The alarm screamed at 3:45 AM. Izuku's hand shot out and killed it with extreme prejudice.
Sleep clung to him like a needy ex-girlfriend. His body begged for five more minutes. His brain, unfortunately, knew better. The old man didn't do mercy, and showing up late would mean something far worse than a simple beach cleanup.
Whatever the hell that even means.
He rolled out of bed, muscles protesting. The weights were already laid out on his floor like instruments of torture. Custom-made, expensive as hell, and utterly brutal. Each limb got its share: 30kg ankle weights, 45kg wrist guards. The compression shirt he pulled on had another 30kg distributed across the torso.
150kg total. It felt like wearing a car.
Izuku caught his reflection in the mirror as he tugged on black sweats. Even at this ungodly hour, half-dead from interrupted sleep, he looked good. The weights made his movements slower, more deliberate, but they also made every muscle in his frame visible under the compression fabric.
If suffering builds character, I must be a goddamn saint by now.
He grabbed his gym bag, stuffed with a change of clothes and the lunch his mother had prepared. The apartment was silent. Mom was still asleep, probably dreaming of future grandchildren and wedding bells.
The streets of Musutafu were empty. Streetlights cast orange pools on the pavement. A convenience store glowed like a beacon in the darkness, the only other sign of life at this hour. Izuku walked past it, hands in his pockets, breath misting in the cool air.
The walk to Takoba Municipal Beach took twenty minutes. With the weights, it felt like forty.
And then he saw it.
The smell hit him first. Salt and rust and something that might have been rotting seaweed mixed with motor oil. It crawled into his nose and set up camp. His eyes watered.
Oh, that's foul. That's weapons-grade foul.
The beach itself came into view as he rounded the final corner. The moon hung low on the horizon, pale and sickly. Its light touched the scene before him and made it worse somehow.
Takoba Beach was dead.
No, worse than dead. It was a corpse that had been left to rot for so long it had become something else entirely. The "beach" part was a lie. Maybe there was sand somewhere under all that garbage, but Izuku couldn't see it. What he saw instead was a mountain range. A jagged, rusted, hostile landscape of discarded civilization.
Refrigerators lay on their sides like fallen giants. Washing machines formed crude towers. Tires were stacked in black pillars that reached toward the sky. Cars, actual cars, sat half-buried in the mess, their frames picked clean by scavengers and time. Smaller debris filled every gap: bottles, cans, broken furniture, shattered electronics, things he couldn't even identify in the dim light.
The scale of it stole his breath.
This is where things go to die. This is where the world dumps everything it doesn't want to look at anymore.
He stood at the edge of the wasteland, one foot on cracked pavement, one on contaminated sand. The waves beyond the trash whispered their eternal rhythm. They sounded tired.
Izuku forced himself forward. Each step sank slightly into the mixture of sand and broken glass. The weights made his footfalls heavy, deliberate. He had to watch where he stepped or risk impaling his foot on some rusted spike.
That's when he spotted the throne.
Perched atop a refrigerator that had tipped onto its side, thermos in hand and legs crossed like some kind of junk-dwelling Buddha, sat Tatsuo Hano.
Of course he found the highest point. Drama queen.
Steam curled from the thermos. The old man took a long sip, completely at ease. He looked like he'd been sitting there for hours, just waiting. His wild white hair caught the moonlight. His tacky Hawaiian shirt, this one covered in unnaturally pink flamingos, flapped gently in the sea breeze.
Izuku trudged forward until he stood at the base of the refrigerator throne. He tilted his head back, meeting his teacher's eyes.
"Alright, Geezer. I'm here. You win." He kept his voice flat, unimpressed. "What's the punishment? Pushups? A marathon? Please tell me you didn't drag me to this dump just for some kind of routine."
His tactical mind kicked in automatically. Old habits. The terrain was a nightmare, uneven and treacherous. Good for footwork training if you wanted to break an ankle. The sheer number of obstacles would force constant awareness. Maybe Hano planned to chase him through this mess. Or set up some kind of endurance gauntlet.
Metal surfaces would conduct heat poorly in this cold. Could make a decent cold-resistance drill. Or maybe he's going to bury me in trash and call it "survival training." Wouldn't put it past him.
Izuku ran through a dozen scenarios. Each one was terrible. Each one made a certain kind of sense given Hano's teaching philosophy.
Tatsuo took another long, slow sip from his thermos. It absolutely did not smell like coffee. More like sake. Definitely sake.
He's day-drinking. At 4:30 in the morning. This man is a menace to society.
"Nope."
Izuku blinked. "Nope? What do you mean, nope?"
The old man didn't answer immediately. He raised the thermos again, this time not to drink. He swept it in a wide arc, encompassing the entire sprawling graveyard of civilization's discards.
His voice, when it came, was almost cheerful. Which made the words so much worse.
"You see all this, brat? This beautiful monument to human laziness? This gorgeous pile of 'somebody else's problem'?" He grinned, and it was the smile of a man about to ruin someone's entire year. "This is your new training ground. Your opponent. Your personal slice of hell for the next ten months."
Tatsuo pointed at the wasteland with his thermos.
"You're going to clean it. Every last piece. All of it."
Silence.
The waves kept their rhythm. Somewhere far away, a train rumbled along elevated tracks. Izuku stared at his teacher. Then at the mountain of trash. Then back at his teacher.
A laugh bubbled up from his chest. Short, sharp, disbelieving.
"Ha! Good one, old man. You almost had me." He shook his head, grinning despite himself. "Seriously though, what's the real training? I can take it. Just tell me so I can get started and go home before Mom wakes up."
Hano didn't laugh.
"Do I look like I'm joking, Izuku?"
Izuku's smile died on his lips. Ice slid down his spine.
Oh, he's serious.
Izuku swallowed. "Sensei, I—"
"That Bakugo kid." Hano interrupted, his voice still low and flat. "The one with the explosions. You know what he has that you don't?"
A personality disorder and an inferiority complex?
Izuku wisely kept that thought to himself.
"A safety net," Hano continued. "He can afford to be sloppy. He can have an off day, make a mistake, lose focus. His Quirk will bail him out. It's always there, under him, catching him when he falls."
The old man stood. Even on top of the refrigerator, even at his full height, he didn't look tall. He looked vast. Like gravity had suddenly remembered he existed and bent toward him.
"You don't have that luxury. You have no net. Your technique has to be flawless. Your body has to be a weapon that never jams, never misfires. Your mind has to process a hundred variables in a heartbeat and never, ever make the wrong call."
He stepped down from the refrigerator, landing on the sand without a sound despite the junk all around.
"U.A. will test you. How does a Quirkless kid become the first one ever admitted into the hero course?" He walked forward until he was standing directly in front of Izuku, looking up at him with those terrible, knowing eyes. "By being so absurdly, overwhelmingly strong that they won't be able to deny him."
Tatsuo gestured to the wasteland behind him.
"This isn't about cleaning, brat. This is about building a foundation so unshakeable that no Quirk, no machine, no god can ever call you weak again. You want to walk into U.A. and stand next to kids who can shoot fire from their hands? Kids who can create things from nothing? Then you work five times harder than all of them combined. You already know this. I taught you this."
The words hit like body blows. Each one landed clean. Izuku felt his last bit of defiance crumble under the weight of pure, irrefutable logic.
He looked at his hands. Calloused. Scarred. The hands of someone who had already chosen this path a long time ago.
Then he looked at the mountain of trash. It seemed even bigger now. More impossible. The kind of task that would break a normal person just from looking at it.
Five times harder. Because I have to be. Because anything less means I lose before I even start.
The first rays of dawn cracked the horizon. Light spilled across the wasteland, turning the rust orange and the glass into fragments of captured fire. It was still ugly. But it was illuminated now. Real. Undeniable.
Izuku took a breath. The air tasted like metal and salt and old dreams left to rot.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the 150kg settle into place. It was familiar now. Comforting, almost. He turned his gaze to a refrigerator half-buried in the sand a few feet away. Its door hung open like a mouth frozen mid-scream.
"Okay." His voice was quiet. Calm. The voice of someone who had just accepted the terms of a deal with the devil. "Where do I start?"
Hano's grin returned. "There."