The sky above Kamino Ward was burning.
Takeshi Yamada was running through streets that no longer existed, his lungs screaming for air that tasted like concrete dust and ozone. Buildings that had stood for decades were collapsing around him, their steel skeletons twisting like dying giants. The ground beneath his feet kept shifting—cracks spreading like spider webs, swallowing cars and street lamps into darkness.
He shouldn't have been there. Nobody should have been there.
The evacuation sirens had started wailing twenty minutes ago, but Takeshi had been three blocks deep into the industrial district when All Might's voice—that impossibly loud, impossibly confident voice—had shaken the entire ward. He'd looked up just in time to see two figures suspended in the air above the warehouse district, their clash sending shockwaves that shattered windows for miles.
All Might. And someone else. Someone whose very presence made Takeshi's skin crawl.
Another explosion rocked the street. Takeshi stumbled, his shoulder slamming into a lamppost that was already leaning at a dangerous angle. His analyst's mind—trained through five years of processing hero data for the Sakura Agency—catalogued everything with detached precision even as panic clawed at his throat.
Seismic activity inconsistent with structural collapse. Energy signatures off the charts. Quirk battle. Class S minimum. Civilian survival rate in immediate vicinity: twelve percent.
He needed to move. He needed to—
The world turned white.
Heat. Pressure. Sound that wasn't sound but pure force slamming into his body. Takeshi felt himself lifting off the ground, weightless for a moment that stretched into eternity. Then he was flying—actually flying—through the air, his back smashing through what might have been a storefront window. Glass and wood and metal all became the same thing: obstacles that his body was too fragile to resist.
He hit something solid. A wall. A floor. It didn't matter. Everything went dark.
When consciousness returned, it came in fragments.
Pain. That was first. Not sharp, not localized—just a fundamental wrongness radiating from every cell in his body. His eyes wouldn't open. His lungs wouldn't expand. For a terrifying moment, Takeshi thought he was dead, that this was what death felt like: trapped in a broken shell, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to—
His chest convulsed. Air rushed in, tasting like blood and chemicals. His eyes snapped open.
The ceiling above him was gone. He was staring directly at the sky, except the sky was the wrong color—orange and red and black, clouds roiling like living things. Smoke. Fire. The aftermath of something catastrophic.
Takeshi tried to sit up. His body didn't respond. He tried again, forcing his arm to move, and this time something gave. Pain lanced through his shoulder, sharp enough to make him gasp, but his arm moved. Slowly, agonizingly, he managed to prop himself up on one elbow.
The building he'd crashed into no longer had walls. Just support beams and rubble and a floor that tilted at a fifteen-degree angle toward a crater that definitely hadn't existed before. In the distance, he could hear sirens. Voices. The roar of fires that had nothing left to consume.
Get up, his mind commanded. Get up or die here.
His legs wouldn't cooperate. They felt distant, disconnected, like they belonged to someone else. Takeshi looked down and immediately wished he hadn't. His left leg was bent wrong. Not broken—he'd seen enough hero combat footage to recognize broken bones—but wrong. The knee was swelling, already purple-black, and his pants were torn enough to reveal scraped skin leaking blood.
Severe contusion. Possible ligament damage. Mobility: compromised.
He was going into shock. The analytical part of his brain recognized the symptoms even as the rest of him started shaking. Cold. He was so cold, despite the fires burning everywhere.
"Help," Takeshi tried to say, but his voice came out as a whisper. "Someone—"
That's when he felt it.
A sensation like electricity, but not electricity. It started in his chest—right where his heart was struggling to maintain rhythm—and spread outward. Tingling. Burning. Wrong in a way that made the pain in his leg seem trivial. Takeshi gasped, his hand clutching at his shirt, and felt his heart skip a beat. Then another.
No. Not now. Not after surviving—
His heart stopped.
For three seconds that Takeshi counted with perfect clarity, his heart didn't beat. The tingling sensation exploded into agony, every nerve in his body firing at once. He couldn't scream. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything except feel his body tearing itself apart from the inside.
Then his heart started again.
Not slowly. Not gradually. It slammed back into rhythm with a force that arched his back off the ground, and suddenly the tingling wasn't tingling anymore. It was power. Raw, formless, terrifying power flooding through his veins like molten metal. Takeshi felt his cells changing—actually felt them rewriting themselves at a molecular level. His broken body was rebuilding, adapting, evolving in response to—
To what?
The knowledge came unbidden, unwanted. During those three seconds when his heart had stopped, when he should have died, his body had been exposed to something. Energy. Quirk energy. Not just any Quirk energy—the residual output from two of the most powerful Quirks ever recorded, colliding with enough force to level several city blocks.
All Might and All For One. Their battle had saturated the air itself with power.
And Takeshi's dying body had absorbed it.
His leg stopped hurting. The wrongness in his knee corrected itself with a series of pops that should have been nauseating but instead felt like relief. Takeshi watched, horrified and fascinated, as the swelling receded. As the bruises faded from purple to yellow to nothing. As his skin knitted itself back together, leaving not even scars.
The power was still flowing. Still changing him. He could feel it reaching deeper, rewriting something fundamental. His Quirk factor—the genetic sequence that determined whether someone was born with a Quirk or without one. Takeshi had been tested as a child. Quirkless. Fourth generation Quirkless, actually, a statistical anomaly in an era where eighty percent of the population had some kind of superpower.
But not anymore.
Something was crystallizing inside him. A new Quirk, born from catastrophe and desperation and the energy of titans. Takeshi didn't understand it yet—didn't understand what it could do or what it would cost him—but he could feel its nature. Its purpose.
Adaptation.
His body would adapt to survive. To overcome. To evolve in response to any threat.
The realization should have been triumphant. Instead, Takeshi felt only dread.
The next hour passed in a haze.
Rescue heroes arrived—not the famous ones, but the specialized teams trained for disaster recovery. They found Takeshi sitting in the rubble, his body fully healed, staring at his hands like they belonged to a stranger. A medic checked his vitals, declared him miraculously unharmed, and moved on to the next victim. There were so many victims.
Takeshi let them guide him to an evacuation zone. Let them wrap a blanket around his shoulders. Let them add his name to a list of survivors. He answered their questions on autopilot while his mind raced through the implications.
He had a Quirk now. A powerful one, if his instincts were correct. He should report it. Register it with the Hero Public Safety Commission. Follow proper protocol.
But something stopped him.
The medic who'd checked his vitals had noted his injuries in her initial assessment—"severe leg trauma, possible internal bleeding"—then crossed them out when she found him completely healed. She'd given him a strange look. Suspicious. Almost afraid.
Quirk manifestation during extreme stress wasn't unheard of. But Quirk manifestation in a twenty-four-year-old civilian, triggered by exposure to S-Class combat energy? That was unprecedented.
And unprecedented meant dangerous. Meant attention from the Commission. Meant testing and observation and possibly detention if they decided his new Quirk was too unstable, too unknown.
Takeshi pulled the blanket tighter and made a decision. He wouldn't report it. Not yet. Not until he understood what he'd become.
The evacuation center was chaos incarnate. Hundreds of civilians packed into a building designed for maybe fifty, all of them scared and hurt and desperate for information. Takeshi found a corner and sat down, his back against a wall that was already cracked from the battle's shockwaves.
Televisions mounted on the walls showed news coverage on repeat. All Might's final stand. His victory over All For One. His retirement. The Symbol of Peace, standing before cameras with a body that looked skeletal compared to his muscular hero form, announcing that he could no longer protect them.
The world was changing. Takeshi could see it in the faces around him—the fear that All Might's retirement would create a power vacuum. That villains would grow bolder. That society itself might start to crumble.
And you have a Quirk that could make you strong enough to fill that vacuum, a traitorous part of his mind whispered. Strong enough to become a hero. To matter.
He crushed that thought immediately. He wasn't hero material. He was an analyst. A support worker. Someone who helped heroes do their jobs, not someone who fought on the front lines.
Besides, his Quirk scared him. The sensation of his body rewriting itself, of cells mutating in response to danger—it hadn't felt natural. It had felt like becoming something other than human.
Takeshi closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but every time he started to drift off, he felt it again. That tingling in his chest. That sense of power coiled inside him, waiting for the next threat.
Waiting to adapt.
Three days later, Takeshi returned to what remained of Kamino Ward.
The Hero Commission had cordoned off the entire district, but security was light—they were stretched too thin managing the aftermath. He waited until dusk, then slipped through a gap in the temporary fencing. His leg, which should still have been injured, carried him without issue. Every step felt stronger than the last.
The building where he'd nearly died was completely gone. Just a crater and some twisted metal. Takeshi stood at the edge and stared into the darkness, trying to reconcile the person who'd fled through these streets with the person he was becoming.
"You shouldn't be here."
The voice came from behind him—feminine, mature, with an edge that suggested its owner was used to being obeyed. Takeshi spun around and found himself face-to-face with a woman who definitely wasn't supposed to be there either.
She was tall, probably in her early thirties, with dark hair and a figure that her civilian clothes couldn't quite hide. But what caught Takeshi's attention were her eyes. Sharp. Assessing. The eyes of someone who'd seen too much and learned to trust nothing.
He recognized her after a moment. Nemuri Kayama. The R-Rated Hero: Midnight.
"Neither should you," Takeshi said carefully.
Midnight's lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. She was injured—he could see it now. The way she held her left arm close to her body. The slight limp in her step. The bandage peeking out from under her jacket collar.
"I have clearance," she said, moving closer. "You don't. Which means you're either a looter, a journalist, or someone with a very personal reason to risk arrest."
"Third option."
"Thought so." She stopped a few feet away, studying him with an intensity that made Takeshi want to step back. "You were here. During the battle."
It wasn't a question. Takeshi nodded anyway.
"And you survived." Midnight's eyes narrowed. "Without a scratch, according to the medical reports. Despite being found in a collapsed building with injuries severe enough that the first responder thought you'd need emergency surgery."
She'd checked the reports. Why would she check the reports?
"I got lucky," Takeshi said.
"Bullshit."
The word was delivered with such casual certainty that Takeshi actually flinched. Midnight took another step closer, and he realized she was positioning herself between him and the exit. Professional instinct. Hero training.
"I've been doing this for fifteen years," she continued, her voice dropping lower. "I know what luck looks like. And I know what Quirk manifestation looks like. Especially traumatic manifestation triggered by near-death experiences and massive energy exposure."
Takeshi's heart was racing. The tingling in his chest started again, responding to his stress. To the threat. His body was already analyzing Midnight, cataloguing her stance, her injuries, calculating how to—
No. Stop.
He forced himself to breathe. Forced his new Quirk to settle. This wasn't a fight. This was a conversation with a hero who'd somehow figured out his secret in less than a week.
"What do you want?" he asked quietly.
Midnight was silent for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she sighed, and some of the tension left her shoulders.
"Honestly? I'm not sure yet." She gestured at the crater. "But I know the Commission is going to start investigating anomalies from Kamino Ward soon. And when they do, a civilian who walked away from injuries that should have crippled him is going to attract attention. The wrong kind of attention."
"Why do you care?"
"Because the Commission is compromised." The words came out hard, bitter. "They've been making mistakes. Covering things up. Sacrificing heroes to maintain their image. And if they decide your new Quirk is dangerous or unpredictable, they won't help you control it. They'll lock you up and study you."
The tingling in Takeshi's chest was fading, but a different kind of tension was building. "You sound like you're speaking from experience."
Midnight's laugh was short and entirely humorless. "My career is over, kid. One bad call during the chaos, one injury that didn't heal fast enough, and suddenly I'm 'encouraged to retire early.' Never mind that I've saved thousands of lives. Never mind my win record. The Commission wants young, photogenic heroes who don't ask questions." She met his eyes. "So yes. I'm speaking from experience."
They stood in silence, the ruins of Kamino Ward stretching out around them. In the distance, Takeshi could hear construction crews working through the night, trying to rebuild what had been destroyed. But some things, he was learning, couldn't be rebuilt. Only transformed into something new.
"What's your Quirk?" Midnight asked finally. "What did Kamino give you?"
Takeshi hesitated. Every instinct screamed at him to lie, to protect this secret. But Midnight was right—the Commission would find out eventually. And if his choice was between facing them alone or having an experienced hero who understood how broken the system was...
"Adaptation," he said. "My body adapts to overcome threats. I don't know the limits yet. Don't know the costs. But when I was dying, when my heart stopped, it just... happened."
Midnight's expression shifted. Not fear. Not suspicion. Something closer to recognition.
"An evolutionary Quirk," she said softly. "Rare. Powerful. Completely unpredictable." She was quiet for another moment, then made a decision Takeshi could see crystallizing in her eyes. "I'm going to make you an offer, and you're going to think very carefully before you answer."
"What kind of offer?"
"The kind where I teach you to control that Quirk before it controls you. Where I keep you off the Commission's radar until you're ready to face them on your terms." Midnight's smile was sharp now, dangerous. "And in exchange, when the time comes, you help me with a problem. A big problem. The kind that requires someone who can adapt to anything."
"What problem?"
"Later. First, I need to know if you're smart enough to realize you need help. If you're brave enough to accept it from a hero the Commission has already discarded." She extended her hand. "So what do you say, Takeshi Yamada? Do we have a deal?"
Takeshi stared at the offered hand. At the scars on Midnight's knuckles. At the bandages hiding deeper wounds. She was offering him training. Protection. A path forward.
She was also offering him a choice: hide and hope the Commission never found him, or prepare for the confrontation that was coming.
The tingling in his chest pulsed once, as if his new Quirk was weighing the decision too. Then Takeshi reached out and clasped Midnight's hand.
"We have a deal."
Her grip was firm. Strong. The grip of someone who'd fought for everything she had and refused to let go without a war.
"Good," Midnight said. "Because starting tomorrow, your real education begins. And kid?" Her smile turned predatory. "You're going to wish you'd stayed Quirkless."