Izuku Midoriya woke up at 5:47 AM on a Saturday morning, thirteen minutes before his alarm, because his body had apparently decided that sleep was for people who hadn't recently had their entire worldview dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up by a comic book shop that probably violated several laws of physics.
He lay in bed for approximately forty-five seconds, staring at the ceiling, reviewing the events of the previous day with the clinical detachment of a scientist examining experimental results.
Found a comic shop that shouldn't exist.
Met an old man who shouldn't exist.
Read what appeared to be the entire combined output of two fictional comic book publishers from a world that shouldn't exist.
Had a fundamental philosophical awakening about the nature of heroism.
Came home, ate dinner, told Mom the katsudon was delicious (it was), went to bed.
Am now lying in bed wondering if I hallucinated the entire thing.
He sat up and looked at the bag.
It was still there. On his desk, right where he'd left it, bulging with trade paperbacks. He reached over, pulled one out at random, and looked at it. The Amazing Spider-Man: Coming Home by J. Michael Straczynski. The cover showed Spider-Man perched on the side of a building, the city reflected in the lenses of his mask.
Not a hallucination, then.
"Okay," Izuku said to his empty room. "Okay."
He swung his legs out of bed and stood up.
And immediately punched a hole through his ceiling.
Let us rewind approximately 0.3 seconds to contextualize what just happened.
Izuku Midoriya, age fourteen, height 166 centimeters, weight 54 kilograms, Quirk status: none, had stood up from his bed. This was an action he had performed every morning of his life for as long as he could remember. It was not, by any reasonable standard, a complex physical maneuver. It required no special training, no advanced technique, no superhuman ability. You put your feet on the floor. You engaged your leg muscles. You stood.
Izuku put his feet on the floor. He engaged his leg muscles. He stood.
He also, apparently, launched himself upward with sufficient force to drive his right fist through the plaster, wood, and insulation of his bedroom ceiling and into the crawl space above.
He hung there for a moment—arm buried to the elbow in his ceiling, feet dangling six inches off the floor, plaster dust raining down on his All Might bedsheets—and experienced what could only be described as a total system error in his brain.
"What," said Izuku Midoriya.
Plaster dust settled in his hair.
"What."
He pulled his arm free. This required more force than it should have, because apparently his fist had gone through a support beam—not around it, not between the gap, through it, like a hot knife through butter if the butter were made of wood and the knife were a fourteen-year-old boy's hand.
He dropped to the floor. The floor cracked slightly under his feet.
"WHAT."
He looked at his hand. His completely uninjured, not-even-slightly-scraped, pristine hand that had just punched through a ceiling without so much as a splinter.
Okay. Okay. Analytical thinking. Hero analysis mode. What just happened? I stood up and punched through my ceiling. Why? Because I apparently applied significantly more force than standing up requires. How much more? Based on the damage—penetration through approximately eight centimeters of plaster, a wooden beam of maybe six centimeters in diameter, and additional insulation material—we're talking about... a lot. That's not a technical measurement but my brain is currently not capable of technical measurements because I JUST PUNCHED THROUGH MY CEILING—
"Izuku?" His mother's voice drifted up from the kitchen, concerned. "Are you alright? I heard a noise."
"FINE, MOM! I, UH—I DROPPED SOMETHING! A BOOK! A HEAVY BOOK!"
"...must have been a very heavy book, dear."
"IT WAS! REALLY HEAVY! LOTS OF PAGES!"
He heard her hum in uncertain acceptance and move back toward whatever she'd been doing.
Izuku looked at his hand again.
Then he looked at the bag of comics on his desk.
Then he looked at his hand.
Then at the comics.
Then at the hole in his ceiling.
"No," he said. "No way. That's... no. That doesn't happen. That's not how... you can't just read about super-strength and then have super-strength. That's not a thing. That's never been a thing. That is a thing that has never been a thing in the history of things."
He reached over and picked up his desk.
His entire desk.
With one hand.
It weighed approximately forty kilograms, loaded with notebooks and textbooks and a laptop and the bag of comics. He lifted it like it was made of cardboard. Like it was nothing. He didn't even feel the strain. His arm didn't shake. His muscles—such as they were, because Izuku Midoriya did not have impressive muscles by any standard—didn't even seem to notice that they were doing something that should have been impossible.
He set the desk down very, very carefully.
"Okay," he said. His voice had gone very quiet, very calm, in the way that voices go quiet and calm when the brain behind them has exceeded its capacity for normal emotional response and has switched to emergency backup processing. "Okay. So I'm strong now. I'm... I'm strong. I just... am."
He did a push-up.
Then another.
Then fifty more.
He wasn't breathing hard. He wasn't tired. He felt like he could do five hundred. Five thousand.
He stopped at fifty-two—not because he was exhausted, but because the analytical part of his brain, the part that never really shut off, was already running calculations and cross-references against everything he'd read the day before.
Not Superman strong. Not Hulk strong. Not "lift a building" strong. I couldn't hold up the Daily Bugle. But...
He thought about Spider-Man. Peter Parker. Proportional strength of a spider. Able to lift approximately ten tons in most depictions, though it varied by writer. Strong enough to stop a car, catch a falling person, hold together the side of a collapsing building long enough for people to evacuate. Not cosmic-tier. Not world-breaker. But street-level strong. The kind of strong that meant you could walk into any fight on any street in any city and come out the other side.
He thought about Iron Fist. Danny Rand. Peak human conditioning enhanced by the mystic power of the Iron Fist. Able to punch through steel. Able to channel chi into devastating strikes. Strong, fast, tough—but not invulnerable. Not unkillable. Just... more than human.
He thought about Luke Cage. Power Man. Superhuman strength and unbreakable skin. The Hero of Harlem. A man who was bulletproof and used that bulletproof-ness not to conquer the world but to protect his neighborhood.
Street-level, Izuku thought. I've got street-level strength. Spider-Man tier. Iron Fist tier. Luke Cage tier, maybe. The heroes who don't fight Galactus or Darkseid. The ones who fight muggers and drug dealers and the Kingpin and the Hand. The ones who protect neighborhoods, not planets.
This was—
This was—
He didn't have words for what this was. His vocabulary, extensive as it was, did not contain a term for "I read comic books from another dimension and now I have superpowers." The closest he could come was "impossible," and he was currently standing in his bedroom with a hole in his ceiling and his desk at arm's length, so "impossible" had clearly taken the day off.
He needed to test this. He needed data.
But first—
He dropped into a fighting stance.
It was not a stance he had ever learned. He had never taken martial arts. His mother couldn't afford lessons, and even if she could, no dojo in Musutafu would waste time on a Quirkless kid when there were students with combat-applicable Quirks to train. The closest Izuku had come to organized fighting was the disorganized fighting that Kacchan periodically organized on his behalf, and that was less "martial arts" and more "applied violence with a target audience of one."
But the stance was perfect.
He knew this because he knew what a perfect fighting stance looked like. He knew what it looked like from every martial art. His body settled into a Wing Chun guard with the casual precision of someone who had been practicing it for years—weight centered, hands positioned, spine aligned, breathing controlled. And beneath that, layered like geological strata in his muscle memory, were a dozen other styles waiting to surface.
Boxing. He could feel the rhythm of it—the footwork, the head movement, the way a jab sets up a cross sets up a hook.
Judo. Weight distribution and leverage points and the beautiful physics of using an opponent's momentum against them.
Muay Thai. Elbows and knees and the understanding that every part of the human body is a weapon if you know how to use it.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Ground work. Submissions. The chess match of limb control.
Krav Maga. No rules. No points. Just survival.
Karate. Taekwondo. Aikido. Capoeira. Silat. Escrima.
Everything Batman knew.
Izuku's brain helpfully supplied the relevant data: Batman, depending on the continuity, was stated to have mastered between 127 and every known martial art on Earth. This was, by real-world standards, absurd. A single human being could not realistically master 127 martial arts in a single lifetime, no matter how dedicated or talented.
But the knowledge was there. In his muscles, in his reflexes, in the automatic responses that fired when he shifted his weight or adjusted his guard. It wasn't theoretical knowledge—it wasn't the kind of thing you could learn from a book. It was embodied knowledge. The kind that came from thousands of hours of practice that Izuku had never actually done.
He threw a punch at the air.
It was, technically, a perfect punch. Mechanically flawless. Hip rotation, shoulder extension, fist alignment, the kinetic chain from foot to knuckle—all textbook. More than textbook. It was the kind of punch that martial arts instructors spent decades trying to develop in their students and rarely achieved.
The air displacement knocked a poster off his wall.
"Okay," Izuku said again. "Okay. So I have—I have the martial arts. I have all of them. All of the martial arts."
He moved through a kata—a Shotokan karate form, the Bassai Dai—and his body performed it with the fluid precision of a master instructor. Every technique was crisp. Every transition was smooth. Every stance was grounded and powerful and correct in a way that would have made a tenth-dan black belt nod in respectful approval.
He shifted to a Muay Thai combination—jab, cross, left hook, right elbow, left knee—and the air cracked with each strike. Not metaphorically. The air actually cracked. Small sonic pops, like tiny whips, from the speed and force of his limbs moving through space.
Moon Knight. Marc Spector. Former Marine, former CIA operative, former mercenary, chosen avatar of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. A man who knew how to fight dirty because fighting dirty was how you survived when the other guy outweighed you by a hundred pounds and didn't care about rules.
Daredevil. Matt Murdock. Blind lawyer by day, vigilante by night. Trained by Stick. Fighting style that combined acrobatics, boxing, ninjutsu, and an almost supernatural awareness of his environment. A man who fought like he was dancing and danced like he was fighting and made it look like the same thing.
Izuku could feel both of them. Not as separate entities—not as voices or personalities or possessions—but as skill sets. Libraries of technique and experience that had been downloaded directly into his nervous system like software into a computer.
He sat down on his bed.
He took a deep breath.
Then he thought about calculus.
The knowledge hit him like a wave.
Not a gentle wave. Not a "waves lapping at the shore on a peaceful beach" wave. A tsunami. A wall of information so vast and so dense that for approximately three seconds, Izuku Midoriya could not see, hear, or feel anything because his entire sensory apparatus had been hijacked by his brain's desperate attempt to process the sheer volume of data that had just materialized in his neurons.
He knew calculus. Not high school calculus—not the introductory, "here's what a derivative is" version that Musutafu Junior High wouldn't teach for another two years. He knew all of calculus. Differential. Integral. Multivariable. Vector. Tensor. Calculus of variations. Stochastic calculus. Every branch, every theorem, every application, laid out in his mind with the crystalline clarity of a well-organized textbook written by God.
But it wasn't just calculus.
He knew physics. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativistic mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, fluid dynamics, plasma physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, particle physics. He knew the Standard Model the way most people knew their home address. He understood quantum entanglement not as an abstract concept but as a tool—something that could be used, that could be engineered, that could be incorporated into devices.
He knew chemistry. Organic, inorganic, physical, analytical, biochemistry, electrochemistry, polymer chemistry, materials science. He could look at a substance and understand its molecular structure intuitively. He could calculate reaction rates in his head. He could design synthesis pathways for compounds that didn't exist yet.
He knew engineering. Mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical, aerospace, biomedical, computer, nuclear. He understood how to build things—not in the vague, theoretical way of a student who had read a textbook, but in the practical, hands-dirty way of someone who had built things. Complex things. Impossible things.
Tony Stark things.
Because Tony Stark was in there. Not Tony Stark the person—Izuku did not suddenly develop a drinking problem or a goatee or an irresistible compulsion to make sarcastic remarks in life-threatening situations (though that last one might develop later; the jury was still out). But Tony Stark's intelligence. His engineering intuition. His ability to look at a pile of scrap metal in a cave in Afghanistan and see an Iron Man suit.
And it wasn't just Tony Stark.
Reed Richards. The smartest man in the Marvel Universe, or at least in the top three depending on who was writing. The man who had mapped the Negative Zone, built a portal to the Microverse, and once constructed a device that could punch a hole in the fabric of reality using parts from a Radioshack. (Izuku was fairly sure that last one was an exaggeration, but with Reed Richards, you could never be entirely certain.)
Reed's intelligence wasn't just vast—it was creative. It was the kind of intelligence that looked at impossible problems and found solutions that no one else would have considered because no one else's brain worked the way Reed's did. Lateral thinking elevated to an art form. The ability to connect disparate fields of knowledge into novel syntheses that advanced human understanding by decades in a single afternoon.
Victor Von Doom. And this one made Izuku pause, because Doom was a villain—the greatest villain in the Marvel Universe, arguably—but his intelligence was undeniable. Doom's mind operated on a level that was qualitatively different from most geniuses. Where Reed Richards was creative and Tony Stark was intuitive, Doom was comprehensive. He didn't just understand one field—he understood every field. Science and magic. Technology and sorcery. Engineering and mysticism. He saw no boundaries between disciplines because, to his mind, boundaries were limitations, and Victor Von Doom did not accept limitations.
Izuku didn't get Doom's arrogance. He didn't get Doom's megalomania or his obsessive rivalry with Reed Richards or his tendency to refer to himself in the third person. But he got Doom's scope. The ability to think in systems. To see the whole board. To understand how every piece connected to every other piece and to manipulate those connections with surgical precision.
Mister Terrific. Michael Holt. The third-smartest man in the DC Universe—though the ranking was disputed, and frankly, when you were that smart, the difference between "third" and "first" was largely academic. Fourteen Ph.D.s. Olympic-level athlete. Inventor of the T-Spheres. A man who was proof that a human being, without any metahuman abilities whatsoever, could stand beside gods and not merely survive but contribute.
Holt's intelligence was methodical. Disciplined. He approached problems the way a chess grandmaster approached a board—seeing not just the current position but every possible future position, mapping decision trees to a depth that most people couldn't conceptualize. If Stark was intuition and Richards was creativity and Doom was comprehensiveness, Holt was precision.
Mister Miracle. Scott Free. And this one was strange, because Scott Free wasn't typically listed among the great intellects of the DC Universe—he was an escape artist, the greatest who had ever lived, raised in the hellish fire pits of Apokolips and trained to survive the unsurvivable. But his intelligence was spatial. He understood systems—mechanical systems, physical systems, social systems—at a fundamental level, because understanding systems was how you escaped them. Every lock was a puzzle. Every cage was a challenge. Every trap was an opportunity to demonstrate that no prison, no matter how well-designed, could contain a mind that refused to be contained.
Izuku sat on his bed with all of this in his head and felt like his skull was vibrating.
"I need a notebook," he said.
He grabbed the nearest one—Notebook #13, a fresh one he'd bought to replace the late, lamented, koi-pond-dwelling #12—and started writing.
The pen moved across the page at a speed that his old self would have found impossible. Not because his hand was moving faster (though it was; the enhanced reflexes from the martial arts knowledge helped), but because his thoughts were organized. Every idea had a place. Every concept connected to every other concept in a web of cross-references so dense and so intuitive that writing it down was less like composition and more like transcription—copying from a master document that already existed fully formed in his mind.
He wrote for an hour.
When he stopped, he had filled the entire notebook.
He looked at what he'd written.
The first fifteen pages were a comprehensive analysis of the Pro Hero licensing system, its structural flaws, its perverse incentives, and its measurable negative outcomes, written with the rigor of an academic paper and the fury of a man who had just realized that the institution he'd worshipped his entire life was fundamentally broken. It cited sociological principles, game theory, behavioral economics, and organizational psychology. It proposed seven alternative models, each with detailed implementation plans, cost-benefit analyses, and projected outcomes.
The next twenty pages were engineering schematics.
Not vague, conceptual sketches. Real schematics. The kind that a manufacturing engineer could hand to a fabrication team and say "build this" and they would build it and it would work. Support structures, wiring diagrams, materials specifications, tolerance ranges, assembly sequences.
They were designs for equipment. Hero equipment. His hero equipment.
Not an Iron Man suit—he didn't have access to an arc reactor or vibranium or any of the exotic materials that Stark's designs typically required. But the beauty of having Tony Stark's engineering intuition combined with Reed Richards' creativity and Victor Von Doom's comprehensiveness and Michael Holt's precision was that Izuku could design around limitations. He could look at the materials available to a fourteen-year-old boy with no budget and no workshop and find solutions.
Grappling hooks designed using principles borrowed from Spider-Man's web-shooters—not actual web fluid, which would require a chemical synthesis lab he didn't have, but mechanical grappling systems that used high-tensile cable and spring-loaded deployment mechanisms that could be built from commercially available components. He'd added notes on where to source the parts. A hardware store. A fishing supply shop. An electronics hobby store in the Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall.
Smoke pellets. Batman used them constantly, and the chemistry was surprisingly simple—magnesium powder, potassium permanganate, a binding agent, a timing mechanism. All purchasable. All legal. All capable of producing a dense, vision-obscuring cloud that would give him three to five seconds of concealment in an enclosed space.
A utility belt. Because of course a utility belt. He'd designed it with sixteen compartments, each sized for a specific tool or device, arranged for rapid access based on frequency-of-use data extrapolated from his analysis of Batman's deployment patterns across multiple continuity runs.
Body armor. Not the full-plate stuff that required advanced manufacturing—lighter than that. Layered Kevlar-equivalent panels over critical areas, flexible enough to allow full range of motion, rated to stop small-caliber rounds and distribute blunt-force impacts. The design borrowed from Daredevil's armored suit, Moon Knight's body armor, and Captain America's scale mail, combining elements of each into something new.
A mask. Simple. Functional. Identity-concealing without being vision-restricting. He'd sketched three versions—one inspired by Spider-Man (full face, expressive lenses), one inspired by Batman (half-face, intimidation-focused), and one inspired by Nightwing (domino mask, lightweight, minimal). He'd circled the Spider-Man version and written next to it: "If I'm going to do this, I should look like someone who's here to help, not someone who's here to terrify."
Then he'd crossed that out and written: "Both. I should look like both. Friendly to civilians. Terrifying to criminals. How did Batman do that? He was THE SAME PERSON in both interactions. Research further."
The remaining pages were a training plan.
It was detailed. It was exhaustive. It covered physical conditioning, martial arts practice (to integrate the knowledge in his muscles with actual experience—knowing a technique and being able to deploy it under pressure in a real fight were different things, and Izuku's analytical brain understood this even if his body technically already knew every technique), parkour and free-running (because Spider-Man and Nightwing and Daredevil all used urban acrobatics, and Musutafu's rooftops were just as navigable as New York's if you knew what you were doing), stealth training, first aid certification, forensic analysis, hacking (he'd need to access police frequencies and security cameras; Mister Terrific's knowledge provided several approaches to this that were technically illegal but ethically justified, and Izuku was rapidly becoming comfortable with the distinction between "legal" and "right"), and—
And he'd run out of pages.
He stared at the full notebook.
Then he looked at the clock.
It was 7:12 AM. He'd been awake for approximately an hour and twenty-five minutes, and in that time he'd punched a hole in his ceiling, discovered that he had the fighting skills of Batman and the physical capabilities of Spider-Man and the combined intelligence of the five smartest people in two fictional universes, filled an entire notebook with analysis and engineering schematics, and had not yet eaten breakfast.
"I should eat breakfast," he said.
He stood up—carefully this time, controlling the force of his legs, the way he imagined Spider-Man had to control his strength in everyday situations to avoid crushing doorknobs and snapping pencils and accidentally yeeting himself through ceilings.
He went downstairs.
His mother was in the kitchen, making rice and miso soup and grilled fish, because Midoriya Inko was a woman who expressed love primarily through the medium of food, and her love was considerable.
"Good morning, sweetie," she said, smiling at him over her shoulder. "You're up early."
"Morning, Mom."
He sat down at the table. She placed breakfast in front of him. He ate.
It was delicious. It was always delicious. His mother was not a Pro Hero, did not have a combat-applicable Quirk, would never appear on a hero ranking board or sell merchandise or be the subject of a fan analysis notebook. She was a short, round, perpetually worried woman who worked part-time at a grocery store and loved her son with a ferocity that would have made Wolverine nervous.
She was, Izuku realized with sudden, aching clarity, the most heroic person he had ever met.
Not because she fought villains. Not because she had power. Because every single day, despite being tired and worried and alone (his father was overseas; had been for years; that was a whole other conversation that Izuku was not prepared to have with himself yet), she got up and she took care of him and she tried. She tried to give him a good life. She tried to protect him from a world that had decided he was worthless. She tried, and she failed sometimes, and she tried again.
With great power comes great responsibility.
But what about the corollary? What about the people without great power who took responsibility anyway? The Uncle Bens. The Martha Kents. The Alfred Pennyworths. The Aunt Mays. The people who didn't fight the battles but raised the people who did. Who didn't save the world but created the conditions under which the world could be saved.
"Mom," Izuku said.
"Yes, dear?"
"I love you."
Inko turned from the stove and looked at him. Her eyes were already glistening, because Midoriya Inko's tear ducts had a hair trigger and always had.
"I love you too, Izuku. Are you alright?"
"Yeah," he said. "I'm... I'm really good, actually."
She studied him for a moment—the way mothers do, the X-ray vision that doesn't require a Quirk—and something in her expression shifted. Not concern, exactly. Something more like... recognition. As though she could see that something had changed in her son overnight and she didn't know what it was but she could sense its magnitude.
"You look different," she said. "Something about your eyes."
"I got a good night's sleep," Izuku lied, because he was not yet ready to explain that he had acquired superpowers from comic books given to him by a man who might have been a pan-dimensional entity in a Hawaiian shirt.
"Well," she said, dabbing at her eyes with her apron, "good. You should sleep well more often."
He finished breakfast. He helped with the dishes—carefully, so carefully, because his grip strength was now approximately ten thousand percent higher than it had been yesterday, and he was acutely aware that a moment's inattention could turn a cereal bowl into ceramic shrapnel.
Then he went back upstairs, grabbed the bag of comics, and headed for the door.
"I'm going out, Mom! I'll be back for dinner!"
"Be safe!"
"I will!"
He would not, in fact, be safe. He was going to spend the day testing the limits of abilities that he didn't fully understand, acquired through a mechanism he couldn't explain, in preparation for an extralegal vigilante career that would put him in direct conflict with the Hero Public Safety Commission, the entire Pro Hero establishment, and probably several categories of criminal law.
But he'd be back for dinner.
Dagobah Municipal Beach.
Izuku stood at the edge of what was, optimistically, called a "beach" and could more accurately be described as "an environmental catastrophe that had been left to marinate." The shoreline—and a significant portion of the shallow water—was buried under a mountain of illegally dumped trash. Refrigerators. Washing machines. Car parts. Tires. Furniture. Construction debris. An entire boat, turned on its side and half-buried in sand, its hull rusted through in a dozen places.
This was where heroes trained in his world. Or rather, this was where heroes didn't train, because no Pro Hero in their right mind would be caught dead at a garbage dump when there were cameras to pose for and rankings to maintain. The beach was a perfect metaphor for everything wrong with the hero system: a problem that everyone knew about, that everyone drove past, that no one fixed because fixing it wasn't glamorous and wouldn't show up on the evening news.
Izuku looked at the mountain of trash.
Then he started cleaning it up.
Not because it was part of his training plan (though it was; physical conditioning, practical application of enhanced strength, assessment of load-bearing capabilities). Not because someone told him to. Because the beach was dirty and someone should clean it and he was here.
That was the whole thing. The whole philosophy, in practice.
He picked up a refrigerator. It weighed approximately eighty kilograms. He lifted it with one hand, held it overhead, and carried it to the road where it could be collected for proper disposal. His muscles felt the weight—he wasn't so strong that eighty kilograms was nothing—but it was manageable. Easy, even. Like carrying a bag of groceries.
He went back for a washing machine. Then a car engine block. Then the boat.
The boat was heavier. He felt it in his shoulders and his back and his legs—the genuine strain of significant weight, the kind of effort that made his muscles burn and his breath come harder. He estimated the boat at approximately two thousand kilograms, factoring in the accumulated sand and water damage. He couldn't lift it over his head. He could, however, drag it. Which he did, leaving furrows in the sand like a plow through a field.
Upper limit testing, his analytical brain noted. Comfortable lifting range: approximately 500 kg. Maximum effort lifting range: approximately 2 tons, with significant strain. Consistent with mid-tier street-level enhancement. Spider-Man's baseline without adrenaline boost. Iron Fist's chi-enhanced state. Luke Cage's lower end.
He worked for two hours. By the end, he'd cleared approximately a fifth of the beach. His shirt was soaked with sweat, his arms ached pleasantly, and he was breathing hard but not exhausted.
A fifth of the beach. In two hours. A task that would have taken a normal person weeks.
"Not bad," he said, surveying his work. "Not bad at all."
Then he tested the martial arts.
He found a clear space on the now-visible sand and began moving. Shadow-boxing first—combinations, flowing from one style to another with a fluidity that he could feel was not just knowledge but instinct. His body knew things his conscious mind hadn't processed yet. When he threw a spinning back kick, his hips rotated with a precision that came from somewhere deeper than practice. When he transitioned from a standing combination into a judo throw (executed on an imaginary opponent), the movement was seamless—no hesitation, no awkwardness, no gap between styles.
He was fast. Faster than a normal human, though not by as much as his strength exceeded normal parameters. His reflexes were significantly enhanced—he tested this by throwing a pebble into the air and catching it, then two pebbles, then five, then a handful of sand, picking out individual grains as they fell. His hand-eye coordination was operating at a level that professional athletes would sell organs for.
And his spatial awareness—
This was harder to quantify, but it was there. A sense of his surroundings that went beyond normal perception. Not Spider-Sense, exactly—he didn't feel a tingling warning of danger. But he was aware of his environment in a way he hadn't been before. He could feel the wind direction without looking at a flag. He could hear footsteps on the boardwalk fifty meters away and distinguish between at least three different walkers based on gait pattern. He could sense the dimensions of the space around him—distance to objects, clearance above and below, sight lines and cover positions—without consciously measuring them.
Daredevil's radar sense? A version of it, maybe. Diluted. Translated through whatever impossible mechanism had transferred these abilities from fiction to flesh.
He spent another hour on martial arts practice, working through forms and combinations and sparring scenarios with invisible opponents, and by the end his body and his knowledge were beginning to sync. The movements that had felt precise but mechanical at the start were becoming natural. Organic. His.
Then he sat on a newly cleared section of beach, pulled out a fresh notebook (he'd brought three; the boy learned from experience), and started designing.
The schematics flowed out of him like water. Not the equipment designs he'd drafted that morning—those were refined versions, updated with data from his physical testing—but something new. Something bigger.
A computer system. Not a commercial one—a custom-built analytical engine designed to aggregate data from multiple sources (police scanners, social media feeds, traffic cameras, weather stations, seismic sensors) and identify patterns that indicated criminal activity, natural disasters, or civilian emergencies. The design was elegant—Tony Stark's intuitive engineering married to Reed Richards' theoretical framework, built on an architecture inspired by Mister Terrific's T-Spheres and constrained by the practical limitations of what a fourteen-year-old could actually acquire and assemble.
He could build it. He could actually build it. The parts were commercially available. The software could be written—and he could write it, because the intelligence package that had downloaded into his brain included computer science at a level that would make most professional developers weep. The total cost—
He did the calculation in his head. Materials, components, tools, workspace rental—
—was more than he had.
Significantly more.
"Right," he said. "Money. I need money."
He thought about this for approximately ten seconds.
"I also need to not be fourteen," he added, because most of his supply list couldn't be purchased by a minor.
He thought about this for another ten seconds.
Then he smiled—and it was a new smile, not the nervous, placating smile he usually wore, but something sharper. Something that had edges.
"Victor Von Doom would not let this stop him," Izuku said to the empty beach. "Victor Von Doom would find a way. And I have Victor Von Doom's intelligence without his crippling narcissism, so I should be able to find a better way."
He started writing again.
He returned to the comic shop at 2:17 PM.
It was still there. Same narrow storefront. Same cluttered window. Same cardboard Spider-Man. Same sign: EXCELSIOR COMICS & CURIOSITIES, Est. ????
The bell jingled when he opened the door.
"He returns!" Stan announced from behind the counter, arms spread wide, as though Izuku were a conquering hero arriving at the gates of Rome rather than a sweaty teenager with sand in his hair and three notebooks under his arm. "The prodigal reader! How's the ceiling?"
"You know about the ceiling."
"Kid, I know about everything. It's one of the perks of being—" He paused, seemed to consider his next words carefully, and then said: "—really good at guessing. How are you feeling?"
"I punched through my ceiling."
"Yep."
"I can lift a car."
"Probably."
"I know every martial art."
"All the cool ones, at least."
"I have the combined intelligence of Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Victor Von Doom, Mister Terrific, and Mister Miracle."
"Sounds about right."
"How?"
Stan leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. "How what?"
"How is any of this possible? I read comic books. You can't get superpowers from reading comic books. That's not—that's not a mechanism. That's not science. That's not even magic, it's just—"
"It's narrative."
Izuku stopped mid-ramble. "...what?"
"Narrative. Story. The oldest power in any universe." Stan took off his glasses and polished them—his signature move, apparently. "You read about heroes, Izuku. Not just skimmed them, not just enjoyed them—you understood them. You connected with them. You internalized what they meant. And in doing so, you became part of their story." He put his glasses back on. "Stories have power. Always have. In your world, that power manifests as Quirks—the physical expression of human potential. But Quirks are random. Chaotic. They don't care about the person they attach to. A good person gets a destructive Quirk, a bad person gets a healing one, and the world just shrugs and calls it luck."
"And this is different?"
"This is intentional. The stories chose you, kid. Or maybe you chose them. Same thing, from the right angle." He leaned forward. "You read about Spider-Man's strength and understood that strength is only meaningful when it's used to protect people. So you got strength—the right amount of strength. Street-level. Enough to help. Not enough to become a tyrant. You read about Batman's skills and understood that discipline and preparation can match raw power. So you got skills. You read about the great minds of both universes and understood that intelligence is a tool for solving problems, not a weapon for dominating people. So you got intelligence—the breadth of intelligence, the ability to see connections and build solutions."
"That's..." Izuku struggled for the word. "That's not how physics works."
"Kid, you live in a world where a guy can turn into a tree because his great-grandfather sneezed on a meteor. Physics checked out a long time ago."
Izuku considered this. He wanted to argue. The scientist in him—the new, vastly upgraded scientist in him, equipped with the theoretical frameworks of Richards and Stark and Doom—wanted to demand a mechanistic explanation, a falsifiable hypothesis, peer-reviewed evidence.
But the reader in him—the boy who had sat in a folding chair in an impossible room and cried over Spider-Man and Superman and a girl on a ledge—that boy understood something that science didn't have words for.
The stories chose him.
Or he chose them.
Same thing, from the right angle.
"Okay," Izuku said. "Okay. I'll accept 'narrative' as a working hypothesis pending further data."
Stan beamed. "That's the spirit. Now—" He clapped his hands together with the enthusiasm of a game show host revealing a prize. "I have something else for you."
He led Izuku toward the back of the shop—not to the back room with the comics (though the door was still there, and Izuku could swear he heard pages turning behind it, as though the stories were reading themselves in his absence), but to a different corner that Izuku was positive had not existed yesterday.
It was a small alcove, separated from the rest of the shop by a curtain made from what appeared to be vintage comic book pages stitched together. Behind the curtain was a television—not a modern flat-screen, but a massive, ancient, cathode-ray-tube monstrosity that looked like it weighed as much as the boat Izuku had dragged across Dagobah Beach. It sat on a wooden stand that bowed under its weight, surrounded by towers of VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, and formats that Izuku didn't recognize and suspected might not exist in any conventional sense.
There were also streaming devices. Multiple ones. Plugged into a power strip that was plugged into an extension cord that was plugged into—Izuku followed the cord with his eyes—the wall, which did not have an outlet. The cord just went into the wall. Into the plaster. There was no outlet.
"Don't worry about it," Stan said preemptively.
Next to the television, stacked in towers that reached nearly to the ceiling, were boxes. Hundreds of boxes. Labeled in Stan's now-familiar handwriting.
BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (COMPLETE)
SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (COMPLETE)
JUSTICE LEAGUE / JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED (COMPLETE)
X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (COMPLETE)
SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (COMPLETE)
SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN (COMPLETE—AND YES, THEY CANCELLED IT TOO SOON, DON'T GET ME STARTED)
TEEN TITANS (THE GOOD ONE)
YOUNG JUSTICE (COMPLETE-ISH, THEY KEEP MAKING MORE)
AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES (COMPLETE)
WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN (COMPLETE—ANOTHER ONE CANCELLED TOO SOON)
BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD (COMPLETE, AND YES IT'S SILLY, WATCH IT ANYWAY)
BATMAN BEYOND (COMPLETE)
STATIC SHOCK (COMPLETE)
INVINCIBLE (ANIMATED SERIES)
And more. So many more. Boxes upon boxes of animated series, live-action television shows, and—
Movies.
An entire shelf of movies.
SUPERMAN (1978, CHRISTOPHER REEVE, THE GOLD STANDARD)
BATMAN (1989, KEATON/BURTON)
SPIDER-MAN (2002, RAIMI, THE HOLY TEXT)
THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY (NOLAN)
THE MCU (COMPLETE, GOD HELP YOU)
MAN OF STEEL (SNYDER, 2013—VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED)
BATMAN V SUPERMAN (SNYDER, 2016—BRING EMOTIONAL SUPPORT)
WONDER WOMAN (2017, PATTY JENKINS, A BLESSING)
SUPERMAN (2025, JAMES GUNN, THE SECOND COMING)
INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (MASTERPIECE, NOT NEGOTIABLE)
THE BATMAN (2022, REEVES, EXCELLENT)
And dozens more. Izuku's enhanced brain catalogued them all in seconds, cross-referencing titles with the comics he'd already read, mapping adaptations to source material, already generating comparative analyses before he'd watched a single frame.
"Stan," Izuku said slowly. "Is this... all of them?"
"Every adaptation worth watching," Stan said. "And a few that aren't, because you need to understand what going wrong looks like too. You can't appreciate a good Superman movie until you've seen a bad one."
"How long is this going to take?"
"Time's funny in here, remember?"
Izuku looked at the television. He looked at the boxes. He looked at Stan.
He sat down on the floor in front of the ancient CRT television, cross-legged, and said: "Start with Superman."
Stan hit play.
Superman: The Movie. 1978. Richard Donner. Christopher Reeve.
From the moment the title credits began—the whoosh of the logo flying toward the camera, John Williams' score swelling like the musical equivalent of sunlight—Izuku understood why Stan had called this the gold standard.
Christopher Reeve was Superman. Not "played" Superman, not "portrayed" Superman—was Superman. The way he held himself, the warmth in his eyes, the slight smile that said I could destroy everything in this room, including you, and instead I'm going to ask about your day. The way he caught Lois Lane as she fell from a helicopter and said, calm as a summer breeze: "Easy, miss. I've got you."
"You've got me?! Who's got you?!"
Izuku laughed out loud. Actually laughed—a full, genuine, surprised laugh, the kind he didn't produce very often because his life didn't typically provide occasions for it.
He watched the entire film. He watched Reeve's Clark Kent—the deliberate, brilliant performance of a man pretending to be less than he was. The slouch, the glasses, the nervous stammer, the way he made himself small so that no one would look too closely. It was acting inside acting—Reeve playing Superman playing Clark Kent—and it was masterful.
And the message. The message of the film. Pa Kent's death scene: "All those powers, and I couldn't even save him." The understanding that power doesn't protect you from loss. Jor-El's crystal fortress speech: "They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way." The belief—not naive, not foolish, but earned, tested against tragedy and loss—that people are worth saving. That humanity is worth believing in.
Superman II. Reeve again. Zod. "Kneel before Zod!" Superman giving up his powers for love, realizing he can't, fighting to get them back, saving the world again because that's what he does.
Then Superman III and IV, which were... less good. Significantly less good. Izuku watched them with the clinical detachment of a medical examiner performing an autopsy.
"These are not great," he said.
"Nope," Stan agreed from somewhere behind him. "But they're instructive. You can learn a lot from failure."
Batman. 1989. Tim Burton. Michael Keaton.
Dark. Gothic. A Gotham City that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated urban planning and loved gargoyles. Keaton's Batman was quiet, intense, weird in a way that felt right—because of course Batman was weird. A man who dressed as a bat to fight crime was inherently weird, and pretending otherwise was dishonest.
Jack Nicholson's Joker was theatrical and terrifying and funny, which was somehow worse—the idea that evil could be entertaining, that chaos could have charisma.
Batman Returns leaned harder into the Burton aesthetic—darker, stranger, weirder—and Izuku wasn't sure he liked it as much, but he appreciated it. Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman was a revelation—a woman who had been destroyed by the system and rebuilt herself as something the system couldn't control.
Then Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, and—
"What happened here?" Izuku asked, staring at the screen as Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered another ice pun.
"Joel Schumacher happened," Stan said. "Don't worry. It gets better."
Spider-Man. 2002. Sam Raimi. Tobey Maguire.
Izuku was not prepared.
He was not prepared for how personal this felt. Maguire's Peter Parker was awkward and earnest and trying so hard and getting knocked down and getting back up, and Izuku watched him get bitten by the spider and discover his powers and try to use them for money and fail and watch his uncle die and—
"With great power comes great responsibility."
Cliff Robertson's voice, delivering the line. Quiet. Gentle. Not a commandment from on high but advice from a man who loved his nephew and wanted him to be good.
Izuku was crying before the scene was over. He didn't even try to hide it.
Spider-Man 2. Doc Ock. "I believe there's a hero in all of us." The train scene—Spider-Man stopping a train with his body, pushing back against thousands of tons of steel and momentum, his mask torn off, his face exposed, just a kid, and the passengers seeing him and protecting him and not telling anyone who he was because they understood.
"He's just a kid," one of them said. "No older than my son."
Izuku had to pause the film. He sat on the floor and pressed his hands against his face and breathed.
Spider-Man 3—messy, overstuffed, Venom was wasted, but the Sandman scene—the birth of Sandman, the grains of sand pulling themselves together, forming a hand, reaching—that was beautiful. And the forgiveness at the end. Peter Parker forgiving the man who killed his uncle. Not because it was easy. Because it was right.
Into the Spider-Verse.
This one broke him in a different way.
Because Miles Morales stood on the edge of a building and fell backward into the sky and the frame flipped and he wasn't falling, he was rising, and the music hit and the animation exploded into something that was more than animation—it was art, it was joy, it was the visual equivalent of the feeling Izuku got when he thought about being a hero—
And the message: Anyone can wear the mask. Anyone. Not just the chosen ones. Not just the people with the right Quirk or the right bloodline or the right license. Anyone who chooses to stand up. Anyone who takes that leap of faith.
What's up, danger?
The Dark Knight Trilogy. Christopher Nolan. Christian Bale.
Batman Begins was a masterclass in the question Izuku had been asking himself all day: How does a person with no superpowers become a superhero? The answer, according to Nolan, was: training, discipline, resources, and an unshakeable commitment to a principle.
"Why do we fall, Bruce?"
"So we can learn to pick ourselves up."
The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger's Joker. Izuku watched this one with his enhanced analytical mind fully engaged, and what he saw terrified him—not because of the Joker's violence, but because of his philosophy. The Joker's argument was that civilization was a facade. That people were only good when it was easy, and the moment things got hard, they'd turn on each other like animals. That heroism was a lie.
And the film's response—the two ferries, each given the power to destroy the other, both choosing not to—was the definitive rebuttal. People were good. Not perfectly, not consistently, but fundamentally. Given the choice between destruction and mercy, between fear and faith, the majority would choose mercy. Would choose faith.
Izuku thought about his world. About the people who had been told that heroism was a profession rather than a choice. About the civilians who stood behind barriers during villain attacks because the law said they couldn't help. About the Quirkless population who had been written off as unable to contribute to a society that measured contribution in combat power.
They would choose faith, he thought. If someone showed them they could. If someone demonstrated that a hero doesn't need a license or a Quirk or permission. Just the willingness to act.
The Dark Knight Rises was about legacy. About the idea that Batman wasn't a person—it was a symbol. A symbol that could be passed on, carried forward, inherited by anyone who was willing to bear its weight.
"A hero can be anyone," Batman told Gordon. "Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know the world hadn't ended."
Then came Man of Steel.
Izuku watched it with growing unease that eventually crystallized into something very close to anger.
It started well enough. Krypton looked incredible—alien and beautiful and doomed. Russell Crowe's Jor-El was commanding and tragic. Young Clark's struggles with his powers were compelling, authentic, real.
But then—
Jonathan Kent told Clark to let a bus full of children drown rather than reveal his powers.
Izuku sat up straight.
"What?" he said.
Jonathan Kent—the moral bedrock of Superman's entire character, the man who taught Kal-El that power was meaningless without compassion, the farmer from Kansas who looked at an alien baby and saw his son—told his son that he should have let children die.
"Maybe," Jonathan Kent said on screen, when Clark asked if he should have let them drown.
"WHAT?!" Izuku shouted at the television.
He looked at Stan. Stan was sitting in a folding chair behind him, eating popcorn from a bucket that had not existed five minutes ago, wearing an expression of patient amusement.
"Keep watching," Stan said.
Izuku kept watching.
It got worse.
Superman fought Zod in Metropolis. In Metropolis. In the middle of a city full of millions of people. Buildings collapsed. Skyscrapers fell. The destruction was massive, catastrophic, cinematic—and Superman didn't seem to care. He didn't try to move the fight out of the city. He didn't prioritize civilian evacuation. He didn't do any of the things that Superman—Superman, the man who once spent an entire issue rescuing a cat from a tree because that mattered too—would do.
He punched Zod through buildings. Through buildings. Buildings with people in them.
"No," Izuku said. "No, no, no. What is—what is this? Superman doesn't—he would never—the first thing he would do is get the fight away from civilians. That's—that's rule one. That's not even a rule, it's just—it's who he is. It's—"
And then Superman killed Zod.
Snapped his neck.
On screen.
With his bare hands.
Izuku stared at the screen in silence for approximately fifteen seconds.
Then he said, very quietly, very calmly: "I have several notes."
Stan snorted popcorn.
"Superman doesn't kill," Izuku said, his voice rising. "That's—that's the point. That's the entire point. He has the power to kill everyone and he chooses not to. That choice is what makes him Superman. Without that choice, he's just—he's just a strong guy. He's just Endeavor with a cape! Why would—who made this? What were they thinking?"
"Zack Snyder," Stan said, wiping popcorn from his mustache. "And what he was thinking—well, that's a longer conversation. He wasn't wrong about everything. He understood that Superman was powerful. He understood that a realistic application of that power would be devastating. He made a Superman who existed in a world with consequences. But—"
"But he missed the point," Izuku said fiercely. "Superman isn't about consequences. Superman is about hope. He's the guy who shows up and suddenly things are going to be okay. Not because he's going to punch the problem—because he cares. Because he's going to find a way. Because giving up isn't in his vocabulary. You don't—you can't—" He gestured at the frozen frame on the screen, Superman's anguished face after the neck snap. "This isn't hope. This is trauma. This is grim and dark and 'realistic' and it completely misses why Superman matters."
He was breathing hard. His hands were clenched at his sides. He realized, with some embarrassment, that he had gotten genuinely, deeply, personally angry about the characterization of a fictional character in a movie from a universe he hadn't known existed twenty-four hours ago.
He did not feel embarrassed for very long, because he was right and he knew he was right.
"Batman v Superman?" Stan offered, holding up a disc.
"Does it get better?"
"...define 'better.'"
Izuku watched Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The extended cut, because Stan insisted that the theatrical cut was incomplete and the extended cut was necessary for full comprehension, even though it was three hours long.
It was... complicated.
Ben Affleck's Batman was good. Like, really good. The warehouse fight scene was the best live-action Batman fight scene Izuku had ever seen (which was all of them, technically, but his enhanced analytical brain could compare technique and choreography and camera work with expert-level precision, and this was objectively excellent). Affleck captured the weariness of a Batman who had been doing this for twenty years and had started to lose himself—the branding, the killing, the cruelty—and the tragedy of that was powerful.
Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman was a beam of light in a film that was otherwise aggressively opposed to the concept of light. When she showed up for the final battle, grinning, shield raised, theme music blaring—
"That's her," Izuku said. "That's exactly her. Why can't the rest of the movie be like that?"
But the overall film was joyless. Heavy. Labored. It treated its characters like icons to be deconstructed rather than people to be understood. It was so concerned with asking "what would superheroes be like in the real world" that it forgot to ask the more important question: "why do we need superheroes in the first place?"
"Snyder understands the aesthetic of heroism," Izuku said, when it was over. "He can make a hero look incredible. But he doesn't understand the heart of it. He thinks Superman is interesting because he's powerful. But Superman is interesting because he's kind. He thinks Batman is interesting because he's dark. But Batman is interesting because he fights the dark—in the world and in himself. He's got the visuals. He's missing the soul."
Stan applauded. Literally applauded, clapping his hands together with genuine delight.
"I knew you'd get it," he said.
Wonder Woman. 2017. Patty Jenkins. Gal Gadot.
This one Izuku loved.
Diana walking across No Man's Land. Shield raised. Bullets ricocheting. Every soldier in the trench watching her with awe, and then—because courage is contagious, because heroism inspires—following her. Getting up. Going over the top. Not because they were ordered to, but because a woman with a shield had shown them it was possible.
"That's it," Izuku said, leaning forward. "That's what a hero does. Not just solve the problem—inspire other people to help solve it. Superman doesn't save the world alone. He makes people believe the world is worth saving, and then they save it too."
He thought about his world again. About how the Pro Hero system had created a culture of passivity—a society where civilians were trained to stand back and wait for the professionals, where helping your neighbor was replaced by calling the hero hotline, where the impulse to act had been regulated out of existence.
The Pro Hero system didn't create heroes. It created spectators.
Then Stan put in the disc labeled Superman. 2025. James Gunn.
Izuku settled in. After Man of Steel, his expectations were guarded. His arms were crossed. His analytical mind was running comparisons against the Donner film, the Snyder films, the animated series, the comics, every version of Superman he'd absorbed in the past day and a half.
The film started.
Twenty minutes later, his arms were uncrossed.
Forty minutes later, he was leaning forward.
An hour in, he was grinning. Actually grinning—the wide, unguarded, almost childlike grin that he hadn't worn in years because the world had spent those years grinding it out of him.
Because James Gunn got it.
This Superman was kind. Not "kind" as a secondary trait, not "kind" as something the story acknowledged and then moved past to get to the punching—kind as the defining, central, load-bearing characteristic of the entire film. This Clark Kent looked at people—all people, not just the important ones, not just the ones who mattered to the plot—and saw them. Cared about them. Wanted to help them not because it was his duty or his burden or his curse but because helping people made him happy.
He saved a cat from a tree.
Actually saved a cat from an actual tree.
And it wasn't played as a joke. It wasn't ironic. It wasn't a deconstruction or a subversion or a "realistic take." It was Superman saving a cat from a tree because a little girl was upset that her cat was stuck and Superman was there and he could help and so he did.
Izuku was crying. He didn't care.
"That's Superman," he said, wiping his eyes. "That's him. That's who he is. Not the dark, tortured, reluctant version. Not the 'realistic' version who kills people and destroys cities. This. A man who could be a god and chooses to be a neighbor."
The film wasn't perfect. No film was. But it understood—fundamentally, in its bones, in every frame and every line of dialogue and every choice it made—that Superman was about hope. That the "S" on his chest stood for something. That in a world full of darkness and cynicism and people telling you that kindness was weakness, Superman stood up and said: No. Kindness is the strongest thing there is. And I'll prove it.
When the credits rolled, Izuku sat in silence for a long time.
Then he said: "Gunn understood what Snyder didn't. Snyder asked 'What if Superman were real?' Gunn asked 'What if we deserved Superman?' And the answer to the second question is so much more important. Because we don't deserve Superman. Not yet. But he shows up anyway. That's the whole thing. That's the miracle. Not that he exists—that he chooses us. Every day. Despite everything. He chooses us."
Stan was quiet. When Izuku looked at him, the old man's eyes were suspiciously bright behind his oversized glasses.
"Yeah," Stan said. "Yeah, kid. That's it exactly."
They watched Batman: The Animated Series.
All eighty-five episodes.
In what felt like a single afternoon but couldn't possibly have been, except that time was funny in here, and Izuku had stopped questioning that.
Kevin Conroy's Batman. Mark Hamill's Joker. A Gotham City drawn in dark lines on black paper—the "dark deco" style that made every frame look like a painting by someone who loved film noir and Art Deco in equal measure.
This Batman was everything the comics had promised and more. He was dark but not cruel. Serious but not joyless. Driven but not consumed. He cared about the people he saved—not in the abstract, not as a duty, but personally. When he sat with a reformed villain and offered help, you believed it. When he fought the Joker, you felt not just his determination but his grief—grief for a brilliant mind twisted into madness, grief for the man the Joker might have been.
The Harley Quinn episodes—"Mad Love" especially—hit Izuku with unexpected force. A woman trapped in an abusive relationship with a madman, and the tragedy wasn't that she was weak. The tragedy was that she was strong—strong enough to break free, if only she could see that she deserved to.
"Heart of Ice." Mr. Freeze. A villain who wasn't evil—who was tragic. A man who had lost everything and frozen his heart because feeling the loss was worse than feeling nothing. And Batman didn't just defeat him. Batman understood him. In the final moments, watching Freeze's snow globe music box play, Batman's expression said everything: I know what it's like to lose someone. I know what that does to you. And I'm sorry.
"This is the best Batman," Izuku said.
"A lot of people agree with you," Stan said.
Then Superman: The Animated Series. Tim Daly's Superman—warm, strong, good in a way that didn't need to be complicated. A version of Superman that understood you could be powerful and gentle, that these things were not contradictory but complementary.
Then Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and Izuku watched the DC Universe come together the way the Avengers came together in the comics—different heroes, different strengths, different perspectives, united by a common purpose. The Cadmus arc. The Question's paranoid investigations. The Flash's heart. Hawkgirl's betrayal and redemption. And the speeches—dear God, the speeches.
"I feel like I live in a world made of cardboard," Superman said, fighting Darkseid, finally cutting loose, finally showing the full extent of his power—and the speech wasn't about power. It was about restraint. About the fact that Superman held back every single day because he was terrified of hurting someone by accident, and the toll of that restraint was enormous, and the one time he let go was against the one enemy who could take it.
Batman Beyond. An old Bruce Wayne passing the mantle to a new Batman—Terry McGinnis, a kid from a broken home who put on the suit not because he was asked but because someone had to. Legacy. Continuity. The idea that heroism wasn't a single person but a chain—each hero training the next, passing on not just the skills but the values.
Spectacular Spider-Man. Izuku watched this one with particular intensity because it was so close to his life that it hurt. Peter Parker in high school, trying to balance homework and friendships and a secret identity, getting bullied by Flash Thompson (he thought of Kacchan), struggling with money (he thought of his mother's careful budgeting), making mistakes and paying for them and learning and growing.
"They cancelled this after two seasons," Stan said, and his voice carried the specific grief of a man who had witnessed a genuine injustice.
"Why?"
"Rights issues. Legal stuff. The usual boring corporate reasons that kill great art."
Izuku shook his head. "In my world, heroes get cancelled because of popularity rankings. In this world, they get cancelled because of corporate rights disputes. Every universe finds its own unique way to fail the people who need it most."
Stan looked at him with something very close to pride.
They watched X-Men: The Animated Series. The theme song alone—that guitar riff, those drums—made Izuku feel like he could run through a wall. The show was imperfect, limited by its animation budget and its time slot, but the stories—adaptations of the best X-Men comics, translated faithfully—were powerful. The discrimination allegory. The weight of being different in a world that feared difference.
The Sentinel episodes. Giant robots hunting mutants—hunting children—because the government had decided that different meant dangerous. Izuku watched these episodes and thought about the Quirk Registration system in his own world, and the parallels made his stomach hurt.
Young Justice. A team of teenage heroes—sidekicks, really, trying to step out of their mentors' shadows—and the show treated them with respect. It didn't talk down to them. It didn't simplify the moral dilemmas. It trusted its young characters to grapple with real issues—identity, loyalty, sacrifice, the gap between what adults told you and what was actually true.
"Wally West dies at the end of season two," Stan warned him.
"STAN."
"What? I'm saving you emotional damage. Preparation is half the battle."
"That's not how that works!"
Wally West died at the end of season two. Izuku was not prepared despite the warning. No amount of preparation could have prepared him.
Invincible. The animated series. Darker than anything else he'd watched—brutal, violent, unsparing in its depiction of what superhero fights would actually look like if the people involved could punch through mountains. Omni-Man's betrayal. Mark Grayson's refusal to stop fighting even when he was outmatched, outpowered, outclassed in every conceivable way.
"You can't stop me," Omni-Man snarled, fist raised, his son's blood on his hands.
"Then I'll die trying," Mark said.
Izuku thought about himself at the Sludge Villain attack. Running toward danger. Running toward Kacchan, who hated him, who had bullied him for years—because Kacchan was in trouble and someone had to help and the Pro Heroes were standing there doing nothing because they didn't have the right Quirk for the situation.
Then I'll die trying.
Yeah. He understood that.
They watched all of it. Every series, every film, every adaptation worth watching and several that weren't. Izuku absorbed them with the voracious appetite of a starving man at a feast, and each one added another layer to his understanding—not just of heroism, but of storytelling. Of the power of narrative to shape minds and hearts and cultures. Of the fact that the stories a society told about heroes determined what kind of heroes that society produced.
His world had no stories like these. His world had hero rankings and merchandise deals and licensing exams. His world had turned heroism into a product, and in doing so, had stripped it of everything that made it meaningful.
When they finally finished—when the last credit rolled on the last adaptation, and Izuku sat in front of the ancient CRT television with his notebooks full and his mind buzzing and his heart so full of stories that it felt like it might burst—he turned to Stan and said:
"I know what I need to do."
"Tell me."
"I need to be the story my world never had. Not just a hero—a symbol. Not like All Might—All Might is a symbol of power. I need to be a symbol of choice. Of the idea that heroism isn't about what you can do. It's about what you decide to do."
Stan nodded slowly.
"I need to show people that a hero doesn't need a license. Doesn't need a Quirk. Doesn't need permission. A hero needs one thing: the willingness to help. That's it. That's the whole qualification. Everything else—the training, the skills, the strength—that's just preparation. The heroism is the choice."
"And the system?" Stan asked. "The Hero Commission? The licensing laws? The entire institutional framework that says what you're planning to do is illegal?"
Izuku thought about Steve Rogers standing against the Registration Act. About Batman operating as a vigilante for decades. About Spider-Man being wanted by the police and showing up anyway. About Superman, who answered to no government and no authority and no law except the one written on his heart.
"The system is wrong," Izuku said. "And when the system is wrong, you don't ask the system for permission to fix it. You just fix it."
Stan's grin was back. The big one. The sunrise one.
"One more thing," the old man said. He reached under the counter (they were back at the counter now; Izuku wasn't sure when they'd moved, but time and space were both suggestions in this shop) and produced a small box. He placed it in front of Izuku.
Inside the box was a pin. Small, metallic, shaped like a diamond—no, shaped like an S. The Superman shield. But not quite—the lines were slightly different, the proportions adjusted, the shape subtly altered so that it was recognizably inspired by the Superman symbol without being identical to it.
"What's this?" Izuku asked.
"A reminder," Stan said. "For when it gets hard. And it will get hard, kid. The kind of hero you're talking about being—no license, no backing, no system supporting you—that's the hardest kind there is. You'll be fighting villains and the establishment. You'll be saving people who might not thank you. You'll be breaking laws that you believe are unjust, and the people who enforce those laws will come after you, and they won't all be wrong to do so."
He pushed the box toward Izuku.
"When that happens—when it's dark and you're tired and every rational part of your brain is telling you to stop—look at this. And remember what it means. Remember what they taught you. Superman. Spider-Man. Batman. All of them."
Izuku picked up the pin. It was warm in his hand. Warm in a way that metal shouldn't be—warm like a living thing. Like a heartbeat.
"It means hope," Izuku said.
Stan's eyes glistened behind his glasses.
"'Nuff said, kid."
Izuku walked home through the streets of Musutafu as the sun set—or didn't set, because time was funny and the sun was in the same position it had been when he'd entered the shop, but it felt like sunset, which might have been more important.
His bag was heavier now. More comics. More trades. More stories to read, more lessons to absorb, more fuel for the fire that had been lit in his chest and showed no signs of going out.
He also had three full notebooks of plans. Engineering schematics refined by hours of analysis. A training schedule optimized by the combined intelligence of five of fiction's greatest minds. A strategic framework for becoming a vigilante hero in a society that had outlawed vigilante heroism.
He had the strength to lift a car and the skills to fight an army and the intelligence to outthink most of the people who would try to stop him.
And he had a pin. A small, warm, diamond-shaped pin that meant hope.
He clipped it to the inside of his shirt collar, against his skin, where no one could see it but he could feel it. A secret. A promise. A reminder.
Anyone can wear the mask.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.
They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way.
Izuku Midoriya walked home, and for the second time in as many days, he was not afraid.
He was not afraid because Spider-Man had taught him that fear was not the absence of courage—it was the prerequisite for it. Because Batman had taught him that preparation could overcome any disadvantage. Because Superman had taught him that the greatest power in any universe was the simple, radical, world-changing act of giving a damn.
His phone buzzed. A text from his mother: Dinner's almost ready! Katsudon tonight!
He smiled.
Coming home now, he typed back. Love you.
He put his phone away. He looked up at the sky—clear, bright, the first stars beginning to appear despite the fact that it was definitely still afternoon, probably, time was funny—and he thought:
Tomorrow, I start building.
Tomorrow, I start training for real.
Tomorrow, I start becoming the hero this world has never seen.
Not a Pro Hero. Not a licensed, ranked, commodified, government-sanctioned hero.
A real one.
Behind him, in a comic shop that existed between the cracks of reality, an old man in a Hawaiian shirt leaned back in his chair and smiled at a wall covered in posters of heroes who had never existed and changed the world anyway.
"The story's just getting started," Stan said to no one in particular. "And boy, is it gonna be a good one."
He reached for his coffee.
"Excelsior," he said.
END OF CHAPTER 2
Next time: Izuku builds his gear. Izuku hits the streets. And a certain underground hero—a man who erases Quirks and has strong opinions about logical ruses—encounters a vigilante who doesn't have a Quirk to erase. This is, to put it mildly, a problem.
Also, Bakugo Katsuki has a very confusing day.