Chapter 2. "The Road Ahead." Part I.
Just think about it — I actually have a superpower.
The impossible dream of a teenager from my world had become genuinely real. That was exactly the kind of thing I used to fantasize about — well, maybe something a little less complicated to wrap your head around, but still. And who wouldn't have dreamed of something like that back in my old world? It was like spending your entire life wishing for magic, then being reborn into a world where it exists and you have a talent for it. Except not magic — a quirk. And not exactly a talent, either, but…
In any case, from that day forward my superhero training launched itself skyward like a rocket.
That same evening I gathered the family in the kitchen and held a serious war council. I laid it out plainly:
"Mo… Mom and Dad, I am going to be a professional hero."
I fixed them with the stern, furrowed gaze of a four-year-old: *just try and argue with me.*
My eyes, for what it's worth, were nearly normal — no mutations. Dark, with permanently dilated pupils that made me look like I was on cocaine, and a narrow ring of blue iris. At a glance, perfectly ordinary Japanese eyes. Anime eyes, really. Quite round, almost European in shape.
With white sclera, naturally — I wasn't some X-Man. Though, as I recalled, there would eventually be a cute pink mutant girl at U.A. with completely black eyes…
My father, of course, was delighted by the announcement, swelled with pride, and declared himself ready to support me in every way possible. My mother… naturally, began to wring her hands and blot her eyes with a lace handkerchief. I hadn't expected anything different.
Nobody actively argued, though — they must have already understood which way the wind was blowing, given how stubborn I was.
To drive the final nail into the coffin of any potential resistance — specifically my mother's — I arranged a demonstration of my undeniably combat-oriented quirk. Outside this time, in the park. A baseball — this was Japan, where everyone who wasn't a hero or a villain played baseball, though personally I'd have preferred volleyball or soccer — launched into a young tree I'd picked out with enough force to snap the trunk clean in half. This impressed my parents considerably.
Then we had to pay a municipal fine. Right. Collateral damage wasn't something I tended to factor in. I had a feeling there was going to be at least one class at the Academy that gave me trouble.
And the very next morning, my beloved time-devouring developmental routine kicked into gear.
The following two years — while my body still wasn't mature enough for anything beyond stretching, running, and general conditioning, and before school obligations got in the way — I focused entirely on developing my quirk and understanding every one of its strengths and weaknesses.
There were plenty of strengths. I could genuinely duplicate any strike of mine to any point in space — any push or throw of any object, from any position, at a fairly significant range. At least several dozen meters, regardless of whether the target was within my line of sight, and the "charge" lasted roughly an hour before it expired.
But there was one very large, very serious caveat. For the quirk to work, I needed to remember the precise point of impact with centimeter-level accuracy. Forget exactly where I'd struck or pushed, lose focus, let my concentration slip, blink at the wrong moment — and nothing. It wouldn't fire.
This was difficult. Genuinely, seriously difficult. Maintaining constant focus on one or two points was one thing, especially in familiar terrain. Maintaining it on six was something else entirely. And if that was during a fight — where you were placing these "markers" in real time, where they were constantly being used up and replaced with new ones at different locations…
Whenever that thought crossed my mind, I'd just bite my lip and go back to training, even if I'd just returned from a session. Not the healthiest habit, I knew — but it was primarily a mental exercise at that stage, so at least I couldn't physically hurt myself. I could burn out, but not break anything. And besides, I was living in a shonen anime about people who pushed past their limits. I had a reputation to maintain.
Among the handful of "peers" and their parents I occasionally crossed paths with, I'd earned a reputation as a detached young genius. I just shook my head and asked not to be bothered, thinking about what — and, more importantly, who — I was going to be up against in less than a decade.
I mean, seriously — the original chubby kid had gotten into U.A. even without my adult, reasonably disciplined mind running the show. I could have relaxed. There had been some genuinely helpless and awkward people there even without him.
But then again — there was also that girl with vine hair who could control it across enormous areas in defiance of physics. And blond Bakugo, with his supernatural reaction speed, capable of bringing down an entire building. And the class president who ran faster than any racing car — what was his name, the one who left any bolide eating his dust. I wouldn't be able to beat a single one of them.
And those weren't even the real benchmark. The real benchmark was the monsters — the ones capable of wiping a whole city off the map. All the Todorokis who could burn one down, the Nomu who could level one through sheer force, Tomura with his ability to disintegrate any matter at the atomic level — at a distance, for god's sake — and Gigantomachia, or whatever you called that Godzilla.
And even that tier was dwarfed by All Might, All For One, and, in potential, the anime's protagonist Midoriya by a considerable margin.
And then there was me.
And I absolutely had to become no less powerful, using only what I had in front of me, in order to have any chance of influencing the events I knew were coming. And the ones I didn't.
It was a little sad, honestly, that I hadn't hung on for one more year in my previous life and watched the sixth season. Or read the manga.
"Alright, enough mourning the fact that you weren't an anime nerd," I told myself, and went back to training.
Time passed. Quietly, peacefully, but… heavily.
Most of it I spent running on fumes — constantly overloaded, training until I was blue in the face, with my brain taking the worst of it. One thing that helped was that all the concentration exercises, combined with the flexibility of a child's developing mind (I still had no idea exactly how this reincarnation business worked or what was actually happening in my head), were gradually improving my overall attentiveness, my ability to catch details, my mental endurance, my memory. Nothing extraordinary — I was clearly still the "hardworking" type rather than the "talented" type.
Activating multiple repeats simultaneously remained impossible for me. Judging by all signs, it probably always would be — something internal strained and resisted the moment I tried to trigger even two strikes at different locations at the same time. It had to be sequential, with a brief pause after each activation.
Triggering two effects at the same point was out of the question entirely. I couldn't even place two "markers" — each of which I felt as a faint, invisible connection to a specific point in space — in the same location. So the only way was to fire the first, then place a second marker in the same spot, then fire that one. In short: I could forget about the fantasy of a stacking damage effect culminating in All Might-level force output.
For now, at least.
So the immediate priority for the coming years became clear: minimize the time between placing a marker and activating its effect. Currently that delay sat at just under a second. Why did it matter?
Because if I could manage — and I genuinely believed I could — near-instantaneous activation at the moment of impact, I could effectively simulate a strength-amplifying quirk. In practical terms, I could fight in close quarters the same way Deku did. Without his speed, sure — but I'd be able to operate at any range, including long distance.
That was if I could pull it off.
By age six in my new life, I was capable of keeping five or six points simultaneously primed and ready, and during slow deliberate activation I could maintain and add to that list for roughly fifteen minutes. I was very much hoping that with time I'd be able to hold more points and fire them faster.
There was also a hard limit on how many repeats and markers I could activate in sequence — and it wasn't simply a matter of memory. I actually had a couple of ideas about how to track important locations more reliably.
The real problem was exhaustion. My quirk, like those of the other eighty percent of powered individuals, ate through stamina at a punishing rate. And since I couldn't activate effects simultaneously, any serious fight would drain me completely and leave me on the ground within a couple of minutes.
That was completely unacceptable.
I dimly recalled that the chubby kid in the original had some kind of device over one eye that supposedly helped him track and remember his impact points.
Not a bad concept, but no — I preferred to rely on my own brain wherever possible. First, because going into close-range direct contact with an opponent while wearing a delicate visor was a terrible idea — though admittedly, the original Niren had been a pure long-range support fighter, so it was logical for him. Second, in a world full of technokinesis and electricity quirk users — especially the latter — relying on sensitive equipment was risky, and potentially just outright dangerous.
On that note: despite my improving memory, I would have long since forgotten every detail of the anime… except I hadn't, because like any sensible isekai protagonist, the moment I could hold a pen, I sat down and wrote everything I remembered into a notebook. My terrible handwriting had followed me into the new world, so the resulting mess of Russian, English, and Japanese all transcribed in Cyrillic came out as quite the cipher.
When I'd finished writing out that "alternative timeline," I thought about it for a while — and then started a whole separate stack of notebooks, this time without any encoding, and began filling them with useful information about various quirk users: Heroes, Villains, future allies and enemies, my own thoughts on effective tactics, tricks, superhero techniques.
In the process I even considered developing my own quirk classification system for personal convenience, but… that turned out to be a dead end. I was nowhere near the first person to try, and far more intelligent and thorough specialists had already suffered crushing defeat on that front.
The problem was that any system for grouping quirks into categories immediately produced so many exceptions that you'd have to add subcategories — which would then have their own exceptions — and you'd keep dividing and subdividing until you were completely lost in the sprawling branches of an ever-expanding tree. And that was without even mentioning the fact that I hit a total wall just trying to figure out which category my own quirk belonged in.
A project for later, maybe. Something to tackle together with someone intelligent and scientifically minded.
Quirks themselves I'd grown used to. In fact, I'd stopped mentally capitalizing the word pretty quickly. As they say, people adapt fast to good things — and it didn't take me long to stop being amazed every time I saw heroes soaring through the air or leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Heroes or otherwise.
The one thing I still couldn't always look at without flinching — having been raised in the context of an entirely different world — was certain passersby on the street. Some quirks disfigured their bearers so severely that it was difficult to recognize not just the person, but any living organism at all.
Which brought up something genuinely remarkable. The society of this country — no, of most of the planet — was tolerant. Actually, meaningfully civilized. People had stopped focusing on appearances and had begun, first and foremost, to value the inner lives of others, their minds, their personal qualities.
All we needed now was unicorns, right?
Obviously, reality wasn't quite that rosy.
Radicals and bigots existed here too, but remained a rare phenomenon — or more precisely, were monitored very carefully and neutralized quickly by state agencies that preferred to keep things quiet.
And of course, there was an invisible but socially significant division of society into "castes." Drawing primarily on my own observations and intuitions, I sorted it into four rough groups.
The first encompassed the unlucky ones — those who hadn't received a quirk at all. Many children, like Midoriya in the anime, became social outcasts. Despite the generally civilized and cultured society, bullying thrived. Kids without quirks faced mockery and violence from their more fortunate peers, and that attitude didn't disappear with age. Alienation. A constant, invisible reminder that you were lesser, that you'd lost the evolutionary lottery — not to mention the very legitimate advantages that quirk-users held in the job market.
A thin, invisible line separated the first group from the second — the group my parents belonged to. Thin, but unbreakable. These people, for the most part, could only conjure rainbows, stretch their fingers, or trace frost patterns on glass, but they could. And that was enough. The vast majority fell into this category, in fact — and having not lost in the quirk lottery, they'd also kept their winnings in the appearance department, retaining a recognizably human form.
Yes. Human appearance. After going through political and sociological surveys from the past twenty years or so, I'd concluded that society's push toward tolerance of those whose quirks had severely altered their appearance had emerged, first and foremost, from one simple fact: significant physical transformation was most often correlated with heightened combat potential. I didn't know whose head that idea had first occurred to, but all of humanity currently owed that person a debt of gratitude for the relative humanity of their civilization.
Because the alternative would have been a war of extermination. And the victims, for the most part, would have been the carriers of the dominant human physical traits.
So yes: the third caste in this society was occupied by the relatively few but generally dangerous individuals with pronounced anatomical quirks. People quietly avoided them, tried not to provoke them, and generally kept their distance — but under no circumstances excluded them from society or caused them offense in any other way. Because that was asking for trouble.
The law of force, functioning openly. Sometimes padded by the cushions of tolerance, sometimes laid completely bare in ugly crimes.
This was also the origin of one of society's most absolute, monolithic taboos: mockery of the appearance of those with anatomical quirks was simply not done. Japanese culture had always — I was seven years a native Japanese at this point, I knew what I was talking about — been built on the principles of hierarchical stratification and extensive behavioral restrictions, so this particular rule had taken root without difficulty.
What was bitterly ironic — and would have been familiar to people from my old world — was that the taboo didn't run in the other direction. Ordinary-looking people were fair game.
And of course, rules were rules, and exceptions happened. The sheer statistical overrepresentation of non-human-looking individuals among all recorded villains — there were official government websites with profiles of wanted villains and registered heroes, incidentally — already suggested something about how comfortable life was for them among more ordinary people.
And yet, such individuals did appear, if considerably less frequently, in the fourth category. You already know which one, right?
Pro Heroes. "Puro-hiro." The caste of demigod Olympians, having almost entirely replaced actors, athletes, and even, to some degree, politicians. People followed their lives. People placed bets on them. They had fan clubs. Films were made about them — films in which many of them starred as themselves. They had their own clothing lines, their own perfumes, their own shampoos.
And their own merchandise.
The anime had stated more than once that the extraordinarily low crime rate — and here it's worth emphasizing this meant successful crime, meaning crime where the criminal had actually managed to escape, kill someone, steal something, and so on, rather than just getting caught and beaten — was entirely and completely the result of All Might. By the time I was seven, I found this claim highly debatable.
You see, that rate was low across the entire planet, not just Japan. Yes, All Might could cover enormous distances, and he'd visited other countries many times, having spent a third of his life in America. But in my view, the credit didn't primarily belong to him.
I was still talking about the merchandise. Seriously. This was the country that had created manga and anime and was thoroughly addicted to both — a country that collaborated closely with America, that paradise of consumption. Comics were drawn about supers, prints of them appeared on t-shirts, people wrote fanfiction about them, took selfies in front of them, bought figurines of them, invited them on talk shows, made documentaries about them — and all of it sold (fanfiction possibly included), and all of it brought them fame and money, money and connections and opportunity.
You understand how many people wanted to become heroes and fight crime?
Anyone who had what it took and broke into the top hundred heroes of the country received nearly everything a person could imagine wanting. In exchange for public exposure, hellish training, and the very real risk of dying young and on the job. But those were just details.
At least, that was how everyone who washed out on those "details" thought about it. But there were so many of them that every single city had a patrol of young idiots with a fanatical gleam in their eyes. The ones who didn't make it into U.A. went to other academies. The ones who didn't have the raw ability to go pro became sidekicks — Endeavor alone had something like twenty of them. The ones who couldn't even get accepted anywhere became street vigilantes — and then, as you'd expect, got beaten up by the police and actual heroes for their trouble.
And yet, all the noise genuinely drove real criminals deep underground. Crime didn't like noise. Too much of it, and the really big fish would show up.
Speaking of fish.
*Animals don't have quirks, by the way* — I might have said, if I didn't remember the principal of U.A. High. But the principal existed. And he was a mouse. Absolute certified insanity. And yet it was precisely under the leadership of this superintelligent mouse — a genius whose mind had nothing in common with the human variety, whose logic was probably entirely alien to human reasoning, who quite possibly perceived all of humanity as the natural evolutionary enemy of his biological species — that the finest professional Heroes in the world were being cultivated, tasked with protecting humanity and advancing its moral and ethical values.
Terrifying.
When this thought first occurred to me, I genuinely considered whether there was any chance this mouse was actually the franchise's main villain. I mean it. What if it was the mouse who had engineered the collision between Japan's strongest hero and villain factions, with the specific goal of simply eliminating the largest concentration of powerful quirk users? And when, after the resulting massive bloodbath, no one capable of stopping him remained, he would lead billions of mice and rats out of the sewers and landfills, finish off the survivors, tear women and children apart, and nothing would stand between the rodents and their eternal right to eat and breed?
It sounded like a trashy horror film.
But regardless of whether All Might won, or One For All, or the government, or even the yakuza, the outcome would suit that fluffy creature with the cold black eyes just fine.
Br-r-r.
Then again — maybe he was actually a good guy? This was, after all, a universe of animated teenage cartoons.
And if he wasn't?
In any case, I swore to myself not to let anything like that happen, and to expose the rodent when the opportunity arose.
Meanwhile, as I'd said: I turned six. And regardless of how special, intelligent, isekai-transported, or anything else I might be, my parents enrolled me in elementary school, first grade. No compromises. It was the law.
What can I even say about school?
A zoo, in a word.
In Japan, as I'd known from my previous world, child-rearing traditionally followed a strikingly "contrast" strategy — the early years involved almost no restrictions, punishments, or reprimands, which was meant to establish the foundations of a strong, complete personality.
Then, from the moment a child fully entered social life, dozens of rigid and even harsh rules came crashing down on them all at once: how to behave in public, how to speak properly, how to display the correct emotions, how to show respect for elders, and so on.
Beyond that, in the Japan I knew from before — a society compressed by high population density onto a small island — the concept of not noticing what doesn't concern you was elevated practically to an absolute.
In this Japan, fortunately, things were considerably easier on all those fronts, largely thanks to heroes and their quirks. Which was lucky, because I wasn't sure I had the self-control to keep not noticing certain things. But I also had no interest in becoming an outcast.
As it turned out, I didn't have to worry — even in the classroom, even in the school, even in lessons, the atmosphere was relaxed enough that children freely used their quirks, flooding the room with water, setting curtains on fire, gluing classmates to each other, levitating, stretching their limbs, sprouting hair, and god knows what else.
I made a point of sitting in the corner, as far from all these small monsters as possible, doing my best to project the energy of a serious, goal-oriented person who had nothing to do with any of this. My transformation into a proper Japanese citizen was well underway.
During the first week, a pair of budding delinquents with quasi-combat quirks — including, imagine this, rows of toothed mouths that opened across the surface of their bodies — tried their luck with me. One public demonstration of force — a desk that cracked and buckled from a light slap of my palm (if they only knew how long that had taken to train) — was sufficient to ensure I was left largely alone for all six years of elementary school.
And yes, I had to pay for the property damage again.
The years began to pass even faster.