The air crackled, thick with the ozone tang that usually meant I was pushing One for All a little too hard. I was out in the training grounds, a familiar ache blooming in my limbs as I practiced my newest Full Cowl maneuvers. The dirt was torn up around me, tiny craters testament to my power, but I was focused, determined to get just a little bit faster, a little bit stronger.
Then, it happened.
The sky, which had been a brilliant, cloudless blue minutes before, twisted. It churned like a disturbed sea, colors bleeding into each other – sickly green and bruised grey, a palette that sent shivers down my spine. It was wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I had barely enough time to register the strangeness before a beam of pure energy slammed into me. It wasn't like lightning, not a jagged bolt, but a solid column of light, pulsating with an unsettling hum.
Pain. Just searing, overwhelming pain. Then, nothing.
I woke up with a groan, my head throbbing like a drum. The training grounds were still there, familiar and yet...different. I felt disoriented, like I'd been tossed in a washing machine. And that wasn't the worst of it.
My quirk. It felt… wrong. One for All, that wellspring of power, the burning, crackling feeling that always thrummed beneath my skin, was gone. In its place was something… gentle. A soft pull, like roots reaching for the earth. I tentatively flexed my fingers, concentrating. Instead of the familiar surge of One for All, a small vine, emerald and vibrant, sprouted from my palm. I gasped, staring at the delicate tendril as it unfurled, a tiny leaf pushing out from its tip.
I tried again, picturing a tree, a solid trunk, sturdy branches reaching for the sky. This time the process was slower, more laborious, but with effort, a sapling, no bigger than my forearm, grew from the ground at my feet. It was a young oak, leaves quivering as if surprised by its sudden appearance. I reached out, touching the bark, the rough texture a stark contrast to the smooth skin of my palm. This wasn't One for All. This wasn't anything like One for All.
Confused and slightly panicked, I slowly made my way back to the dorms. The feeling of something being fundamentally off only intensified as I approached the building. The usually vibrant laughter of my classmates was replaced by a low hum of confusion and disbelief.
I pushed open the common room door to silence. And then, the chaos began.
Bakugo was staring at his hands, smoke billowing around them, but not the explosive kind. Thistles, dark and thorny, were blooming from his fingertips. He snarled, trying to shake them off, but they only grew more determined. Iida was surrounded by a field of waving wheat, stalks reaching his hips. He was frantically trying to get them under control, his usual precise movements replaced with flailing arms. Uraraka was bouncing up and down, not floating, but with small clusters of plump, red berries popping into existence above her head. Tsuyu, to my absolute astonishment, had small, bioluminescent mushrooms growing all over her body and they softly glowed. She wasn't a frog anymore, at least not completely. She was, a walking, glowing garden.
"What in the world is happening?" I whispered, mostly to myself.
"Deku? Is that you?" Mina asked, her voice tight with disbelief. Tentacles of thick ivy coiled around her arms as she spoke, and flowers of every colour burst from the vines. Even Kirishima, usually as solid as a rock, was covered in a coarse, green moss.
Everyone was different. Changed. Their quirks had seemingly… mutated, twisted into something nature-based, something…plant-like. A wave of nausea rose in my throat. What had that beam done to us? What had happened to One for All? Had I lost the quirk that had defined me, the quirk that was meant to protect everyone?
"I... I don't know," I stammered, the sapling at my feet trembling with my fear. I looked at my hands, at the little vine I created earlier, and a sense of overwhelming loss washed over me. We were heroes in training. We had been working so hard, honing our powers, and now all of it felt… wrong.
We looked at each other, a room full of teenagers suddenly strangers to their own abilities. My plant-based quirk. Bakugo and his thistles. Iida with his wheat field. We were no longer the same, and the questions loomed larger than the strange changes that had overtaken us. Had we been stripped of what made us special? Had we been given something new, something we didn't understand, something with the potential to be completely different from what we knew? Only time would tell, and looking at the fear and confusion in my classmates, I knew this was going to be a long, strange road ahead of us. The sky, still a bruised mix of green and grey, offered no answers. Only questions that screamed to be asked.