Chapter 3. "Moving Forward."
Back in my previous life, American cinema had drilled a very specific image into my head — the morning run. Dawn light, breath misting in cold air, a hoodie, earbuds in, an empty street. A world holding its breath. Maybe a shoreline, or a bridge over a strait. Rhythmic movement, steady breathing, just you and the whole sleeping city.
Needless to say, reality in that world had rarely matched the picture. Wrong city, wrong schedule, wrong choices — I'd always managed to pick the other thing.
Fortunately, I'd been given another shot.
The technology here was significantly more advanced and considerably more affordable, so even on pocket money I'd managed to pick up some excellent compact speakers with outstanding bass and rich surround sound. And the running shoes here? Incredible. You'd run yourself ragged.
I slipped quietly out the door — my parents were still asleep — and stepped into the still, empty street.
It was dark.
Going outside in a city at night was, in this world, not the most sensible idea in general. Our neighborhood, though, was fairly quiet, All Might was back in Japan, and any would-be criminal element that decided to give me trouble was in for a very unpleasant surprise.
I ran through a light warm-up, stretched with genuine satisfaction, and set off at an easy pace toward my new training hall — a gray-blue shadow flickering between streetlights.
Because I had found a hall. And more than that — I now had an ideal sparring partner.
But better to tell it in order.
When I'd spotted the brunette girl in class, I'd been immediately certain I was looking at none other than Momo Yaoyorozu.
Future genius student of U.A., an extraordinarily promising hero-in-training, consistently top of every class, breathtakingly beautiful — yes, with one of those costumes — and holder of what was probably the most broken quirk I could remember: she could create any non-living object from any surface area of her body, provided she understood its composition and structure. I probably would have conquered the world by now if my consciousness had landed in her body. Fortunately, there was no gender-swap twist.
I mean, really, who else could she be?
I was completely wrong.
Since all students in Japan introduced themselves at length on the first day, within a couple of minutes I heard — with some difficulty, because she spoke very quietly — that yes, this girl did want to become a hero, and yes, she was planning to apply to U.A. Academy, which provoked an excited murmur through the classroom. But her name was different.
Yui.
Yui Kodai.
My brain threw a blue screen.
In response to someone's question about her quirk, the unknown girl said she could make things smaller or larger.
I blinked, came back to earth, and remembered everything — then scolded myself for the stupidity.
Right. The anime had actually included this — a tendency for part of the Class 1-B roster to loosely echo the appearance and, to some degree, the quirks of the main plot characters from Class 1-A. I'd have said before that the mangaka was just cutting his own workload. Living in this world, though…
I thought it was probably just coincidence. It was hard to imagine one person creating an entire universe. Right?
Either way, the person who'd fumbled here was me. I'd read about Yaoyorozu online, in this very world — I knew she was educated at home by the finest private tutors. Not only was Momo herself from a very wealthy family, which I assumed meant she'd been screened at the best possible clinic with the most precise diagnostics, but her quirk was so extraordinary that the Japanese government and the quirk oversight authority had had her on their radar since she was four. She was one of those recommended for admission to U.A., the best hero school in the world — as I knew for certain from the anime.
And how did that system work? When gifted — and dangerous — children were funneled into the academy, it wasn't only about learning to use their quirks safely and productively for society's benefit. It was also comprehensive psychological and ideological conditioning. Hence the hero cult in the broader culture: why would you want anything more when you already have everything?
Because Momo, if the state failed to value her sufficiently — or if she herself weren't bound closely enough to it by family, honor, ethical principles, and material comfort — could simply decide to, say, synthesize antimatter and play suicide bomber.
Playing hero, in a manner of speaking.
And if I understood her quirk correctly, we weren't talking about half a gram — which would have been enough for Hiroshima, a bombing that, incidentally, had not occurred in this world — but something in the range of half a kilogram of antimatter, enough to erase Japan and half of Asia from the map. Possibly the entire planet.
In my old world, a child like that would most likely have been shot on the spot. Better safe than sorry. But this was a more tolerant and civilized society, and so the girl had been taken very seriously — with an eye, presumably, toward positioning her as one of Japan's strategic assets on the geopolitical stage in the future.
Right.
Strange, actually, that with state oversight of genuinely dangerous superpowers functioning so efficiently, Tomura Shigaraki — one of the anime's central villains — had slipped through their fingers entirely. His quirk was, in potential, no less terrible than Momo's Creation, but unlike hers, it required no academic knowledge or years of study. Just destruction. Pure and simple.
There was really only one explanation: the supreme villain, All For One, had ensured that nobody would save the boy from himself while there was still time.
I sighed. Tomura was probably already well into villainy by now. Possibly already had his family's blood on his hands. But what could I have done?
Meanwhile, yielding to other students' requests and waiting for the class teacher's approving nod, Yui demonstrated her quirk. She borrowed a classmate's ordinary hair comb, touched it with her palm, and with a loud crack enlarged it to the size of a chair. The kids were delighted. The girl stood quietly near the board — she was very quiet in general, almost timid — fidgeting with the hem of her skirt, while I frowned and ran the combat analysis.
Yes, same thing she'd done in the anime.
I had long since given up tearing my hair out trying to understand how quirks like this actually worked. Where did the extra mass come from when something was enlarged? What happened at the molecular level when the size changed? If an object was falling and then got enlarged mid-fall, did it retain the accumulated velocity? And when something grew larger, did the number of atoms increase proportionally while the shape stayed the same, or did the individual atoms themselves grow in size — and I honestly wasn't sure which of those was more terrifying. And what happened when an enlarged object was destroyed?
No answer. No serious attempt, including at major research institutions, had succeeded in explaining the mechanisms behind most quirks, so it was better not to think about it. They exist, they work. Fewer headaches.
What mattered more was this: in the anime, as I recalled, she'd just thrown nuts and bolts, which would enlarge in flight — worth noting that the quirk had a delay, something like two or three seconds — and continue flying, which meant momentum was preserved. Or maybe it increased proportionally along with the object? God.
And that was it? That was all she did?
Were they serious? This quirk was also an incredibly powerful force if used with any intelligence, wasn't it? Maybe there were limitations I didn't know about yet. Or maybe I should just demonstrate to her how irrational her current approach was and explain how to actually use it. I could turn her into an S-rank hero.
Wait. No. I'd decided not to change the canon for as long as possible. And besides — was that even my business?
Definitely not.
At that point I realized everyone was looking at me and waiting.
Oh right. My turn. Walk to the board.
"Hi, I'm Niren Shoda, I'm going to get into U.A.," I delivered flatly at the board, dispensing with most of the social niceties the situation called for while staying just inside the boundaries of decency.
Then I sat back down.
The homeroom teacher — apparently somewhat thrown off by a student who behaved like a delinquent but was on record as a straight-A student — ventured:
"Well, Niren-kun… would you at least like to show us your quirk?"
I smirked. "It's an enhancement type."
A chorus of envious sighs rippled through the classroom.
True enough — enhancement quirks, versatile and purely combat-oriented, weren't exceptionally rare, but rare enough that practically every young person dreamed of having one.
That was when I caught Yui's attentive gaze.
*Yes, sweetheart — we're competitors now.* Though technically, both of us were going to make it into the Academy regardless. She just didn't know that yet.
And either way, the fact that she was using her quirk at maybe five percent efficiency wasn't my problem.
The rest of the day they left me alone, and I was free to think.
And what I concluded was: now that I was already bumping up against the canon, why not turn that to my advantage right now? The damage to the original timeline seemed minimal.
Reasoning thus, I returned to looking for a dojo — except this time, instead of searching for a training facility, I was specifically looking for characters I recognized from the anime. Several future U.A. students had to be training somewhere before the entrance exams. Many of them were already competent martial artists by the time of the exams. Like that guy with drills for hands. Or that one funny kid from Class A with the big tail.
What was his name? I consulted the very first of my hero notebooks, where I'd recorded everything I remembered about the anime. Right. Very helpful. I hadn't written down a first name or a surname — I hadn't remembered either. Fine. He'd been some kind of martial arts enthusiast, if I recalled. And he had a big tail. My age. Blond. Lives in Japan.
A fairly quick web search turned up an article about the winner of a regional school karate championship held a couple of years back: one Mashirao Ojiro.
Having a name made things faster, and, as I'd expected, the kid came from a whole family of equally tailed and equally martial-arts-obsessed individuals — though he was more talented and more tailed than most. His family ran a sizeable training facility. And there was the address.
I went there the next day, after the torture of school finally ended. Funny thing — this institution was already annoying me more than elementary school had managed in all six years. Blazer with the uniform, respect your upperclassmen, don't zone out in class.
I arrived at the dojo with a healthy degree of skepticism. What I primarily needed wasn't a facility but a proper sparring partner — someone I could practice hitting in the face while they practiced not being hit. I could train technique on my own, on a construction site somewhere.
Honestly, when I'd watched the series, I'd considered Mashirao the most useless character in the entire anime.
I mean, seriously — what did he have? A tail? That was his whole quirk? What could he even do with it? Swat flies? Tickle a villain with the tuft on the end? I understood that not everyone could be compared to Endeavor or All Might, but there had to be some reasonable minimum. What would he do against any opponent with a strong offensive quirk? Or — forget that — what would he do against some ordinary quirkless loser who happened to have a gun? Yes, this was Japan, firearms were heavily restricted for civilians, but criminals had them. You could run into that on an ordinary street, let alone as a graduate of U.A. — the absolute elite — facing actual professional criminals like Overhaul or Stain on a daily basis. A kid with just a tail going up against that.
What was even the point of training him if he was that limited going forward?
God, I was so wrong.
From the outside, the "dojo" turned out to be a fairly large complex with several outbuildings. Since I'd arranged the visit in advance, a pleasant young woman with a small ponytail was waiting for me just inside the first door. Mildly surprised by my age, she led me through a couple of corridors to a large and visibly reinforced hall. I gave in to a boyish impulse on the way and rapped my knuckles against the wall — it rang like metal.
Beautiful.
The hall itself was familiar territory: high ceilings, mats across the floor, half a dozen young students in gi of varying quality working under the supervision of a senior student of moderate severity.
The man in charge turned out to be exactly the same kind of tall, blond, mustachioed figure as my previous master.
I raised an eyebrow. Was this the author running low on imagination? Or had the Matrix run out of RAM?
On closer inspection, though, this man — who turned out to be Akira Ojiro, the future hero's own father — also had a tail: thin, with a tuft, somewhat like a lion's. And he resembled a lion in other ways too — shaggy and dangerous.
At this particular moment, the tail was bristled and held stiffly upright, like a bottle brush. The man was in a bad mood.
"So you're the one who wrote yesterday about trying a practice spar with Mashi?" He looked me over from head to feet with open skepticism. "I expected someone older. Someone bigger. You're…"
I held his gaze steadily, my attention drifting occasionally to the tail.
"Fine," Akira-sensei grumbled. "Have you competed anywhere? Any belts? Any dan grades? And did you come alone? Who do I answer to if you get hurt?"
I raised my hands.
"My family knows where I am and has no objection. And my previous dojo was under Toga-sensei — I left with excellent recommendations, as you're well aware."
"Hm."
"With respect, Ojiro-sensei — would you be willing to simply watch? If I'm useless and talentless, you can throw me out in ten minutes. Fair enough?"
The man snorted.
"Ten minutes, you say. Sure. Let's see you last one. You got a quirk, kid?"
"Yes. Enhancement."
His expression sharpened immediately.
"Right, you mentioned that in the letter." His gaze became considerably more serious. "You in control of it?"
"Completely."
"Powerful?"
"I think so," I said, somewhat transfixed by the loops the tail was drawing in the air. It seemed to transmit the subtlest shifts in his mood. "But I won't use it until I'm completely certain I won't hurt anyone."
The man went quiet, mustache working thoughtfully.
At last, he sighed.
"Fine. But only because Toga genuinely spoke well of you. And understand — I'm watching you."
I bowed without a word.
---
***
---
*The Jade Lion Dojo — the Ojiro family establishment. Martial arts master, Akira Ojiro.*
*The same moment.*
---
Akira-sensei cleared space for the sparring match — his overly enthusiastic nephew had to be hauled away by a fluffy ear — called his son over from the far end of the hall, introduced the two boys, and gave the signal. The match began.
He was skeptical.
To keep pace with twelve-year-old Mashirao in sparring, you either needed a mutation on par with him physically, or a genuine enhancement quirk. And enhancement types were worth their weight in gold — rare enough that you hardly ever encountered one.
If this Niren actually had one — why hadn't anyone heard of him? He hadn't won any championships. He hadn't been recommended to U.A. by anyone.
And if he didn't — well, it wouldn't be the first friendly spar Mashi-chan had won cleanly while trying to find a decent opponent.
Hell, Akira himself no longer risked full-contact matches with his son. One hit from that sledgehammer and it was all over.
The exchange began sluggishly. His son showed his characteristic courtesy and restraint, giving the newcomer space to show what he could do, while the newcomer moved carefully. Akira's lip curled. Understandable, in its way — but time in this dojo wasn't unlimited. Come on, faster.
They picked up the pace, and Niren attacked with reasonable energy — simultaneously going low with a kick to the knee and immediately following with a straight right. His strike mechanics were solid. A sharp crack rang out when Mashi-chan blocked and countered from the left. The blue-haired boy's technique was genuinely good — worth acknowledging. He bounced back, used the momentum, and spun into a kick, but the attack was predictable enough that Mashirao stopped it with his tail.
What followed was a return strike from that same tail. Not even the Whirlwind Roll or any of his signature moves — just a basic strike, taken on the newcomer's competently held guard.
The blue-haired kid flew off his feet and skidded to the other end of the hall, ending up flat on his back.
Akira permitted himself an approving grunt behind his thick mustache. The boy had managed to partially tuck in time — no real injuries, aside from a couple of scrapes. Still, a hit like that should have been devastating, primarily to the ego, and Akira fully expected this Niren — strange name, that — to recognize the gulf between himself and Mashirao and quietly see himself out.
Akira was wrong.
Still on his back, the blue-haired kid suddenly grinned and snapped both palms hard against the floor on either side of him — generating something resembling a powerful shockwave that literally launched him back onto his feet.
A chill ran down the master's spine.
The boy rolled his neck, stretched, and said: "Sending you to the floor will be a pleasure, Mr. Anderson."
And he went back in, opening the second round.
Frowning and trying to work out what the strange phrase meant, Akira nearly missed the moment the whole pattern of the fight changed. Niren attacked sharper and wilder — practically exploding into a combination of hand strikes. *"Could he have been holding back before — just reading his opponent, as he'd suggested?"* the master thought. When Mashirao blocked the final blow with his tail, there was a crack —
And this time it was his son who got up off the floor at the other end of the hall.
The spectators — family members who'd paused their own training and others who'd come running from elsewhere in the complex — stared with their eyes practically leaving their heads. Mashirao Ojiro was preparing to enter U.A. Everybody knew that. And yet here —
Akira quickly ran his eye over Mashi-chan checking for injuries — found none — and allowed himself a satisfied smirk.
Toga hadn't been lying. Not even a little. A decent sparring partner had finally turned up.
---
***
---
*Niren.*
---
Oh, damn. Everything hurt after that fight.
Forearms that had been hammered raw, scraped knuckles, bruises across the ribs and thighs, several cuts — and my palms burning like I'd held them over a flame. Why the palms, of all things?
Whatever. That wasn't the point.
Forget everything I ever said about that stupid tail.
Yes, it was "just a tail." But *what* a tail. That thing was a massive, flexible log, not a tail. Size does matter, as it turned out.
Not only was the muscular casing on that log as hard as steel — hard enough, as I'd had ample opportunity to evaluate, that he could probably block a bullet with it and come out with nothing worse than the round lodged in the fur — but he also swung it like I swung my — my — I really needed to come up with a name for my quirk, actually. And on top of all that, he fought with it as well as I fought with my hands.
In short: a beast.
We turned out to be very nearly ideal sparring partners, in a strange and wonderful way. I could hit hard, he could block it. He could hit hard, I could — well. And beyond that, it was genuinely fascinating experience — fighting an opponent who knew martial arts at your level but had one additional limb.
Mashirao, as it happened, I liked as a person too. Calm, measured, and — importantly — completely free of any star complex. Hard-working as hell. And unlike me, who approached all of this as a tool toward specific goals, Mashi-kun was a genuine martial arts enthusiast — apparently across every discipline without exception. He knew an enormous amount about them, had a real talent for them, and that talent gave him an enormous head start over my persistence and drive.
And he'd been preparing for U.A. since age four, same as me.
To my surprise, I found that this kid — and in terms of maturity, he still was a kid — could actually understand something about what my life was like. We had more shared ground than I'd expected.
The fight itself, and the hundreds of routine sparring sessions that followed in subsequent days, also revealed one very significant problem of mine.
I lacked speed.
At bottom, I was a physically trained kid with ordinary human capability. Give me time to prepare — to "mine" a battlefield — and I could cause serious problems even for the best heroes. Villains. But they were rarely courteous enough to grant that kind of time.
Right now I couldn't even keep up with Mashirao — trained but, in the end, also just human — purely because he had one extra limb.
If I didn't find a way to transfer some of my quirk's properties to my own movement, or if I didn't equip my future hero costume with some absurdly sophisticated gadgetry like wheels or blades, I was finished in the first serious fight I ever had. That was the situation.
Worth a separate note: my Agent Smith-style floor launch. I spent a long time trying to work out how I'd done it. I never figured it out. Eventually I gave up and put it aside — it wouldn't be my last sparring session against a strong opponent.
---
***
---
That morning, despite a good run and a decent mood, training fell apart. Mashirao took me cleanly — in fact, handed me my first ever knockout in all our sessions together — which, in the context of my psychological age (and possibly in spite of it), was infuriating.
It had gone like this: I ducked under a wide spinning kick, went for a leg sweep, saw there was no way he was getting out of it — and let myself relax, certain the round was mine.
The tailed bastard just slammed his log-tail into the floor, changed the trajectory of his entire body, and literally jumped over me — sailing three meters forward and a meter up.
His knee connected with my forehead at full force as he flew past.
*…Huh, the ceiling's doing something interesting…*
*…Hey, Mashirao, since when can you duplicate yourself…*
*…Niren, are you okay…*
*…Bleh.*
When I came around, I sank into a low mood.
Being examined by a doctor for potential concussion — which I didn't take seriously even slightly, having been fine with mild head trauma since my previous life and its extreme sports — was one thing. Being knocked cold by a twelve-year-old was another. And on top of all that, even this kid, who I'd written off as useless barely a month ago, was progressing fast, inventing new techniques, and solving the same problems that were hanging over me.
And I?
Nothing.
No brain damage was found (solid as cast iron, same as always), one episode of vomiting didn't count as a death sentence, so I comfortably missed the end of training and walked to school at my own pace.
I thought along the way.
I'd gotten the impression that people in this world were, on the whole, tougher and more resilient than they'd been in mine. Not surprising, really — take Lemillion, who could hold his own against villains even after losing his quirk. Then again, he'd trained for half his life. Not exactly commonplace.
My mood was poor, and I'd fallen into a reflective loop. There was some thought circling in my head that I couldn't quite catch by the tail — ugh, tail —
Hm.
Actually, what could the "Tail Hero" even do with that appendage?
As it turned out: a great deal.
First, he could hit with it. My entire battered body was already well acquainted with the specifics of those hits. Not what I was looking for.
Second, he could hang from it like some kind of iguana — and even swing between wooden beams the way Spider-Man swung between buildings. Spider-Man, who also did not exist in this world. Relevant to me? Hardly. Not what I needed.
Third, he could stand on it, use it as an additional limb for support, which was deeply unpleasant in a fight when you might suddenly absorb two low kicks at once from different directions. Still not it.
He'd also shown me his Whirlwind Rolls — stupid name, honestly, but that was a matter of temperament and, possibly, a romantic disposition. Either way, it was a technique where he spun in place, protecting himself from everything around him with the tail as a shield. Not it.
And then there was the new trick I'd had the privilege of experiencing firsthand that morning. Mashirao said he'd been working on it for a while. He later demonstrated something I could only call "strafe-jumping" — a term straight from early Counter-Strike, from my actual first youth — a zigzag movement technique that let him cover enormous distances at high speed by hammering his tail against the ground, launching himself into a jump, and changing direction mid-air in an instant when needed.
He'd held off using it against me until now, when he already knew what to expect from me.
Flattering little bastard.
I smirked. Sure, he knew what to expect. Because I'd never once used my ranged attacks and had been keeping them carefully concealed throughout.
Right. That last one. That was the thing. Something like his strafe-jumping was exactly what I needed.
Hm.
After our first spar, my palms had hurt terribly. Established fact. Why? The logical assumption was the floor-strike through the quirk — the Matrix reference. Established.
Mashirao could move at high speed and change direction instantly — though, to be fair, he was completely exposed during those jumps. Established.
I could create an impact on any surface. Established, more or less.
So, theoretically — that surface could be myself, couldn't it?
All right. Let's assume it could.
The possible applications were endless, but what interested me specifically right now was a way to add speed to my movement.
What did that require? It required amplifying each of my steps — triggering a small explosion — but instead of blasting craters into the ground behind me, directing the effect the other way. Pushing not the earth, but my own leg forward.
It sounded insane.
But you don't know until you try.
Okay. How to try? To use the quirk at full capacity this way, I'd need armored boots and shock-absorbing gloves — like the kind Deku would eventually end up using. Speaking of which, I should probably start thinking about a costume design at some point.
So — start small. Ten percent of full capacity, say.
I arrived at school somewhere in that train of thought. Walked into the classroom — it was between lessons, having missed first period — and sat down at my desk without having to greet anyone, since nothing resembling social connection had developed with my classmates.
Anyway.
I sat — and clapped my hands loudly together, ignoring the surprised looks. Then stared very intently at my palm and tried to release the amplification impulse directly from the skin's surface.
It wasn't really working.
Tingles…
Hm — did something happen just then? Or was that just a draft?
I was engaged in this fascinating experiment when a girl approached and stopped next to me.
Yui? What did she want?