All Might's hair tasted like bug spray. Or hair spray. Midoriya wasn't sure, but it had some sort of horribly bitter chemical residue on it that burned and gagged him as the strand of hair traveled down his throat.
'It makes sense, I suppose,' He thought, idly rubbing his throat as he walked down the cherry blossom lined path to Yuuei's main building, 'there's got to be something holding his hair in that style.'
After the initial moment of awkwardness and confusion that resulted from his mentor telling him to eat a strand of his hair had passed, All Might had explained the way that One for All was transferred from person to person. Throughout the ten months of training, Midoriya had honestly remained rather skeptical of the idea of 'transferring a quirk', but he had gone along with the whole thing since he wasn't about to turn down free training from All Might. However, his explanation that it required the recipient to ingest the previous user's DNA made things clearer.
'It must work something like CRISPR. The section of the DNA containing One for All is forcibly inserted and integrated into the genetic structure of the new host.' Midoriya shook his head. 'It's a shame that All Might swore me to secrecy about this, if I took this quirk to a geneticist, the things that we could discover about the nature of quirks could change the world. We might even be able to cure quirklessness, or fix malignant quirks…something to consider in the future I suppose.'
"Get the fuck out of my way, Deku." A rough voice growled from behind Midoriya, interrupting his musing. "Or I'll light you on fire."
"Ah, good morning Kacchan." Midoriya replied in a conversational tone, ignoring the casual threat of grievous bodily harm as he turned around to greet the speaker. He gave Bakugo an easygoing smile. "Good luck on the exam, yeah?"
"Tch." Bakugo scoffed, walking past Midoriya with an angry expression, "I don't need something as worthless as luck, you loser." Bakugo didn't stop, but he slowed down a bit before looking back over his shoulder. "…Don't get yourself killed out there. I don't give a fuck, but my mom would be sad if you died." He spat on the ground. "She still asks about you sometimes…stupid hag."
Midoriya quirked a half-smile in amusement. "I can't make any promises, but I'll do my best."
"Whatever." Bakugo grunted in reply before walking off with a scowl, ignoring the whispers of the other test takers who recognized him from the sludge incident.
Ever since that day, Bakugo had stopped hassling Midoriya—mostly. He still spoke to him contemptuously, but Midoriya was hardly unique in that regard. Bakugo spoke to everyone contemptuously. He had, however, ceased the violence, threats and stopped going out of his way to put him down. Midoriya didn't believe that the change was due to any new sense of respect—and definitely didn't think it was due to gratitude—if anything, it was like Bakugo had decided that it was simply no longer worth the effort.
Midoriya shrugged—whatever the case—it was a welcome change to what had been a consistently unpleasant feature of his life. 'It's not like I have time to think about something like that right now, anyways.' He thought, stepping forward. 'I need to focus on the task ahead of me and devote one hundred percent of my concentration towards my new quirk. Everything else is inconsequential!'
Midoriya's gaze was steely, straightforward, and determined as he took a step forward, his stride full of confidence…until he tripped on his shoelace, which had come untied without his notice. He plummeted face first towards the ground. 'Or not...damn it.'
He closed his eyes, and just as he had resigned himself to eating the pavement, Midoriya's downward trajectory had come to a halt and he found himself gripped by the disorienting sensation of weightlessness. He opened his eyes—somehow, he was floating parallel to the ground.
"Eh?" He said. "What just happened?" A pair of small hands grabbed him and reoriented him to a standing position.
"Are you okay?" A feminine voice asked, "It's my quirk. Sorry about using it on you without permission, but I thought that tripping like that before an exam would be bad luck."
Midoriya turned his head in time to see a brown-haired girl with rosy cheeks smile at him. She pressed her fingertips together and he felt the weight suddenly return to his body.
'C-cute!' Midoriya swallowed hard at the sight of the bright and refreshing smile on her face. "I, uh…"
"This sure is nerve wracking, isn't it?" The girl continued, "Well, good luck!" She turned to walk away.
"W-wait!" Midoriya called after the girl. He knew he wasn't the smoothest guy in the world, but he'd had the worst of his social anxiety beaten out of him long ago, and he wasn't about to let someone who had done him a favor walk away without so much as a thank you. She paused and turned back towards him. He bowed his head and met her gaze with a grateful smile. "Thanks for saving me. I don't relish the idea of getting all scuffed up before the test even begins! Good luck out there."
She smiled right back. "Don't worry about it. I just did what anyone would do."
'I wonder about that.' Midoriya thought, picturing Bakugo's laughter if he had seen Midoriya fall on his face. "Right." He agreed in principle if not in reality. He indicated towards the meeting area. "We should probably get going. Want to walk in together?"
The girl nodded. "Sure!"
The two headed inside, chatting casually until they got their seating numbers, and went their separate ways. It was only after Midoriya had taken his seat next to Bakugo of all people that he realized that he had never gotten the nice girl's name.
'Dang.' He mentally kicked himself for that. 'She was so cute…and nice to me too. Now I might never see her again.' He sighed, 'Oh well, it's not like her being nice to me necessarily means anything. I try to be nice to everybody, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in them. It's probably the same for her.'
"For fuck's sake Deku, stop muttering!" Bakugo growled. "Nobody gives a shit about your love life."
Midoriya didn't react, save for a slight flush appearing on his cheeks. He hadn't meant to say any of that out loud. He hadn't even noticed that he'd done it. "Sorry." He replied, "I'll try to refrain."
After about five minutes of waiting, the lights in the auditorium suddenly cut out. Midoriya sat silently and watched the pro hero, Present Mic, give his presentation covering the entrance exam with a strange sense of relief. He was confident in his ability to deal with robots—due to hardware restrictions, any mobile platforms like the faux villains could only contain the most basic of AI system—slow to react to environmental changes, predictable, and easily fooled. However, this wasn't the only reason that Midoriya was relieved to be facing machines. He didn't know what would happen to a living opponent if he couldn't control One for All right away.
After the Slime Villain incident, Midoriya sat down and calculated the amount of force All Might needed to use in order to summon those rain clouds. If his numbers were correct—and they usually were—Midoriya now carried an amount of energy roughly equivalent to several nuclear bombs…probably. There really wasn't any way to be 100% sure. One of the biggest hurdles that the scientific community faced after the appearance of quirks was adjusting to the new reality that previously ironclad physical laws of Thermodynamics, Conservation of Matter and Energy, Universal Attraction, and Relativity could be thrown out the window with the introduction of the right quirk.
'Regardless, if I used 100% on a person, I wouldn't kill them so much as delete them from existence.' Midoriya shivered at the thought, unnerved by the prospect of accidentally killing someone in such a brutal manner. 'There wouldn't even be a body left to identify.'
The walk to the testing ground was a bit of a jaunt—nearly twenty minutes at a brisk pace—but Midoriya was grateful for the delay. He made use of the time to center himself and clear his mind of all distractions. By the time he arrived at the impressively large model city, he wore a tranquil smile and his lean frame was free of tension, projecting an aura of complete confidence that drew wary stares from the other competitors.
When Present Mic made the call to begin, Midoriya decided to sit back and allow the desperate cluster of students fighting to shove their way through the crowded gateway disperse. He didn't want to waste any energy unnecessarily, and the moment that a gap opened in the crush of people, he easily jogged through the gate, and began his search for his first villain bot.
The streets of the test site were a warzone—everywhere Midoriya looked, there were dozens of test takers firing off flashy, powerful quirks, smashing, melting, exploding, and tearing the villain robots into expensive piles of scrap. In the distance, he could hear his competitors calling out their scores—some of them rather high considering how much time still remained.
Midoriya frowned, things were progressing much faster than he expected. 'Maybe I should have been in a bit more of a rush. If I don't give a move on, there won't be any points left for me.' He was concerned, but he wasn't about to panic just yet. He just needed to keep his cool and keep searching—an opportunity would appear, he was sure of it.
Fortunately, Midoriya didn't need to search very long for said opportunity; it came to him, violently bursting out of a wall like the Kool-Aid man. With a large "1" painted on its sides, the robot was fairly large, blocky, full of sharp edges and intimidating at first glance. It mechanically swiveled its triangular head back and forth before locking onto Midoriya. "Target Acquired." The machine growled in a deep mechanical tone that had been designed to be menacing. It began to barrel towards him. "Prepare for termination, human."
Rather than freezing in fear, Midoriya grinned at the opportunity and chambered his fist. "Thanks for making my life easier." He said, "Now, let's take this quirk for a spin."
Willing his new quirk to appear, Midoriya felt a sensation of intense heat as One for All surged through his right arm like bottled lightning, crackling with unbridled power and shredding the sleeve of his shirt, begging to be released. All Might's words before the test echoed in his head.
"You've had no time to get used to the power, so be prepared for a real kickback. But when the moment to use it arrives, remember this: when using One for All, clench up your butt cheeks and from the bottom of your heart, proudly shout—"
"SMASH!"
With All Might's signature battle cry, Midoriya let his fist fly, unleashing all of the built-up energy at once. When struck by the full might of One for All, the helpless robot was more than defeated—it was obliterated. The force behind the blow was absurd, even more powerful than the payload of a surface-to-air missile. It created gale-force winds that buffeted the surrounding area, even sending test takers unlucky enough to be nearby flying, and devastated the building in the path of his punch.
Unfortunately, Midoriya was not in a position to appreciate the sheer power he now possessed for one simple reason: every single bone in his right arm had been completely shattered into dust. He was no stranger to pain, but this intense agony was an entirely new level of torture. He could hear somebody screaming—it took a moment before he realized that it was him.
'Kickback!' The small part of his mind that was still lucid cried. 'He calls this kickback?'
Midoriya's racing thoughts were interrupted by a loud, creaking groan—an ominous sound that snapped him out of his current state of agonized obliviousness—and saw that his attack had rendered a large water tank on the building above him structurally unstable.
~Creeeeeeeak~
The large, heavy mass of iron leaned further and further over the edge of the roof, and finally, with a loud snap, the remaining struts holding it in place broke and the tower toppled over, hurtling towards the ground—directly towards Midoriya, who could only watch helplessly as death approached him from above.
"Oh, shi—" With the deafening crash of metal on pavement, the world went black.
Heroes Never Die
"Are you okay?" A familiar feminine voice asked, "It's my quirk. Sorry about using it on you without permission, but I thought that tripping like that before an exam would be bad luck."
Midoriya opened his eyes with a gasp. He glanced at his arm—it was totally fine, as if the grievous injury that he just suffered had never happened. More importantly, he wasn't currently doing his best impression of a bug beneath a rolled-up newspaper, which could only mean one thing.
'I guess I'm in a loop, huh?' It had been almost a year since the last one—the longest stretch of time Midoriya could remember since his quirk manifested. 'I'm definitely overdue for one.' He sighed. 'On the bright side, at least my arm isn't destroyed anymore.'
"This sure is nerve wracking, isn't it?" The friendly girl continued on script, just as before. "Well, good luck!" Midoriya was too caught up in his thoughts to stop her this time, so she simply walked away.
'Ah…Darn it.' Midoriya chastised himself for letting her go. 'I forget to get her name again...or even say thank you.' He shook his head. 'No matter…I'll probably get another chance, and I need to dedicate my time to figuring out what I need to do right now anyways.' He checked his watch. 'It's 9:52 right now, so the exam starts in exactly one hour and eight minutes. That's lucky…normally my timeframe is much shorter.'
After he made his way into the auditorium for the second time, Midoriya walked to his assigned seat on autopilot, pulled out his pocket notebook and began to write down his thoughts in a process that he had perfected over the course of many, many repeats.
'I can't exactly be sure what triggered the reset, but my death occurred immediately after using One for All and injuring myself, so my mistake is likely within that series of events.'
With this hypothesis in mind, Midoriya began to list the ways he could test his theory. 'That being the case, my options are A: Defeat the robot without One for All; B: Ignore it and move on to a different target; or C: Defeat it with One for All, but without injuring myself.'
As he thought, Midoriya absently tapped the side of his cheek with the end of the ballpoint pen. 'At my current level, Option A is…' Midoriya shook his head. 'Yeah…no way. Beating those things without any powers or weapons is impossible for me as I am.' He crossed out that entry and moved on. 'Option B is the simplest solution, and also the easiest to check.' He underlined the entry to indicate it as promising. 'B is probably the best choice right now.' For the sake of being thorough, he moved on to the next entry. 'Option C, while possible in theory, is easier said than done. I just got this quirk today, and I haven't had enough time to master it, so I'd probably just end up repeating over and over until I got it…right…' Midoriya stopped writing mid pen stroke, eyes going wide as inspiration hit him like a lightning bolt. 'Holy shit.' A grin slowly spread across Midoriya's face, and he had to struggle to contain the maniacal laughter threatening to escape his throat at any moment.
Midoriya had never intentionally triggered a reset of a loop before. It had never even occurred to him to do so, mostly because—until now—he hadn't seen any point, since the actions required to break free of the loop tended to coincide with his desired outcome anyways. More importantly—as used to the experience as he was—dying was still extremely unpleasant, especially since Midoriya's deaths were almost universally gruesome and/or painful. It was something that he preferred to avoid, if at all possible.
Midoriya scribbled frantically in his notebook, writing so hastily that his typically neat script was jagged and rough. His brain was on fire, and he needed to get his thoughts down before he lost them.
'There must be a way to regulate the amount of power that I'm using at once…if there wasn't, then All Might would kill every villain that he came across. As long as I don't change anything except the level of power that I'm using, I can endlessly experiment with One for All without consequence!' He paused, remembering the agony of his exploded arm. 'Well, mostly without consequence.'
He wasn't looking forward to experiencing that kind of pain over and over again. Clenching his fists, Midoriya shook his head. 'Suck it up, Izuku.' He chastised himself. 'If you don't do this now, you'll still have to do it later—when you might actually have to live with long term consequences of messing up.'
Midoriya wasn't a medical expert of any kind—his knowledge began and ended with basic first aid—but he was pretty sure that injuries as bad as the breaks in his arm were the kind of injuries that resulted in long-term, lingering problems. He had no intention of burning out in his twenties or early thirties like so many other heroes.
He placed pen to paper and began to write once more. 'Back when I was in quirk therapy, the specialist was big on visualization—creating a concrete image of using my quirk and visualizing success. It didn't really help me then, since all I could picture was dying, but now…' Midoriya furrowed his brow, trying to recall the sensation of using One for All. 'It was like a rush of heat, pressure, and sort of a tingly feeling, like…' He tapped the page of the notebook rapidly with his pen, the image he was looking for was in his mind, just barely out of reach, but he couldn't find the words to express it.
Just before he came to a realization, Midoriya's thought process was interrupted by an elbow to his ribs from Bakugo. Letting out a surprised yelp at the sudden pain, he looked up from his notebook to glare at Bakugo only to see the white-haired boy pointing behind them.
Midoriya's followed the surly teen's finger before landing on another test taker—a tall, solidly built teenager wearing a suit and glaring in Midoriya's direction through a pair of rectangular lensed glasses. Midoriya vaguely recognized the boy as the one who had spoken up the first time he sat through the presentation—something about an error on the information packets—but he didn't pay him much mind at the time. Once again, he was in the middle of a rant.
"—should listen when people are talking to you!"
Midoriya looked around—it seemed like everyone else was staring at him as well. 'Ah.' Midoriya realized. 'This is about me then.' He sighed. 'What a pain.'
"I'm sorry, can I help you?" Midoriya asked. His face was calm and his voice was even, but internally, he was seething that his train of thought had been utterly derailed by this interruption.
The other teen's glare intensified. "Yes!" He shouted, chopping the air in an oddly robotic fashion. "You've been muttering to yourself this entire time! It's distracting!" He gestured at the rest of the silent crowd watching their exchange with the same strange sense of compelling curiosity inspired by seeing a wreck on the side of the road. "We are all trying our best to become students here! If you think that this is some kind of joke, then please leave!"
Midoriya's body stiffened involuntarily. "A…joke?" He repeated. In his outrage, he failed to notice the sensation of heat flooding through his entire body as the images of countless deaths and his ten months of training from hell flashed through Midoriya's mind. The other boy flinched in surprise at the bottomless depth of feeling contained in Midoriya's glowing green eyes. "Is that what you think this is to me?"
The air surrounding Midoriya thrummed with latent power, making the hair of everyone in the immediate vicinity stand on end as if lightning were about to strike. Out of the corner of his eye, Midoriya could see Bakugo eying him with a mixture of shock, wariness, and suspicion.
"I…" Iida faltered, suddenly forgetting what he had been so upset about only moments before. Despite being significantly larger than Midoriya, Iida Tenya felt pitifully small under the weight of his gaze—his primal instincts were screaming at him to submit. 'What on earth is this? I'm not the one in the wrong here…why do I feel like I should apologize?'
Luckily for Iida's pride and the audience's nerves, Present Mic chose that moment to step in and answer the question Iida had asked concerning the printout before he called out Midoriya for his muttering. With the subject successfully changed, Midoriya turned back to his notes and everyone let out a sigh of relief as the aura of power surrounding the plain looking boy disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
Though the moment had passed, Bakugo's eyes remained glued on Midoriya. He scowled—he didn't understand what had just happened. He didn't like it when he didn't understand things. "What the hell was that just now, you shitty nerd?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." Midoriya answered instantly, snapping his notebook shut in resignation. If Bakugo was curious enough to actually ask him a question rather than bark out demands or simply insult him, Midoriya couldn't simply brush him off or redirect him like he usually did. For better or worse, Bakugo wasn't the kind of guy who let things go once they caught his attention. At the very least, Midoriya wasn't going to be able to think in peace until the walk to the test center.
"Don't give me that bullshit, you assclown!" Bakugo growled, "I'm not an idiot. You did something just now, I could feel it—it was like standing next to a goddamn power station. You've never done anything like that before. What did you do?"
Midoriya raised his eyebrows and tilted his head curiously. "Really?" He asked, suddenly flipping his notebook back open and setting his pen in the writing position with an intent look in his eye. "This 'something' you're talking about…was it a physical phenomenon, or did it feel more psychological in nature? Were there any visible changes that you could detect? Please, be as descriptive as possible—any information would be extremely helpful."
Bakugo blinked, taken aback by the sudden onslaught of questions. Seeing honest, eager curiosity writ large upon Midoriya's face, Bakugo scoffed and turned away—like hell he would help the shitty nerd if he didn't even know what he had done himself. He still wanted him to fail. "Fuck off." He growled. "Figure it out yourself, loser."
Midoriya frowned minutely at the brusque dismissal, then shrugged, writing it off as Bakugo being Bakugo. He turned back to his notebook. 'Like 'standing next to a power station', huh? I must have been channeling One for All without even noticing.' He smirked. 'He definitely didn't mean to, but Kacchan gave me a great hint just now. I think I know the image I'm going to go with.'
Heroes Never Die
Midoriya's eyes were steely and determined as he stared down the 1-point robot from his previous life. 'Okay,' he thought, 'If I think of the energy of One for All in terms of electricity, then my body is a circuit. I just need to adjust the level of energy and distribute it in a way that's usable.'
He summoned One for All, feeling the same rush of heat and power flood into his right arm. He grit his teeth. 'No, that's too much, that was the same as before…If I use it like this, I'll just break it again…don't let it surge out of control…picture adding resistors to the circuit, reduce the amperage by about half.' He slowly let out the breath he had been holding for nearly thirty seconds, focusing his full attention on reducing the intensity of the sensation. After a second or two of concentration, he felt the surging heat in his arm dissipate. He grinned. 'Good enough, let's give it a try.'
"SMASH!"
Heroes Never Die
"Are you okay?" A familiar feminine voice asked, "It's my quirk. Sorry about using it on you without permission, but I thought that tripping like that before an exam would be bad luck."
Midoriya opened his eyes and suppressed the desire to groan. '50 percent is still too much, huh? I guess it was stupid of me to think that I could get it on my second try.' He absently rubbed his throat for a moment to ease the phantom pain from his death. It was a flying shard of glass that killed him this time. Midoriya grimaced at the memory—after piecing his throat, it took him nearly twenty seconds of choking on his blood before he lost consciousness. Remembering where—and when—he was, Midoriya glanced over at the smiling girl standing next to him.
"Thanks for the help." He told the girl with a bow. "I could definitely use all of the good luck I can get right now." He smiled ruefully. "My name's Midoriya Izuku, what's yours?" He wasn't going to beat around the bush this time around—he didn't want to just keep calling her "nice girl" in his head.
"Oh…I'm Uraraka Ochako." She said with a smile. "Nice to meet you!"
"Likewise." Midoriya replied. "We should probably head in now, if we don't want to be late." He paused, "Want to go in together? We'll be future classmates after all, might as well get to know each other now."
Uraraka smiled, feeling oddly reassured by Midoriya's casual confidence in their success—he stated his belief in their ability to pass in the same matter-of-fact manner one would use to describe the color of the sky. "Sounds like a plan!"
As he amiably chatted with his bubbly new acquaintance, Midoriya knew that he should probably be focusing on his power incontinence issue, but at the moment, he couldn't bring himself to care. He'd just died in a truly awful way and needed a moment to recover. After all, there was no need to rush—he had all the time in the world.
AN: Okay, this took a while, I apologize. Writer's block is a mother. Not much else to report. Please leave a comment or a review to let me know what you think! Until next time, Plus Ultra.