Izuku found the body on a Tuesday.
It was his third week of patrolling. Three weeks since he'd started going out at night in the suit he'd built—black and dark green, reinforced with layered impact-resistant panels, a full-face mask with adaptive lenses that he'd engineered using principles borrowed from Spider-Man's suit designs and materials sourced from three different hardware stores and an online electronics supplier who didn't ask questions about why a fourteen-year-old needed variable-tint polycarbonate lenses.
Three weeks of stopping muggings, preventing assaults, breaking up drug deals, pulling people out of car accidents before the Pro Heroes arrived. Three weeks of operating in the margins—the gaps between hero patrol routes, the blind spots in the system, the neighborhoods that weren't important enough to warrant consistent Pro Hero coverage because the people who lived there weren't wealthy enough to generate the kind of incidents that boosted rankings.
Three weeks, and he'd been feeling good about it. Not triumphant—he wasn't naive enough for that—but competent. Like he was making a difference. Like the stories he'd read and the abilities he'd been given were being put to their intended purpose.
Then he found the body.
It was in an alley behind a convenience store in the Naruhata district—a neighborhood that straddled the line between "rough" and "abandoned," where the streetlights worked about sixty percent of the time and the police response time averaged forty-seven minutes and the nearest Pro Hero patrol route was eight blocks away.
Izuku had been on a rooftop, running his scanner—the handheld device he'd built from modified radio components and a custom software suite that monitored police frequencies, emergency services channels, and local security camera feeds—when he'd picked up a 110 call. Domestic disturbance. Screaming. Possible Quirk involvement.
He'd arrived in ninety seconds. The police wouldn't arrive for another forty-three minutes.
The apartment was on the third floor of a building that smelled like mold and resignation. The door was unlocked. Inside, the living room was destroyed—furniture overturned, wall cracked, a television shattered on the floor.
The woman was in the kitchen. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the refrigerator, arms wrapped around her knees, rocking slightly. She had bruises on her arms and her face and her neck, and the pattern of the bruises told a story that Izuku's enhanced analytical mind read in approximately two seconds: repeated trauma, multiple incidents over an extended period, escalating severity.
This was not the first time.
"Ma'am," Izuku said, keeping his voice soft—the voice he'd practiced, the Superman voice, the "I'm here and it's going to be okay" voice. "My name is—I'm a hero. I'm here to help. Where is—"
"He left," she said. Her voice was flat. Empty. The voice of someone who had screamed until there was nothing left. "Out the back. He always goes out the back."
"Are you hurt? Do you need medical attention?"
She laughed. It was the worst sound Izuku had ever heard.
"I need him to stop," she said. "I need him to stop."
Izuku called an ambulance on the burner phone he carried for exactly this purpose. He stayed with her until the paramedics arrived—four minutes, because he'd routed the call through a priority channel that he'd accessed using methods that Mister Terrific would have approved of and that the telecommunications regulatory authority absolutely would not.
Then he went looking for the man.
He found him in the alley behind the convenience store.
The man was standing over a body.
Not the woman's body. Someone else. A teenager—a boy, maybe sixteen, with a convenience store uniform and a name tag that read HIRO. He was on the ground. He was not moving. There was blood. There was a lot of blood.
The man was holding a knife. The knife was red.
"He saw me," the man said, and his voice was conversational, almost cheerful, the voice of someone explaining a minor inconvenience. "Came out for a smoke break. Saw me come out the back door. I couldn't—he would have told someone. I couldn't let him tell someone."
The man's Quirk was active. His hands were glowing—a low, pulsing red light that Izuku's analytical mind immediately categorized: some kind of heat generation, thermal output consistent with second-to-third-degree burn capability at contact range. The same Quirk he'd used on his wife. On the woman sitting on the kitchen floor with handprint-shaped burns hidden under her sleeves.
Izuku looked at the boy on the ground.
Hiro.
Sixteen years old, maybe. Convenience store employee. Working a night shift, probably for minimum wage, probably to help his family, probably because life in Naruhata wasn't easy and you did what you had to do.
Wrong place. Wrong time. Came out for a smoke break and saw something he shouldn't have and now he was on the ground and he was not moving and there was blood and Izuku could see—with the enhanced perception that Daredevil's abilities had given him—that the boy's chest was not rising and falling.
Not rising and falling.
Not breathing.
Dead.
Hiro was dead.
The boy with the name tag was dead, and the man with the glowing hands was standing over him with a red knife and a conversational tone, and Izuku Midoriya stood in the mouth of that alley and felt something inside himself crack.
Not break. Not shatter. Crack. The way ice cracks on a frozen lake—a single line, sharp and clean, running through something that had been solid a moment ago and was now, suddenly, structurally compromised in a way that could never be fully repaired.
He'd read about this. He'd read about it in a hundred comics across two universes.
The moment when the hero finds the body.
The moment when it becomes real.
Uncle Ben bleeding out in Peter Parker's arms. Jason Todd beaten to death by the Joker. Gwen Stacy's neck snapping at the bottom of a fall that Spider-Man had been a fraction of a second too slow to prevent. The Waynes in Crime Alley. The Kents in the tornado. The endless, grinding, relentless parade of death and loss that marched through every hero's story like a drumbeat, reminding them—and the reader—that heroism was not a fairy tale. That the cape didn't make you invincible. That you could do everything right and still lose.
But reading about it and standing in it were different things.
Izuku looked at the dead boy and understood, with a clarity that felt like a blade sliding between his ribs, that he had been naive.
Not foolish. Not wrong. His beliefs were not wrong—he held that conviction like a fistful of broken glass, tight enough to cut. Superman was right. Spider-Man was right. The choice to help, the refusal to look away, the fundamental commitment to the idea that every life had value—all of that was right.
But he had been naive about what that commitment would cost.
"You should leave," the man said, gesturing with the knife. His glowing hands pulsed brighter—a threat display, animalistic, instinctive. "This isn't your business. I don't want to hurt you."
"You killed him," Izuku said.
"He saw me."
"He was a kid."
"He saw me." The man's voice shifted—hardened, the conversational tone dropping away to reveal something underneath that was cold and flat and empty. "You don't understand. I can't go back to prison. I did four years. Four years for what I did to—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "I can't go back."
"You beat your wife," Izuku said. His voice was very quiet. "For years. You burned her with your Quirk. You were convicted, you served time, you got out, and you went right back to her and did it again. And when this boy—" His voice cracked. Just slightly. Just enough. "When this boy saw you, you killed him. So she wouldn't find out. So no one would know."
The man stared at him. The glow in his hands intensified.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I'm the guy who's going to stop you."
The man lunged.
Izuku disarmed him in 1.3 seconds.
The knife went first—a wrist lock, a twist, the blade clattering to the asphalt. Then the man's glowing hands came up, reaching for Izuku's face, and Izuku moved inside the reach—Daredevil's close-quarters instinct, the understanding that a ranged fighter's power diminished at contact distance—and struck three times. Solar plexus. Liver. Jaw.
The man went down.
He went down hard. He went down unconscious, his glowing hands flickering and dying as his brain checked out, and he lay on the dirty asphalt of a dirty alley in a dirty neighborhood, and he did not move.
Izuku stood over him.
He looked at the man.
He looked at the boy.
He called the police. He waited on the rooftop across the street until they arrived—twelve minutes this time, because he'd flagged the call as a homicide, and even the Naruhata precinct took homicides seriously. He watched them find the body. Watched them find the man, still unconscious, zip-tied with the heavy-duty restraints Izuku carried in his utility belt. Watched them piece together what had happened.
Then he went home.
He sat on his bed and stared at the wall for a very long time.
He went to the comic shop the next day.
Stan was behind the counter, as always. But today the old man wasn't grinning. His face was neutral, patient, the expression of someone who had been expecting this visit and had prepared himself for it.
"I couldn't save him," Izuku said. He was standing in the middle of the shop, still in his school uniform, bag over his shoulder, and his voice was steady in the way that voices are steady when the person speaking has spent the previous twelve hours carefully constructing a dam against the flood of emotions threatening to overwhelm them.
"No," Stan said. "You couldn't."
"If I'd been faster. If I'd gone to the alley first instead of the apartment. If I'd—"
"Izuku."
"—anticipated that the suspect would exit through the rear of the building, which I should have, the layout of the apartment clearly indicated a secondary exit point, and my tactical analysis should have accounted for—"
"Izuku."
Izuku stopped.
Stan came around the counter. He moved slowly, deliberately, the way you approach a wounded animal—not because you're afraid of it, but because you don't want to make its pain worse.
"Sit down," he said.
Izuku sat. Stan pulled up the folding chair across from him and lowered himself into it with the careful dignity of a man whose joints had opinions about sudden movements.
"You read a lot of comics," Stan said. "Two universes' worth. Thousands of issues. Hundreds of characters. You absorbed their powers, their skills, their intelligence." He paused. "Did you think you'd absorb their pain, too?"
Izuku was quiet.
"Here's the thing about those heroes, kid. Every single one of them—every single one—has a moment like the one you had last night. The first time they couldn't save someone. The first time they arrived too late or weren't strong enough or just weren't there. And that moment is the most important moment in their entire career. More important than the first time they put on the suit. More important than their biggest victory. Because that moment is when they learn the truth that no amount of training or power can prepare them for."
"What truth?"
"That you can't save everyone."
The words landed in the room like stones dropped into still water.
"Superman can't save everyone," Stan said. "He can hear every cry for help on the planet. Every scream. Every whisper. Every heartbeat that falters and every breath that stops. He hears all of it, all the time, and he can't get to all of them. He has to choose. Every second of every day, he has to choose who to save and who to—" Stan's voice caught, just slightly. "Who to let go. And that choice eats him alive. It's the thing that keeps him up at night. The thing that makes him push harder, fly faster, do more—and it's never, ever enough."
"All-Star Superman," Izuku said softly. "The scene where he talks to the girl on the ledge. She asks him why he's there instead of saving people, and he says—"
"'I'm here because someone needs me to be,'" Stan finished. "'And because I can be here.' He can't save everyone. But he can save her. Right now. In this moment. And that has to be enough. Not because it is enough—it isn't, it never is, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying—but because it's what he has."
Izuku's dam cracked.
Not catastrophically. Not the full flood. But a crack—a thin line of tears running down his face, silent, almost dignified in its restraint.
"The boy's name was Hiro," Izuku said.
"I know."
"He was sixteen."
"I know."
"I could have saved him if I'd been there thirty seconds earlier."
"Maybe. Maybe not. You don't know what the variables were. You don't know if the man would have killed him regardless of your timing. You don't know if your presence would have escalated the situation. You don't know, Izuku. You can't know. And torturing yourself with the unknowable isn't heroism. It's self-destruction."
Izuku wiped his eyes. He was quiet for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was different—harder. Not cruel, not cold, but resolved in a way it hadn't been before.
"The man," he said. "The one who killed Hiro. His name is Sasaki Enji. He has a prior conviction for aggravated assault—domestic violence. He served four years of a seven-year sentence. He was released on parole eighteen months ago. His parole conditions explicitly prohibited contact with his ex-wife. He violated those conditions within the first month. No one followed up. No one checked."
"The system failed," Stan said.
"The system always fails. That's what I'm learning. The system isn't designed to protect people—it's designed to process them. To sort them into categories: hero, villain, civilian. And once you're sorted, the system treats you like a case number, not a person. Sasaki Enji was Case Number whatever. He completed his sentence. He was released. Box checked. Next case."
"And the boy?"
"The boy wasn't even in the system. He was just... there. Working his shift. Living his life. And he died because a man who should have been monitored, who should have been stopped, was allowed to walk free because the system's definition of 'justice' ends at the prison gate."
Stan nodded slowly. "So what do you do about it?"
Izuku looked at him. His green eyes were very bright, and in them was something that Stan had seen before—in other eyes, in other stories, in the moments when heroes stopped being idealists and started being practitioners.
"I've been thinking about Batman," Izuku said.
"I thought you might."
"I love Batman. I love everything about him. His dedication. His preparation. His refusal to take a life. His belief that everyone—everyone, no matter how far they've fallen—deserves the chance to be saved." He paused. "But I've also been thinking about the Joker."
Stan said nothing. He waited.
"The Joker has escaped Arkham Asylum—what? Dozens of times? Hundreds? Every time he escapes, people die. Hundreds of people die. Jason Todd. Sarah Essen. The people in 'The Killing Joke.' The people in 'Death of the Family.' The people in 'Endgame.' An endless parade of corpses stretching back decades, and every single one of them is alive because Batman caught the Joker and the Joker escaped and Batman caught him again and the Joker escaped again and the cycle never ends because Batman will not kill him."
"Batman's no-kill rule is fundamental to his character," Stan said carefully.
"I know. I respect it. I understand why he won't kill. If Batman kills, he becomes something else—something darker, something that can't come back. The line between hero and monster is thinner than people think, and once you cross it, the crossing gets easier every time. I understand that. I believe that."
"But?"
"But Jason Todd is dead."
The words hung in the air.
"Barbara Gordon is in a wheelchair. Hundreds—thousands—of people are dead because Batman won't do the one thing that would stop the Joker permanently. And I have to ask myself: Is Batman's moral purity worth more than those lives? Is his soul more important than their survival?"
Stan was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was careful—the voice of a man choosing his words the way a surgeon chooses incisions.
"That question," he said, "is the most dangerous question in all of superhero fiction. It's the question that created the Punisher. It's the question that drove Jason Todd to become the Red Hood. It's the question that Ozymandias answered 'yes' to in Watchmen and killed three million people in New York because he decided the math justified it."
"I'm not Ozymandias."
"No. You're not. But that question has a gravity to it, kid. It pulls you in. Once you start thinking about it—once you start calculating the utility of killing, weighing lives saved against lives taken, running the numbers—you're on a slope. And the slope is greased. And at the bottom of that slope is a person who kills not because they must but because they can. Because it's easier. Because every problem starts to look like it has a lethal solution."
"I know," Izuku said. "I've read The Punisher. I've read Watchmen. I've read Irredeemable. I know where the slope goes."
"So where do you stand?"
Izuku was quiet for a long time. A very long time. The clock on the wall—Spider-Man's arms pointing at a time that was probably fictional—ticked through minutes that may or may not have been real.
Then he spoke, and his voice was the voice of someone who had been arguing with himself for twelve hours straight and had finally reached a verdict.
"Superman doesn't kill," Izuku said. "Batman doesn't kill. Spider-Man doesn't kill. And they're right. They're right ninety-nine percent of the time. The no-kill rule saves more people than it costs, because the idea of a hero who won't kill is more powerful than any individual act of lethal violence. When Superman refuses to kill, he's making a statement—he's saying that life has value, all life, even the lives of monsters. And that statement inspires people. It changes the world. It matters."
"But?" Stan said again.
"But there's a one percent. A one-percent scenario where the math doesn't work. Where the villain cannot be stopped any other way. Where every alternative has been exhausted—every prison, every containment strategy, every rehabilitation program, every non-lethal option—and the villain is still killing people. Still escaping. Still hurting innocents. And in that one-percent scenario—only in that scenario—a hero has to be willing to do what Batman won't."
He met Stan's eyes.
"Not because they want to. Not because they enjoy it. Not because it's satisfying or righteous or just. Because it's necessary. Because the alternative is more death. Because a hero's first obligation isn't to their own moral purity—it's to the people they're trying to protect."
Stan studied him for a long, searching moment.
"You're talking about the Red Hood philosophy," he said. "Jason Todd."
"Yes and no. Jason was angry. Jason killed because he was furious—at the Joker, at Batman, at a world that had let him die and then kept spinning like it didn't matter. His killing was driven by rage, and rage makes you sloppy. Rage makes you enjoy it. And the moment you enjoy killing—the moment you take any satisfaction from ending a life—you've lost. You've become the thing you're fighting."
"So what's your version?"
"My version is... surgical. Clinical. The way a doctor amputates a limb—not because they want to, but because the infection will kill the patient if they don't. You don't celebrate an amputation. You don't feel good about it. You feel the weight of it. You carry it. You carry it for the rest of your life, and you should carry it, because the day it stops being heavy is the day you've become a monster."
He took a breath.
"I will exhaust every other option first. Every. Single. One. I will try talking. I will try containment. I will try rehabilitation. I will try understanding—because Diana taught me that, because Wonder Woman's first instinct is always compassion, and she's right, compassion should always be the first instinct. But if all of that fails—if the villain cannot be stopped, cannot be contained, cannot be reached—and people are dying—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
Stan was quiet for a very long time.
Then he said: "You know that this makes you different from them. From Superman. From Batman. From Spider-Man."
"I know."
"You know that some of them would disagree with you. Strongly."
"I know. Batman would never speak to me again. Superman would be disappointed. Spider-Man would understand but would never be able to do it himself." He paused. "But Jason Todd would respect it. Diana would understand the necessity, even if she grieved it. And Steve Rogers—" He thought about Captain America. About a soldier who had fought in a war. Who had killed, on battlefields, because that was what war required. Who carried the weight of every life he'd taken and never, never pretended it was easy or clean or right. "Steve would understand. Because Steve knows that sometimes the world puts you in a position where there are no good choices. Only less-bad ones."
"And you're prepared for the cost?"
"No," Izuku said honestly. "I don't think anyone can be prepared for it. But I'm willing to pay it. Because the alternative—letting people die to preserve my moral comfort—is worse."
Stan looked at him for another long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.
"You've grown up, kid."
"I found a dead body in an alley. That tends to accelerate the process."
"Yeah. It does." Stan stood up from his chair with a groan—the authentic, unrehearsed groan of genuinely old joints. "Come on. There's something else you need to know."
They went to the back room. The impossible room. The room of stories.
But this time, Stan didn't lead him to the longboxes of Superman and Spider-Man and Batman. He led him deeper—past the shelves of Justice League and Avengers, past the X-Men section and the cosmic events and the indie titles—to a section that Izuku hadn't explored before.
The boxes here were different. Darker. The labels were written in red marker instead of black, and the names on them were—
RED HOOD (JASON TODD)
MOON KNIGHT (MARC SPECTOR)
THE PUNISHER (FRANK CASTLE)
DEADPOOL (WADE WILSON)
DEATHSTROKE (SLADE WILSON)
BULLSEYE
ELEKTRA
WOLVERINE (SOLO RUNS, THE VIOLENT ONES)
—not heroes.
Or not only heroes.
Anti-heroes. Vigilantes. Killers. People who operated in the space between heroism and villainy, who did terrible things for reasons that ranged from noble to nihilistic, who existed in the gray areas that Superman and Spider-Man tried to pretend didn't exist.
"These are the ones you haven't read yet," Stan said. "Deliberately. I held them back."
"Why?"
"Because you needed the heroes first. You needed to understand what the ideal looks like before you started examining the deviations. If I'd given you Punisher before Superman, you might have concluded that killing was the default. That violence was the primary tool. I needed you to understand—really, deeply understand—that violence is the last resort. That every other option comes first. That killing is a failure state, not a strategy."
"And now?"
"Now you've arrived at that understanding on your own. Through experience. Through a dead boy in an alley. And that means you're ready to read about the people who live on the line."
Izuku pulled the first box toward him. Red Hood.
"Read," Stan said. "And pay attention. Not just to what they do—but to what it costs them."
Jason Todd.
The second Robin. The boy who was angry where Dick Grayson had been graceful. The kid from Crime Alley—literally from Crime Alley, the same alley where the Waynes died—who stole the tires off the Batmobile and got adopted by Batman because Bruce Wayne saw in this furious, feral, brilliant child a mirror of his own rage.
And then the Joker killed him.
Beat him with a crowbar. Left him in a warehouse. Blew up the warehouse.
Batman found the body.
Batman did nothing.
Not nothing about Jason—he mourned Jason, kept the Robin suit in a glass case in the Batcave like a shrine, carried the grief of Jason's death like a stone in his chest for years. But he did nothing about the Joker. The Joker went back to Arkham. The Joker escaped. The Joker killed more people. And Batman caught him and sent him back and he escaped and killed more people and the cycle continued, world without end, amen.
And then Jason came back.
Came back wrong. Or came back different, which might be the same thing or might not, depending on your theology. Came back burning with a fury that made Izuku's hands shake just reading about it, because Jason's anger wasn't the blind, indiscriminate rage of a madman—it was the focused, specific, entirely justified anger of a murdered child whose father figure had refused to avenge him.
"I'm not angry that you didn't save me," Jason told Batman, in the scene that Izuku would remember for the rest of his life. "I'm angry that you didn't avenge me. That you let him live. After what he did to me—after what he's done to everyone—you let him live. Not because you couldn't kill him. Because you wouldn't. Because your rule was more important than my life."
Izuku set the comic down.
He sat with that for a while.
Jason was wrong about some things. His methods were excessive—the drug lord decapitations, the duffel bag of heads, the general approach of "kill everyone involved in organized crime and sort out the ethics later." That was rage talking. That was the slope Stan had warned about, greased and steep and leading somewhere dark.
But Jason was right about the question. The question that Batman couldn't answer—wouldn't answer—because answering it honestly would require him to acknowledge that his no-kill rule had a body count. That every person the Joker killed after the first escape was, in some moral calculus, a consequence of Batman's choice. Not Batman's fault—the fault was always and forever the Joker's—but Batman's responsibility.
With great power comes great responsibility.
And that responsibility included the responsibility for the consequences of your inaction. The things you chose not to do. The lines you refused to cross, and the people who died on the other side of those lines.
Jason Todd understood that.
Jason Todd was also completely unhinged about thirty percent of the time, which complicated the moral lesson significantly.
Izuku kept reading.
He read Under the Red Hood—the animated movie version too, when Stan produced it—and watched Jason's philosophy play out: Take control of the drug trade. Reduce violence. Establish rules. Not because drug dealing was moral, but because uncontrolled drug dealing was worse, and if someone was going to run the criminal underworld, it might as well be someone with a code.
It was Ozymandias logic applied at street level. Utilitarian. Cold. Effective.
And deeply, fundamentally uncomfortable.
"Jason isn't a hero," Izuku said. "But he's not a villain either. He's... a cautionary tale about what happens when a hero breaks. When the system that was supposed to protect you fails you so completely that you decide to build your own system, consequences be damned."
"And what do you take from him?" Stan asked.
Izuku thought about it.
"Guns," he said.
Stan raised an eyebrow.
"Not—not enthusiastically. Not as a primary tool. But Jason's firearms proficiency is... it's part of what I absorbed, isn't it? When I read about him. Like the martial arts. Like the intelligence."
He reached into the utility belt he'd started wearing under his jacket—a habit that had developed over the past week, because Batman wore his belt at all times and the logic was sound—and pulled out a pencil.
He flipped it between his fingers.
Then he threw it.
The pencil crossed the room in a flat trajectory and embedded itself point-first in the wooden doorframe of the back room, sinking approximately two centimeters into solid oak.
From fifteen meters away.
Without looking.
Izuku stared at the pencil. Then he stared at his hand. Then he stared at Stan.
"Bullseye," he said.
"Yep," Stan said.
"I have Bullseye's aim."
"Among others. But yeah, Bullseye's the headliner in that department."
Izuku's analytical brain was already processing. Bullseye—Lester, sometimes called Benjamin Poindexter, depending on the continuity—was a psychopath. A genuine, clinical, DSM-certifiable psychopath who killed people for money and occasionally for fun and who could turn literally any object into a lethal projectile. He was one of the most dangerous assassins in the Marvel Universe, and his primary "power" wasn't a power at all—it was aim. Perfect, preternatural, impossible aim. The ability to calculate trajectories and angles and velocities instantaneously, to account for wind and gravity and spin, to throw a playing card and make it a weapon.
That ability was now in Izuku's hands.
And alongside it—
He flexed his fingers. Extended his arm. Mimed drawing, aiming, firing.
The muscle memory was there. Jason Todd's firearms expertise. Not just handguns—rifles, shotguns, explosive ordnance, the full arsenal of a man who had been trained by Batman in every weapon and then gone on to specialize in the ones Batman refused to use.
"I know how to use guns," Izuku said quietly. "I know how to use them very well."
"You do."
"I don't have any guns."
"No."
"I'm fourteen."
"Also relevant."
Izuku sat down. His brain was running calculations—not about whether to use firearms, because that question was more complex than pure mathematics could address, but about the capability. About what it meant to have Jason Todd's gun skills and Bullseye's aim and the physical abilities he'd already catalogued.
It meant he could be lethal from any distance with any object.
A pencil in a doorframe from fifteen meters was a parlor trick. With Bullseye's ability, he could—
He stopped that train of thought. Deliberately. Forcefully. Because he could feel the slope under his feet, and he understood now—understood with the visceral, earned understanding of someone who had found a body in an alley—why Stan had warned him about the gravity of the question.
"I need rules," Izuku said. "Clear, explicit, non-negotiable rules about when lethal force is even on the table. Because if I don't have rules—if I leave it to situational judgment—I'll rationalize. Every human being rationalizes. It's what we do. We find reasons for the things we want to do and we dress them up as necessity. And I cannot let that happen."
He pulled out Notebook #14—he was going through notebooks at an alarming rate—and started writing.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT — NON-NEGOTIABLE
1. Lethal force is the LAST resort. Not the second-to-last. Not the backup plan. The LAST RESORT. Every other option must be exhausted first. Every. Single. One.
2. Lethal force is only justified when failure to act will result in the IMMINENT death of an innocent person and no non-lethal alternative exists.
3. The decision to use lethal force must NEVER be driven by anger, frustration, revenge, or convenience. If I'm angry, I am NOT qualified to make the decision. Step back. Breathe. Find another way.
4. I will NEVER enjoy it. The moment I feel satisfaction from taking a life, I hang up the suit. Permanently. No exceptions.
5. Every life I take, I carry. I remember their name. I remember their face. I carry the weight. Forever. Because the weight is the only thing that keeps me human.
6. I will submit myself to judgment. Not the legal system—the legal system is broken, and I'm already operating outside it. But I will maintain a record. A full, honest, unredacted account of every action I take, every decision I make, every life I save and every life I take. And someday, when this is over, I will answer for all of it.
He stared at what he'd written.
Then he added a seventh rule:
7. When in doubt, ask: What would Superman do? If the answer is "he wouldn't do this," then I need a VERY good reason to do it anyway. And "very good" means lives are at stake. Not my comfort. Not my convenience. Not my anger. LIVES.
He closed the notebook.
"Good rules," Stan said. He'd been reading over Izuku's shoulder, which Izuku normally would have found intrusive but which in this case felt appropriate. "Not perfect—no rules are perfect—but good. Honest. Humble enough to acknowledge your own capacity for self-deception, which is the most important thing."
"They're inspired by Steve," Izuku said. "Captain America always had rules of engagement. Even in the war—especially in the war—he had lines he wouldn't cross. He killed enemy soldiers because that was war, and war requires killing, and pretending otherwise is a luxury that gets people killed. But he never killed a surrendering enemy. Never killed a prisoner. Never killed a civilian. And he grieved for every death, even the justified ones."
"Steve Rogers was a good man."
"Steve Rogers was the best man. Not the most powerful. Not the most skilled. The best. And that's what I'm trying to be. Not the most powerful hero. Not the most skilled. The best. In the way that matters."
He read Moon Knight next.
Marc Spector was—complicated. Former Marine. Former CIA operative. Former mercenary. A man who had died in the Egyptian desert and been resurrected by Khonshu, the moon god, as his Fist of Vengeance. A man with dissociative identity disorder—Marc Spector, Steven Grant, Jake Lockley, and sometimes others, multiple personalities sharing a single body, each with their own skills and perspectives and moral frameworks.
Moon Knight fought dirty.
Not "dirty" in the Daredevil sense—Daredevil fought hard, but he fought with the disciplined brutality of a trained martial artist. Moon Knight fought like a man who had been dead and didn't care if he died again. He fought with a savage, unhinged, terrifying intensity that made his opponents freeze not because they were afraid of losing but because they were afraid of what would happen to them when they did lose.
The fighting style integrated into Izuku's existing skill set like a virus. Not replacing what was already there—the Batman precision, the Daredevil fluidity, the Captain America efficiency—but supplementing it. Adding a layer of raw, brutal pragmatism to the technical foundation.
An elbow to the throat. A thumb in the eye. A knee to the groin. The willingness to bite, gouge, headbutt, use the environment—a wall, a fire hydrant, a parked car, a garbage can lid—as a weapon. The understanding that in a real fight, there were no rules, no referees, no points—just survival.
Moon Knight's lesson was simple: When the fight is real, fight real.
Not for sport. Not for show. Not for the cameras. Real. Ugly. Effective.
Izuku absorbed this and filed it under "methods of last resort" alongside Jason Todd's firearms expertise. Tools in the toolkit. Not the first tools you reach for—but there when you need them.
Then, Deathstroke.
Slade Wilson was a villain. Or an anti-hero. Or a mercenary. Or all three, depending on the writer, the era, and how much moral ambiguity the editorial department was comfortable with that month.
What he was, unambiguously and without qualification, was dangerous. Enhanced by a military super-soldier serum that had cranked his physical abilities to superhuman levels, trained in every form of combat known to the modern military-industrial complex, and possessed of a tactical mind that made him—in the assessment of Batman himself—one of the most formidable combatants on the planet.
Izuku didn't absorb Slade's amorality. He didn't absorb the mercenary mindset or the willingness to take contracts or the complicated, deeply unhealthy relationship with his children.
He absorbed the healing factor.
He noticed it when he was reading the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans run—Slade's introduction, the Judas Contract—and felt a warmth spread through his body that was different from the usual absorption sensation. Not knowledge flowing into his brain or skill patterns mapping onto his muscles. Something deeper. Cellular. Biological.
He cut his finger on the edge of a page.
The cut closed in four seconds.
He stared at it.
"Healing factor," he said.
"Deathstroke-level," Stan confirmed. "Not Wolverine—you're not going to regenerate from a skeleton. But accelerated healing. Broken bones in hours instead of weeks. Cuts and bruises in seconds. Poisons and diseases processed and neutralized at an enhanced rate. You're not invulnerable, kid—a bullet will still put you down if it hits something vital. But you'll recover from things that would sideline a normal person for months."
"That's..." Izuku touched the place where the cut had been. Smooth skin. No scar. No mark. "That changes my tactical calculations significantly."
"It should. It also means you can train harder, push further, take hits that would break someone else. Use it wisely. A healing factor is not an excuse to be reckless—ask Wolverine about that sometime, if you ever meet a version of him."
Deadpool.
Izuku wasn't sure what to make of Deadpool.
Wade Wilson was—insane was the clinical term, and for once, the clinical term was entirely accurate. A former Special Forces operative turned mercenary turned experiment turned unkillable, fourth-wall-breaking, chimichanga-obsessed force of chaos who fought, killed, joked, and occasionally saved the world with equal enthusiasm and zero consistency.
Deadpool was not a role model.
But Deadpool had one ability—beyond the healing factor, beyond the combat skills, beyond the reality-bending meta-awareness—that Izuku found genuinely, practically useful.
Improvisation.
Deadpool could use anything as a weapon. Not in the Bullseye sense of "I can throw any object with lethal accuracy"—though he could do that too—but in the broader sense of "I can look at any situation, no matter how chaotic, and find an advantage." A rubber chicken. A taco. A street sign. A confused bystander. The fourth wall itself. Everything was a tool. Everything was a resource. Nothing was useless, nothing was irrelevant, nothing was "not a weapon" if you were creative enough and desperate enough and crazy enough to use it.
Izuku didn't absorb Deadpool's insanity. He didn't start hearing voices or breaking the fourth wall or developing an unhealthy obsession with Mexican food. But he absorbed the mindset—the creative, lateral, utterly unorthodox approach to problem-solving that said: There is always a solution. It might not be elegant. It might not be dignified. It might involve using a fish as a bludgeoning weapon. But it exists, and you WILL find it.
Combined with Reed Richards' creativity, Tony Stark's intuition, and Doom's refusal to accept limitations, Deadpool's improvisation gave Izuku's problem-solving arsenal a final, crucial element: the willingness to be ridiculous. To try things that no sane person would try. To look at a situation that appeared impossible and say: "Okay, but what if I did something completely stupid and it worked?"
"I'm going to be a very strange hero," Izuku said, closing the last Deadpool trade.
"The best ones are," Stan said.
He sat in the shop for a long time after that, surrounded by the stories of people who lived on the line. Anti-heroes. Vigilantes. Morally complex individuals who did terrible things for reasons that ranged from righteous to reprehensible.
He thought about Elektra—assassin, lover of Matt Murdock, a woman who had been shaped by violence and chose violence as her primary language but who was, beneath the killing, still human. Still capable of love and sacrifice and choice.
He thought about Wolverine—the berserker, the animal, the man who had claws that could cut through anything and a rage that could burn through everything and who still, despite all of it, chose to teach children. Who became a professor at Xavier's school. Who channeled the worst parts of himself into protecting the most vulnerable.
He thought about the Punisher—Frank Castle, the cautionary tale, the man who had crossed the line and kept going and couldn't come back. Who was effective, absolutely—whose methods worked, in the narrow, tactical sense of "criminals he killed didn't reoffend"—but who had lost something essential in the process. Something that couldn't be regained. Something that made him less than what he'd been before, even as he became more dangerous.
"Frank is what happens when you follow the logic without the heart," Izuku said. "He's the endpoint of pure utilitarianism. If the only thing that matters is reducing crime, then killing criminals is the most efficient solution. But the only thing that matters isn't reducing crime. What matters is building a world where crime isn't necessary. Where the conditions that create criminals are addressed at the root. And you can't build that world with a gun."
"You can't build it without one, either," Stan said. "Not always. Not in the real world."
"No," Izuku agreed. "Not always. But you can make sure the gun is the last thing you reach for. And you can make sure you never forget what it costs to use it."
He stood up. He gathered his notebooks—now numbering fifteen and sixteen, both full—and tucked them into his bag alongside the new trade paperbacks Stan had given him.
"Stan."
"Yeah, kid?"
"Thank you. For—for not sugarcoating this. For not pretending that heroism is simple, or clean, or... or painless. For showing me the whole picture. The heroes and the anti-heroes. The ideals and the compromises."
Stan smiled. It wasn't the big grin—not the sunrise grin, not the "I know something you don't" grin. It was smaller. Sadder. The smile of a man who had told a lot of stories and knew that the best ones always hurt.
"Kid, let me tell you something." He leaned on the counter. "I spent my whole career—my whole existence, you could say—telling stories about heroes. And the thing I learned is that the best heroes aren't the ones who never struggle with the hard questions. They're the ones who struggle with them every day and keep going anyway. Spider-Man doesn't stop being Spider-Man because the world is unfair. Superman doesn't stop being Superman because he can't save everyone. And you—" He pointed at Izuku. "You don't stop being a hero because the line is blurry. You just make sure you know where it is. And you carry the weight of every time you have to get near it."
"I will," Izuku said.
"I know you will." Stan's grin came back—the real one, the big one. "Now get out of here. You've got a city to protect."
Izuku left the shop.
He stood on Nikaido Street and breathed in the evening air—or morning air, or afternoon air; time was still funny, though less funny than it had been, as though the universe were slowly reconciling his experiences in the shop with the normal flow of causality.
He felt different. Again. Not the bright, expansive, everything-is-possible feeling of the first visit, when he'd read Superman and Spider-Man and discovered that heroism was a choice rather than a credential. Not the excited, empowered feeling of the second visit, when he'd discovered his abilities and started building his suit and felt like the future was an open door.
This was heavier. Darker. More real.
He was a hero who was willing to kill.
He hated that about himself. Hated it with a passion that surprised him, because he'd expected the decision to bring clarity, and instead it had brought weight. A stone in his chest that hadn't been there before, cold and hard and permanent.
But the alternative was worse.
The alternative was a dead boy named Hiro and a man with glowing hands who would have killed again. The alternative was the Joker escaping Arkham for the hundredth time, and the hundredth body, and the hundredth funeral that didn't need to happen. The alternative was a world where heroes stood on their principles while innocent people bled out in alleys and convenience store kids died on smoke breaks.
Izuku would not be that hero.
He would be Superman when he could. Spider-Man when he could. Batman when he could. He would be kind and compassionate and hopeful and good, as good as he could manage, as good as anyone could manage in a world that seemed designed to grind goodness into dust.
And when he couldn't—when the one percent scenario materialized, when the monster couldn't be stopped any other way, when the line between saving lives and preserving his own moral comfort demanded a choice—
He would choose the lives.
Every time.
And he would carry the cost.
Every time.
He walked home. His bag was heavy with stories. His heart was heavy with understanding. His body hummed with abilities that spanned two fictional universes—the strength of Spider-Man, the skills of Batman, the intelligence of five of fiction's greatest minds, the aim of Bullseye, the gun skills of the Red Hood, the dirty fighting of Moon Knight, the healing factor of Deathstroke, and the impossible, ridiculous, creative improvisation of Deadpool.
He was fourteen years old.
He was Quirkless.
He was the most dangerous person in Musutafu, and no one knew it.
His phone buzzed. His mother: Dinner's ready! I made your favorite!
He smiled—and the smile was real, and warm, and it reached his eyes, because the darkness in him hadn't killed the light. That was important. That was maybe the most important thing. The darkness was there—it would always be there now, the knowledge of the line and the willingness to approach it—but the light was there too. Superman's light. Spider-Man's light. The light of a thousand stories about people who looked at the worst of the world and chose to believe in the best.
Coming home now, Mom. Love you.
He walked. The sun set. The city darkened around him, and somewhere in that darkness, someone needed help.
Tomorrow night, he'd find them.
He paused at the corner of his street.
Turned his hand over. Looked at his palm.
Closed it into a fist.
Opened it again.
The cut from the comic book page was gone. No scar. No mark. Just smooth, unblemished skin and the faint warmth of a healing factor that would knit his body back together no matter how many times the world tried to tear it apart.
He thought about Bruce Wayne, standing over his parents' bodies, making a vow.
He thought about Peter Parker, holding his uncle, hearing words that would define his life.
He thought about Clark Kent, standing in a field in Kansas, looking up at a sky that was not his birthright but was his home.
He thought about Hiro. Sixteen. Name tag. Smoke break.
"I couldn't save you," Izuku whispered. "I'm sorry. I'll carry you. I promise."
Then, quieter:
"But I'll save the next one. And the one after that. And the one after that. And I'll do whatever it takes—whatever it takes—to make sure there are fewer people to mourn and more people to protect."
He went home.
He ate katsudon.
He hugged his mother.
He went to bed.
He did not sleep well.
That was okay. Heroes rarely did.
In the comic shop on Nikaido Street, Stan sat alone behind his counter, surrounded by stories, and thought about the boy who was becoming something new. Something that his worlds—both of his worlds, Marvel and DC, the twin pillars of his imagination—had never quite produced.
Not a Superman. Not a Batman. Not a Spider-Man.
Something that contained all of them and compromised none of them and was, in the end, something entirely its own.
A hero who believed in hope and was prepared for the worst.
A hero who would save your life and cry about it later.
A hero who would kill you if he had to and hate himself for it forever.
A hero who was, above all else, honest—honest about the costs, honest about the compromises, honest about the beautiful, terrible, impossible calculus of trying to protect a world that didn't always want to be protected.
"You're gonna be something special, kid," Stan said to the empty shop.
He looked at the ceiling—or through it, at a sky that existed in every universe and none of them.
"Something really special."
He reached for his coffee.
It was cold.
He drank it anyway.
"Excelsior," he said.
END OF CHAPTER 3
Next time: Izuku hits the streets for real. Eraserhead finds a vigilante who doesn't register on any database. Bakugo Katsuki encounters the new Izuku for the first time—and the experience is deeply, profoundly unsettling. And somewhere in the shadows of Musutafu, a certain Hero Killer hears about a Quirkless boy who's doing what he's always said heroes should do.
Stain has... opinions.