The first memory that did not belong to him came on a summer night, just after Kenji Tanaka had celebrated his third birthday.
In his sleep, he was no longer the little boy curled up against his teddy bear. He had become someone else, older, sitting in a soft armchair facing a large glowing screen. The image showed three boys on a rooftop under a starry sky. They looked strange. One wore a straw hat and had an oversized smile, another had freckles and a scar under his eye, and the third was blond with battered glasses. They were holding cups, and their voices rang out with a solemnity that pierced through years and lives.
"From today on, we're brothers!"
The feeling that flooded him was not that of a child. It was an adult emotion, complex, made of deep nostalgia and burning admiration. He felt it, he knew it: those three were bound by something stronger than blood, a vow that defied the world. The scene was animated, unreal, yet it squeezed his heart like an embrace. Then the dream shattered, leaving behind a lingering warmth and a strange-sounding word: One Piece.
He jolted awake, eyes wide in the darkness of his room. Moonlight filtered through the blinds, drawing silver stripes across his rocket-patterned blanket. His heart was racing, not with fear, but with a deep, confused excitement. He lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, trying to hold onto details that slipped through his fingers like sand. The laughter of the boy in the straw hat, the determination in the redhead's eyes, the pride of the blond. And that energetic, thunderous music...
"Brothers..." he whispered into the silence.
His bedroom door opened softly, letting in a strip of light from the hallway. It was his mother, Akari. She had that instinct that made her wake whenever one of her children was restless.
"Kenji? Are you okay, my treasure?" she whispered as she came closer.
She sat on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on his forehead. Immediate calm washed over Kenji. It wasn't just his mother's reassuring presence. It was her Quirk, "Tactile Reminiscence." By touching him, she perceived the echo of his emotions, the wave of burning nostalgia, the confusion, and her soothing presence acted like balm. She didn't know what he had dreamed, but she could feel it wasn't an ordinary nightmare.
"You had a big dream, didn't you?" she asked, stroking his hair.
Kenji nodded, snuggling against her. How could he explain? He was three years old. So he simply said:
"There were three big boys. They became brothers. It was beautiful."
Akari smiled and kissed his forehead.
"That's a very beautiful dream, yes. But now you have to go back to sleep. The big boys in your dream need to rest too."
The next morning at breakfast, the family was together. Sunlight flooded the modern, minimalist dining room designed by his father, Hiroshi. The man, calm and precise in his movements, was reading the morning paper, whose front page featured an article about Crust's heroic intervention in Osaka. He looked up at Kenji.
"Your mother says you went on quite a journey last night, champ."
Daichi, his seven-year-old big brother, burst into the room, hair still a mess. His overflowing energy contrasted with Kenji's morning reserve.
"A journey? Did you fly in your dream? Last night I dreamed I went BANG BANG with my hands and flew like Hawks!" he shouted, miming shots with his palms.
Their father smiled. Daichi's Quirk, "Sound Impact," had manifested a few months earlier, and since then, the boy had lived only to train it and imagine himself becoming a famous hero.
"No, not flying," Kenji replied softly, playing with his bowl of rice. "They just... shared a promise."
"Meh, sounds boring," Daichi said before shoveling in his scrambled eggs.
Hiroshi studied his younger son. There was sometimes, in Kenji's eyes, a depth beyond his age. A look too thoughtful. His own Quirk, "Integral Rule," gave him a sharp sense of proportion and balance. He sensed in his son a kind of inner harmony, but also tension, as if two different melodies were trying to play at once.
The days, then the weeks that followed brought other fragments. They didn't come in order, nor by choice. It was a smell, a sound, a color that brought to the surface a shard of a past that wasn't his.
One afternoon, while watching a cartoon with Daichi, a classic heroic series full of flashy fights, a completely different image forced itself into his mind. A small, thin boy with green hair was staring with heartbreaking admiration at a muscular giant in a red, white, and blue suit, smiling brightly. The giant raised a thumb, and the boy cried. The scene was so powerful, so loaded with hope, that Kenji's breath caught. All Might. The name surfaced in his mind, heavy with meaning, mixed with another name: Midoriya. This was different from the dream of the three brothers. It felt more... real. Closer. As if it belonged to the world he lived in now. His confusion deepened.
Little by little, other images assembled, forming an incomplete, disorienting puzzle. Scenes of fierce battles in a massive stadium. A blond, explosive, angry boy screaming "DIE!" Another, half white and half red, with a cold stare and powers both icy and burning. A brown-haired girl making objects float. He recognized the elements. This was the world of heroes, his world, but seen as a story. A story whose beginning he knew, but whose middle and end were blurred, warped by secondhand memories: clips watched on his former self's screen, fragments of online discussions, spoilers caught in passing on apps with suggestive names like TikTok. He knew terrible things happened later. Names like Shigaraki, All For One, War hovered like faceless shadows. It was unstable knowledge, a map riddled with holes.
It shaped his personality. Outwardly, he was a calm, observant child, somewhat withdrawn in his quieter moments. But Kenji did not doubt his place. The hazy certainty of having already lived, of having already watched, gave him a kind of inner serenity. He wasn't shy out of fear of others' gazes, but because his attention was often turned inward, trying to untangle the threads of his two lives. With his family, he was affectionate and present. With Daichi, he played willingly, listening to his brother ramble about future exploits with amused patience.
One evening, when he was a little over four, he witnessed a scene that crystallized his understanding of the world. The family was watching the news. A villain with a mud-morphing Quirk had taken hostages in a bank. Suddenly, a minor hero, whose name Kenji didn't know, intervened. The fight was brief, a bit chaotic, and ended with the villain's arrest. The anchor commented lightly, quickly moving on to the weather.
Daichi bounced with excitement. "Whoa! Did you see that last hit? He sent his fist like POW!"
Hiroshi, more pragmatic, said, "His positioning was bad at first. He exposed the hostages for a moment. He got lucky."
Akari sighed. "They overdo it sometimes. All for the cameras."
Kenji stayed silent. Watching the report, a worn memory resurfaced: an online critique from his old life about the superficiality of hero society in MHA. And suddenly, he saw that superficiality not as a plot device, but as reality. The media glorification, the excessive merchandising, the deep inequality created simply by the luck of being born with a powerful Quirk or not... The fragments of his prior knowledge gave him an early critical lens. He looked at his brother, whose eyes shone with pure enthusiasm, and felt both affection and a wave of unease. This world was far more complex and dangerous than children's shows made it seem.
The years passed, carrying Kenji toward five, then six years old. School exposed him to the diversity of Quirks. Some children could stretch their fingers, others change their hair color, another generated small sparks. Kenji, however, still hadn't manifested anything. He wasn't worried. Many Quirks awakened later. But an impatient curiosity gnawed at him. His body felt normal. Too normal.
Yet sometimes, strange sensations passed through him. After a long day running in the spring sun with Daichi, he felt oddly energized in the evening, as if physical exhaustion were being offset by something else. Once, after falling off a swing, not very high, the impact with the ground hurt less than expected, and he had the fleeting impression that the shock had "dissipated" inside his body before vanishing. Was it childhood imagination? The desire for a power echoing reality? He told no one, watching and waiting.
His family life remained his haven. He admired his father's quiet precision, who with a gesture of his hand could make bluish lines and perfect measurements appear in the air to explain a building's architecture. He fed on the intuitive warmth of his mother, whose simple touch could soothe his most restless nights filled with scattered memories. And he followed, with a mix of exasperation and affection, Daichi's inexhaustible enthusiasm, who at ten trained relentlessly to master his sound waves, already dreaming of U.A.'s entrance exam.
He thought about U.A. too. How could he not, with his fragmentary memories of the hero school? But his desire was different from his brother's. He didn't necessarily want to be in the spotlight, famous. He wanted to understand. Understand this world, understand his own power when it came, and find his place. Maybe not in full sunlight, but somewhere he could make a difference in his own way.
Time flowed like that, quietly, until the eve of his seventh birthday.
That day, a storm was brewing. The air was heavy, charged with electricity. Daichi, as turbulent as ever, dragged Kenji into the garage to show him a "new ultimate technique." The garage was an organized mess, with an old punching bag, floor mats, and their father's neat workbench.
"Watch closely, little brother!" Daichi said, striking a dramatic pose. He aimed at an old padded target hanging from a nail. "Sound Impact: Concentrated Percussion!"
He clapped his hands with controlled force. CLAP! The sound was sharp and vibrating. A visible shockwave warped the air and struck the pad, which began to swing violently. But the control wasn't perfect. Part of the energy dispersed sideways, making a metal shelf tremble.
On that shelf stood an old reading lamp, a plugged-in heirloom. Under the vibration, it wobbled, tilted dangerously, and fell. The plug was ripped from the wall with an electric crackle, and the exposed wire, still live, whipped through the air before touching the cement floor, damp from the stormy atmosphere.
A blinding bluish flash erupted with a sinister crack, searching for ground. The shortest path passed through Kenji's small wet shoes as he stood frozen, watching.
The pain was instant, absolute. A white-hot burn shot through his leg, his entire body, locking his muscles in a horrific spasm. He tried to scream, but no sound came out. In his mind, a silent howl echoed, a primal, visceral refusal: NO! STOP! THIS ISN'T FOR ME!
And deep within his being, in a place he had never perceived before, something awakened.
The pain didn't vanish. It was... swallowed. The brutal, chaotic, destructive electrical energy ravaging his nerves was suddenly channeled, drawn in like into a whirlpool. It converged toward the center of his chest, toward a point that felt like an infinite, hungry void. The sensation was both agonizing and ecstatic. It was no longer an assault, it was a filling. As if his entire body were a massive battery, dry his whole life, and someone had finally plugged in a high-voltage cable.
The buzzing in his ears changed in nature. It was no longer the electric shock, but a deep internal hum. His eyes, wide open, saw halos around objects. He saw the residual, warm energy of Daichi's sound impact floating in the air. He felt the faint daylight filtering through the dirty garage window like a soft rain on his skin. He perceived the vibrations of the floor beneath his feet, every tiny tremor.
"KENJI!" Daichi's voice was a scream of pure horror. His brother was pale as death, eyes bulging, hands outstretched without daring to touch him.
Their parents came running, alerted by the shout and the noise. Hiroshi took in the scene: the torn wire, the flash, his youngest son trembling, eyes glowing with a strange light. Akari covered her mouth, her maternal instinct and her Quirk screaming terror and... something else. A massive surge of power.
Kenji raised a hand. It was shaking, but not with fear. It was with newly born energy, pure, volatile, coursing under his skin, in his veins. Energy he instinctively understood to be his. His charge. His power.
There was no technique. No shout. Just the vital need to release some of the wonderful, terrifying pressure swelling inside him. He pointed his palm not at his horrified family, but at the old padded target still hanging there, inert.
He focused. Not on a precise form, but on the nature of what he had just absorbed. Electricity. Fast, biting, direct.
A bolt leapt from his palm. Far thinner, far more controlled than the wild arc from the exposed wire. It was a clean, precise blue beam that struck the pad with a sharp, violent CRACK! The pad wasn't pushed back. It was pierced, and a jet of black smoke burst out before it fell heavily to the floor.
The silence that followed was more deafening than the storm rumbling outside. Only the rain beginning to lash the garage roof and Kenji's ragged breathing could be heard.
He slowly lowered his hand, staring at the thin wisp of smoke curling from his fingers. He could feel the energy inside him, reduced by a fraction, but still there, warm and alive. He looked up at his family. Daichi was staring at him, mouth open, with a mix of terror and total, absolute admiration. His father watched him, his architect's gaze analyzing the scene with new intensity, already calculating the implications. His mother had tears in her eyes, one hand over her heart.
Inside him, two consciousnesses finally met.
The seven-year-old child, awed and a little frightened, simply thought: It's... mine.
The reincarnated observer, finally connecting the dots between his intuitions, his dreams, and reality, completed it with calm, dreadful certainty: All-energy. That's it. My story begins now.