Age: 14
The air in the abandoned quarry was still, heavy with dust and silence. The afternoon sun beat down on the limestone rocks, creating a perfect natural oven for my sweating.
I stood in the center of the clearing, shirtless. At fourteen, puberty had hit like a truck, and combined with a decade of Spartan training, my body was no longer that of a child. It was a compact machine of dense muscle and superficial burn scars.
I looked at my hands. Sweat pooled in my palms, glistening like oil.
Nitroglycerin.
In canon, Bakugou Katsuki was an artist of violence. An instinctive prodigy who painted the battlefield with chaos. His body moved before he thought, creating combat flows that were pure aggressive poetry.
I retain those instincts. My body knows, at a cellular level, how to twist a hip to maximize a punch or how to dodge a blind attack on pure reflex. That is the genetic heritage of the beast.
But I am not just an artist. I am an engineer. And when you combine the instinct of a predator with applied physics, you get something far more dangerous than a simple explosion.
I raised my right arm, aiming at a block of granite forty meters away.
"Instinct: Aim for center of mass," I muttered. "Science: Shaped Charge."
Instead of opening my full palm for an expansive detonation (shotgun style), I closed my fingers into a circle, leaving only a small opening between my thumb and index finger. I turned my hand into a pressure chamber.
Bakugou's instinct screamed at me to release the power. The OC's mind calculated fluid compression.
I tensed my forearm to absorb the recoil.
"AP Shot: 50 Caliber."
CLACK!
It wasn't a roar. It was a dry, sharp crack, like the shot of a high-caliber sniper rifle. A beam of concentrated light, no thicker than a pencil, shot out of my hand at supersonic speed.
The beam impacted the rock.
There was no large, wasted fireball. There was only a clean, perfect hole that went through the solid stone from side to side. The edge of the hole glowed red-hot from thermal friction.
I lowered my arm. A trail of white smoke drifted from my fingers.
"Dispersion at 1.5%. Total penetration."
In the original story, Bakugou didn't develop this technique until the Provisional License Exam, at sixteen, and he did it out of necessity. I have it operational at fourteen by design.
I crouched. My legs tensed like springs.
"Now, mobility."
BOOM-BOOM.
Two quick explosions at my back launched me into the air. It wasn't a jump; it was a liftoff.
This is where the fusion shined. My mind calculated the thrust vectors needed to counteract gravity and wind, but my body made the micro-adjustments for balance automatically. I didn't have to think about "moving left foot two degrees," my cerebellum did it alone.
I rose thirty meters above the quarry. I spun in the air, hanging upside down, looking at the receding ground.
Original Bakugou used the Howitzer Impact, creating a tornado to add rotational inertia. It was devastating, but slow to prep.
I preferred Atmospheric Compression.
I brought both hands together in front of me as I nosedived. I accumulated sweat but didn't detonate it. I let it vaporize between my palms, saturating the air, creating a cloud of supercritical aerosol.
"Delayed ignition."
The ground was rushing up. 20 meters. 10 meters.
My instinct screamed: NOW! My logic said: Wait one more millisecond for max pressure.
At the very last instant, just before impact, I released the spark.
KABOOM!
The shockwave didn't disperse in all directions. By using my own falling body as a plug and the shape of my hands as a nozzle, I forced all the energy downward.
The air turned into a solid hammer.
I landed in the epicenter. The quarry floor didn't just break; it liquefied. A five-meter diameter crater opened under my boots, and the shockwave kicked up a dust cloud that covered the entire clearing.
I stood in the center of the smoke, breathing calmly. My knees had absorbed the impact perfectly. My shoulders throbbed with that dull, familiar ache that meant growth.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead.
I was at a level the canon Bakugou only reached during the Sports Festival, perhaps even a bit more refined in terms of control. I had the brute strength of the beast and the precision of the surgeon.
"Still slow on the reload," I critiqued myself, walking out of the crater. "The interval between the AP Shot and flight was 0.4 seconds. In a fight against someone fast like All Might or that USJ Nomu, that's enough time to die."
I walked toward my backpack and water bottle.
Power wasn't the problem. I had enough firepower to level any middle school. The problem, as always, was the chassis durability. My body adapted, but my ambitions were always one step ahead of my biology.
I drank water, looking at the city skyline in the distance.
Two years until U.A.
For most, that was a long time. For me, it was the final stretch. I had to perfect the Stun Grenade, master sustained long-distance flight, and most importantly, ensure my "team" (Izuku and Toga) was up to the task.
I squeezed the plastic bottle until it crackled.
"I'm not just going to be number one," I muttered to myself, feeling Bakugou's arrogant smile curve my lips by instinct. "I'm going to be untouchable."