Ten years ago.
N.C.R.C.D.Q. Complex.
The constant sound of monitors, keyboards, and low alarms filled the observation room. Several scientists worked at the same time, covered from head to toe in reinforced containment suits. Masks, visors, thick gloves — everything there existed to protect them from what was on the other side of the reinforced glass.
Beyond the large observation window, inside a special anti-radiation chamber, there was a child.
The small body lay on the cold floor, dressed in a loose, pale patient gown. Wires were attached to his chest, arms, and neck, along with small tubes connected to a system in the ceiling that injected proteins, sedatives, and other compounds to keep him stable.
A scientist standing before a control panel adjusted his glasses behind his mask and read the data aloud.
"Subject 47-B remains unconscious. It has been thirty minutes since his last overload state."
Another scientist beside him checked the levels on a tablet and replied.
"That is good. The drugs are barely having any effect on him anyway... at least this gives us some relief while he remains out."
The two of them stared at the child behind the glass for a few seconds.
The scientist holding the clipboard let out a sigh, muffled by his mask.
"This is a tragedy..." he said quietly. "A Quirk awakening at this level... and today, of all days. We were lucky the damage remained relatively concentrated in such a small area. If the civilian evacuation had been delayed by even a few more minutes..."
The other turned his face toward him.
"Even so, there were victims outside the central point. Some people were affected simply because they were too close to the release zone."
The first scientist lowered his head slightly.
"I know."
Before the conversation could continue, the sliding door to the observation room opened abruptly.
Several scientists turned around at once.
The first to enter was Director Arima, with his usual rigid posture and serious expression.
But the figure behind him immediately stole everyone's attention.
It was a woman wearing a yellow Super Sentai-style suit, with very distinct feline details. The helmet had feline ears, eyes resembling those of a tiger, and on the forehead, above the visor, there was a large stylized G. On the chest and shoulders, the uniform bore a simple tiger symbol, and at the center of the belt was a buckle shaped like a feline head.
Some of the scientists recognized her immediately.
"Isn't that..."
"Yellow Ranger..."
"What is one of the Gaurangers doing here...?"
One of the five members of the famous pro-hero group from the Osaka region-
The Yellow Gauranger: Kiiro.
But the powerful image everyone knew seemed to vanish in that moment.
The woman hurriedly brought her hands to her helmet and removed it almost desperately, revealing the face of Yuuko Tanaka. Her short hair was disheveled, her black eyes wide and filled with panic.
As soon as she saw the small body on the other side of the glass, she lost all composure.
"Ryo...!" Her voice came out trembling.
Yuuko ran to the glass, completely ignoring the technicians' warnings.
She pressed her hands against the thick glass and called again, her voice breaking.
"Ryo! Ryo, wake up! Mommy is here! It's okay, look at Mommy!"
But the boy did not move.
Yuuko stared at her motionless son for a few seconds, then suddenly turned to the technicians, tears already gathering in her eyes.
"What happened to him?" she asked, her voice growing louder. "What did you do to my son?!"
Arima stepped forward.
"We did nothing to him, Mrs. Tanaka. He simply passed out after the last surge."
She turned her face toward him immediately.
"'Simply passed out'?!" she repeated, incredulous. "You say that as if it's normal!"
Arima maintained his posture.
"The situation is under control."
"Under control?!" Yuuko almost laughed from sheer nerves. "My four-year-old son is trapped inside a reinforced metal box, stuffed full of wires and tubes, and you tell me it's under control?!"
The room fell silent.
Even the scientists avoided looking directly at her.
Yuuko turned her gaze back to Ryo on the other side and clenched her fists.
"He... he was at kindergarten..." she said, her voice growing softer and trembling even more. "He was just at a damn kindergarten..."
No one answered.
She took a deep breath, but it only made the tremor in her voice worse.
"I know what happened. I know his Quirk awakened. I know that..." She stopped for a moment, her throat tightening. "...that people died."
Her eyes lowered, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of guilt.
"I already know that! I know very well what the victims' families are going through! But he is just a child... a child, Arima! He does not understand what he did. He does not understand what happened. He... he did not choose for this to happen..."
She struck the glass again with her hand.
"Look at him! He's alone! Alone!"
Arima frowned slightly.
"Yuuko, calm down."
"Don't tell me to calm down!" she snapped, turning toward him angrily. "Don't you understand?! When he wakes up, he'll realize he's trapped. He'll think he was abandoned! He'll think he did something horrible! He'll think I didn't come!"
"You cannot go in there."
"Then get him out!" she shot back immediately. "Open that room! Let me see my son!"
"That is impossible. The radiation level inside the room has not stabilized enough yet."
Yuuko stared at him with pure desperation.
"I don't care!"
"But I do, for everyone's safety," Arima replied firmly. "Because if you go in there, you will eventually die."
"Then let me die taking care of my son!" she screamed.
The sentence shocked the room for a moment.
Arima remained silent for a second before answering.
"And then he would lose his mother."
Yuuko froze.
Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and she brought a hand to her mouth, holding back a sob.
"I just..." Her voice came out broken. "I just want to hug him..."
She turned back toward the glass, her shoulders trembling.
"I just wanted to tell him everything is going to be okay..."
It was then that one of the monitors began to beep.
A scientist quickly looked at the reading.
"Subject 47-B is waking up!"
Everyone turned their attention back to the glass.
On the other side of the chamber, Ryo's small body moved.
First his fingers.
Then his shoulders.
Then, slowly, the boy opened his eyes.
He remained lying down for a few seconds, clearly disoriented, staring at the ceiling and at the wires attached to his body. His eyes wandered across the floor, the walls of the chamber... and finally rose to the reflective surface of the glass in front of him.
From his perspective, it looked more like a dark mirror than a window.
Ryo blinked a few times.
Then his little face changed.
Confusion gave way to recognition.
And recognition gave way to fear.
"N-No..." he murmured, his voice small and weak.
Yuuko immediately struck the glass with both hands.
"Ryo! Mommy is here! Mommy is here!"
But he could not hear her.
Ryo suddenly sat up and looked around, breathing faster.
"N-No... no... I'm still here..."
His lip began to tremble. His eyes filled with tears.
"Get me out of here..." he pleaded quietly.
Then he looked at the glass again, seeing only his own tearful reflection.
"Get me out of here!" he repeated, louder this time.
Yuuko was already crying on the other side.
"Ryo! Sweetheart! Look at Mommy! I'm here!"
Ryo staggered to his feet and ran to the glass. A green aura began to appear around his body, unstable and wavering chaotically along with his growing fear.
The alarms went off at once.
"His energy is rising!"
"Radiation levels increasing!"
"Prepare secondary containment!"
But Ryo did not seem to notice any of it.
He slammed his little hands against the glass and began to truly cry.
"Let me out!" he screamed, desperate. "It's scary here! I don't want to stay here!"
Tears streamed down his small face as he pressed his hands against the cold surface.
"I want to go home! I want to see my mom!"
Yuuko fell to her knees on the other side of the glass, striking her hands against the window at the exact same place where her son was pressing his.
"Ryo! Mommy's here! Mommy's here!"
He still could not hear her.
"Mommy!" he cried. "I want to see Mommy!"
The green aura around his small body trembled along with his sobs, growing stronger with every passing second.
Yuuko was completely in tears now.
"I'm here, sweetheart... I'm here..." she repeated, barely able to speak. "Mommy's here..."
Ryo slid down until he was kneeling before the glass, his hands still pressed against it.
"Mommy..." he called again, his voice small and broken. "Where are you...? I'm scared..."
And on the other side, unable to do absolutely anything, Yuuko cried with him.
----------------------------------------
The reality shattered.
Ryo widened his eyes in midair, his breathing heavy, hot, and uneven. His entire body was trembling. The memories of the past were still far too fresh in his mind, as if he had just woken from a nightmare.
"Tch... damn it..." he muttered, gritting his teeth.
The green aura around his body was completely unstable. It was no longer just rippling; it was bursting in small pulses, as if trying to escape from him. The green flames leaking from the corners of his eyes and mouth grew more intense, and sparks of energy began crackling through the air.
Down below, across the entire island, the systems were already compromised by the electromagnetic pulses he had released earlier. Those pulses had still been "clean," relatively harmless to living beings. They had knocked out electronics, frozen systems, and caused the I-Tower to go dark.
But if he kept going like this...
If he let that wave of rage grow even a little more...
Then it would stop being a simple electromagnetic pulse.
It would become something far worse.
Ryo felt it in his own body before he could even rationalize it. The heat inside him was rising too fast. His energy was changing state. If he stayed in an overloaded state for too long, he would enter a thermonuclear state, and the next pulses would no longer be merely electromagnetic. They would transform into thermonuclear waves, hot enough to sweep across the entire island with heat reaching thousands of degrees.
The focus sustaining his Gauss Propulsion shattered at that instant.
The electromagnetic rings spinning around his body failed, lost their shape, and dissolved into the air like particles of green light. Without the fine control over his own acceleration, Ryo completely lost his support in the sky.
His body plummeted.
He cut through the air in free fall like an uncontrolled green star and, seconds later, crashed violently into the top of one of the island's buildings.
BOOM!
The impact kicked up a huge cloud of dust and shattered concrete. Part of the roof caved in and cracked beneath his weight and speed, forming an irregular crater surrounded by fractures.
For a few seconds, the only sound was debris sliding.
Then, in the middle of the dust, Ryo's silhouette appeared.
He was kneeling at the center of the crater, his head lowered and his arms tense at his sides. His suit was scorched in several places. The skin on his face and arms looked darker, almost like some strange negative image, and the ground beneath him was already beginning to heat up.
Ryo exhaled through his mouth.
But what came out was not just vapor.
Thick white smoke escaped between his teeth, mixed with small tongues of green flame that curled upward before disappearing into the air.
"Hah... hah...!"
He placed one hand on the ground to steady himself.
The metal and concrete beneath his fingers hissed immediately.
The material began to soften.
It partially melted under his touch and warped around his hand, molding itself between his fingers like hot clay. His palm sank into the floor as the heat kept rising, and new cracks spread around his knees.
Ryo clenched his teeth hard.
His body was trembling.
Not from fear.
From excess.
From too much energy trying to get out.
"Calm... down..." he muttered to himself, his voice hoarse. "Calm down, damn it... calm down..."
Another breath escaped his mouth, this time even hotter. The green flames danced again between his lips. His eyes, still glowing intensely, spilled that same light from their corners.
He gripped the floor harder.
Melted concrete slipped between his fingers.
For an instant, the image of the past threatened to return in full.
That room.
That glass.
His child self's voice begging to be let out.
His mother crying on the other side.
His body responded immediately. The green aura expanded a few more centimeters, and the air around him distorted with heat.
Ryo took a deep breath, but that almost made everything worse.
"No... it won't..." he growled under his breath. "It won't happen again..."
He shut his eyes tightly.
He tried to grab onto anything that could pull him out of that spiral.
And then he thought about the people on the island.
Not faceless scientists.
Not abstract people.
Real people.
Dash.
That hyperactive idiot who was probably throwing himself against an army of robots just because Ryo had asked him to.
Midoriya, Kirishima, Kaminari, Mina...
He thought about everyone scattered across that island.
He thought about Anan, who had left Japan with him and trusted that he would be able to behave himself.
He thought about Melissa, about her proud smile when he managed to heal her finger, about the way she looked at him as if he really could do something good with his power.
He thought about what would happen to all of them if he lost control now.
His hands trembled even more.
But this time, it was not only because of the energy.
It was because of the effort to hold it back.
"I may be pissed..." he said through gritted teeth, his voice muffled. "I may be angry... I may want to tear those piles of scrap apart and smash the faces of everyone involved in this..."
He lowered his head further.
"But if that makes me hurt someone in the process... then I need to calm down."
The glow in his eyes flickered.
The aura around his body expanded again, but this time less than before. Unstable. Then it wavered.
Ryo forced his breathing to slow.
Inhale.
Hold.
Exhale.
Inhale again.
The green flames leaking from his mouth shrank a little. The white smoke continued to pour out, but in smaller amounts. The ground was still hot, still melted in places, but the rise in temperature finally stopped accelerating.
"It's okay..." he said to himself. "It's okay. I'm still in control."
One more breath.
This time, better.
His hand relaxed slightly against the melted ground. His fingers stopped sinking any deeper. The glow in his sclera began to fade in intensity, and the flames at the corners of his eyes diminished until they were nothing more than luminous vapor.
"I'm not in that room." His voice came out low, but firm. "I'm not on that day."
He slowly raised his head.
The sky above the island was still dark, and in the distance, the I-Tower remained partially blacked out because of the electromagnetic pulse. Even so, he could still make out the building's silhouette.
There were still people inside.
There were still friends inside.
And there were still villains standing.
Ryo released one last burst of hot air from his mouth. Smaller now. More controlled.
"Right..." he muttered, wiping some sweat and soot from his face with the back of his hand. "First I control myself... then I finish the rest."
He planted his foot on the ground and slowly began to rise from the crater, feeling his body still far too hot, but stable enough to keep going.
He tried to take a step.
Just one.
But his knee gave out.
His body tipped to the side and crashed heavily onto the rooftop, kicking up a little dust and fragments of concrete.
Ryo lay on his side, gasping, his eyes already too heavy to keep open. The overload had pushed his body beyond its safe limit, like a circuit that, even while using only part of the available energy, still ends up overheating its own components because it cannot withstand the constant voltage.
Every muscle in his body ached. His nerves felt burned from the inside, and his energy, once abundant, now flowed weakly and unstably. The effort of holding back his emotional explosion had drained not only his strength, but also his body's ability to keep functioning at that pace.
It was as if his entire system had entered emergency mode.
And now, to keep itself from breaking completely, his body was simply shutting down.
He tried to move.
But he couldn't.
His vision began to darken at the edges.
That was when, in the distance, he heard a different sound cutting through the air.
Ryo forced one of his eyes to open a little more.
In the night sky, coming toward him, was a white winged creature. Large. Elegant. Its wings spread wide, its silhouette impossible to ignore even in his state.
His heavy eyes widened slightly.
"...Huh...?"
The creature drew even closer, and he noticed two figures riding on its back. The wind carried a familiar voice to his ears.
"Ryo!"
It was Anan.
He blinked slowly, unable to believe what he was seeing. His brain, already on the verge of shutting down, tried to process that absurd image for a second.
A pegasus.
There was a damn pegasus coming toward him.
"Is that..." His voice came out almost inaudible, dragged down by exhaustion. "...a fucking pegasus...?"
The last thing he saw was the silhouette of the winged animal descending rapidly toward him as Anan called his name again.
And then everything went black.
----------------------------------------
10 minutes earlier.
"Get out of my way!" Swordkill snarled, the blade on his arm still extended.
Melissa was lying on her side, trying to get back up despite the pain shooting through her body. The impact against the floor had knocked the air out of her for a few seconds, and her arm burned where the blade had grazed her.
Swordkill took a step toward her, but he couldn't go any farther.
A fist slammed into his face with brutal force.
—SMASH!
Midoriya struck Swordkill head-on with a 20% Smash without thinking too much, the blow hurling the villain into the nearby stairs. His body crashed against the concrete steps, shattering them completely and sending up a cloud of dust and debris.
Midoriya was breathing heavily, his arm trembling slightly from the strain. Even so, he didn't waste any time. He ran over to Melissa and dropped to his knees beside her.
"Melissa-san! Are you okay?!"
"I-I'm fine…" she tried to answer, forcing a smile. "It was just a little scare…"
But Midoriya saw the blood.
A cut ran across part of her arm. It wasn't deep enough to be truly serious, but it was ugly enough to make his chest tighten.
"You're hurt…"
He quickly tore the sleeve of his own shirt and began carefully tying it around her arm, pressing the fabric against the wound.
"I'm sorry…" he said, his voice heavy with guilt. "If I hadn't held back against him earlier, this wouldn't have happened."
Melissa blinked, surprised by his reaction.
"Midoriya-kun…"
"I should've been faster. I should've stopped him before he—"
"Hey." Melissa gently held his wrist with her free hand. "You saved me."
Midoriya stopped.
She smiled.
"I know you want to carry everything on your shoulders… but you don't need to turn every mistake into guilt. You made it in time. That matters a lot."
Midoriya looked at her in silence, still pressing down on the improvised bandage.
"But…"
"No 'buts,'" she said, trying to sound firm. "Heroes make mistakes too. They hesitate too. And they still have to keep moving forward. Isn't that what Uncle All Might has always done?"
Those words struck him differently. Midoriya took a deep breath, feeling his heart slow down a little.
"Right…" he murmured. "Thank you."
Melissa nodded.
"Now let's keep moving before you start another guilt speech."
Midoriya let out a weak, nervous laugh.
"S-sorry."
He finished tightening the knot around her arm, checking to make sure it was secure, but not too tight.
That was when the air changed.
A deafening scream echoed from outside.
It didn't sound human.
Not completely.
Midoriya and Melissa froze.
Through the massive hole torn open in the side of their floor, an intense green light appeared in the sky above the city. The glow erupted upward like a pillar, tearing through the night and illuminating the dark interior of the floor.
Shadows stretched across the walls.
Melissa's face was swallowed by that harsh green light.
"T-That scream… Rito-kun…?" she whispered.
Midoriya slowly stood up, his eyes wide.
"Takeda…"
The pillar seemed to change the color of the entire scene in waves. The walls, the stairs, the debris, and even the blood on the makeshift cloth wrapped around Melissa's arm were bathed in that unstable glow.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the pillar vanished.
For a moment, only a sphere of green light remained suspended above the city.
Then it exploded in waves.
A pulse swept across the island.
The lights around them flickered violently. Panels died. Security systems screeched and failed. The few robots still active on the floor froze for several seconds, their sensors blinking out of rhythm.
Midoriya shielded Melissa with his body on instinct.
"What was that?!"
Melissa stared at the sky, terrified.
"An electromagnetic pulse…"
Another pulse passed through.
The entire floor shook from the impact.
She pressed her injured arm against her chest, her eyes locked on the green light still dancing on the horizon.
"Rito-kun… what are you doing…?"