There were worse ways to spend a Tuesday night than having twenty-seven years of someone else's life dumped into your skull.
Kaito Ryu could not think of any right now, but he was sure they existed.
He was fifteen years old, lying flat on the floor of his bedroom with his arms at his sides like a man awaiting burial, staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had just been personally insulted by the universe.
Outside, a cat was yowling at something. The city hummed. His mother was watching a drama in the next room — he could hear the muffled soundtrack of someone crying about something that was probably a misunderstanding.
Inside Kaito's head, it was significantly louder.
The memories had come all at once, which he felt was unnecessarily dramatic. Dreams for years — fragments, faces, the ghost of a language that was not Japanese — and then tonight, without warning, a dam had broken and twenty-seven years of Liam Holt had poured in.
Liam Holt, who had been unremarkable in almost every way except that he had read every chapter of My Hero Academia twice and watched the anime three times and died at twenty-seven because a truck had not seen him crossing an intersection at 11:47 p.m. on a Thursday.
Kaito Ryu, who was apparently the same person reborn, lay on the floor and processed this.
Every arc. The war. The things Shigaraki became. All For One's voice — explaining to someone exactly why they had already lost.
He knew who had One For All. He knew what All Might was hiding behind that smile.
He knew that a Quirkless boy named Midoriya Izuku was out there right now, probably writing hero analysis notes by the light of a desk lamp, completely unaware of the weight that was about to land on his shoulders.
He also knew, with complete clarity, that he himself had a Quirk. Not just a Quirk — a system. And he had been doing nothing with it for fifteen years.
[ COMBAT TRAINING PROFICIENCY SYSTEM Status: ACTIVE
Registered User: Kaito Ryu
Current Skills: NONE
Message: You have been sleeping for fifteen years. Please begin. ]
Kaito stared at the notification floating in the corner of his vision — visible only to him, blue-white and clinical, like a bored secretary who had been waiting at a desk since he was born.
'Please begin,' he read aloud, quietly.
The cat outside yowled again.
He sat up. His reflection in the dark window looked back at him — pale amber eyes under silver-dark hair, the face of a fifteen-year-old Japanese boy wearing the expression of a man who had just looked at a very long to-do list and decided he was not afraid of it.
He was not afraid. That was the thing he was most certain of, lying on the floor of his bedroom with the entire plot of a manga series stored in his memory like a manual.
He was not afraid because he already knew how this ended. The world survived. At a cost, yes — at a terrible cost — but it survived.
The question was how much of that cost he could reduce.
And separately, a smaller and more honest thought: how strong he could get. Because Kaito Ryu had known, even as a small child with no memories recovered yet, that he wanted to fight. Not to be famous. Not to be a symbol. Just — he wanted to be in the room when it mattered.
He wanted to test himself against the hardest things the world had. He wanted to be so absurdly powerful that the things that were supposed to be inevitable had to look him in the eye first.
This was not a noble motivation. He was at peace with that.
He stood up, cracked his knuckles, and looked at the training dummy in the corner of his room — a battered thing his mother had bought him three years ago when he had asked with very serious eyes for something he could hit.
He crossed the room, positioned himself in front of it, and punched it.
[ Punching: Lv.1 → 1/10 . First strike registered.Current Output: Baseline human. Nothing special. Keep going.]
[ Punching: Lv.1 → 2/10 ]
He punched it eight more times in a row, methodically, adjusting his form with each one. By the tenth, his knuckle was slightly red and the dummy had a new dent.
The notification updated once per clean strike. He made a note of the threshold requirement.
At 1:15 a.m., his mother knocked on his door and asked why he was awake.
'Thinking,' he said.
A pause. 'About what?'
'Training.'
Another pause, longer this time. 'Go to sleep, Kaito.'
He went to sleep. But he set an alarm for five a.m., because the punching was not going to level up automatically.
The alarm went off at five and Kaito silenced it before the second beep, because his father was a light sleeper and there was no need to be dramatic about productivity.
He was outside and running by 5:04 a.m.
The neighborhood was quiet — that particular early-morning quiet where the city had not yet decided to be the city. Street lights were still on.
A delivery truck idled at an intersection. A man walked a dog that looked as though it resented every step.
Kaito ran past all of it at a pace that was slightly faster than a fifteen-year-old should sustain, breathing through his nose, watching the system in his peripheral vision.
[ Running: Lv.1 → 1/10 . First sustained run registered.Note: Current speed is 18 km/h. Adequate for a dog. Improve. ]
'I'm going to turn off the commentary function if there is one,' Kaito said under his breath.
There was not. The system continued to be a brutally honest performance tracker with the personality of a personal trainer who had given up on being encouraging sometime around 2019.
He ran six kilometers. By the time he returned home, his calves ached and the system had registered Running at 4/10.
He stretched in the yard, noted that his mother's light was on in the kitchen, and went inside to find her already making rice with the focused ,she had been awake for a while.
Hana Ryu was a retired pro heroine. Not famous — she had operated at the mid-tier level under the name Steelspring, using a modest strength-enhancement Quirk that let her punch about three times harder than baseline.
She had retired at thirty-two, married Kaito's father, and spent the next fifteen years cooking rice and occasionally watching hero news with an expression that was either nostalgic or critical, depending on which hero was on screen.
She looked at her son coming in the door sweaty at 5:50 a.m. and said nothing.
Kaito sat down at the table.
She put rice in front of him. He ate. She sat across from him with her own bowl and watched him.
'How long have you been doing this?' she asked.
'This morning is the first time.'
'And it won't be the last.'
'No.'
She nodded once and ate her rice. He ate his. Outside, the city started becoming itself again, and neither of them needed to say anything else.
The rest of the week was architecture.
Kaito designed his training around the system's mechanics.
It was not complicated once you understood the rules: one skill, one action, ten clean repetitions at meaningful effort equaled one level.
Ten levels equaled evolution.
The system tracked quality as well as quantity — lazy repetitions registered at a fraction of a level.
He tested this on the second day by doing push-ups with bad form and watching the counter barely increment.
[ Running: Lv.1 → 5/10 ]
[ Punching: Lv.1 → 6/10 ]
[ Durability: Lv.1 → 1/10 ]
[ Note: Durability tree requires impact absorption to progress. Taking hits counts. Avoiding all damage does not.]
'So I have to get hit,' Kaito said to himself, sitting on the floor of his room after a session. 'Fantastic.'
He thought about this for two minutes and then went downstairs to ask his mother if she would hit him.
The look on her face was, he felt, disproportionate to the request.
'For training,' he clarified.
'I understood that,' she said. 'The answer is yes, and you are going to explain everything to me first.'
So he did. Not everything but he explained that he wanted to became a hero. He wants to attend U.A and to do that he has to pass the entrance exam.
As she knows his Quirk is Training Ground. Which helps him to train at a faster time .So, by getting geting hit , he wants to train his durability.
She listened without interrupting, which was the most alarming thing she could have done.
When he finished, she was quiet for ten seconds.
Then she said: 'I'll spar with you on weekends. Don't tell your father until after the first session '.
Kaito looked at his mother and thought: she was always underrated in the canon. Out loud he said: 'Thank you.'
She waved this off and went back to reading. 'Go do your homework. You can't pass entrance exam without studying.'
'Yet,' he said.
'Kaito.'
'Doing homework.'
I have already written 40 chapters of this fanfiction. If you guys like this then I will continue to post the chapter but if you don't like it, then I will delete this fan fiction and the chapter and try to write a new story. So please tell me you are thoughts in comments.