Justice is a word people throw around like it actually means something.
Ren Asano had been thinking about this for the better part of third period, chin propped against his fist, eyes half-lidded, watching Tanaka-sensei drone on about the societal impact of quirks on modern legislature.
The irony was almost too perfect. Here was a man, five foot nothing with sweat patches blooming under his arms and a voice like a door that needed oiling, lecturing thirty teenagers about how the law adapted to protect everyone equally in a world where some people could literally shoot fire from their hands and others could turn invisible.
Equally.
Right.
Ren shifted in his seat and the chair groaned under him. Every piece of furniture in Aldera Junior High groaned when he sat in it because whoever designed school desks did not have a fourteen-year-old standing six foot two in mind. Early growth spurt, the doctor had told his parents when he shot past everyone in his class over a single summer.
His mom had teared up about it because she teared up about everything. His dad had looked him up and down and said, "Well. Guess we're buying new clothes again," in the same tone he used for weather updates.
"...and so the Hero Public Safety Commission was established to ensure that the application of quirks in law enforcement was regulated, transparent, and fair to all citizens regardless of..."
Ren stopped listening.
Heroes got paid based on popularity. Villains got sentences based on how much media coverage their arrest generated.
A guy with a flashy quirk who saved one person on camera got more recognition than some underground hero who'd been pulling people out of collapsed buildings for twenty years with zero fanfare. The law was just the rulebook that whoever happened to be in power wrote to keep themselves there. Change the regime, change the rules. What was illegal yesterday was legal today. What was heroic last year was vigilantism this year.
The only justice that actually meant something was the kind that came from a single person deciding what was right and having the spine to enforce it with their own two hands. Everything else was theatre.
The bell rang. Chairs scraped. Ren stood up and the movement pulled a few glances his way. Hard not to when you towered over most of your classmates by a solid head.
"Oi, Deku!"
Right on schedule.
Ren didn't bother turning around. He could map the entire interaction without looking. Bakugo crowding Midoriya's desk, Midoriya shrinking into himself, the two extras flanking Bakugo like they were getting paid to stand there (they weren't, they were just that desperate for proximity to someone relevant), and the rest of the class pretending they couldn't see it because pretending was easier.
He slung his bag over one shoulder and headed for the door. Passing through Bakugo's orbit, he caught a fragment of "...useless Deku, you really think you can..." and kept moving. Midoriya's eyes flickered to him for half a second. That hopeful, desperate little look that said *please* without making a sound.
Ren glanced at him. Looked through him, really. Then he walked out.
If Midoriya wanted it to stop, Midoriya would have to be the one to stop it.
Bakugo had tried him once. Exactly once. Back in first year, riding the high of being the strongest kid in every room he'd ever walked into, he'd shoulder-checked Ren in the hallway and barked something about watching where he was going. Ren had looked down at him, because he'd already been taller by then, and said nothing, no expression at all just the blank, patient stare you'd give a traffic light that was taking too long to change.
Bakugo had practically vibrated with the need to escalate. Palms crackling, jaw tight, the whole performance. But Ren just stood there, and something about the complete vacuum where a reaction should've been threw Bakugo off his rhythm. You couldn't bully someone who didn't register the attempt. It was like screaming at a wall, the wall will never care and eventually you just felt stupid for trying.
After that, Bakugo left him alone. They had an understanding. Bakugo would be loud somewhere else, and Ren would continue not thinking about him.
It helped that Ren wasn't quirkless. If he had been, Bakugo probably would've forced the issue just on principle. But Ren's quirk, Regeneration, was boring enough to not register as a threat and functional enough to not be worth mocking. He healed fast. About a hundred times faster than a normal person. A broken bone that'd take weeks for anyone else sorted itself out in roughly three hours. Cuts closed in minutes. Bruises faded before the school day ended.
Nothing flashy. Nothing that would make highlight reels or get him trending online. But it meant Ren could eat a hit from basically anyone and be fine by dinner.
---
His mom was already in the kitchen when he got home, which meant she'd either left work early or hadn't gone in at all. Asano Yui operated on a frequency that Ren had never fully figured out. Mid-forties, soft face, the kind of woman who could communicate an entire emotional essay through the way she set a plate down. Her love language was food, her secondary love language was worrying about whether you'd eaten enough of the food, and her tertiary love language was standing in the doorway watching you eat and asking if it was too salty even though it was never too salty.
She had a quirk that let her slightly adjust the temperature of anything she touched. Completely useless in combat. Absolutely god-tier for cooking. Every meal that came out of her kitchen was served at the exact perfect temperature, and Ren had never once in his life experienced a cold centre in a piece of meat.
"Ren! How was school?"
"Educational."
"That's not an answer."
"It's technically an answer."
She gave him the look. The *mom* look that somehow transcended language and culture, the one that said *I love you but I will wait here until you give me something real*. He gave her a half-smile, which was the most she was getting, and dropped his bag by the door.
"It was fine, Mom. Tanaka-sensei talked about hero legislation for an hour and Bakugo yelled at someone."
"That Bakugo boy." She shook her head, turning back to the stove. "His mother came into the clinic last week. Loud woman. I could hear her from two rooms over. Now I understand where he gets it."
His mom worked part-time at a physiotherapy clinic downtown. She didn't talk about patients by name, ever, but she had a habit of describing them in enough detail that Ren could usually figure out who she meant.
He found it hilarious.
She thought she was being discreet.
"Your father called. He'll be late.
Something about a claim that went sideways."
"When do claims not go sideways?"
"That's what I said." She smiled over her shoulder. "But I made enough for three, so he can heat his up when he gets home. Sit."
Ren sat. The kitchen table was the centre of the Asano household in a way that the living room never managed to be. It was where his mom did her crosswords in the morning, where his dad spread out paperwork he'd brought home, where Ren had done homework as a kid. The wood was scratched and stained in places, one leg was slightly shorter than the others so it rocked if you leaned on it wrong, and his mom had been talking about replacing it for three years without ever actually doing it.
She set the katsudon down in front of him. Perfect temperature, obviously.
"Mom."
"Hm?"
"I'm applying to hero schools."
Mom just kept wiping down the counter with that particular rhythm she had, the one that meant she was processing. In a world where half the kids in the country wanted to be heroes, this wasn't exactly a shocking announcement. It was more like telling your parents you wanted to go into medicine or engineering. Respected career path, good money, high risk. The kind of thing parents supported with a knot in their stomach.
"UA?" she asked.
"Probably. Maybe Shiketsu too, as a backup."
"You'd have to move to Osaka for Shiketsu."
"I know."
She sat down across from him, not eating yet, just watching him with that expression she got when she was trying to figure out how to say something careful without making it sound careful. "Your quirk is good for it. The regeneration. That's a real advantage in the field."
"Yeah."
"But hero work is dangerous, Ren. Even with your quirk."
"I know."
"Do you, though?" She leaned forward a little. "Because knowing it as a fact and knowing it as a mother watching her son walk into it are two very different things."
He put his chopsticks down. Looked at her properly. "I'm not doing it for the fame or the ranking or any of that stuff. I want to be a hero because heroes get to decide what justice looks like in real time. Not after the fact, not through paperwork, not filtered through six committees. A hero standing in front of someone right now gets to choose what's right and back it up. That's what I want."
His mom studied him for a long moment. "That's a very intense reason for a fourteen-year-old."
"I'm a very intense fourteen-year-old."
She laughed at that. You sound like your father. He said something almost exactly like that when he told his parents he was going into insurance instead of heroics."
"Dad considered being a hero?"
"For about five minutes when he was twelve. Then he decided the paperwork was worse than villain fights and went the other direction entirely." She picked up her chopsticks. "Eat your food before it gets cold."
It wouldn't get cold. She'd literally touched it. But he ate anyway.
His dad got home around eight, loosening his tie in the hallway with the weary satisfaction of a man who'd survived another day of arguing about property damage assessments. Asano Kenji was six foot one, which meant Ren had officially passed him by an inch sometime last month, and neither of them had acknowledged this fact out loud. It existed as a silent tension in every room they stood in together.
His dad had a quirk too. Minor spatial awareness. He could sense the exact dimensions of any room he was standing in and the precise location of every object in it, down to the centimetre. Absolutely useless for anything except knowing when someone had moved his stuff, which made him the most annoying person in the house to steal snacks around.
"Your son wants to be a hero," his mom said from the kitchen.
"My son?" His dad hung up his jacket. "When he does something impressive he's your son. When he's being dramatic he's mine?"
"It's not dramatic," Ren called from the couch.
His dad walked in, saw him sprawled out, and sat in the armchair opposite. "Hero school, huh."
"Yeah."
"UA?"
"Probably."
"Their acceptance rate is something like one in three hundred."
"Good. I'd be bored if it was easy."
His dad gave him a look. like he was running internal calculations, weighing variables, assessing risk. The insurance brain never turned off. "Your regeneration gives you a real edge in the physical exam. You can push harder than anyone else because the cost of failure is three hours of healing instead of three months. That's a genuine tactical advantage if you use it right."
"I know."
"But it also means you might develop a habit of tanking hits instead of avoiding them, and there are things in this world that'll put you down faster than your quirk can bring you back."
"I know that too."
His dad looked at him for another few seconds, then nodded once. "Alright. We'll look at prep courses this weekend. Your mother's already worried, so do her a favour and don't get yourself killed."
"I'll do my best."
"That's not a promise."
"Best I've got."
His dad almost smiled. The man rationed his smiles like they were a limited resource, and Ren had inherited that exact trait, which his mother found endlessly frustrating about both of them.
---
Later. Past midnight. The house was dead quiet.
Ren was on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. Not insomnia. He just liked the way his brain ran differently when the noise of the day wasn't pressing in on it. The ceiling had a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a boot, and he'd been staring at it long enough that it was starting to look like something else entirely.
The pain hit without warning.
One second he was staring at the ceiling. The next, every nerve in his body lit up like someone had plugged him into a wall socket. His skull felt like it was splitting from the inside. He couldn't breathe, couldn't move, his back arched off the mattress and his fingers clawed at the sheets and his mouth was open but nothing came out because the agony was too complete for something as small as a scream.
Then the memories came.
Not his memories. They hit in fragments, out of order, a whole life smashing through his skull in jagged pieces.
*A classroom. Chalk dust. Kids' laughter. A feeling of purpose so deep it was almost physical.*
*Then a girl's wrists. Long sleeves pushed up. Yellow-green bruises fading into skin that was too young to look that tired.*
*Forms. Paperwork. A CPS office with fluorescent lighting that buzzed.*
*A name: police superintendent. Twenty-three years on the force. Commendations on the wall. Golfing with the district judge. Poker with the deputy mayor.*
The fragments started stitching themselves together as they settled, and the full picture that formed was worse than any of the individual pieces.
*A middle school literature teacher. Late twenties. Average in every visible way. He loved his job. He noticed the bruises. He reported it through every channel they told you to use. Forms, administration, counselor, CPS. Everything by the book.*
*The girl's father was the superintendent. Locally untouchable.*
*His CPS report was marked "unsubstantiated" in forty-eight hours. No home visit. No interview. The school counselor who'd initially backed him suddenly couldn't recall the details. Administration sat him down with three people who explained, very calmly, that the father was a pillar of the community, and that continuing would be "counterproductive."*
*He continued.*
*A journalist ran the story. It stayed live for four hours before the editor killed it. The superintendent's lawyer sent a defamation notice. The school board terminated his contract. When he filed a second CPS report, a different caseworker told him repeated unsubstantiated claims could be considered harassment.*
*He kept going anyway. Blog. Real name. All the documentation, all the evidence, posted publicly because he thought transparency would protect him.*
*Anonymous commenters called him a predator projecting his own guilt. A parents' group petitioned to put him on a watchlist. The superintendent held a press event, flanked by his wife and his daughter, the actual victim, standing there in long sleeves with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and he talked about how grateful he was for the community's support during "this difficult period." His voice cracked at exactly the right moment. People in the crowd wiped their eyes.*
*Lost the teaching license. Lost the apartment. Family stopped answering. His mother called once, crying, telling him to let it go, that some things were just bigger than one person.*
*Seven months after the first report, they found him dead in a motel room. Overdose. The investigation lasted two days. The blog was taken down for terms of service violations.*
*The girl stayed in that house.*
*Maybe it was the pills. Maybe it wasn't. He'd made enough enemies by the end that both options were equally likely, and nobody with the power to find out cared enough to try.*
*His last thought, the very last one: I did everything they told me to do. I was just. I was fair. I followed every rule. And they erased me for it.*
Ren came back to himself gasping on sweat-soaked sheets.
His hands were trembling. The ceiling was still there, same stain, same cracks, but everything behind his eyes had changed. The memories settled into his mind alongside his own, not fighting for space but finding it, and the two lives didn't clash because they didn't need to. The man had tried to find justice inside the rules. The rules ate him alive. Ren had always known that was how it worked. Now he had a dead man's receipts to prove it.
He was still Ren. Still the kid who sat at that scratched-up kitchen table with his parents a few hours ago.
He sat up and ran a hand through his hair, breathing hard. His heart was hammering but already slowing down. Regeneration working on the physiological stress, pulling him back to baseline whether he wanted it to or not.
Then the second wave came.
Not pain this time. Information. Cold and structured, cracked open directly inside his skull. He saw a courtroom. Not a real one. Something more absolute than any physical space. Wooden benches, a judge's podium, evidence arranged in perfect order. A space where guilt and innocence weren't matters of opinion but verdicts enforced by something deeper than any human law.
*Deadly Sentencing.*
The name arrived fully formed, and with it came the ability itself. Not a locked door. Not a promise of future power. The full Domain Expansion, downloaded into him like muscle memory for a body that had never performed the motion. He could feel it sitting there, ready, a courtroom that existed as concept more than architecture. A bounded space of total adjudication where guilt and innocence weren't opinions but verdicts enforced by something deeper than human law.
He could use it. He knew that with absolute certainty. If he pushed right now, the domain would open.
What he couldn't do was understand it. The domain had rules, procedures, conditions, an entire legal framework baked into its structure, and he had access to maybe a tenth of that knowledge. Higuruma had been a genius lawyer, intellect on par or surpassing Satoru Gojo. Higuruma spent decades in courtrooms before awakening this technique. The domain was an extension of a lifetime of legal mastery.
Ren was a fourteen-year-old who'd never read a statute in his life. He had the weapon but not the manual. Using it would be like handing a fighter jet to someone who'd never seen a cockpit. The jet would fly. The landing was the problem.
He knew all of this because the template told him where it came from. One percent of a man named Higuruma Hiromi.
Ren blinked. He knew that name.
Not from this life. From the other one. From the memories of a man who'd spent his evenings watching anime after grading papers, who'd read manga on his phone during lunch breaks because fiction was easier to stomach than reality.
Higuruma Hiromi. Jujutsu Kaisen. The lawyer who awakened a Domain Expansion out of pure obsession with justice, who built his entire cursed technique around the courtroom he'd spent his life in.
And that was the good anime. The actually good one. Not the one about the crying kid with the green hair.
He could feel the cursed energy now. Barely. A second pulse layered under his actual heartbeat, thin and fragile, like a trickle of water running through a cracked pipe. The template's arrival had broken open some kind of reservoir inside him. What was in there was almost nothing. But it existed where it hadn't before.
One percent. A fully operational Domain Expansion he could deploy but barely comprehend, and roughly enough cursed energy to use it once before collapsing.
Ten seconds passed.
The third wave hit, and this one came from somewhere inside him.
Not another person's memories. Not template data. Something that had been sitting at the front of his brain his entire life, quiet and unrecognized, waiting. The trickle of cursed energy from the template reached it and it woke up.
*Decree.*
No instruction manual. No courtroom visualization. No sense of readiness. Where the Domain Expansion had arrived fully formed and operational, this was the opposite. Raw instinct with no interface.
A gut-level certainty that he could look at something and assign it weight, decide its significance, and reality would shift. A fraction of a degree in whatever direction his judgment pointed. But he had no idea how to reach for it on purpose.
He focused on his right hand. Flexed his fingers. Thought, with genuine conviction, *this hand matters*, and felt something warm settle into his fist.
A density that hadn't been there a second ago, like the muscles had tightened and the bones had hardened just slightly.
He let the thought go. The warmth went with it. He tried to do it again. Nothing happened. Whatever he'd done the first time, he couldn't replicate it consciously.
His own technique and he couldn't even turn it on twice in a row. Meanwhile Higuruma's Domain Expansion was sitting right there, ready to deploy, and he didn't know enough about law to use it without embarrassing himself. Beautiful.
Ren lay back down and stared at the ceiling.
Two sets of memories. Two lives. And between them, a recognition that had been building since the first fragment hit.
He'd known this world had heroes and villains. He'd grown up in it.
That was just reality. But the other him, the teacher, the man from a world with no quirks, he'd watched this reality as a show. My Hero Academia.
Ren had his memories of it. Season one, vaguely. The broad strokes. All Might, One For All, Bakugo, Midoriya, UA.
He'd dropped it after season one. The main character cried too much and the fandom was doing unspeakable things on the internet.
But that was an anime. Written by someone in a world without quirks, about a version of this world that may or may not match the one Ren had actually grown up in.
His Bakugo was real. His UA was real. Whether the events some mangaka wrote about would actually play out the way they did on screen was a completely different question. He couldn't treat a season of television as a prophecy. His world wasn't a script. The people in it weren't characters.
Whatever meta knowledge he had was surface-level and probably unreliable. Not worth building a strategy around.
Jujutsu Kaisen, though. Now that was a good anime and manga. The teacher had kept up with that one all the way through. And the fact that the Higuruma template came from JJK and not from this world raised questions Ren didn't have answers for yet. Cursed energy didn't exist in My Hero Academia. Domains didn't exist here. He had a power system from a completely different fiction sitting inside him alongside a quirk, and he had no idea what the rules were.
He'd figure it out later.
Ren pulled the blanket up. The cursed energy trickled faintly underneath his skin, new and thin. The Higuruma template sat in his mind, a courtroom he could open but barely navigate once inside. Decree hummed somewhere at the front of his skull, shapeless, patient, the opposite problem: his own power that he couldn't even activate on command yet. And underneath all of that, Regeneration kept doing what it did, quietly knitting together whatever the awakening had torn up inside him.
One percent. A dead man's memories. A domain he could open but not properly run. A technique he owned but couldn't control. A world that might or might not follow a script he barely remembered.
The man who died for doing the right thing, his last thought had been that justice failed him.
Ren's last thought before sleep was different.
*Justice didn't fail you. Other people's justice did. Mine won't.*
He smiled to himself in the dark. It wasn't a nice smile.
Then he went to sleep.
---
How was chapter 1?
Leave a comment if you enjoyed it.
Justice is a word people throw around like it actually means something.
Ren Asano had been thinking about this for the better part of third period, chin propped against his fist, eyes half-lidded, watching Tanaka-sensei drone on about the societal impact of quirks on modern legislature.
The irony was almost too perfect. Here was a man, five foot nothing with sweat patches blooming under his arms and a voice like a door that needed oiling, lecturing thirty teenagers about how the law adapted to protect everyone equally in a world where some people could literally shoot fire from their hands and others could turn invisible.
Equally.
Right.
Ren shifted in his seat and the chair groaned under him. Every piece of furniture in Aldera Junior High groaned when he sat in it because whoever designed school desks did not have a fourteen-year-old standing six foot two in mind. Early growth spurt, the doctor had told his parents when he shot past everyone in his class over a single summer.
His mom had teared up about it because she teared up about everything. His dad had looked him up and down and said, "Well. Guess we're buying new clothes again," in the same tone he used for weather updates.
"...and so the Hero Public Safety Commission was established to ensure that the application of quirks in law enforcement was regulated, transparent, and fair to all citizens regardless of..."
Ren stopped listening.
Heroes got paid based on popularity. Villains got sentences based on how much media coverage their arrest generated.
A guy with a flashy quirk who saved one person on camera got more recognition than some underground hero who'd been pulling people out of collapsed buildings for twenty years with zero fanfare. The law was just the rulebook that whoever happened to be in power wrote to keep themselves there. Change the regime, change the rules. What was illegal yesterday was legal today. What was heroic last year was vigilantism this year.
The only justice that actually meant something was the kind that came from a single person deciding what was right and having the spine to enforce it with their own two hands. Everything else was theatre.
The bell rang. Chairs scraped. Ren stood up and the movement pulled a few glances his way. Hard not to when you towered over most of your classmates by a solid head.
"Oi, Deku!"
Right on schedule.
Ren didn't bother turning around. He could map the entire interaction without looking. Bakugo crowding Midoriya's desk, Midoriya shrinking into himself, the two extras flanking Bakugo like they were getting paid to stand there (they weren't, they were just that desperate for proximity to someone relevant), and the rest of the class pretending they couldn't see it because pretending was easier.
He slung his bag over one shoulder and headed for the door. Passing through Bakugo's orbit, he caught a fragment of "...useless Deku, you really think you can..." and kept moving. Midoriya's eyes flickered to him for half a second. That hopeful, desperate little look that said *please* without making a sound.
Ren glanced at him. Looked through him, really. Then he walked out.
If Midoriya wanted it to stop, Midoriya would have to be the one to stop it.
Bakugo had tried him once. Exactly once. Back in first year, riding the high of being the strongest kid in every room he'd ever walked into, he'd shoulder-checked Ren in the hallway and barked something about watching where he was going. Ren had looked down at him, because he'd already been taller by then, and said nothing, no expression at all just the blank, patient stare you'd give a traffic light that was taking too long to change.
Bakugo had practically vibrated with the need to escalate. Palms crackling, jaw tight, the whole performance. But Ren just stood there, and something about the complete vacuum where a reaction should've been threw Bakugo off his rhythm. You couldn't bully someone who didn't register the attempt. It was like screaming at a wall, the wall will never care and eventually you just felt stupid for trying.
After that, Bakugo left him alone. They had an understanding. Bakugo would be loud somewhere else, and Ren would continue not thinking about him.
It helped that Ren wasn't quirkless. If he had been, Bakugo probably would've forced the issue just on principle. But Ren's quirk, Regeneration, was boring enough to not register as a threat and functional enough to not be worth mocking. He healed fast. About a hundred times faster than a normal person. A broken bone that'd take weeks for anyone else sorted itself out in roughly three hours. Cuts closed in minutes. Bruises faded before the school day ended.
Nothing flashy. Nothing that would make highlight reels or get him trending online. But it meant Ren could eat a hit from basically anyone and be fine by dinner.
---
His mom was already in the kitchen when he got home, which meant she'd either left work early or hadn't gone in at all. Asano Yui operated on a frequency that Ren had never fully figured out. Mid-forties, soft face, the kind of woman who could communicate an entire emotional essay through the way she set a plate down. Her love language was food, her secondary love language was worrying about whether you'd eaten enough of the food, and her tertiary love language was standing in the doorway watching you eat and asking if it was too salty even though it was never too salty.
She had a quirk that let her slightly adjust the temperature of anything she touched. Completely useless in combat. Absolutely god-tier for cooking. Every meal that came out of her kitchen was served at the exact perfect temperature, and Ren had never once in his life experienced a cold centre in a piece of meat.
"Ren! How was school?"
"Educational."
"That's not an answer."
"It's technically an answer."
She gave him the look. The *mom* look that somehow transcended language and culture, the one that said *I love you but I will wait here until you give me something real*. He gave her a half-smile, which was the most she was getting, and dropped his bag by the door.
"It was fine, Mom. Tanaka-sensei talked about hero legislation for an hour and Bakugo yelled at someone."
"That Bakugo boy." She shook her head, turning back to the stove. "His mother came into the clinic last week. Loud woman. I could hear her from two rooms over. Now I understand where he gets it."
His mom worked part-time at a physiotherapy clinic downtown. She didn't talk about patients by name, ever, but she had a habit of describing them in enough detail that Ren could usually figure out who she meant.
He found it hilarious.
She thought she was being discreet.
"Your father called. He'll be late.
Something about a claim that went sideways."
"When do claims not go sideways?"
"That's what I said." She smiled over her shoulder. "But I made enough for three, so he can heat his up when he gets home. Sit."
Ren sat. The kitchen table was the centre of the Asano household in a way that the living room never managed to be. It was where his mom did her crosswords in the morning, where his dad spread out paperwork he'd brought home, where Ren had done homework as a kid. The wood was scratched and stained in places, one leg was slightly shorter than the others so it rocked if you leaned on it wrong, and his mom had been talking about replacing it for three years without ever actually doing it.
She set the katsudon down in front of him. Perfect temperature, obviously.
"Mom."
"Hm?"
"I'm applying to hero schools."
Mom just kept wiping down the counter with that particular rhythm she had, the one that meant she was processing. In a world where half the kids in the country wanted to be heroes, this wasn't exactly a shocking announcement. It was more like telling your parents you wanted to go into medicine or engineering. Respected career path, good money, high risk. The kind of thing parents supported with a knot in their stomach.
"UA?" she asked.
"Probably. Maybe Shiketsu too, as a backup."
"You'd have to move to Osaka for Shiketsu."
"I know."
She sat down across from him, not eating yet, just watching him with that expression she got when she was trying to figure out how to say something careful without making it sound careful. "Your quirk is good for it. The regeneration. That's a real advantage in the field."
"Yeah."
"But hero work is dangerous, Ren. Even with your quirk."
"I know."
"Do you, though?" She leaned forward a little. "Because knowing it as a fact and knowing it as a mother watching her son walk into it are two very different things."
He put his chopsticks down. Looked at her properly. "I'm not doing it for the fame or the ranking or any of that stuff. I want to be a hero because heroes get to decide what justice looks like in real time. Not after the fact, not through paperwork, not filtered through six committees. A hero standing in front of someone right now gets to choose what's right and back it up. That's what I want."
His mom studied him for a long moment. "That's a very intense reason for a fourteen-year-old."
"I'm a very intense fourteen-year-old."
She laughed at that. You sound like your father. He said something almost exactly like that when he told his parents he was going into insurance instead of heroics."
"Dad considered being a hero?"
"For about five minutes when he was twelve. Then he decided the paperwork was worse than villain fights and went the other direction entirely." She picked up her chopsticks. "Eat your food before it gets cold."
It wouldn't get cold. She'd literally touched it. But he ate anyway.
His dad got home around eight, loosening his tie in the hallway with the weary satisfaction of a man who'd survived another day of arguing about property damage assessments. Asano Kenji was six foot one, which meant Ren had officially passed him by an inch sometime last month, and neither of them had acknowledged this fact out loud. It existed as a silent tension in every room they stood in together.
His dad had a quirk too. Minor spatial awareness. He could sense the exact dimensions of any room he was standing in and the precise location of every object in it, down to the centimetre. Absolutely useless for anything except knowing when someone had moved his stuff, which made him the most annoying person in the house to steal snacks around.
"Your son wants to be a hero," his mom said from the kitchen.
"My son?" His dad hung up his jacket. "When he does something impressive he's your son. When he's being dramatic he's mine?"
"It's not dramatic," Ren called from the couch.
His dad walked in, saw him sprawled out, and sat in the armchair opposite. "Hero school, huh."
"Yeah."
"UA?"
"Probably."
"Their acceptance rate is something like one in three hundred."
"Good. I'd be bored if it was easy."
His dad gave him a look. like he was running internal calculations, weighing variables, assessing risk. The insurance brain never turned off. "Your regeneration gives you a real edge in the physical exam. You can push harder than anyone else because the cost of failure is three hours of healing instead of three months. That's a genuine tactical advantage if you use it right."
"I know."
"But it also means you might develop a habit of tanking hits instead of avoiding them, and there are things in this world that'll put you down faster than your quirk can bring you back."
"I know that too."
His dad looked at him for another few seconds, then nodded once. "Alright. We'll look at prep courses this weekend. Your mother's already worried, so do her a favour and don't get yourself killed."
"I'll do my best."
"That's not a promise."
"Best I've got."
His dad almost smiled. The man rationed his smiles like they were a limited resource, and Ren had inherited that exact trait, which his mother found endlessly frustrating about both of them.
---
Later. Past midnight. The house was dead quiet.
Ren was on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. Not insomnia. He just liked the way his brain ran differently when the noise of the day wasn't pressing in on it. The ceiling had a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a boot, and he'd been staring at it long enough that it was starting to look like something else entirely.
The pain hit without warning.
One second he was staring at the ceiling. The next, every nerve in his body lit up like someone had plugged him into a wall socket. His skull felt like it was splitting from the inside. He couldn't breathe, couldn't move, his back arched off the mattress and his fingers clawed at the sheets and his mouth was open but nothing came out because the agony was too complete for something as small as a scream.
Then the memories came.
Not his memories. They hit in fragments, out of order, a whole life smashing through his skull in jagged pieces.
*A classroom. Chalk dust. Kids' laughter. A feeling of purpose so deep it was almost physical.*
*Then a girl's wrists. Long sleeves pushed up. Yellow-green bruises fading into skin that was too young to look that tired.*
*Forms. Paperwork. A CPS office with fluorescent lighting that buzzed.*
*A name: police superintendent. Twenty-three years on the force. Commendations on the wall. Golfing with the district judge. Poker with the deputy mayor.*
The fragments started stitching themselves together as they settled, and the full picture that formed was worse than any of the individual pieces.
*A middle school literature teacher. Late twenties. Average in every visible way. He loved his job. He noticed the bruises. He reported it through every channel they told you to use. Forms, administration, counselor, CPS. Everything by the book.*
*The girl's father was the superintendent. Locally untouchable.*
*His CPS report was marked "unsubstantiated" in forty-eight hours. No home visit. No interview. The school counselor who'd initially backed him suddenly couldn't recall the details. Administration sat him down with three people who explained, very calmly, that the father was a pillar of the community, and that continuing would be "counterproductive."*
*He continued.*
*A journalist ran the story. It stayed live for four hours before the editor killed it. The superintendent's lawyer sent a defamation notice. The school board terminated his contract. When he filed a second CPS report, a different caseworker told him repeated unsubstantiated claims could be considered harassment.*
*He kept going anyway. Blog. Real name. All the documentation, all the evidence, posted publicly because he thought transparency would protect him.*
*Anonymous commenters called him a predator projecting his own guilt. A parents' group petitioned to put him on a watchlist. The superintendent held a press event, flanked by his wife and his daughter, the actual victim, standing there in long sleeves with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and he talked about how grateful he was for the community's support during "this difficult period." His voice cracked at exactly the right moment. People in the crowd wiped their eyes.*
*Lost the teaching license. Lost the apartment. Family stopped answering. His mother called once, crying, telling him to let it go, that some things were just bigger than one person.*
*Seven months after the first report, they found him dead in a motel room. Overdose. The investigation lasted two days. The blog was taken down for terms of service violations.*
*The girl stayed in that house.*
*Maybe it was the pills. Maybe it wasn't. He'd made enough enemies by the end that both options were equally likely, and nobody with the power to find out cared enough to try.*
*His last thought, the very last one: I did everything they told me to do. I was just. I was fair. I followed every rule. And they erased me for it.*
Ren came back to himself gasping on sweat-soaked sheets.
His hands were trembling. The ceiling was still there, same stain, same cracks, but everything behind his eyes had changed. The memories settled into his mind alongside his own, not fighting for space but finding it, and the two lives didn't clash because they didn't need to. The man had tried to find justice inside the rules. The rules ate him alive. Ren had always known that was how it worked. Now he had a dead man's receipts to prove it.
He was still Ren. Still the kid who sat at that scratched-up kitchen table with his parents a few hours ago.
He sat up and ran a hand through his hair, breathing hard. His heart was hammering but already slowing down. Regeneration working on the physiological stress, pulling him back to baseline whether he wanted it to or not.
Then the second wave came.
Not pain this time. Information. Cold and structured, cracked open directly inside his skull. He saw a courtroom. Not a real one. Something more absolute than any physical space. Wooden benches, a judge's podium, evidence arranged in perfect order. A space where guilt and innocence weren't matters of opinion but verdicts enforced by something deeper than any human law.
*Deadly Sentencing.*
The name arrived fully formed, and with it came the ability itself. Not a locked door. Not a promise of future power. The full Domain Expansion, downloaded into him like muscle memory for a body that had never performed the motion. He could feel it sitting there, ready, a courtroom that existed as concept more than architecture. A bounded space of total adjudication where guilt and innocence weren't opinions but verdicts enforced by something deeper than human law.
He could use it. He knew that with absolute certainty. If he pushed right now, the domain would open.
What he couldn't do was understand it. The domain had rules, procedures, conditions, an entire legal framework baked into its structure, and he had access to maybe a tenth of that knowledge. Higuruma had been a genius lawyer, intellect on par or surpassing Satoru Gojo. Higuruma spent decades in courtrooms before awakening this technique. The domain was an extension of a lifetime of legal mastery.
Ren was a fourteen-year-old who'd never read a statute in his life. He had the weapon but not the manual. Using it would be like handing a fighter jet to someone who'd never seen a cockpit. The jet would fly. The landing was the problem.
He knew all of this because the template told him where it came from. One percent of a man named Higuruma Hiromi.
Ren blinked. He knew that name.
Not from this life. From the other one. From the memories of a man who'd spent his evenings watching anime after grading papers, who'd read manga on his phone during lunch breaks because fiction was easier to stomach than reality.
Higuruma Hiromi. Jujutsu Kaisen. The lawyer who awakened a Domain Expansion out of pure obsession with justice, who built his entire cursed technique around the courtroom he'd spent his life in.
And that was the good anime. The actually good one. Not the one about the crying kid with the green hair.
He could feel the cursed energy now. Barely. A second pulse layered under his actual heartbeat, thin and fragile, like a trickle of water running through a cracked pipe. The template's arrival had broken open some kind of reservoir inside him. What was in there was almost nothing. But it existed where it hadn't before.
One percent. A fully operational Domain Expansion he could deploy but barely comprehend, and roughly enough cursed energy to use it once before collapsing.
Ten seconds passed.
The third wave hit, and this one came from somewhere inside him.
Not another person's memories. Not template data. Something that had been sitting at the front of his brain his entire life, quiet and unrecognized, waiting. The trickle of cursed energy from the template reached it and it woke up.
*Decree.*
No instruction manual. No courtroom visualization. No sense of readiness. Where the Domain Expansion had arrived fully formed and operational, this was the opposite. Raw instinct with no interface.
A gut-level certainty that he could look at something and assign it weight, decide its significance, and reality would shift. A fraction of a degree in whatever direction his judgment pointed. But he had no idea how to reach for it on purpose.
He focused on his right hand. Flexed his fingers. Thought, with genuine conviction, *this hand matters*, and felt something warm settle into his fist.
A density that hadn't been there a second ago, like the muscles had tightened and the bones had hardened just slightly.
He let the thought go. The warmth went with it. He tried to do it again. Nothing happened. Whatever he'd done the first time, he couldn't replicate it consciously.
His own technique and he couldn't even turn it on twice in a row. Meanwhile Higuruma's Domain Expansion was sitting right there, ready to deploy, and he didn't know enough about law to use it without embarrassing himself. Beautiful.
Ren lay back down and stared at the ceiling.
Two sets of memories. Two lives. And between them, a recognition that had been building since the first fragment hit.
He'd known this world had heroes and villains. He'd grown up in it.
That was just reality. But the other him, the teacher, the man from a world with no quirks, he'd watched this reality as a show. My Hero Academia.
Ren had his memories of it. Season one, vaguely. The broad strokes. All Might, One For All, Bakugo, Midoriya, UA.
He'd dropped it after season one. The main character cried too much and the fandom was doing unspeakable things on the internet.
But that was an anime. Written by someone in a world without quirks, about a version of this world that may or may not match the one Ren had actually grown up in.
His Bakugo was real. His UA was real. Whether the events some mangaka wrote about would actually play out the way they did on screen was a completely different question. He couldn't treat a season of television as a prophecy. His world wasn't a script. The people in it weren't characters.
Whatever meta knowledge he had was surface-level and probably unreliable. Not worth building a strategy around.
Jujutsu Kaisen, though. Now that was a good anime and manga. The teacher had kept up with that one all the way through. And the fact that the Higuruma template came from JJK and not from this world raised questions Ren didn't have answers for yet. Cursed energy didn't exist in My Hero Academia. Domains didn't exist here. He had a power system from a completely different fiction sitting inside him alongside a quirk, and he had no idea what the rules were.
He'd figure it out later.
Ren pulled the blanket up. The cursed energy trickled faintly underneath his skin, new and thin. The Higuruma template sat in his mind, a courtroom he could open but barely navigate once inside. Decree hummed somewhere at the front of his skull, shapeless, patient, the opposite problem: his own power that he couldn't even activate on command yet. And underneath all of that, Regeneration kept doing what it did, quietly knitting together whatever the awakening had torn up inside him.
One percent. A dead man's memories. A domain he could open but not properly run. A technique he owned but couldn't control. A world that might or might not follow a script he barely remembered.
The man who died for doing the right thing, his last thought had been that justice failed him.
Ren's last thought before sleep was different.
*Justice didn't fail you. Other people's justice did. Mine won't.*
He smiled to himself in the dark. It wasn't a nice smile.
Then he went to sleep.
---
How was chapter 1?
Leave a comment if you enjoyed it.
Justice is a word people throw around like it actually means something.
Ren Asano had been thinking about this for the better part of third period, chin propped against his fist, eyes half-lidded, watching Tanaka-sensei drone on about the societal impact of quirks on modern legislature.
The irony was almost too perfect. Here was a man, five foot nothing with sweat patches blooming under his arms and a voice like a door that needed oiling, lecturing thirty teenagers about how the law adapted to protect everyone equally in a world where some people could literally shoot fire from their hands and others could turn invisible.
Equally.
Right.
Ren shifted in his seat and the chair groaned under him. Every piece of furniture in Aldera Junior High groaned when he sat in it because whoever designed school desks did not have a fourteen-year-old standing six foot two in mind. Early growth spurt, the doctor had told his parents when he shot past everyone in his class over a single summer.
His mom had teared up about it because she teared up about everything. His dad had looked him up and down and said, "Well. Guess we're buying new clothes again," in the same tone he used for weather updates.
"...and so the Hero Public Safety Commission was established to ensure that the application of quirks in law enforcement was regulated, transparent, and fair to all citizens regardless of..."
Ren stopped listening.
Heroes got paid based on popularity. Villains got sentences based on how much media coverage their arrest generated.
A guy with a flashy quirk who saved one person on camera got more recognition than some underground hero who'd been pulling people out of collapsed buildings for twenty years with zero fanfare. The law was just the rulebook that whoever happened to be in power wrote to keep themselves there. Change the regime, change the rules. What was illegal yesterday was legal today. What was heroic last year was vigilantism this year.
The only justice that actually meant something was the kind that came from a single person deciding what was right and having the spine to enforce it with their own two hands. Everything else was theatre.
The bell rang. Chairs scraped. Ren stood up and the movement pulled a few glances his way. Hard not to when you towered over most of your classmates by a solid head.
"Oi, Deku!"
Right on schedule.
Ren didn't bother turning around. He could map the entire interaction without looking. Bakugo crowding Midoriya's desk, Midoriya shrinking into himself, the two extras flanking Bakugo like they were getting paid to stand there (they weren't, they were just that desperate for proximity to someone relevant), and the rest of the class pretending they couldn't see it because pretending was easier.
He slung his bag over one shoulder and headed for the door. Passing through Bakugo's orbit, he caught a fragment of "...useless Deku, you really think you can..." and kept moving. Midoriya's eyes flickered to him for half a second. That hopeful, desperate little look that said *please* without making a sound.
Ren glanced at him. Looked through him, really. Then he walked out.
If Midoriya wanted it to stop, Midoriya would have to be the one to stop it.
Bakugo had tried him once. Exactly once. Back in first year, riding the high of being the strongest kid in every room he'd ever walked into, he'd shoulder-checked Ren in the hallway and barked something about watching where he was going. Ren had looked down at him, because he'd already been taller by then, and said nothing, no expression at all just the blank, patient stare you'd give a traffic light that was taking too long to change.
Bakugo had practically vibrated with the need to escalate. Palms crackling, jaw tight, the whole performance. But Ren just stood there, and something about the complete vacuum where a reaction should've been threw Bakugo off his rhythm. You couldn't bully someone who didn't register the attempt. It was like screaming at a wall, the wall will never care and eventually you just felt stupid for trying.
After that, Bakugo left him alone. They had an understanding. Bakugo would be loud somewhere else, and Ren would continue not thinking about him.
It helped that Ren wasn't quirkless. If he had been, Bakugo probably would've forced the issue just on principle. But Ren's quirk, Regeneration, was boring enough to not register as a threat and functional enough to not be worth mocking. He healed fast. About a hundred times faster than a normal person. A broken bone that'd take weeks for anyone else sorted itself out in roughly three hours. Cuts closed in minutes. Bruises faded before the school day ended.
Nothing flashy. Nothing that would make highlight reels or get him trending online. But it meant Ren could eat a hit from basically anyone and be fine by dinner.
---
His mom was already in the kitchen when he got home, which meant she'd either left work early or hadn't gone in at all. Asano Yui operated on a frequency that Ren had never fully figured out. Mid-forties, soft face, the kind of woman who could communicate an entire emotional essay through the way she set a plate down. Her love language was food, her secondary love language was worrying about whether you'd eaten enough of the food, and her tertiary love language was standing in the doorway watching you eat and asking if it was too salty even though it was never too salty.
She had a quirk that let her slightly adjust the temperature of anything she touched. Completely useless in combat. Absolutely god-tier for cooking. Every meal that came out of her kitchen was served at the exact perfect temperature, and Ren had never once in his life experienced a cold centre in a piece of meat.
"Ren! How was school?"
"Educational."
"That's not an answer."
"It's technically an answer."
She gave him the look. The *mom* look that somehow transcended language and culture, the one that said *I love you but I will wait here until you give me something real*. He gave her a half-smile, which was the most she was getting, and dropped his bag by the door.
"It was fine, Mom. Tanaka-sensei talked about hero legislation for an hour and Bakugo yelled at someone."
"That Bakugo boy." She shook her head, turning back to the stove. "His mother came into the clinic last week. Loud woman. I could hear her from two rooms over. Now I understand where he gets it."
His mom worked part-time at a physiotherapy clinic downtown. She didn't talk about patients by name, ever, but she had a habit of describing them in enough detail that Ren could usually figure out who she meant.
He found it hilarious.
She thought she was being discreet.
"Your father called. He'll be late.
Something about a claim that went sideways."
"When do claims not go sideways?"
"That's what I said." She smiled over her shoulder. "But I made enough for three, so he can heat his up when he gets home. Sit."
Ren sat. The kitchen table was the centre of the Asano household in a way that the living room never managed to be. It was where his mom did her crosswords in the morning, where his dad spread out paperwork he'd brought home, where Ren had done homework as a kid. The wood was scratched and stained in places, one leg was slightly shorter than the others so it rocked if you leaned on it wrong, and his mom had been talking about replacing it for three years without ever actually doing it.
She set the katsudon down in front of him. Perfect temperature, obviously.
"Mom."
"Hm?"
"I'm applying to hero schools."
Mom just kept wiping down the counter with that particular rhythm she had, the one that meant she was processing. In a world where half the kids in the country wanted to be heroes, this wasn't exactly a shocking announcement. It was more like telling your parents you wanted to go into medicine or engineering. Respected career path, good money, high risk. The kind of thing parents supported with a knot in their stomach.
"UA?" she asked.
"Probably. Maybe Shiketsu too, as a backup."
"You'd have to move to Osaka for Shiketsu."
"I know."
She sat down across from him, not eating yet, just watching him with that expression she got when she was trying to figure out how to say something careful without making it sound careful. "Your quirk is good for it. The regeneration. That's a real advantage in the field."
"Yeah."
"But hero work is dangerous, Ren. Even with your quirk."
"I know."
"Do you, though?" She leaned forward a little. "Because knowing it as a fact and knowing it as a mother watching her son walk into it are two very different things."
He put his chopsticks down. Looked at her properly. "I'm not doing it for the fame or the ranking or any of that stuff. I want to be a hero because heroes get to decide what justice looks like in real time. Not after the fact, not through paperwork, not filtered through six committees. A hero standing in front of someone right now gets to choose what's right and back it up. That's what I want."
His mom studied him for a long moment. "That's a very intense reason for a fourteen-year-old."
"I'm a very intense fourteen-year-old."
She laughed at that. You sound like your father. He said something almost exactly like that when he told his parents he was going into insurance instead of heroics."
"Dad considered being a hero?"
"For about five minutes when he was twelve. Then he decided the paperwork was worse than villain fights and went the other direction entirely." She picked up her chopsticks. "Eat your food before it gets cold."
It wouldn't get cold. She'd literally touched it. But he ate anyway.
His dad got home around eight, loosening his tie in the hallway with the weary satisfaction of a man who'd survived another day of arguing about property damage assessments. Asano Kenji was six foot one, which meant Ren had officially passed him by an inch sometime last month, and neither of them had acknowledged this fact out loud. It existed as a silent tension in every room they stood in together.
His dad had a quirk too. Minor spatial awareness. He could sense the exact dimensions of any room he was standing in and the precise location of every object in it, down to the centimetre. Absolutely useless for anything except knowing when someone had moved his stuff, which made him the most annoying person in the house to steal snacks around.
"Your son wants to be a hero," his mom said from the kitchen.
"My son?" His dad hung up his jacket. "When he does something impressive he's your son. When he's being dramatic he's mine?"
"It's not dramatic," Ren called from the couch.
His dad walked in, saw him sprawled out, and sat in the armchair opposite. "Hero school, huh."
"Yeah."
"UA?"
"Probably."
"Their acceptance rate is something like one in three hundred."
"Good. I'd be bored if it was easy."
His dad gave him a look. like he was running internal calculations, weighing variables, assessing risk. The insurance brain never turned off. "Your regeneration gives you a real edge in the physical exam. You can push harder than anyone else because the cost of failure is three hours of healing instead of three months. That's a genuine tactical advantage if you use it right."
"I know."
"But it also means you might develop a habit of tanking hits instead of avoiding them, and there are things in this world that'll put you down faster than your quirk can bring you back."
"I know that too."
His dad looked at him for another few seconds, then nodded once. "Alright. We'll look at prep courses this weekend. Your mother's already worried, so do her a favour and don't get yourself killed."
"I'll do my best."
"That's not a promise."
"Best I've got."
His dad almost smiled. The man rationed his smiles like they were a limited resource, and Ren had inherited that exact trait, which his mother found endlessly frustrating about both of them.
---
Later. Past midnight. The house was dead quiet.
Ren was on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. Not insomnia. He just liked the way his brain ran differently when the noise of the day wasn't pressing in on it. The ceiling had a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a boot, and he'd been staring at it long enough that it was starting to look like something else entirely.
The pain hit without warning.
One second he was staring at the ceiling. The next, every nerve in his body lit up like someone had plugged him into a wall socket. His skull felt like it was splitting from the inside. He couldn't breathe, couldn't move, his back arched off the mattress and his fingers clawed at the sheets and his mouth was open but nothing came out because the agony was too complete for something as small as a scream.
Then the memories came.
Not his memories. They hit in fragments, out of order, a whole life smashing through his skull in jagged pieces.
*A classroom. Chalk dust. Kids' laughter. A feeling of purpose so deep it was almost physical.*
*Then a girl's wrists. Long sleeves pushed up. Yellow-green bruises fading into skin that was too young to look that tired.*
*Forms. Paperwork. A CPS office with fluorescent lighting that buzzed.*
*A name: police superintendent. Twenty-three years on the force. Commendations on the wall. Golfing with the district judge. Poker with the deputy mayor.*
The fragments started stitching themselves together as they settled, and the full picture that formed was worse than any of the individual pieces.
*A middle school literature teacher. Late twenties. Average in every visible way. He loved his job. He noticed the bruises. He reported it through every channel they told you to use. Forms, administration, counselor, CPS. Everything by the book.*
*The girl's father was the superintendent. Locally untouchable.*
*His CPS report was marked "unsubstantiated" in forty-eight hours. No home visit. No interview. The school counselor who'd initially backed him suddenly couldn't recall the details. Administration sat him down with three people who explained, very calmly, that the father was a pillar of the community, and that continuing would be "counterproductive."*
*He continued.*
*A journalist ran the story. It stayed live for four hours before the editor killed it. The superintendent's lawyer sent a defamation notice. The school board terminated his contract. When he filed a second CPS report, a different caseworker told him repeated unsubstantiated claims could be considered harassment.*
*He kept going anyway. Blog. Real name. All the documentation, all the evidence, posted publicly because he thought transparency would protect him.*
*Anonymous commenters called him a predator projecting his own guilt. A parents' group petitioned to put him on a watchlist. The superintendent held a press event, flanked by his wife and his daughter, the actual victim, standing there in long sleeves with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and he talked about how grateful he was for the community's support during "this difficult period." His voice cracked at exactly the right moment. People in the crowd wiped their eyes.*
*Lost the teaching license. Lost the apartment. Family stopped answering. His mother called once, crying, telling him to let it go, that some things were just bigger than one person.*
*Seven months after the first report, they found him dead in a motel room. Overdose. The investigation lasted two days. The blog was taken down for terms of service violations.*
*The girl stayed in that house.*
*Maybe it was the pills. Maybe it wasn't. He'd made enough enemies by the end that both options were equally likely, and nobody with the power to find out cared enough to try.*
*His last thought, the very last one: I did everything they told me to do. I was just. I was fair. I followed every rule. And they erased me for it.*
Ren came back to himself gasping on sweat-soaked sheets.
His hands were trembling. The ceiling was still there, same stain, same cracks, but everything behind his eyes had changed. The memories settled into his mind alongside his own, not fighting for space but finding it, and the two lives didn't clash because they didn't need to. The man had tried to find justice inside the rules. The rules ate him alive. Ren had always known that was how it worked. Now he had a dead man's receipts to prove it.
He was still Ren. Still the kid who sat at that scratched-up kitchen table with his parents a few hours ago.
He sat up and ran a hand through his hair, breathing hard. His heart was hammering but already slowing down. Regeneration working on the physiological stress, pulling him back to baseline whether he wanted it to or not.
Then the second wave came.
Not pain this time. Information. Cold and structured, cracked open directly inside his skull. He saw a courtroom. Not a real one. Something more absolute than any physical space. Wooden benches, a judge's podium, evidence arranged in perfect order. A space where guilt and innocence weren't matters of opinion but verdicts enforced by something deeper than any human law.
*Deadly Sentencing.*
The name arrived fully formed, and with it came the ability itself. Not a locked door. Not a promise of future power. The full Domain Expansion, downloaded into him like muscle memory for a body that had never performed the motion. He could feel it sitting there, ready, a courtroom that existed as concept more than architecture. A bounded space of total adjudication where guilt and innocence weren't opinions but verdicts enforced by something deeper than human law.
He could use it. He knew that with absolute certainty. If he pushed right now, the domain would open.
What he couldn't do was understand it. The domain had rules, procedures, conditions, an entire legal framework baked into its structure, and he had access to maybe a tenth of that knowledge. Higuruma had been a genius lawyer, intellect on par or surpassing Satoru Gojo. Higuruma spent decades in courtrooms before awakening this technique. The domain was an extension of a lifetime of legal mastery.
Ren was a fourteen-year-old who'd never read a statute in his life. He had the weapon but not the manual. Using it would be like handing a fighter jet to someone who'd never seen a cockpit. The jet would fly. The landing was the problem.
He knew all of this because the template told him where it came from. One percent of a man named Higuruma Hiromi.
Ren blinked. He knew that name.
Not from this life. From the other one. From the memories of a man who'd spent his evenings watching anime after grading papers, who'd read manga on his phone during lunch breaks because fiction was easier to stomach than reality.
Higuruma Hiromi. Jujutsu Kaisen. The lawyer who awakened a Domain Expansion out of pure obsession with justice, who built his entire cursed technique around the courtroom he'd spent his life in.
And that was the good anime. The actually good one. Not the one about the crying kid with the green hair.
He could feel the cursed energy now. Barely. A second pulse layered under his actual heartbeat, thin and fragile, like a trickle of water running through a cracked pipe. The template's arrival had broken open some kind of reservoir inside him. What was in there was almost nothing. But it existed where it hadn't before.
One percent. A fully operational Domain Expansion he could deploy but barely comprehend, and roughly enough cursed energy to use it once before collapsing.
Ten seconds passed.
The third wave hit, and this one came from somewhere inside him.
Not another person's memories. Not template data. Something that had been sitting at the front of his brain his entire life, quiet and unrecognized, waiting. The trickle of cursed energy from the template reached it and it woke up.
*Decree.*
No instruction manual. No courtroom visualization. No sense of readiness. Where the Domain Expansion had arrived fully formed and operational, this was the opposite. Raw instinct with no interface.
A gut-level certainty that he could look at something and assign it weight, decide its significance, and reality would shift. A fraction of a degree in whatever direction his judgment pointed. But he had no idea how to reach for it on purpose.
He focused on his right hand. Flexed his fingers. Thought, with genuine conviction, *this hand matters*, and felt something warm settle into his fist.
A density that hadn't been there a second ago, like the muscles had tightened and the bones had hardened just slightly.
He let the thought go. The warmth went with it. He tried to do it again. Nothing happened. Whatever he'd done the first time, he couldn't replicate it consciously.
His own technique and he couldn't even turn it on twice in a row. Meanwhile Higuruma's Domain Expansion was sitting right there, ready to deploy, and he didn't know enough about law to use it without embarrassing himself. Beautiful.
Ren lay back down and stared at the ceiling.
Two sets of memories. Two lives. And between them, a recognition that had been building since the first fragment hit.
He'd known this world had heroes and villains. He'd grown up in it.
That was just reality. But the other him, the teacher, the man from a world with no quirks, he'd watched this reality as a show. My Hero Academia.
Ren had his memories of it. Season one, vaguely. The broad strokes. All Might, One For All, Bakugo, Midoriya, UA.
He'd dropped it after season one. The main character cried too much and the fandom was doing unspeakable things on the internet.
But that was an anime. Written by someone in a world without quirks, about a version of this world that may or may not match the one Ren had actually grown up in.
His Bakugo was real. His UA was real. Whether the events some mangaka wrote about would actually play out the way they did on screen was a completely different question. He couldn't treat a season of television as a prophecy. His world wasn't a script. The people in it weren't characters.
Whatever meta knowledge he had was surface-level and probably unreliable. Not worth building a strategy around.
Jujutsu Kaisen, though. Now that was a good anime and manga. The teacher had kept up with that one all the way through. And the fact that the Higuruma template came from JJK and not from this world raised questions Ren didn't have answers for yet. Cursed energy didn't exist in My Hero Academia. Domains didn't exist here. He had a power system from a completely different fiction sitting inside him alongside a quirk, and he had no idea what the rules were.
He'd figure it out later.
Ren pulled the blanket up. The cursed energy trickled faintly underneath his skin, new and thin. The Higuruma template sat in his mind, a courtroom he could open but barely navigate once inside. Decree hummed somewhere at the front of his skull, shapeless, patient, the opposite problem: his own power that he couldn't even activate on command yet. And underneath all of that, Regeneration kept doing what it did, quietly knitting together whatever the awakening had torn up inside him.
One percent. A dead man's memories. A domain he could open but not properly run. A technique he owned but couldn't control. A world that might or might not follow a script he barely remembered.
The man who died for doing the right thing, his last thought had been that justice failed him.
Ren's last thought before sleep was different.
*Justice didn't fail you. Other people's justice did. Mine won't.*
He smiled to himself in the dark. It wasn't a nice smile.
Then he went to sleep.
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How was chapter 1?
Leave a comment if you enjoyed it.`