The hologram opened with fanfare that nobody asked for.
All Might materialized above Izuku's desk in a blaze of gold light, grinning wide enough to crack the projection, one fist raised in a pose that probably had its own trademark.
Izuku fast-forwarded through it.
The scoreboard loaded.
1st Place — MIDORIYA IZUKU — 77 Villain Points / 41 Rescue Points — Total: 118
Below it, second place.
Bakugou Katsuki. 77 villain points. Zero rescue points.
'Same villain score. Zero rescue. Couldn't bring himself to help a single person.'
He looked at his own number again. 118. First place at the most competitive hero school entrance exam in Japan.
He didn't feel proud. He felt the way you feel when a calculation checks out and you move on to the next one. Maybe that was its own kind of problem.
He crushed the projector remote in his fist, dropped the plastic in the bin, and started packing.
***
The U.A. uniform did not fit.
Ten months of deadlifts and squats had produced a body that the standard sizing chart had not anticipated and did not appreciate. The jacket pulled across his shoulders. The shirt underneath pressed flat against his chest with zero slack.
'I look like I'm wearing my little brother's clothes. If I had a little brother. If I was actually the person these clothes were ordered for.'
He walked into Class 1-A at 8:51 AM.
He heard Bakugou before he saw him. That was always how it went. The kid was at the front of the room yelling at Iida about something, both of them squared up like they were about to fight over a parking violation.
Izuku walked past both of them and took the seat in the back left corner.
Headphones around his neck. Phone out.
Then he looked up and started working through the room. Not threat assessments. He was trying to stop calling them that. People assessments.
Pink skin girl. Acid quirk, probably ranged. She was laughing at something and her whole face was in it. Seemed like someone who enjoyed being alive.
Tape boy from the exam. Sero. Mid-range utility. Currently telling a story with both hands.
Kaminari. Electric. Loud. High output, zero precision. The human equivalent of a shotgun blast. He was already trying to talk to every girl in the room.
Kirishima was harder to place. Big. Enthusiastic in a way that was completely genuine, which was almost disorienting in a room full of teenagers performing confidence. Hardening quirk, probably. The type to charge straight in and figure it out on the way.
He scanned the rest. One look each. Twenty students in four minutes.
'Stop ranking people. They're classmates, not targets.'
He couldn't quite stop.
Then he felt something at the door.
Not a sound. The ambient cold from his stored shadow picked it up first. A temperature shift, barely a degree, but the Hound underneath him was sensitive to things it had no business being sensitive to.
Something on the other side of that door was very, very good at being unnoticed.
'Teacher.'
The yellow sleeping bag hit the hallway floor with a soft thump.
It shifted. The zipper moved. Aizawa Shouta's face emerged before the bag finished unzipping, tired eyes scanning the room with the flat, automated efficiency of a man who'd been reading classrooms for longer than most of these kids had been alive.
His eyes found Izuku.
It was the look a man gives a locked door when he's already decided to open it.
Izuku was already looking back.
A full second passed. Aizawa's gaze didn't move on the way it moved past everyone else. It stayed. Something recalibrated behind his eyes. Not surprise. Just a man discovering a room was slightly bigger than the blueprints suggested.
He stood. Unzipped the rest of the bag.
"I'm your homeroom teacher, Aizawa Shouta. Change into your gym clothes. We're heading outside."
No good morning. No explanation.
Izuku decided he liked this man.
***
The locker room was twelve boys pretending they weren't looking at each other while they changed. The universal choreography of male insecurity.
Izuku pulled off his jacket. Then his shirt.
He wasn't paying attention to the room when the room stopped.
The background noise cut out. Conversations dying at slightly different times, like someone was turning down individual volume knobs.
He looked up.
Kirishima was staring. Kaminari was staring. Sero had been mid-sentence and just... stopped.
'Ah. Right.'
He knew what they were seeing.
Ten months left records. Shoulders that didn't belong on a fourteen-year-old. Forearms mapped with veins. The right one carrying a branching burn scar from wrist to elbow — the Lichtenberg figure from the capacitor blowout in month seven, pale and permanent. Underneath it, the older silver line where the bone had fractured on day one.
He looked like someone who'd been through something. Because he had. He just couldn't explain what.
He pulled the gym shirt over his head. Smoothed it flat. Grabbed his headphones.
Walked out without looking back.
Behind him, nobody had started moving.
Aizawa was already outside, hands in pockets, staring at the sky like it owed him money.
He didn't look at Izuku when he came through the door first.
But he shifted his weight. Small. Involuntary. The adjustment of a man recalculating how much space to give something.
Izuku noticed.
He put his headphones on and waited.
TO BE CONTINUED