João Ferreira was not the kind of man who expected surprises.
He was twenty-three years old. He worked twelve-hour shifts at a logistics warehouse in Setúbal, sent half his pay to his mother in Luanda every month, and spent his evenings in a two-room apartment he shared with a guy named Marcos who never washed his dishes and somehow always had an opinion about everything.
It had not always been warehouses.
In Luanda, before the visa and the flight and the two years of shifts, he had been the person people called when something electronic stopped working. Phones, computers, old televisions that should have been thrown away ten years ago, and security systems installed by people who did not understand them. He fixed them. He also built things occasionally, small programs, simple automation scripts, nothing that would have impressed anyone serious, but enough that a man at a tech company in Luanda had once handed him a business card and told him to call when he was ready.
He had never called.
His mother's rent had gone up that same month. Then his cousin needed school fees. Then his grandmother's medication became expensive. The business card had stayed in his wallet until it was soft at the corners and the ink had faded, and eventually, he had completely forgotten about it.
He had come to Portugal for the warehouse job because it paid three times what anything in Luanda paid, and the math was simple, and the math always won.
He was good at the warehouse job. He was good at most things he did. But he had stopped being surprised by that a long time ago.
His life was not extraordinary. He had accepted that a long time ago.
He was the kind of man who carried things quietly. The kind who noticed when someone needed help and moved before being asked. The kind whose goodness lived underneath his surface, patient and unannounced, because he had grown up in a world that did not always reward showing it.
His name at home was João.
At work, everyone called him Johnny because his English supervisor could not pronounce the nasal vowel, and Johnny had decided the correction was not worth the energy.
Johnny, it was.
It was a Tuesday in March when everything changed, which felt appropriate somehow.
Nothing important ever happened on a Monday.
He was walking home from his shift, hands in his jacket pockets, earphones in, the particular tiredness of a ten-hour day sitting in his shoulders and his lower back. The street was busy, the way Setúbal streets were busy in the early evening, people moving with that end-of-day energy, everyone wanting to get somewhere warm.
He was thinking about his mother.
She had called that morning before his shift, which she only did when something was on her mind that she could not wait to say. She had told him about his cousin's new business idea, which this month involved importing phone cases from China, and he had made the appropriate sounds of interest while eating cold rice standing at the kitchen counter.
But before she hung up, she had said something strange.
She had said, "I had a dream about your grandfather's land last night.
The old quarry. Something is waiting there, João. I can feel it."
He had told her to get some rest.
He was thinking about that now, walking home, the evening air cold against his face, wondering if he should call her back when he got in.
He never got in.
He heard the horn first.
Not the careful warning sound of normal traffic.
The long panicked blare of something that had already lost control, already too late, already inevitable.
He turned.
The truck was large and moving fast, and the driver's face through the windscreen was a mask of pure helpless terror.
Johnny had exactly one second.
In that second, he thought about his mother. About the money he had sent last week. About the phone screen, he had been meaning to fix it for three months. About Marcos's dishes still in the sink.
He thought, I should have called her back.
Then the world ended.
The darkness was complete and very quiet.
Johnny floated in it for a while, doing inventory the way he always did when something unexpected happened. Two hands, check. Two feet, check. Heartbeat, no. No heartbeat. Lungs no. No breathing.
I'm dead, he thought.
He sat with that for a moment, the same practical attention he gave to everything.
I'm dead, he thought again. Okay.
He was not panicking. He was not sure if that was courage, shock, or simply the particular calm of a man who had spent his whole life preparing for things to go wrong and had therefore already made peace with most outcomes.
The darkness moved around him like the bottom of a deep river.
Then the light appeared.
Small at first. A point of green so deep it was almost blue, turning slowly in the darkness like something alive. Then larger. Then, in front of him, a sphere of soft spiralling energy that rotated with an inner complexity that was beautiful in a way he did not have words for.
It looked at him.
Johnny looked back at it.
Greetings, something said. Not a voice exactly. More like a meaning that arrived directly, bypassing language. You have been found.
"Found," Johnny said. "Are you sure it's me?"
A pause. The strange light gave an air that felt like it was surprised.
Most hosts do not react this calmly.
"I am not most hosts," Johnny said. "I don't even know what a host is yet."
We are the last fragment of a cosmic energy, it said. The Spiral force. The power of life and will, and evolution. We were shattered in a war older than your sun. What remains of us is what you see before you.
We have been searching for different people to host us.
Someone to carry us forward. Someone whose will is already formed, already real. We felt you across the distance between worlds, and we followed that feeling here.
Johnny looked at the green light for a long moment.
"And if I say no?"
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then you pass on to whatever comes after this, it said simply. And we continue searching.
Johnny thought about his mother saying something is waiting there. He thought about his grandfather's land, the old quarry, and the way she had said it, like she felt something.
He thought about Marcos's dishes.
"I have conditions," he said.
The green light pulsed. Genuinely surprised.
Conditions.
"Three of them. First, you seem like you will be inside me, so don't read my private thoughts without asking. Second, you tell me the truth even when it is inconvenient for you. Third, if I ask you to stop something, you stop."
A long silence.
No host has ever negotiated before, it said.
"That seems like a problem with your selection process," Johnny said.
Something moved through the green light that felt unmistakably like laughter.
Agreed, it said.
All three conditions. We accept.
"Good." Johnny looked at it. "What do I call you?"
We have carried many names across many worlds. In this moment, the choice is yours.
Johnny thought about it honestly. He was not good at naming things. He had named his first phone Miguel after his cousin and had regretted it immediately.
"Spiral," he said. Spiral. Simple. Direct.
Spiral, it agreed, and the name settled between them like something that had always been true.
"So," Johnny said. "What comes next?"
We will send you to a world,Spiral said. A world your memories know well. A world you think is just fiction. A world where your qualities, your will, and your nature will have room to grow into something extraordinary.
We sense a dimension nearby. Based on your memories, it is called My Hero Academia.
Don't worry, we are not reading your memories... anymore, said Spiral
Something moved in Johnny's chest. Not quite excitement. Something quieter and more real than excitement.
He had loved that story since he was sixteen, reading scans on a cracked phone screen during lunch breaks at his first job. He knew that world. He knew its rules, its people, its history, its dangers.
He knew what it needed.
"Okay, and I will forgive you for the first intrusion of my memories," he said. "Let's go."
There is one thing you must know before we arrive,Spiral said, and something in its tone shifted. The transfer will cost more than we have. We are already diminished from the war that shattered us. Merging with you, crossing dimensions, rebuilding your form in a new world, it will take everything we have left for now.
Johnny understood what it was saying before it finished.
"You will have to slumber," he said.
Yes. We do not know for how long. Months. Years perhaps. Until your Spiral energy grows strong enough to wake us.
You will be alone for a time.
Johnny was quiet.
He thought about being alone. He had been alone in Portugal for two years, sending money home, eating noodles, watching Marcos leave dishes in the sink. He knew how to be alone.
"I will be alright," he said.
We know,Spiral said. That is why we chose you.
The green light moved forward and entered him, and it was not violent or painful. It was like water finding its level, like something coming home after a very long time away.
The darkness became everything at once.
As Johnny and Spiral crossed the distance between worlds, something else stirred in the void they left behind.
A red light. Small at first. Then larger.
It had felt the Spiral energy activate. It had felt the bond form between host and fragment. It had felt its ancient enemy, diminished but alive, find itself a new beginning.
The red light had no warmth in it, no negotiation, no conditions.
It had only one thing.
Purpose.
It began, slowly and with great patience, to move.