Chapter 2: Power That Cannot Be Held
Ryuji Midoriya learned early that pain could be measured.
Heart rate. Core temperature. Neural load. Cellular degradation over time. All things that could be graphed, tracked, and predicted.
Fear, however, could not.
The first time he tried to push his quirk past its "safe threshold," the warning alarms in his support braces screamed like living things.
He ignored them.
Energy bloomed beneath his skin—an invisible sun pressing outward, distorting the air around his arms. His vision blurred as heat flooded his bloodstream, not burning him, but overloading him, every nerve firing at once.
Then something cracked.
Not his bones.
His tolerance.
Ryuji collapsed to his knees, vomiting as blood leaked from his nose and ears. The glow faded slowly, reluctantly, like a dying star refusing to go out.
Recovery took three weeks.
The damage never fully healed.
The doctors were blunt.
"You're not getting stronger," one of them said quietly. "Your body is getting better at breaking."
Ryuji nodded, hands clenched in his lap.
That night, he rewrote his training regimen.
No more endurance tests.
No more output escalation.
He stopped trying to force his body to adapt.
Instead, he began asking a different question.
What if the body isn't the problem?
Quirk science was still young, still clumsy. Most research focused on amplification—how to make quirks hit harder, last longer, overwhelm opponents.
Ryuji went the other way.
Stabilization.
He dissected public research papers, cross-referenced black-market quirk analyses, and rebuilt existing models from scratch. Where others saw quirks as abilities, he saw them as systems—inputs, outputs, thresholds, and catastrophic failure points.
Izuku noticed the change first.
Ryuji stopped training with him.
Not because he didn't want to.
Because even light activation left him shaking.
"Sorry, bro," Ryuji said one afternoon, forcing a grin as Izuku tightened his gloves. "Rain check?"
Izuku nodded, pretending not to notice the faint glow under Ryuji's skin, the way his breathing hitched like he was holding something back.
At night, Ryuji dreamed of pressure.
Not explosions. Not fire.
Just containment.
Walls cracking. Vessels fracturing. Something infinite trying to fit inside something finite.
He woke up already tired.
The Support Course labs became his sanctuary.
Machines didn't flinch when overloaded—they failed honestly. Cleanly. Predictably.
Mei Hatsume found him there one night, half-asleep over a workbench, hands still gripping a stylus.
"You know," she said, peering over his shoulder, "most people don't try to reinvent quirk theory before breakfast."
Ryuji blinked. "Most people don't explode if they sneeze too hard."
She laughed—sharp, delighted—and dragged a stool over.
"What's the obsession, then?"
He hesitated.
Then told her the truth.
That his quirk wasn't meant to be used. That every activation shaved years off his life. That no amount of physical training would ever make him compatible with his own power.
Mei listened. Really listened.
Then she leaned forward, eyes bright.
"So," she said, "your problem isn't power. It's interface."
Ryuji froze.
Interface.
The word hit him harder than any diagnosis.
Human bodies were terrible conduits. Flesh warped. Nerves burned. DNA degraded under sustained output.
But machines?
Machines could be reinforced. Redesigned. Replaced.
That night, they sketched until their fingers cramped.
External regulators. Power sinks. Quirk-output dampeners that responded dynamically instead of reactively. A system that could accept energy rather than resist it.
For the first time in years, Ryuji felt hope that didn't hurt.
But the tests were cruel.
Every prototype required him to activate his quirk, even briefly. Every activation left damage behind—microfractures in bone, scarring in neural tissue, cellular decay that no healing quirk could fully reverse.
He logged it all.
Every failure. Every pain spike. Every shortened estimate of his remaining lifespan.
Then the war escalated.
All For One's name began appearing in whispers again. Shigaraki's power surged beyond prediction models. Quirks began mutating under stress, breaking the rules scientists thought they understood.
Ryuji read the reports and felt sick.
Not because he feared them.
Because he recognized them.
Power exceeding containment.
Quirk factors outgrowing their hosts.
People like him.
Like Shigaraki.
Like others who would never survive their own strength.
The conclusion settled into him quietly.
Some quirks were not meant to be mastered.
Only managed.
Only contained long enough to matter.
Ryuji stared at his reflection in the darkened lab window—eyes sunken, skin faintly glowing, hands trembling despite his braces.
He smiled anyway.
"If I can't live with it," he murmured, opening a new file, "then I'll make sure no one else has to die from it."
The project received a new name that night.
Final Output Containment System.
He didn't write the acronym.
He didn't need to.
Somewhere deep in his chest, his quirk pulsed in quiet agreement—energy pressing outward, patient and endless.
Waiting for a vessel strong enough to hold it.