Chapter Text
Izuku Midoriya was a normal child in a world where people were born with superpowers, called quirks. He wasn’t born powerless, or quirkless, as it is called for people born without a quirk; he had a quirk—but his quirk was, for lack of a better term, something more spiritual than the average quirk.
He wasn’t born with a simple power like a mild telekinetic ability based on hand movements like his mother's quirk, or the power to breathe fire like his dad's quirk, but instead with the power to take something akin to a snapshot of a person's soul and draw power from that snapshot to enhance himself in ways related to that person’s quirk.
For example, drawing power from his dad’s snapshot allowed Izuku to cast fire as if it were magic from a fantasy game, while drawing power from his mom gave Izuku access to something that was more gravity-related magic than the telekinesis that Izuku thought his mom had.
That quirk of his, while making him quite versatile as long as he had access to snapshots of people with the right quirk, made him quite the pariah in Mustafu. His power to permanently get something akin to a copy of a person's quirk offended a lot of people, as quirks were so tied to a person’s sense of self that someone who could copy their powers was seen as an attack on their whole person. Not even actively telling people that he wasn’t going to use his quirk on them was enough to earn any kind of leeway. The fact that people were also worshipping Bakugo because of his flashy quirk, and Bakugo hated Izuku because of what his quirk could do, also didn’t do Izuku any favors, but Izuku wasn’t someone who felt too broken up about the whole thing.
Izuku spent his whole childhood, from the day his quirk manifested until the day of the U.A. entrance exam, focusing on mastering its inner workings to pursue his dream of becoming a hero. As a child, he thought his quirk allowed him to almost cast magic like in a fantasy video game, but he wasn’t aware of how deep that rabbit hole went, as his understanding of those spiritual snapshots only grew with practice.
The first thing he did as he grew was to decide on a more suitable name for what his quirk could do, as snapshots of a person's soul were quite a mouthful, and he wasn’t keen on saying that all the time to refer to his power. So, after some research on Japanese culture and folklore of the pre-quirk era, he came up with the idea of calling his quirk Shikigami Master and referring to those snapshots he could create as Shikigami for simplicity's sake.
The second thing was to understand how those shikigami worked through secret training at Takoba Municipal Beach Park, which had been turned into a scrapyard when the sea started dragging trash onto the beach, and people didn’t bother to clean it up. He discovered that while he wasn’t able to fully replicate the power of the original person when using a shikigami based on them, he could do something close enough to those feats, and even ignore some of the disadvantages that said power had in the person itself.
For example, the shikigami he created from his dad may not allow Izuku to breathe fire as his dad could, but he could generate fire wherever he wanted, normally at the tip of his fingers or his palms, and keep releasing fire without having to worry about harming his respiratory system like his dad had to do when using his quirk, as Izuku wasn’t spewing that fire from his mouth. Izuku also discovered that gaining more mastery with a shikigami gave him access to passive powers that either enhanced his use of that shikigami or removed any potential weakness that the power had, like giving Izuku the ability to avoid choking himself with carbon dioxide from breathing in smoke generated when burning something, or even his body developing a natural resistance to heat, up to a certain extent, making him able to draw even more power from that particular shikigami.
Izuku also learned that he could confine the power of one of his Shikigami within certain items and give them to others as accessories, granting them a small amount of passive powers based on the Shikigami he used to create that accessory. This provided a massive boost to the original person from whom he had created a Shikigami if Izuku gave them an accessory with the power of their Shikigami once he had mastered it. He learned this when he made a good luck charm for his father after his father came back from America for a week, and his father told him on the phone a couple of weeks later, after he returned to America, that he had managed to safely evacuate a building that was set ablaze by a villain. The passive powers that Izuku unlocked from his shikigami allowed his father to avoid choking to death from breathing too much carbon dioxide and made his body far more resistant to the heat and flames around him, to the point that he was able to simply walk out of the building himself without needing firefighters to rescue him.
While that process did get rid of that shikigami, Izuku didn’t fully lose all the power that the shikigami could give him, as some part of its power remained with him permanently. For example, the ability to avoid passing out from breathing carbon dioxide and a higher resistance to fire and heat had become a fixture of Izuku’s baseline, even though he had lost access to the ability to create fire.
Izuku may have handicapped himself by refusing to create shikigami from people he met in his day-to-day life, with few exceptions, but that didn’t mean he was limited to the shikigami that he created based on his parents. He took a more restrained approach with his quirk, and while he would never create shikigami of other people, as he considered that a violation of their sense of self…if someone tried to attack him with the intent to harm…then things were fair game and Izuku saw no issue with fighting back against a bully by creating a shikigami out of them and fighting back with their own power in a way.
The people in Aldera learned quite quickly that bullying Izuku only made him stronger, as not only did Izuku refuse to back down from any physical confrontation, but he would gain new powers based on the quirk of those who bullied him. By the time the entrance exam of U.A. came, only Bakugo was bullying Izuku, and even that bullying was only through verbal confrontation, as Bakugo learned the hard way that Izuku’s mastery of the shikigami based on him made him resistant enough to tank his explosions and retaliate with his own explosions that, while weaker than his, weren’t subject to the weaknesses that Bakugo’s explosions had and could be used to spread more than just heat.
Whatever bond Izuku had with Bakugo was dead at this point, and Izuku didn’t see Bakugo as a hero in the making, but as a villain who was too deluded to understand that he wasn’t hero material because of his repugnant behavior, even if everyone around him praised him and called him a hero in the making for his flashy quirk. But that wasn’t his problem anymore. Izuku’s problem now was calming himself down enough to make sure he would be ready for the entrance exam, and hoping things would go his way after all those years of preparations for this day.
“…” Izuku was now at the entrance of a fake city that was inside U.A.’s property. Izuku would not only marvel at the fact that something like that was inside U.A., but also question how much money U.A. had to spend to have something like that right now if it wasn’t for the fact that he was in the middle of the practical part of the entrance exam.
The entrance exam for U.A. was split into two parts: a written test that Izuku found quite beefy for something meant for soon-to-be high schoolers, but Izuku considered that, since U.A. only accepted the best of the best that Japan’s youth could offer, something like that was expected; and a practical part that was a simple competition between groups of participants in multiple fake cities within U.A. that consisted of destroying villain robots to score points. Those who scored the most points would have the best chance of entering the hero course.
He saw the signal to start given by the heroine, Midnight, who was working as a teacher at U.A., and then he rushed alongside the group of participants that he was part of into that city in order to beat robots and claim as many villain points as possible.
Izuku ran at a group of villain robots that were about to reach him, and then he extended his hand in order to release a fire blast, combining the power of his dad's shikigami and Bakugo’s shikigami, in order to blast those robots away and melt them at the same time. That action earned him a couple of villain points and left some of the other participants awed, but while the explosion's flashiness blinded them, it all stemmed from Izuku learning the inner workings and limitations of his quirk.
Izuku may have had the power to create shikigami based on other people when they are close to him, and while he may not be able to gain the same power that the original person had, and what he could do barely could reach half of what that person could do with their quirk, thanks to the fact that he could have up to three shikigami active at the same time, he could potentially mix and match shikigami in order to compensate for the lack of power by getting creative with his shikigami combinations.
Bakugo’s shikigami was one that allowed Izuku to generate explosions from his palms like Bakugo could do with his quirk, but since he didn’t detonate any nitroglycerine sweat like Bakugo had to do with his quirk to create his explosions, then said explosions were less real explosions and more bursts of non-elemental energy that lacked some of that stopping power that Bakugo’s explosions had, but by having a shikigami with elemental properties, like his dad shikigami, then Izuku turned those weak blasts of energy into fire blasts that were better that what he could do with Bakugo’s shikigami alone, but he still wasn’t able to fully match Bakugo’s raw power with whatever explosion he could create that way. That way, Izuku exchanged raw power for versatility, as he could change from blasting people with fire to blasting them with ice, wind, or electricity based on the shikigami that he had active, or he could even do other things depending on the situation, but for now, Izuku only needed to rely on Bakugo’s shikigami and the one of his father as his means to attack because there was no real need at the moment to do something different.
There wasn’t too much to do for him aside from blasting robots away, as no other participant got themselves in a sticky situation that required him to step up, aside from one purple-haired kid with eyebags who was throwing a tantrum because his quirk was useless against those robots. So, he didn’t have to switch gears and rely on the third shikigami that he had on standby in case he needed to go from attacking others to supporting them.
Izuku made it a personal rule to keep at least one shikigami attuned to healing or protective duty on himself at all times, as one never knew when the need for someone with a healing quirk would arise, and Izuku preferred to be ready for those situations in case they popped up. Izuku learned that lesson the hard way when one of Bakugo’s suicide dares in Aldera to one of their classmates almost ended in a casualty, and the only thing that prevented the worst from happening was that Izuku had a shikigami that allowed him to heal others on his person that day. While Izuku never forgave Bakugo for that incident, which reinforced his view of Bakugo as a villain freak, it made him decide to always be ready for any situation that required a healing quirk, regardless of the law on quirk use.
The exam continued without issue… until a small tremor shocked everyone in the area.
“…” Izuku kept his composure as he saw how a massive robot appeared out of nowhere and started to advance in their direction at a slower pace, destroying buildings in its wake, and while Izuku would have considered that the sign for him to get out of the way and call it a day…Izuku heard a girl's screams from the direction of that robot and realized it was time for him to use the shikigami he had on standby for emergencies, by the looks of it.
Inside U.A.’s main building, Principal Nezu, alongside some of the heroes that were under U.A.’s payroll, were witnessing how the practical exam was going on, thanks to all the screens that were in the room where they were all located, and they saw how the zero-point robot had been unleashed in every examination area.
While the destruction caused by the zero-point robot in those areas was quite impressive and dangerous…U.A. was prepared for any possible eventuality in case that said destruction causes any kind of severe injury to a participant, and as the zero point robot marched down their respective areas, their visual scanners searched for any participant that had been injured during its rampage and automatically sent to the medi-bots that were on standby the coordinates of where those students were in order to have them rescued as soon as possible.
The girl in the area where Izuku was, who was now trapped under a massive pile of debris, was one of those fake buildings that had collapsed and fallen on top of her, and wasn’t left to rot despite the Zero Point Robot having changed the whole dynamic of the entrance exam. Some medi-bots were on their way, and one of the drones recording how the exam was being conducted in that area was tracking her location.
Unless the situation was severe enough to require a full stop of the exam to save a participant’s life, those that were in a precarious situation weren’t rescued in an instant, but were left there for a little while, a minute or two, in order to have them act as a last minute extra rescue point for those participants that decided to risk it all and go to save someone that had been left behind instead of running away, and that girl, while injured, wasn’t in a condition that would require taking any extreme measures.
That may sound cruel, but her situation would be at worst extended for a couple of minutes before she would be rescued by the medi-bots if no one stepped up to do the heroic thing in this situation, and considering that Nezu saw how Izuku Midoriya rushed to the location of that girl and quickly got her out of that pile of debris that kept her trapped, then her situation had improved faster than expected.
Nezu pulled Izuku’s files—not the ones about his academic records, but those pertaining to his quirk—in order to get a read on that kid’s power. He watched as Izuku somehow managed to pull some of the debris chunks into his hands by levitating them, then fired them at the zero-point robot, causing serious damage. Afterward, he changed tactics to heal the sprained ankle the girl had—the injury she had suffered despite being almost buried alive by all that debris—which piqued Nezu’s interest.
“Shikigami…Master?” Nezu mused, reflecting on the recent update to Izuku’s quirk file from a couple of years prior, made by Izuku himself, and read it with quite an interest. The details immediately caught his attention. In essence, Izuku could create spiritual "snapshots" or shikigami, as he called them, of people he encountered, allowing him to channel aspects of their quirks through these constructs. He was capable of using up to three shikigami simultaneously, blending their abilities for maximum versatility. Though each shikigami only granted a partial copy of the original power, a 50% at best and a measly 33% at worst, this flexibility meant Izuku could adapt to nearly any situation, provided he had the right shikigami at hand.
As Nezu finished reading, he glanced at the two men standing quietly at the back of the observation room: Shota Aizawa, known as Eraserhead, and Sekijiro Kan, or Vlad King. Both would soon be the homeroom teachers for the next generation of hero students, and Nezu was keen to see their reactions.
Eraserhead wasn’t paying attention at all, as he was too focused on the screen that showed the dejected figure of his apprentice, who had failed the entrance exam because he wasn’t prepared enough, while Vlad King was having quite the contemplative look as he saw how Izuku helped that girl walk to the entrance after the zero-point robot in that area had been destroyed by Izuku.
That was enough for Nezu not to send Izuku to the class that would be under Eraserhead’s care, as Eraserhead’s methods of teaching, or the lack of them if Nezu was honest with himself, were something that Nezu wasn’t going to impose on Izuku Midoriya should he manage to make it to the hero course after the results of the entrance exam were calculated.
Eraserhead was still only a teacher at U.A., despite his methods being a net negative for the school, not only because his quirk was just that useful, but also because two of the teachers at U.A. would quit U.A. if Eraserhead were fired for his incompetence as a teacher. Whatever fondness Nezu had for Eraserhead was quickly burned away when Nezu learned the hard way that allowing Eraserhead the power to expel his students and put a black mark on them without giving a valid reason put those kids' lives in jeopardy. The black mark was a mark of shame in Japan, and two of those kids who had those black marks placed in their records tried to kill themselves out of shame. It was only pure luck that allowed them to survive.
Eraserhead’s arguments for wanting those kids in the first year to taste ‘death’ so they would take the hero course by using that expulsion scare tactic of his seriously sounded good on paper, but the execution of those methods had disastrous results and dangerous ramifications, prompting Nezu to quickly put an end to those privileges. Even if Eraserhead still used it to get those kids to shape up, the last thing Nezu wanted was for a hero student he considered to have great potential—one who had even caught his attention—to be upset at U.A. and its faculty because of Eraserhead’s methods, like all those students who had suffered from Eraserhead’s expulsion scare and never said anything positive of U.A. when they became heroes.
Nezu would make the appropriate decisions when the time came, but one thing was clear: Izuku Midoriya wouldn’t be under Eraserhead’s care should he make it to the hero course.
A couple of weeks had passed since the entrance exam at U.A., and now Izuku and Bakugo were in the principal’s office at Aldera. The entrance exam results had been given to the faculty of Aldera, and the principal wanted to congratulate both Izuku and Bakugo on making it into U.A.’s hero course.
Izuku wasn’t surprised at all when Bakugo threw a tantrum because not only did Izuku dare to not do what he had told him to do, which was to not take part in the U.A. entrance exam because Bakugo was so entitled that he refused to allow anyone else in Aldera to take that exam to not overshadow him, but also had the gall to surpass his score in the writing test by one measly point, surpassing Bakugo’s score of 95 with a 96.
It mattered little that Bakugo was the first in the practical test, as Bakugo’s destructive behavior allowed him to gain 90 villain points, while Izuku only managed to get fourth place with his 69 total points. His act of saving that girl during the incident earned him enough rescue points to go from not making the top 40 to fourth place. To Bakugo, being surpassed in any way by Izuku was an insult that he refused to tolerate.
Bakugo had barely enough sense to know not to press that issue in front of the principal…but as soon as school hours were over and Izuku walked to his home, Bakugo decided to try to intimidate Izuku into dropping out of U.A. to not ruin his hero origin story. Izuku, far from being intimidated by that display, simply laughed in his face as he decided to talk with someone who had once been his friend before his own ego and the society around him twisted him into the villain freak he was today.
“You know… you’re a little too old to still be obsessed with crafting this perfect ‘hero origin story’ about coming from humble beginnings. The truth is, your parents are quite rich, not enough to own a house bigger than half the city, but enough to allow you to live in a nice house in the richest parts of the city. There’s nothing humble about your background. And don’t pretend like you didn’t have options—your family could’ve put you in any elite junior high in Mustafu, like Isamu Junior High, with a hero course prep for people who had the intention to enter a hero school after junior high but you only picked Aldera, the worst possible school for hero hopefuls in Mustafu, because you wanted to sell the idea that you were clawing your way up from the bottom. You had every resource, every advantage, and you threw it away just to have a sob story to sell to people as you climbed up the hero rankings. Stop pretending you’re some underdog coming from a humble background. The only thing humble about your story is the fiction you keep telling yourself.” Izuku said, his words cutting through Bakugo’s bravado.
“Shitty Deku…!” Bakugo didn’t take kindly to Izuku’s words and released a couple of small explosions from his palms, a show of strength that intimidated a lot of people in Aldera, but one that didn’t work on Izuku.
“What’s the matter? The truth hurts you, you whiny little bitch? Your ploy of appearing to come from a humble background and rise to the top so you could sell yourself as the next coming of All Might fails at a cursory glance, as the name of your parents, especially your dad, is quite well-known in the fashion industry, so the first thing people would do is ask why someone who had access to enough money to go to good schools before U.A. chose the cheapest ones when it would have been a better choice to enroll you in schools that would have allowed you to develop your talents as a hero hopeful years before entering U.A.” Izuku started, walking up to Bakugo and getting in his face, then continued to talk to him about how he wasn’t someone who could pass himself off as coming from a humble background while he had the resources to get a better education than the one he chose for himself.
“You don’t live in an apartment located in a Danchi like my mom, and I do, and I will remind you that a Danchi is either property of the local government or a private company. We can’t live in a nice house like you and your family do, because my family doesn’t have as much money as yours. We can only live there because the apartment belongs to the company that keeps my father away from us, working in America as a corporate slave almost all day during the year, and that company wants to keep the families of their employees living in their property as bargaining chips to keep their employees under their thumbs with more than just paying them a modest salary, enought to survive but not to aspire to something better.” Izuku said. He did hate Bakugo for his obsession with wanting a perfect origin story by appearing to come from a humble origin, as he considered that obsession an insult to people that actually had those origins, as it was clear that Bakugo had the means to get a better education and more opportunities than a lot of people like him had, but chose to do that out of a childish idea of being more marketable as a hero if he made himself look like an underdog that scraped his way to the top from the bottom.
“So no, I don’t give a fuck about any threat of yours, you don’t have any power to stop me, and now that I made it to the hero course…then Aldera’s faculty isn’t going to help you to get me out of your way…or do you not find it strange that for as much as the faculty there worships you so much, to the point of sabotaging others that tried to upstage you, they still allowed me to take that exam and didn’t sabotage my paperwork in any way?” Izuku continued, watching as Bakugo, for a couple of seconds, looked somewhat contemplative about the situation, almost as if his words had reached him, but whatever thought he had died quickly, as Bakugo simply demanded that he abandon his dream of becoming a hero and not go to U.A.
“Fuck off. I will be a hero student in U.A., regardless of how that hurts your fragile ego. If you have a problem with it, either quit your dreams of becoming a hero, or grow the fuck up. This is reality, you fucking idiot, not a shonen story in which you are a protagonist. The world doesn’t have to bend over for you and your childish delusions, and while you had gotten away with a lot of shit, sooner or later you are going to hit a fucking wall that you won’t be able to overcome because you would be too busy whining and bitching about the injustice of it to actually persevere in life.” Izuku said before walking away from Bakugo, leaving the blond to scream profanities in his direction in impotent rage as his threats failed to intimidate him.
Izuku was sad in a way to see someone that had so much potential…a thing that Izuku knew intimately, as Bakugo’s shikigami that he had possessed a lot of passive skills that made it quite the utility tool for him, and he suspected that Bakugo was smart enough to figure out how to use his explosions in ways that went above just mindless destruction, but said potential was wasted because Bakugo was too much of a petulant child who wanted to be praised all the time just for existing and would lose his composure if someone didn’t see him as the second coming of All Might.
But that wasn’t going to be his problem anyway. Izuku would be in class 1-B, while Bakugo would be in class 1-A. That would be the first time in a long while when both wouldn’t be sharing the same classroom, and, while relieved at the idea, Izuku hoped that Bakugo’s future classmates would have the patience of a saint to endure his bullshit.
Because, as far as Izuku was concerned, he was done with him and wanted nothing to do with Bakugo anymore.
Some time passed after that encounter, and the end of one school year came… for another to start. Izuku Midoriya had successfully graduated from Aldera Junior High and was now on a train bound for U.A. to start his education as a hero.
This was the first day of the new school year, and Izuku was unable to fully contain his excitement at the fact that after all those years of tirelessly studying and training on his own, it had paid off.
His last days in Aldera had been the closest thing to a peaceful tenure in years, as now that he had successfully reached U.A., the faculty of Aldera was neither able nor willing to screw him over about it, as they were that much of an opportunistic bunch that they considered having two students from their school going there was better than one, even if one of them hadn’t anything good to say about them. That was something Bakugo was unable to grasp, and it drove him to a rage during his last days at Aldera, as he couldn't even comprehend why the faculty who had shielded and coddled him so much over the past years weren’t doing anything to stop Izuku from stealing his spotlight.
Bakugo was that naive, or a little too self-centered to realize that while the discrimination Izuku faced for what his quirk could do was bad, the potential Izuku had as a hero was far too great to be ignored. So while the faculty of Aldera never gave Izuku the privileges that Bakugo received as their golden child…he was given far more leeway than everyone else when dealing with anyone else that wasn’t Bakugo.
To use your quirk without a license was illegal, even for self-defense, and while there would need to be a lot of warnings and genuine villainous actions to be branded as a villain, Izuku was aware that the faculty never bothered to stop him from using his quirk to make shikigami from those who attacked him and looked the other way when he was attacked so they wouldn’t have anything to report.
Izuku was neither protected nor sabotaged by the faculty, as other kids who wanted to be heroes had been when they clashed with Bakugo’s fragile ego, and that was the privilege that he was given by the faculty of Aldera so he could fulfill his dreams to be a hero…and had a selection of shikigami that allowed him to theoretically cover a lot of situations.
Bakugo was a brute and a school bully that pushed others around with his quirk, and the flashiness of it alongside his aggressiveness made him a good bet to be a hero in the future…but people like Bakugo were a dime a dozen in Japan, and that didn’t mean that he would succeed, as the hero market was oversaturated in this day and age, and being strong and defeating villains only wasn’t impressive enough unless you had a massive track record to garner the attention of the public.
Izuku, on the other hand, was someone who would need a lot of workaround to match Bakugo in raw power, but he had the potential to perform in heroic duties that weren’t only just beating villains thanks to how his quirk worked, and heroes that were able to perform in multiple fields aside from just beating villains were those that made it in the story books as anomalies over people like Bakugo that would at best become a trend for a while before someone more powerful and flashy appeared and people would forget about him.
Bakugo was the golden child of Aldera for the short-term benefit in their eyes that he would have for their school if he made it as a hero, while Izuku was a long-term investment that Aldera had for having someone who would, in a way, allow the name of their school to enter the story books should he reach the kind of level of fame that his potential allowed him to reach if things went well for him. While all of that made Izuku sick to his stomach, he had no choice but to play ball with the faculty and take their ‘kindness’ and endure as much as he could before he made it to U.A., and now that said day had come, Izuku was somewhat nervous.
Izuku wasn’t in the same class as Bakugo was, something that he considered a blessing from the heavens after years of being Bakugo’s classmate and the only one that more or less kept him in check by being his favorite target of ire, and while that was good news, Izuku wasn’t sure what he would find in U.A.
Would he find people like Bakugo in his new class, or would he have to deal with an almost malicious faculty like the one that Aldera had? Izuku didn’t know, but he hoped that U.A. would be the hero academia of his dreams and not a barely tolerable nightmare that Aldera had been for him for years, but that would only be something that he would know once he reached U.A. and spent a couple of days there.
But one thing was sure… his story about how he became a hero began today.