Chapter 2. Part II.
Honestly, despite the occasionally annoying and distracting obligations — like cleaning the classroom — I liked school. It was lively, and in its own way, cozy. The colorful chaos of my tiny classmates was entertaining and made me smile. Nobody bothered me, and being the Democratic Republic of Niren suited me just fine.
Nothing in the schoolwork gave me any real trouble, of course. My handwriting and pronunciation were still far from ideal, but more importantly — who said that sitting in a classroom with windows overlooking a large park, where the kids went running during recess, had to interfere with training?
As a result, while we sat inside gnawing through the granite of academia, things occasionally cracked out in that park. Pavement tiles split. Branches snapped. Trees even fell, once or twice — I didn't always manage to calibrate the force properly. The teachers, the school staff, and even the parents' committee all tried to find the culprit — my parents exchanged silent glances and sighed — but I, in the true tradition of a professional Hero, however nascent, held my tongue and admitted nothing. I had no time to waste on school nonsense. I needed to cultivate — ahem, I mean, train.
At seven and a half, I decided I was strong enough to start looking for a martial arts gym.
A dojo, in other words.
In theory, I might have run into trouble if one of the masters had noticed that I wasn't learning from scratch but relearning — an ingrained stance, a developed strike, reflexes worn into muscle memory, a practiced block and break of distance. But after thinking it through, I dismissed the concern: this young body carried no muscle memory connected to fighting. None at all.
And beyond that, Krav Maga — which might not even exist in this world — while an extremely functional self-defense discipline, was also extremely limited. It sacrificed mobility and speed in favor of maximum stability, built around a wide, crab-like base stance with toes turned inward.
Given that I had no protection against attacks from the monsters living openly among ordinary people here, speed and mobility were my highest priority. My old fighting style — knees bent, body and head covered, carefully testing the ground behind me with a heel — was completely unsuitable.
A couple of weeks later, I found a dojo a few blocks from home. The master — a stocky, blond, mustachioed man of indeterminate nationality — was teaching a dozen young men and women something that could only be described as a savage blend of Muay Thai, judo, and karate.
I lost my trial sparring match cleanly to a kid my age who outweighed me — my motor control, and my general physical conditioning, were still nowhere close to what I needed, and quirk use was strictly prohibited. But I was accepted. And I sighed, and started learning all over again. Simultaneously relearning what was familiar and absorbing something entirely new.
For what it's worth, I hadn't noticed any tendency toward the chubbiness my new body had apparently been saddled with in the original. Either the previous Niren had let himself go by not committing to heroics early enough, or I was yet to survive some catastrophic weight gain in puberty. Either way, I currently looked like a perfectly ordinary skinny kid — with pale blue hair, naturally.
Scowling, antisocial, and tired most of the time.
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***
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Two months after my tenth birthday, the world was shaken by news of a devastating battle between All Might and a fairly well-known and powerful villain who went by the name Toxic Chainsaw. I'm serious — that was actually his name, and you could Google his photos. After a prolonged fight, Toxic was stopped and captured. And however strong he might have been, he was no match for the Symbol of Peace. Besides, these things happened often enough that it shouldn't have been remarkable.
Except what came next was strange enough to attract every manner of conspiracy theorist.
Some of them put forward the idea that the villain hadn't been working alone. For one thing, the mere fact that someone had managed to give the Number One Hero a real fight — a necessary condition for a prolonged battle — was already alarming. Toxic was good, brutal, and strong, but not that strong. For another, panicked posts were circulating online claiming that All Might had been severely wounded. As evidence, people posted photographs of the battle site, which had been reduced to a flat wasteland — and was drenched in blood.
Supporting that theory: a second villain, if one existed, had fled the scene. And All Might himself, contrary to habit, hadn't given any interview after the fight. He'd simply vanished somewhere.
Of course, no one gave these defeatist rumors any traction. The battle had no witnesses whatsoever. All Might himself reappeared publicly soon enough — a couple of weeks later — saving people as though nothing had happened. And the relevant comments and posts were scrubbed suspiciously quickly.
People breathed a sigh of relief. Everything returned to normal.
I, knowing considerably more than everyone else thanks to an anime watched in a previous life, just bit my lip and trained, and trained, and trained. All Might hadn't been fighting Toxic Chainsaw. All Might had been fighting All For One — his archnemesis, and likely one of the first and oldest quirk users among any living human beings.
All For One — also a man with the surname Shigaraki, which I'd barely managed to retain from my previous life — was a figure who operated entirely in shadow. It was impossible to find a single mention of such a person online, or of such an impossibly broken quirk that had apparently allowed him, over literal centuries, to collect, steal, accumulate, combine, and even gift to others nearly any superpower imaginable, growing stronger and more dangerous with every passing decade.
But he existed. The gray cardinal of the criminal underworld existed in the series, and he was the primary threat to the civilized world. And I had no reason yet to doubt that the story I'd once watched on an old laptop, terminally ill and bedridden, was playing out as written.
On a separate note — an interesting quirk of translation, so to speak, regarding Shigaraki's alias. "All For One," rendered into other languages, loses the wordplay that made it matter. In English, the hero's quirk is "One For All" and the villain's is "All For One" — mirror images of each other. "One For All" is literally the motto from Dumas' *Three Musketeers*, where the preposition carries an unambiguous sense of nobility and self-sacrifice. "All For One," on the other hand, means *everything for one* — pointing toward greed, egocentrism, and a corrupted nature.
I doubted he'd named the quirk himself, though. Or had he? If not him, then who?
Either way — quirks had appeared just over two centuries ago. And All For One had been there to see it. As best I understood it, Shigaraki's longevity was also tied to some acquired quirk, probably regenerative in nature. Though if that was the case, I couldn't quite work out why he'd been unable to regenerate his face in the future — destroyed, incidentally, in this very fight a few weeks ago. Then again, it was stupid to assume that an endlessly powerful and cunning creature, after decades of existence, hadn't stolen some impressive regeneration for himself. I'd have picked up that ability first thing if I were him. And I thought it was extremely dangerous to underestimate this monster's intelligence.
Presumably it was those quirks — or that quirk — that had allowed him to survive now.
And yes, the good guy — All Might — had also been genuinely, seriously injured in that fight.
If you could call losing his left lung, his stomach, several ribs, and enduring a dozen surgeries "injured." And I was only listing what I still remembered a decade later. In the series, he was missing something like a literal chunk of his torso.
Time was running short.
The countdown to Toshinori — I couldn't remember his last name, and I obviously hadn't found his civilian identity online — the man who was All Might, the carrier of One For All, the Symbol of Peace, the strongest hero on the planet — the countdown to his loss of power had already begun. I had only a few years left. Five and a half, to be precise. And I was still right where I'd started, making no real progress.
Come on then, Niren. Grow. Improve. Come on.
The dream of an entire lifetime was finally so close. All that was left was to get into U.A. and survive. Come on! Well?! *COME ON.*
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***
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By age twelve, I could place half a dozen markers in close proximity to each other — not exactly in the same spot, but very close, just a couple of centimeters apart.
I'd also learned to activate multiple markers simultaneously, whether clustered together or spread across different locations.
And most importantly, I'd managed to reduce the activation delay to fractions of a second — effectively fusing the two impacts, my own weak human strike and the considerably more powerful force of the quirk, into a single superhuman blow.
In doing so, I'd closed out a years-long chapter of my life.
All of this came with the obvious caveat that I was a lean twelve-year-old, which meant the output was closer to the punch of an ordinary trained adult male than a natural disaster on the scale of One For All. And the amplification was directly proportional to how much I put into the triggering strike.
Still: at this point, a slap of my palm on that poor old desk would simply break it.
And the fact was — in this world, I'd been preparing to become a Pro Hero since very nearly birth. If you counted my previous life, you could say since before that.
From time to time, catching my own reflection in a mirror, I'd ask myself: was it worth it?
It had been years since I'd been close to anyone, in any sense of the word.
I had no friends. Other children steered clear of the driven "genius" with the work ethic of a grown adult, and even if they hadn't, we'd have had little to talk about. Heroes, maybe?
Except I was already up to date on every piece of news and gossip — I checked the news regularly, dug through forums, and continuously updated my mental library.
Recently, the Winged Hero — the impossibly talented Hawks — had appeared seemingly from nowhere to immediately claim the twentieth spot in the national hero rankings and been given responsibility over an entire city district. But those of us paying attention knew full well that an entire state apparatus stood behind him.
Meanwhile, the Rabbit Hero, Miruko, lacking any such unfair backing, was climbing the rankings through sheer merit.
All Might had returned from another extended trip to America, where he'd once again defeated some powerful villain that Captain Celebrity hadn't been able to handle.
And I was Niren. Twelve years old, biologically speaking. Lying on the roof of the school in sunshine and clear sky. Not defeating villains, not saving people, not working as a hero.
So why did every single day feel like a fight? A life-or-death battle in which I had no choice but to give everything I had. A battle I lost every single day.
The sky didn't answer.
And the kid whose hair matched its color had to find the answer himself.
At this stage, I obviously had no peers in any academic or physical discipline. I'd been the best fighter at my dojo for years — in my weight class, admittedly, and without using my quirk — and if training hadn't taken up so much of my time, I thought I could've already gotten a university degree remotely. Computer science, maybe.
I'd never managed to develop a hobby, despite the bonus second chance the universe had handed me. I'd been driving single-mindedly toward my goal, whatever the obstacles and sacrifices — and how else could it be? The dream of my first childhood had merged completely with the question of survival. I had learned a foreign language, technically. That could count, maybe.
In short, I felt alone and wrung out.
I graduated from elementary school with top marks across every subject and strong recommendations. I didn't care even slightly — to the point where I offloaded the valedictorian speech, in all its importance and honor, onto my class representative, and simply skipped the ceremony. I was on the roof, watching clouds.
Maybe I'd just burned myself out.
The important thing was not to develop a full-blown depression, because then I'd need treatment, and that could affect my admission to the Academy.
My slump of despondency was bad enough that the choice of middle school for the next three years passed by in a complete blur. My parents tried to ask questions, but I didn't care about the details. All that mattered was whether the diploma would be recognized when applying to U.A.
On top of that, I'd had to leave my dojo.
I wouldn't say I'd thought of it as home, but I'd gotten used to it, and it was conveniently located. The problem was that the master had announced publicly that I was a goddamn prodigy with nothing left for him to teach me. I only grimaced at the wild exaggeration, because the real issue was something I'd already brought to the sensei myself, the day before his announcement: I was starting to amplify my strikes almost reflexively, and had been working toward exactly that, which meant I was now afraid of injuring sparring partners who weren't properly protected.
What I needed were opponents with combat quirks — defensive, enhancement-based, or capable of ranged attacks — and a safe reinforced space, something like a training ground, that could withstand what I might throw at it.
Those kinds of facilities weren't lying around on street corners. And I wasn't ready to go looking for villainous adventures in dark alleys. Not yet.
Not that such places didn't exist — there were numerous hero training centers and specialized facilities, of course. But they were restricted to enrolled students and licensed professionals. At my age, nobody was letting me anywhere near them.
An entire month passed in fruitless, and frankly half-hearted, attempts to find something suitable.
And then —
April.
The trees lining the wide avenue were entirely pink. Delicate, vivid sakura petals drifted slowly through the…
No. That's not right.
Clichéd, vulgar chunks of raw-meat-colored foliage rained down underfoot and were trampled into the mud.
There. That was closer to what I was actually feeling.
Cheerful, anxious, and focused — all types, really — schoolboys and schoolgirls in brand-new uniforms made their way in pairs and clusters and alone toward some enormous brick of a building. It was, if not a holiday, then certainly an Event for them.
I felt nothing except mild boredom and a faint nostalgia for the Soviet first-of-September school assembly.
The day passed in that spirit. A pompous opening ceremony swept past me. Meeting the school. Meeting the schedule. Meeting the teachers. Meeting after meeting after meeting.
I was lazily going around in circles through the same thoughts I'd already considered a hundred times over.
Over the past several years I'd returned to this question again and again, and had ultimately decided to change nothing about the story — for as long as possible. Maybe that was selfish. Maybe I could have warned the government, or All Might, or his former sidekick, about the League of Villains or All For One's plans. Why would it be implausible? Plenty of quirks let people see the future. But no.
By keeping quiet for now, I preserved my advantage — the essentially one-time trump card of future knowledge — and could play it when the timing was most favorable. One-time, because the moment I changed anything, even something small, the entire plot of this anime reality could jump to a different track, and I might not survive to see the following evening.
Though that was easy to say now, from the comfort of a peaceful afternoon.
What would happen when I actually had the power to save a good person, but the right thing to do was to run?
I doubted I'd run.
What kind of hero would I be if I did?
Well.
For the same reasons — the trump card, the preparation, the paranoia — I'd decided to conceal everything I could about my quirk and register it under a completely opaque name when the time came. The same went for my hero name.
More than that: given my reasonably successful efforts to adapt the quirk for close combat, I could genuinely present myself as a simple strength-enhancement type. Someone like the rabbit-eared Miruko, or the "sugar" hero Sato who loaded up on candy for a short-term power spike, or even Midoriya himself in the early seasons.
Which meant I'd have concealed in my sleeve not just a trump card but an entire royal flush of combat surprises for any enemy who would never expect me to be more dangerous at range. And I was — by this point I'd closed the gap from my original-universe counterpart entirely and could activate the quirk from at least half a kilometer away.
Which was highly relevant, because there was definitely a mole in U.A. — someone feeding information to All For One. A rat in the Academy.
A rat, hm. Which was a… mouse.
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***
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So there I sat.
Pensive, detached, and antisocial. Something like a Shoda-cosplay of a certain Shota from a certain anime — which didn't exist in this world.
And then, at the moment of first meeting my future classmates, the world ground to a halt like a cassette tape getting chewed up.
I saw a young girl — not quite grown yet, but getting there. A brunette, quite pretty, with clean features.
A brunette I was absolutely certain I had seen before. In that same anime. The only one that mattered anymore.
It appeared canon was coming for me.