The notebook exploded in a flash of heat and smoke.
Izuku blinked.
'Wait. What?'
His vision swam. The world tilted sideways, then snapped back so hard it felt like getting slapped awake.
He was staring at his own hand.
Small. Scarred. Shaking.
That wasn't his hand.
Those weren't his scars.
The smell of burnt paper hit him. Bitter, chemical. A notebook sailed past his head and out the open window, edges still smoking.
"You really think they'll let a quirkless loser into U.A.?"
He knew that voice.
He turned his head slowly and there he was. Katsuki Bakugou. Blonde. Pissed off. Palms crackling with nitroglycerin sweat. Looking exactly like a 14-year-old who'd been told his entire life that he was special and had believed every word.
'Holy shit. I'm in My Hero Academia.'
The thought landed like a brick to the chest.
He wasn't supposed to be here. He was supposed to be — where? His apartment? Work? Something with a screen and a keyboard and the faint smell of solder. The memory was already slipping, dissolving like wet paper, and the harder he grabbed for it the faster it came apart.
Gone.
All of it.
Except the hands. He remembered hands on a workbench. A different workbench. A different life.
And now he was Izuku Midoriya. Fourteen years old. Quirkless. Standing in a middle school classroom while some kid with anger issues and a god complex told him to —
"Just pray you'll be born with a quirk in your next life, and take a swan dive off the roof."
Silence.
Two kids behind Bakugou laughed nervously.
Izuku just stared at him.
'Did this actual child just tell me to kill myself? Is that — is that what just happened?'
He waited for the fear to kick in. The stammering. The tears. Whatever this body was used to doing when Bakugou got in its face.
Nothing came.
He felt exactly the way you feel when someone cuts you off in traffic and you're too tired to honk. Mild irritation. Vague contempt. The distant awareness that this person existed and was, on a fundamental level, not worth the energy.
Bakugou's grin faltered.
"What? You deaf now, Deku?"
Izuku turned and walked toward the door.
The classroom went dead quiet.
"Hey! I'm talking to you—"
"I'm getting my notebook."
Flat. Bored. Like he was telling someone the time.
He didn't look back.
***
The koi pond was behind the school building, tucked between the gym and an old equipment shed that smelled like mildew and forgotten PE uniforms.
His notebook was floating face-down in the water. Pages bloated. Ink bled into nothing.
'Great. Months of hero analysis, gone. Thanks, Bakugou. Real cool.'
He fished it out and squeezed. Murky water dribbled through his fingers.
That's when he felt it.
A pull. Deep. Not in his muscles, not in his bones. Somewhere behind his sternum, like someone had opened a freezer inside his chest and left the door swinging.
He looked down into the water.
Three koi fish floated belly-up near the rocks. Dead for days. Pale and bloated and wrong.
And he could feel them.
Not see. Not hear. Feel.
They were hollow. Empty. Like cups waiting to be filled.
His heart started hammering.
'No. No way.'
He'd watched enough isekai to know where this was going. He'd made fun of this exact premise on forums. He'd left comments like "lmao another edgelord necromancer self-insert" under fanfics that were exactly this.
And now he was the fucking fanfic.
'No fucking way.'
He knelt at the water's edge and stretched his hand toward the largest fish.
The cold in his chest stirred. It wasn't asking permission. It was already moving, already reaching, like a muscle he'd never used flexing for the first time.
The word came out before he could stop it.
"Arise."
***
The temperature dropped so fast his breath fogged.
The water rippled.
The dead fish twitched.
Then it moved. Jerky. Wrong. Like a puppet being worked by someone who'd never seen a real fish swim.
Its body lifted out of the water, suspended in the air, dripping black ichor that turned to smoke before it touched the ground.
Its eyes glowed a sick, pale blue.
Izuku's breath caught.
'Holy shit. It actually worked. I'm a necromancer. In My Hero Academia. I'm a goddamn necromancer in a superhero anime.'
The fish hovered in front of him. Weightless. Wrong in every way a thing could be wrong.
A shadow.
A soldier.
His soldier.
Then the pain hit and the wonder turned to screaming.
***
It started in his fingertips.
A burning cold that shot up his wrist, through his forearm, into his shoulder like liquid nitrogen injected directly into his veins.
His bones screamed.
Not metaphorically. He could hear them. Could feel the fracture happening in real time, the radius splitting along a clean line while his body tried to process magic it had absolutely no business conducting.
The shadow fish flickered and dissolved into black mist.
His arm buckled.
*Crack.*
Wet. Sickening. Final.
He collapsed onto his side clutching his forearm, and the noise that came out of his mouth wasn't dignified or stoic or anime-protagonist cool. It was "FUCK, FUCK, FUCK" through clenched teeth while his vision went white at the edges and every nerve in his right arm lit up like a shorted circuit.
'Oh god. Oh that's bad. That's really bad.'
He lay there, cheek pressed against cold concrete, breathing in shallow gasps, staring at his hand as it swelled.
One fish. One dead fish, for about three seconds, and it had snapped his arm like a twig.
The power was still there. He could feel it behind his sternum, massive and patient, completely indifferent to the fact that it had just broken him. Like an ocean pouring through a garden hose. The hose was always going to burst. The ocean didn't care.
'Okay. Okay okay okay. New plan.'
He forced himself to sit up. Cradled the broken arm against his chest. Sweat dripped off his nose and hit the concrete.
'If my body can't handle the power, then I need a stronger body. Simple. Just — just physics. Build the container to match what's inside it.'
He looked at his arm. Swollen. Useless. Fourteen years old and made of paper.
'I need to get to a gym. I need to eat everything in sight. I need to turn this body into something that doesn't shatter when I look at a dead fish wrong.'
He stood up. Wobbled. Nearly went back down.
Then he laughed.
It hurt. His arm screamed. But the laugh came out anyway because the whole thing was so deeply, profoundly stupid. He'd died, woken up in an anime, tried to be a necromancer, and immediately broken his own arm. That was his origin story. That was the beginning of his legend.
'Alright, Izuku. Time to hit the gym.'
He started walking toward the nurse's office, cradling his arm, trying not to throw up.
Behind him, the koi pond was perfectly still.
The cold in his chest waited.
Hungry.
TO BE CONTINUED