Hello. My name is Izuku Midoriya, and this is my story.
I must warn you: this chronicle is not for children. It is a record written in blood, forged in the furnace of battle, and stained with the sweat of carnal pleasure. If you are a child, put this down immediately and run back to your fairytales. If you are an adult, steel your nerves. Still here? Fair enough. Before I tell you my story, you must understand the history of the charnel house that came before me.
The history books tell a clean lie: they claim that in the year 2050, a child was born in China emitting light, the "first" of our kind. On paper, that baby was the genesis. But off the record? The truth is far more jagged. Years before that child's first cry, others were born with flickers of unstable, terrifying power. They had no costumes; they had only their fists and their feet to enforce their will in a world that saw them as tumors.
This was the Age of the Dark Heroes.
It was a lawless, predatory epoch. Every shadow hid a killer; the heroes and villains of that time waged a clandestine war in the guts of the earth—underground, savage, and absolute. Tales and news feeds whispered of the carnage, but the powers-that-be ensured no concrete evidence ever escaped the gutters. Alliances were flipped like a blood-slicked coin in a rainstorm. The innocent were mere grist for the mill, slaughtered as cities across the globe were forced into martial law to suppress "terrorist activity" that was actually the first rising of the Quirk.
Everything changed when the "Shining Baby" went public. The villains and heroes stepped out from the darkness and into the light, but visibility only made the blood spill faster and hotter. What was once a trickle of rumors became an ocean of gore as war was waged openly in the streets. Empires of crime rose like titans only to be toppled like dominoes. Power was a jagged scale that never found its balance, constantly tipping between absolute tyranny and chaotic fire.
Governments responded with the only tool they understood: slaughter. They raised armies to cull the "infected" and the "innocent" alike in a fit of global hysteria. Heroes fought for a peace that felt like a funeral; villains fought with a fire that aimed to level civilization. No one knew who to trust. That was the backdrop for the World Summit, where the leaders of men gathered to forge the E.I.R.A.—the Enhanced Individual Registration Act. It was a global collar: register your DNA into the government systems, or be hunted like a rabid dog.
It ignited a powder keg. In the United States, the Meta-Liberation Army rose and waged a localized civil war that turned American soil into a mass grave. Even nations that despised the U.S. sent soldiers to aid the meat-grinder. The ripples of that conflict birthed the Age of the Witch.
Bureaucrats abused the E.I.R.A. to launch state-sanctioned manhunts. If you were even suspected of carrying the Quirk "infection," you were dragged from your bed and thrown into concentration camps that mirrored the worst horrors of Nazi Germany. Humanity showed its true, rotting heart. Quirk users fought a desperate guerrilla war behind the wire, breaking out of the camps while heroes and villains dropped their banners to fight as brothers just to avoid the gas chambers.
Humanity was nearly added to the list of extinct species. We were a hair's breadth from the end until word arrived that the Meta-Liberation Army had finally been broken. The soldiers returned home, but they found only ruins and ash. The fighting didn't stop; it only became more intimate and more cruel.
It reached the point where nuclear silos were being prepped for launch. That was until she arose: Mariah, a nun of the Holy Church. She possessed a Quirk that gave her angelic wings, and with the Pope's divine blessing, she began a campaign for peace that was whispered to be miraculous. The era was dubbed the Era of Renewal. Mankind—both the powered and the "Quirkless"—tried to sue for peace under her shadow. For a while, the fires died down.
But the rot remained. The innocent had seen a light, but the next age was born from the darkness of the human soul: the Age of Villains. They popped up like weeds in a graveyard—robbing, murdering, and raping with impunity. Blood spilled in the open again. And the heroes? They stood by and watched. It wasn't hatred that stayed their hands; it was the bone-deep terror of the camps. They feared that if they used their power, the government would build the cages again.
Even an elderly Mariah pleaded for justice, but her voice was drowned out by the screams of the victims. That was until Brian Costalean, the Bronze Tiger, stepped out of the underground. He was a man who understood that peace without a blade is just a slow death. He was recognized by the government as the first "True Superhero," and slowly, others crawled out of the shadows to join him. It was a terrifying transition—the heroes were still looking over their shoulders, waiting for the government to pull the trigger on them.
Then came the age before mine: the Age of Heroes. The public was screaming, outraged that the "protectors" had stayed their hands while the world burned. It only stopped when a hero named Magnus stood before a press conference and stripped away the mask. He told the world the truth: "We were scared. We are still scared of the slaughter."
The public reacted with a mix of venom and pity. The governments swore the camps were a relic of the past, but the heroes weren't ready to trust their lives to a promise. That was until Richard Zandensk, a Russian billionaire with more money than god, built a fortress-school in Russia to train heroes, daring the world to stop him. Other governments followed his lead, but the halls remained silent, haunted by the ghosts of the past.
With the heroes paralyzed, the villains nearly reclaimed the world. We were on the edge of a new age of fire until the Saint Arthur's School of Warriors in Europe saw something impossible: a small group of kids walked through the gates to register. They were trembling, terrified of being caged, but they chose to be beacons. When those kids graduated and began their careers without being dragged to a camp, the dam finally broke.
Thousands joined. The world's leaders met again, not to build cages, but to build boundaries: no heroes under 18, strict training, and ironclad laws on Quirk usage. They enacted the Vigilante Rehabilitation Program and the Resurrection Assurance Act. For the first time, the monsters who ran the camps were the ones in the docks. It didn't matter if you were a general or a teacher; if you had spilled blood in the camps, you were hunted down and tried for crimes against humanity.
The Age of Heroes became a time of soaring prosperity and scientific wonders. We used Quirks to forge the future—new metals, new medicines, and a world where sickness was a choice. Jobs flourished, and the planet finally began to heal. For a fleeting moment, humanity breathed without the scent of extinction in its nostrils.
But now, it is a new age. Heroes and villains are the new gods of the spotlight—careers, fame, and the very foundation of society revolve around the power in our marrow. And that is where I come in.