Chapter 1. "Hello?" Part I.
I wanted to be a superhero ever since I was a kid.
Back then, I didn't give a damn about consequences. Didn't care that idiots in tights in the real, three-dimensional, gray world are just idiots in tights.
So I threw myself into everything I figured was sufficiently superhero-worthy — modern pentathlon, running, calisthenics, parkour (God forgive me), and even sewing. That last one I blame entirely on Raimi's cursed *Spider-Man*, which inspired me to secretly sacrifice several tablecloths and curtains to the cause of stitching myself an awesome costume — behind my mother's back, naturally — never quite managing to figure out what I was doing wrong.
I was a kid, basically.
Then I grew up, and the dream grew up with me — this fundamentally unrealizable desire. I tried to squeeze every possible drop out of the "three-dimensional, gray" world. I trained seriously and consistently, kept myself in shape, ran marathons, went to survival camps (and LARP camps too, yes), skydived and went wingsuit flying, hit the shooting range and got decent with a gun. Did a stint in the army, too. Can't skip that part.
I lived a healthy lifestyle.
Sometimes, though, I felt like garbage for no obvious reason. Weakness in the mornings. And there were other signs too, darker ones — like the way pigmentation spots suddenly started appearing all over my skin, even though I wasn't even thirty yet. I wasn't some old man.
But… whatever. I ignored it. I was still young, after all. Probably nothing serious, right?…
That was probably the first brick laid in the foundation of my future paranoia. But it didn't fully take hold until much later, unfortunately.
For a long time I also agonized over which martial art to study — the movies that had first inspired me were useless as a guide on that front. In the end I made a purely pragmatic choice: Krav Maga. Sure, I'd never pull off an epic kung fu spinning kick, but what the hell did I need one of those for in a dark alley in winter?
I'd like to think I achieved some decent results there, too.
On paper, I was ready. Zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, even some idiotic "latent gene activation" scenario straight out of *X-Men* — I'd have been at least a little prepared for any of it.
And I wanted to be prepared. Like I knew, somewhere deep down, that I had some kind of purpose — some important goal I needed to be ready for. That something was going to happen.
Another brick.
Maybe that was why I worked so hard to stockpile every skill that might be useful in an extreme situation. Not knowing what exactly I needed to be ready for, I prepared for everything. Again: driving, self-defense, falling from heights, swimming, first aid, running, shooting…
Maybe that was why I never thought much about climbing the career ladder, and by the time I was thirty I'd cycled through about a dozen jobs across totally different fields.
Maybe that was why I never really built up any proper social connections, even by the end of my life. Not much to say on that front — I left this world completely alone.
Or maybe none of that was the reason.
Either way, I was convinced I'd done nearly everything possible to face this unknown trial with dignity — whatever form it took.
And yes, a latent gene really was involved in the end. But…
Unfortunately, the one thing I was completely and utterly unprepared for — the one thing I couldn't have prepared for — was colon cancer.
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***
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Skipping over the long and agonizing illness itself… first I lost the physical condition I'd worked so hard to build. Then I became an invalid. And after that… well. It was obvious where it was all heading.
And it went there.
By the end, I was just lying there, half a corpse on a couch. For better or worse — hard to say which now — my cancer was at an advanced, inoperable stage, which meant I was immediately classified as one of those patients whose chances of survival were below the floor. The kind they discharge to family, when family is available.
So they can die at home. Not in the hospital.
So I had access to the internet and a screen. Tired of asking myself questions like *"Why did I live?"* and *"What's the point of any of it?"*, I just watched things. When I was conscious.
Action movies, disaster films, blockbusters, Marvel, anime… superhero stuff.
Eating the garbage of reality with the junk food of the impossible, so to speak. Like most people do. Like maybe I should have done from the start.
The last thing I remember is watching the fifth season of *My Hero Academia*. The first three I actually liked. The last two were so-so. Or maybe I just couldn't make out what was happening because I'd gotten worse and my vision had started going, and I kept slipping down into some kind of dark well…
And then — nothing.
I was in the long-awaited, clichéd… boundless darkness.
I understood almost immediately that I'd finally died. Nothing hurt. Absolutely nothing — my head was clear, no narcotic haze, and there was this lightness in my whole body. My last months had been one solid knot of agony and raw nerve endings. Even in sleep the pain never stopped; it gnawed and gnawed.
It hadn't always been like that, actually — in the beginning I'd just been getting weaker, my body falling apart, but nothing actually hurt, and I'd even let myself hope it might still be okay. Later they told me that the intestines simply don't have pain receptors, and that when the pain finally comes, it means invasion, metastases… in short, too late.
In the darkness where I now found myself, though, it was cozy. Warm, quiet, and peaceful.
*Well*, I thought, *if this is what "nothingness" actually is, it's far from the worst option. Especially considering I came here straight from my personal hell.*
I couldn't see myself, by the way. Just vague shadows where my arms and legs should have been.
Hm… and I never got to see my life flash before my eyes. That's a shame. There were a couple of moments I wouldn't have minded reliving. Once or twice. Especially involving one particular pretty blonde… so… maybe somewhere in this darkness there's some way to play those back? Like a highlight reel?
Possibly a couple of minutes passed, or possibly an eternity — but at some point I realized my thoughts about hacking the biblical operating system of existence were being interrupted by something flickering.
Not far from "me" — whatever I was, bodiless in this void — a round source of light began to glow in the dark. Something like a ghostly ball of fire.
Green fire.
And then this fireball spoke to me.
I didn't understand a word of it, though. First, because the "connection" kept cutting out, and his words came through as if from far away. Second, because this visitor who needed my help was speaking Japanese, and I didn't know Japanese.
Wait.
Actually… I think I do now. And moreover, I can more or less speak it myself.
"Who are you?" I asked, with an absent mouth, in clean anime-quality Japanese.
*An alien, maybe?…*
"…and I… You… not yet… but you'll meet… in the future…" came the answer. Not exactly illuminating.
I tried again.
"Did you… uh… summon me here?"
The green fireball seemed to agitate, expanding outward, and answered sharply, at higher volume:
"…us… time! We… help! We… couldn't… not enough strength! And he… not a fighter. And we… you… Help!"
The ball of fire had grown entirely and now looked more like a blindingly burning human figure. It was reaching a hand toward me.
"Uh… okay?"
And then it flared blinding white.
For one brief instant in the flash I caught a glimpse of my interlocutor's silhouette, crackling with lightning — and even, through some inexplicable means, my own figure, not dark as I'd assumed but covered entirely in ragged wisps of something purple, like smoke or fire…
And then some beam of unknown energy swept me rapidly forward.
Then — darkness and warmth. Again.
You might think that at this point I could expect a minute or two of rest and quiet — or maybe even a private lecture from a white-bearded elder who would explain just what the hell was happening.
As you may have already gathered, my expectations rarely line up with reality.
So I wasn't particularly surprised when something started pulling me somewhere, and the terrible pain followed right after. Again.
Except…
Despite everything I'd suffered through every single day before my death, that pain was nowhere close to *This* pain. It had no specific point of origin, and yet it felt like absolutely everything hurt — every part of my body, every finger, every hair, every cell. It felt like my head was about to be crushed flat, clamped in a vice, and at the same time like my whole body was being twisted and literally torn to pieces.
Then the darkness broke to a light so sharp it burned, and I thrashed, tried to wrench myself out of the grip of the pain — only to realize with horror that I couldn't move. I wanted to at least see whoever was doing this to me, wanted to let them know, even just with my eyes, how much I hated them — but I could only make out blurry shapes. I tried to draw breath to scream — and choked on it, and unbearable pain lanced through my chest, something there gurgling, as if expanding, opening up, unfolding…
Screaming was still within my capabilities, though. I had enough air for that.
So that's what I did.
In retrospect — I have no idea how I survived it. Maybe years of wrestling with hellish pain gave me some kind of tolerance. Maybe the underdeveloped, infantile nervous system cushioned it. Or maybe just the pigheaded stubbornness with which I'd met every closed gate on my path through my previous life.
Either way… I was born.
Again.
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***
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For nearly an entire year — the first year of my new life — all I could really do was think. Well, perhaps somewhat less than a year; learning to sit and walk is considerably easier when you've already done it before.
There were endless questions. What now? Who was I supposed to help? Was this new world the same as my old one, or was it different somehow? Who was I? What kind of family had I been born into? Was I lucky or not?
Considering that I was now gradually learning Japanese from scratch — the mysterious fluency had vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared — and the people around me were speaking Japanese, including my… parents… and that I had clearly been reborn into a different body…
No way. Was I actually in an isekai?
But it didn't look like a fantasy world. Everything around me looked like perfectly modern, familiar reality.
And I hadn't been hit by a truck.
I wasn't picking up on anything magical or superhero-ish in my surroundings either, which even made me a little sad.
Except — possibly — the technology, which seemed more advanced than in my old world: a large robot vacuum, a voice assistant, and holographic displays throughout the house — I'd seen my mother call them up on the walls dozens of times, setting what looked like timers.
They didn't really let me watch the news, and my parents rarely had the TV on in general. I thought I caught a glimpse of a news anchor with a dog's head once, but I eventually decided it must have been a mask, or some cartoon.
The man — my father — I only saw two days a week, on weekends, from what I could tell. The man worked hard. The woman, my mother, was the one who took care of me. Really took care of me, too: clay, crayons, all kinds of puzzles and building sets, reading me books I couldn't understand a word of… though for some reason she wasn't a big fan of going outside. And she didn't watch TV.
She did take me out in the stroller, of course — but only around the small courtyard of our building, enclosed by walls that made the outside world impossible to see. Or we'd take car trips to nearly empty parks — and the child seat, damn the thing, faced backward, so I couldn't see anything out the window.
That was hardly the worst of it. The first few months I couldn't see anything but colored blobs where the world should have been. And I couldn't consciously turn my head at all. Ugh.
And even the books gave me no clues — typical children's books, full of strange characters, anthropomorphic forces of nature, and humanoid animals, nothing out of the ordinary. I also spotted what looked like comics with a muscular figure on the cover, but my little hands kept failing to actually reach them.
Hm… well. Something to read eventually. When I'm bigger.
I had my suspicions, of course, but nothing concrete.
And there was plenty else to think about. What struck me as remarkable was the fact that my fully formed adult consciousness had somehow, impossibly, been completely written onto the hard drive of an infant whose cerebral cortex wasn't even properly developed yet. How was that even possible? Was my consciousness existing partly on some kind of "astral" plane? Was this what people called a soul? Magic? Harry? Was I Batman?…
I tested it, and yes, the transfer had been complete — my entire consciousness, every memory, intact. The test was simple: for a very long time, in the most literal sense, there was absolutely nothing I could *do.*
It was awful, honestly.
And to keep from going mad with boredom, I just replayed memories in my head — all of them, anything and everything — tried to organize whatever knowledge and skills might be useful for survival, speculated about where exactly fate had dropped me, and thought, and thought, and thought…
When my anatomy and my parents finally allowed me to walk, the very first thing I did was make my way to the window that faced the street, climb up onto the sill with great effort, and look out through the glass.
And I understood everything.
You see, among all the many fantastic worlds I'd managed to get acquainted with during my short previous life, there was exactly one in which perfectly ordinary people could stroll down a sidewalk in broad daylight with a head shaped like, say, a rectangular chunk of concrete, or some disturbing version of a tube of glue… ghastly…
Quirks. Those things. Of course.
I had definitely gotten lucky. Hell yes!
*My Hero Academia!* I remembered!…
Then the joy gradually faded.
For one thing… it was just strange. Was reincarnation really based on the principle of "wherever you end up is the last thing you watched"? Seemed unlikely.
For another, if I was remembering correctly, one in five people in this world had no quirk. So lucky wasn't necessarily guaranteed. Losing the dream twice — especially in a world where it was possible, where it was even normal — would hurt.
Although…
I carefully examined my body for any signs of quirk development, specifically my toes, and cheered up again. The mood swings of a child's body were truly staggering in speed — absolute whiplash, putting any superhero to shame. Sure enough, my little toes only had two joints each. I hadn't even noticed.
But… that rule wasn't absolute. There were exceptions. Otherwise the protagonist of the anime series, for instance, never would have gotten into the elite hero academy in the first place. Or would have caused a lot of awkward questions. In short, logically speaking, it wasn't a reliable indicator.
Which meant — I'd have to wait. Wait for a quirk to manifest on its own, or wait until I was taken to a diagnostic doctor — I thought that was how they'd told Midoriya he had nothing… Ugh… Unlikely there'd be another All Might out there just for me…
Although, what was I even talking about? The main thing was that I was alive!
But… if I had gotten lucky after all… what would I be capable of? Had I been born into this world as "myself" — as a new, independent person? Or had I been slotted into the original story in someone else's place? Or was this not the world of the *Academia* anime at all, but something entirely different, something I didn't know? Or some parallel universe relative to that series? That last one even seemed plausible…
Well… either way, to get any answers, I needed to start talking and asking my parents questions.
I started soon after. Since I wasn't really trying to hide anything, my parents initially did the expected thing and decided my quirk must be genius-level intelligence. No — I doubted that was my case. I wasn't the Sasuke type, a natural genius. I was the Naruto type: stubborn and thick, but hardworking.
That said, I also didn't see much point in hiding what little brains I did have. A toddler who talks like an adult wasn't going to impress anyone in a world where a bipedal orca superhero or a kid at the Academy who cosplays as Darkwing Duck was perfectly normal.
So, then…