Chapter 17: Nightmares, Neighbors, and a New Perspective.
The night before the Sports Festival was a crucible of anxiety. For Izuku Midoriya, sleep did not offer respite, but a different kind of trial. He dreamt he was back at the USJ, facing the Nomu. He activated One For All, the power coursing through him, and threw his most powerful punch. The monster didn't even register the hit. Then, the dream shifted. The Nomu was gone, and Saitama was there, his face as blank as a stone. He threw a simple, quiet punch, not at a monster, but at the world itself. Midoriya watched in his dream as the sky, the ground, everything he knew, simply erased itself in a silent, white void.
He woke up with a gasp, his heart hammering against his ribs, his sheets soaked with cold sweat. His fear was no longer just about failing to live up to All Might. It was a new, existential dread. He had witnessed a power that was not on the scale of heroes and villains. It was on the scale of creation and destruction. What did his own struggle mean in the face of such an absolute?
Unable to sleep, he dressed and made his way to one of the smaller, 24-hour campus gyms. He needed to move, to feel the strain in his muscles, to ground himself in the physical reality of his own limits. He entered the quiet, brightly-lit space, expecting it to be empty.
It wasn't.
In the far corner, sitting on a flat weight bench, was Saitama. He wasn't lifting. He wasn't training. He was illuminated by the glow of his smartphone, his thumbs a blur of motion across the screen. He was wearing a ridiculous pair of cat-themed pajamas.
Midoriya approached cautiously. "Saitama-san? What are you doing here?"
Saitama grunted in frustration as a series of 'MISS' icons flashed on his screen. "The Wi-Fi in my room is terrible," he explained without looking up. "The signal is way better here. I can't get my daily login bonus for 'Gacha Warrior Princess' if the connection keeps dropping."
Midoriya stood there, speechless. The man who haunted his nightmares, a being of seemingly infinite power, was in the gym at 2 AM because of a bad internet connection and a mobile game. The sheer, domestic absurdity of it was disarming.
Exhausted, Midoriya began his own workout, lifting weights that felt impossibly heavy, his mind still racing. After a grueling set, he sat on a bench near Saitama, trying to catch his breath. The silence stretched between them, punctuated only by the taptaptap of Saitama's game.
"Saitama-san," Midoriya finally asked, his voice barely a whisper. "Don't you ever get… scared? Or frustrated? That you might not be strong enough?"
Saitama's thumbs paused. He had lost the level. He misheard the context of the question, assuming Midoriya was asking about life in general, not about hero work. He thought back to the years before his power, the agonizing, endless struggle.
"Yeah. All the time," he said, his voice surprisingly quiet and genuine. He finally looked up from his phone, his eyes distant. "Back when I was looking for a job and getting rejected everywhere. When I couldn't pay my rent and worried about getting evicted. When I ran into a monster that looked like a giant lobster and almost died." He let out a small, humorless laugh. "Being too weak is the worst feeling in the world. It's frustrating. You feel like you're not even in control of your own life."
He looked at Midoriya, whose eyes were wide with shock at this sudden, unexpected glimpse of a vulnerable past.
"But you can't let it stop you," Saitama continued, his voice returning to its usual flat tone as he shrugged. "You just gotta keep going. Do your push-ups, do your sit-ups. Sooner or later, if you stick with it, something's bound to change." He looked back at his phone. "Crap. Now I have to use a Potion of Revival."
In a dark corner of the gym, the rhythmic thud of fists hitting a heavy bag had stopped. Katsuki Bakugo stood in the shadows, sweat dripping from his face. He had come to the gym for the same reason as Midoriya: to burn off his restless, furious energy. He had been listening to the entire conversation.
He didn't hear a metaphor about hard work. He heard a literal, infuriatingly simple origin story. He heard a tale of a weak, pathetic nobody who had gotten strong through a stupid, stubborn, relentless routine. He wasn't a cheat. He wasn't an alien. He wasn't born with it. In Bakugo's mind, Saitama was the ultimate, horrifying endpoint of his own philosophy: that strength was a product of will. And this man's will had somehow broken the world. It wasn't an impossible wall anymore. It was a mountain. A mountain he now knew, somehow, had been built from the ground up.
The three of them occupied the silent gym, a triangle of quiet contemplation. Midoriya felt the crushing weight on his shoulders lighten, replaced by a simple, straightforward resolve. Bakugo felt his unfocused rage sharpen into a single, impossibly distant target.
And Saitama had just missed his chance to get a limited-edition SSR-rank princess for his gacha team.
The calm was over. The dawn was breaking. And the U.A. Sports Festival was about to begin.
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