting of disinfectant. The doctor's glasses flashing as he turned from a screen. The question I asked him—Can I be a hero?—landed like a coin that had no other side. His answer came cold, simple, practiced as if I was below him: no you could never be a hero asHe lifted a foot X-ray, my X-ray and pointed to bones, explained extra joints and evolution and statistics, about how I am in the 20%. He talked like a verdict. I heard the sentence more than the science: never. In the memory, something broke very quietly. I felt my own throat close around it now. I was in shock.
My eyes snapped open, and the ceiling stars flickered back into existence. For a second I was disoriented by the shift from fluorescent glare to night. Then the two lives crashed together, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I had died on the sands of Iraq, then I had woken in a child body, and not a random child but the main character of one of my favorited anime. My platoon was gone. Everything that I knew is gone! And that damn doctor's words were still drying on the air around me. Everything was true at once, and I didn't know where to stand inside it.
I let my head rest against the wall and listened for a heartbeat that wasn't the one I have always known. A second passed, then minutes. Just the small, steady machine-noise of a home that expects its people to keep breathing.
Why this boy? Why this world? Some cynical part of me ran the odds and came up empty. Another part, the one that used to scribble diagrams of repulser math at 3 AM, whispered that impossible is just a word for "not engineered yet."
I stripped the question down to one truth: I was here now, in this new body of mine, in this new life. Whatever force had dragged me from the desert and dropped me here wasn't going to explain itself. In all honesty it didn't matter. This new life was mine to live and I won't waste my new chance
Then I heard her.
A voice carried through the thin walls of the apartment. Low. Shaking with self hate.
"…I'm sorry, Izuku… I'm so sorry. If only I'd been stronger… maybe then… maybe you wouldn't be…" A sob cut the rest apart. "I couldn't even give you a quirk. I couldn't even give you that. I'm so pathetic."
I froze. Her words clawed down into me and set fire to the calm I'd built as I dealt with my new reality. She was blaming herself. Because of him. That basterd of a doctor, with his cold smile and his statistics. His words hadn't only crushed a four-year-old boy—it had poisoned a mother into believing she'd failed at the most basic level.
My hands curled into fists. Rage flared, sharper than anything I'd felt in a long time. That bastard wasn't just a doctor—no, I remembered too much of the anime not to connect the dots. He was working under All For One, feeding into the Nomu projects, turning human despair and victims into monsters. I couldn't reach him now, not in this tiny body of mine. But I made myself a promise: one day, he would answer for it, and I will make sure his death is one worth turning into a happy memory.
I sighed as I pushed myself to my feet and went to the desk. That's when I saw it.
A notebook, worn at the corners, with clumsy but determined handwriting across the cover: Hero Analysis for the Future No. 1. Izuku's dream in paper form. I couldn't help but smile. It was pure, unbroken it was hope in its rawest shape. I set it gently back down, then opened the drawer and pulled out a new notebook—clean, and untouched.
I sat down, Pen in hand. For the first time since waking up, and I felt steady ready for what was to come.
Across the first page, I wrote the words in bold, deliberate strokes:
THE AVENGERS INITIATIVE.
I didn't choose this life, but someone, something, had given me this chance. And like I said I wasn't going to waste it. Both the original Izuku and I had the same dream to become a hero. Unlike him however I added my own spin on it since I am now in this world I want to surpass even the symbol of peace and show this world that simple quirk those not rule life but courage, and your own capability to move forward and never give up.
As I was thinking of my goals, I began to write the roadmap to my future.
First, I got to work on my body. This Four years old body meant plasticity—bones, muscles, reflexes. If I can Train this body to its breaking point, shape it now, and it would carry me for decades especially considering the adaptability of humans in the MHA universe is incredible considering that the original Izuku from the anime while quirk-less could withstand the Pomeranian explosion point blank. Plus with proper training for just 10 months he was able to lift refrigerators, and lift up allmight who weighs a total of 562 lbs!!! And mind you while being quirk-less at the time mind you.
After my little tirade about the adaptability of humans in this world I continued to write down workout regimens: balance drills, climbing exercises, grip strength from towels and bottles. Then the basics of combat. Judo for leverage. Boxing for timing. Karate for discipline. I scribbled notes about mixing styles, weaving agility with precision until I could craft something unique. A fighting style built for survival and victory, not for sport.
Secondly, I have to work on my intelligence and intellect. Study electrical and mechanical engineering, materials science, computer science, applied math; learn bioengineering and neurobiology so I can understand bodies and how to augment them safely; read papers, take courses, build small projects, and learn calculus-level problem solving and design thinking. Short-term: prototype and hack, learn CAD and circuit design, master troubleshooting. Long-term goal: push my raw intellect and practical skill toward the genius tier—think Stark-level hardware savvy and Reed-Richard's theoretical depth—so I can design solutions that actually work, not just look pretty on paper.
I paused, leaning back on my chair. My reflection in the window smirked back at me.
"Heroes have failed this city," I muttered, almost laughing at the irony. A line from Green arrow that one of my platoon member always said before he took a shot at the enemy making it very clear what his favorite universe was. But it fit here, too. The truth was plain and simple: too many of these so-called hero's had traded lives for status, justice for sponsors. They weren't symbols—they were brands like Uwabami.
I shut my eyes, voice dropping as much as it could any way.
"Villains are evil? Hero's are righteous? These terms have always changed throughout the course of history! Kids who have never seen peace and kids who have never seen war have different values! Those who stand at the top determine what's wrong and what's right! This very place is neutral ground! Justice will prevail, you say? But of course it will! Whoever wins this war becomes justice!"
The words echoed in the quiet room.
I opened my eyes again, and the notebook stared back up at me. The Avengers Initiative, as I stared at it at my future as I thought about this messed up world decided something.
I wasn't going to be a "normal" hero. I wasn't going to play by their rules. If this world needed a symbol, I'd build one with my hands, sweat, and blood and If it needed a monster destroyed, I'd pull the trigger myself.
I closed the notebook and looked toward my mother's room. Her quiet sobs still carried through the walls. I clenched my jaw. She wouldn't cry forever. Not if I had anything to say about it.
Not anymore.