The first thing Izuku noticed wasn't the power. It was the hunger.
He woke up on the floor of his bedroom, his body screaming. It was a primal, hollow ache in the pit of his stomach, as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. He scrambled to the kitchen, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. He devoured everything. Leftover rice, a loaf of bread, cold miso soup, a block of cheese.
His hands were vibrating. The spoon rattled against his teeth.
"Izuku?"
He froze. The voice sounded distorted, dragged out like a tape reel played at half speed. I... zzz... uuu... kuuu...
He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his brain to slow down, to downshift gears until the world snapped back into a comprehensible rhythm. He turned around.
Inko Midoriya stood in the doorway, clutching her robe. She looked so small. She had bags under her eyes—eyes that had cried too much for him.
"Mom," Izuku said. His voice was raspy. "I... I was just hungry."
Inko's expression crumpled into relief. She rushed over and hugged him. "You haven't eaten properly in days. You've been so quiet... I was so worried you were going to do something foolish."
Izuku stiffened in her arms. He could hear her heart beating. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. He could hear the blood rushing through her veins. He could see the dust motes floating in the air behind her, moving so slowly they appeared suspended in amber.
He hugged her back, terrified that if he squeezed even a fraction too hard, he would shatter her ribs.
"I'm okay, Mom," he lied. "I'm not going to do anything foolish."
He looked over her shoulder at the window. The reflection stared back—eyes flickering with a faint, red luminescence before fading.
"I'm just focusing on my future."
Returning to school was an exercise in torture.
The world was excruciatingly slow. The teacher's voice was a drone. The ticking of the clock on the wall was a sledgehammer against his sanity. Tick... (eternity)... Tock.
Izuku gripped his pen. He tapped it against the desk. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Within seconds, the plastic pen disintegrated, friction-burned into dust by the speed of his fidgeting.
"Deku!"
The explosion came from his left. Katsuki Bakugo.
Usually, Izuku would flinch. He would cower. But as Bakugo's hand moved toward his shoulder, popping with small explosions, Izuku didn't feel fear. He felt boredom.
He watched Bakugo's hand approach. He could see the individual beads of nitroglycerin sweat forming on Katsuki's palm. He could see the muscles contracting in his forearm. It was moving in slow motion.
Izuku didn't fight back. He didn't dodge in a way that would reveal his power. He simply... leaned.
He shifted his torso three centimeters to the right.
Bakugo's hand missed his shoulder, slamming onto the desk instead. BANG.
"What the hell?" Bakugo snarled, looking at his hand, confused. He glared at Izuku. "You look down on me? Why aren't you muttering? Why aren't you crying?"
Izuku looked up. For the first time in his life, he looked Katsuki Bakugo in the eye without trembling.
"I'm just tired, Kacchan," Izuku said flatly.
"Tired?" Bakugo scoffed, smoke rising from his palm. "You're a quirkless extra. Being tired is all you'll ever be."
Quirkless, Izuku thought. The word didn't sting anymore. It felt like an inside joke.
He looked at the other students. They were laughing. Ignorant. Slow. Fragile. If he wanted to, he could snap everyone's neck in this room before the teacher finished writing a sentence on the chalkboard. The thought was intrusive, violent, and sudden.
Izuku clenched his fist under the desk until his knuckles turned white. No. Not them. They don't matter. They're just... statues.
But the anger was there. It was a cold, red thing coiling around his heart, fed by the constant humming of the Negative Speed Force. It whispered that he was a god walking among insects.
Weeks passed. Izuku lived a double life.
By day, he was the silent, depressed son Inko worried over. He ate massive amounts of "high-calorie energy bars" he claimed were for a new workout regimen. He watched movies with her, forcing himself to sit still on the couch while his body screamed to run.
He loved her. She was the anchor. If not for Inko, he felt he might just run into the timestream and never come back. He had to protect her—from villains, yes, but mostly from the truth of what he was becoming.
By night, he worked.
He returned to the crater at Dagobah Beach. He scavenged materials. He needed a suit. Normal clothes shredded the moment he broke the sound barrier. He needed something friction-resistant.
He found it in discarded firefighter gear and stolen experimental polymers from a dumpster behind a support gear support company.
He sat in his makeshift lab, sewing at super-speed. The needle was a blur.
He held up the cowl. He had dyed the material yellow.
Why yellow?
"Because you're the Gold Standard," Izuku whispered to the empty air, thinking of All Might. "You're the sun everyone looks at. But staring at the sun makes you blind."
He painted the lightning bolts on the side. Then, he painted the chest emblem. A black circle. And inside it, a jagged, red lightning bolt.
He put the mask on. He vibrated his face, checking the reflection in a piece of polished metal. The red eyes glowed back.
He didn't look like a hero. He looked like a warning sign.
The first incident wasn't planned.
It was 2:00 AM. Izuku was testing his turning radius, running laps around the city perimeter. The wind whipped past him, the sonic booms suppressed by his precise control over his own vibrations.
He heard a scream.
He stopped, skidding to a halt atop a five-story building. His breath plumed in the cold air, red electricity arcing off his shoulders.
Down in the alleyway, three men had cornered a woman. One of them had a mutation quirk—blades for fingers. He was cutting the strap of her purse, laughing as she cried.
"Please," she begged. "Just take it!"
"We'll take it," the villain sneered. "And then we'll have some fun."
Izuku waited. Where are the heroes? he thought. There's a patrol agency two blocks away.
He waited three seconds. In his time, that was five minutes.
No one came.
"The police will be here!" the woman screamed.
"Heroes don't patrol alleys like this, lady," the villain laughed. "Not enough cameras."
Something snapped in Izuku's chest.
Not enough cameras.
That was it, wasn't it? Heroism had become a performance. A job. If nobody was watching, did the hero save the day? All Might saved people with a smile because the cameras were rolling.
Izuku dropped from the roof.
He didn't land. He fell, and just before impact, he accelerated.
WHOOSH.
The alley was filled with a sudden, violent gust of wind. The three men were thrown against the brick walls as if hit by a truck.
The woman blinked, shielding her eyes from the sudden dust cloud. When she looked up, the villains were down.
But they weren't just knocked out.
The leader, the one with the blade fingers, was screaming. His hands were mangled, fingers bent backward at impossible angles. The other two were groaning, their legs clearly broken.
Standing in the center of the carnage was a yellow blur.
"Who..." the woman stammered, trembling. "Are you a hero?"
Izuku turned to her. His body was vibrating, his form hazy and indistinct. The glowing red eyes bore into her soul.
"Go home," the distorted voice commanded.
"Thank you! Thank you so much!" She scrambled past the broken men and ran.
Izuku looked down at the leader. The man was sobbing, cradling his shattered hands.
"You... you're crazy!" the villain wheezed. "You broke my hands! That's excessive force! That's illegal!"
Izuku crouched down. The red lightning crackled, dancing from his cowl to the villain's nose.
"Illegal?" Izuku asked, tilting his head. "You were going to kill her. The heroes weren't coming. The law wasn't coming."
He placed a vibrating hand on the villain's chest. He could feel the man's heart fluttering in terror.
"I am the only thing that matters in this alley right now. And I say you got off easy."
Izuku stood up. He looked at his hands. He felt... good.
He hadn't felt helplessness. He hadn't felt the crushing weight of being 'Deku.' He had felt absolute control. He had judged them, and he had executed the sentence.
It wasn't the righteous satisfaction of All Might. It was darker. It was the satisfaction of a surgeon cutting out a tumor.
He sprinted away, the red streak disappearing into the night.
When he got home, he crept into his room and peeled off the suit. He was shaking, the adrenaline crash hitting him hard. He went to the kitchen for water.
Inko was there, asleep at the kitchen table. Her head was resting on her arms. A small photo album was open next to her—pictures of Izuku as a baby, smiling, holding an All Might toy.
Izuku froze. The darkness in his chest receded for a moment, replaced by a sharp pang of guilt.
He walked over and gently draped a blanket over her shoulders. He moved so fast the air didn't even stir.
"I'm sorry, Mom," he whispered, looking at the photo of the innocent boy he used to be. "He can't save you. He couldn't save anyone."
He touched the photo, his finger vibrating slightly, scorching a small black mark onto the picture of the All Might toy.
"But I can."
He walked back to the darkness of his room. The villain didn't just hate the world; he believed he was the only one willing to fix it. And to fix a broken bone, sometimes you have to re-break it first.
Izuku Midoriya was ready to break everything.