The evening was a comfortable one in the Toruko apartment, marked by the quiet hum of domestic life and the soft, electrical scent of innovation. Dave sat cross-legged on the living room floor, a disassembled haptic sensor array from an old VR set spread on a towel before him. His textbook on fluid dynamics lay open nearby, mostly for reference. In the air above his lap, three screws orbited a central bolt in a slow, stable rotation, a casual exercise in maintaining multiple telekinetic vectors.
"Think the damping gel in these nodes has degraded," Dave said, not looking up as he poked at a small rubber component with a precision driver. "Feedback latency would be all over the place."
From the couch, Kenji peered over the top of his tablet. "Probably. That's a first-gen model. Meant to be disposable. What're you trying to make it do?"
"Not sure yet, Dad" Dave admitted, letting the screws descend gently into his palm. " I Was thinking about tactile feedback for non-visual spatial awareness. But the base components aren't great. Might just harvest the flex sensors." He began reassembling it with quick, sure movements.
"Translation: he took apart my old junk and now he's putting it back together better," Kenji said to Aiko with a grin.
Aiko looked up from her medical journal, smiling. "As long as it's not my good measuring cups again." Her tone was light, teasing.
"That was one time,mom" Dave said, a faint smile touching his own lips. "And I put them back with more consistent volumetric accuracy. The stamped lines were off by nearly two milliliters."
"My hero," Aiko chuckled, returning to her reading.
The conversation lulled back into a comfortable silence, broken only by the click of components and the turn of pages. This was the easy rhythm Dave had come to rely on—a space where his analytical nature was just a part of the family landscape, not something to be explained or defended. He was simply their son, who happened to think about the world in a certain way.
Later, after helping clear the dinner dishes, Dave stepped out for his evening run. The city air was cool, carrying the distant sounds of traffic and life. His mind, as always, partitioned its focus. A part of him enjoyed the simple rhythm of his feet on the pavement, the stretch and pull of muscle. The larger part was busy. Hive managed his breathing and pacing for optimal oxygen exchange, while a dedicated sub-process ran a silent simulation—today's model was a variation on the UA entrance exam, factoring in new data from Izuku's latest historical analysis about probable robot weight distributions.
As he ran, a news alert chimed softly from a public screen he passed: "Major Sludge Villain Incident in Downtown Musutafu. Pro-Heroes On Scene. Multiple Block Evacuation." Dave's eyes flickered to the screen, absorbing the headline. Sludge-based heteromorph. Urban environment ideal for mobility. High chaos potential. Rescue priority: airway clearance, containment. The data was filed automatically into his growing mental catalog of threat profiles, a cold, academic note. He ran on, his system humming with purpose, utterly unaware that two of his classmates were at the heart of the chaos.
Chaos was the right word. The scene was a tableau of professional frustration. Death Arms, Kamui Woods, Backdraft—capable heroes all—stood at the periphery of a maelstrom of liquid filth, their quirks ineffective against the amorphous villain holding a hostage. The hostage was Bakugo Katsuki, and he was fighting with a fury that only seemed to make things worse, his explosions vaporizing bits of sludge that simply reformed, the villain laughing at his struggles.
From the edge of the crowd, Izuku Midoriya watched, his hands trembling. His analytical mind, honed by years of study and sharpened by recent, more methodological training, was working furiously.
Villain composition: Non-Newtonian fluid, likely shear-thinning. Explosions create temporary cavities but no structural damage. Heroes' quirks: All impact or binding types. Useless. Hostile is a fluid puzzle. Bakugo's airway… partially occluded. Primary risk: suffocation from sludge ingress, not compression. Time is critical.
He saw the pros hesitating, planning. They were waiting for a hero with a better quirk match-up. Izuku understood the logic, but his calculations screamed a different result. Bakugo has maybe 90 seconds before total respiratory blockage. No hero with a thermal or dehydration quirk is on the scene logs for this district. Waiting equals death.
His body moved before the final calculation was complete.
It wasn't a blind, emotional rush. It was a vector. He dodged under Kamui Woods' extending branch, his eyes fixed on the one variable he could influence: Bakugo's face, twisted in rage and desperation. The villain's eyes, two mocking yellow orbs, were focused on the struggling host and the surrounding heroes. Izuku's approach from the side was a low-priority threat.
His backpack swung off his shoulder. Not as a weapon, but as a tool. He'd analyzed All Might's fight with this same villain. The weakness was dispersion. A large-impact scatter could momentarily destabilize the cohesion.
He hurled the backpack with all his strength, not at the villain's core, but at the mass covering Bakugo's head. Books and pencils exploded outwards in a cloud of debris. The villain recoiled, snarling in surprise, the biomass around Bakugo's face rippling and thinning for just a second.
That second was all Izuku needed. He didn't try to pull Bakugo out. He went for the critical system failure: he began clawing at the sludge around Bakugo's mouth and nose with his bare hands, a frantic, manual debris clearance. "KACCHAN!" he screamed, his voice cracking not with fear, but with focused intensity.
The villain roared, a tendril of sludge lashing out to engulf Izuku as well. The world became dark, thick, and suffocating. But even as the pressure closed in, Izuku's mind, in its final moments, was running an abort protocol. Secondary victim. Same threat model. Cohesion focused on restraining two targets now. Distribution of biomass may have weakened structural integrity around primary victim's—
The thought was cut off by a vacuum of air, then a hurricane of force.
"IT'S ALL RIGHT NOW! WHY? BECAUSE I AM HERE!"
All Might's arrival was seismic. A single, colossal punch changed the air pressure, forcibly scattering the sludge villain into a thousand harmless droplets. Bakugo and Izuku collapsed to the ground, gasping and coughing.
The aftermath was a blur of noise, flashing lights, and scolding heroes. "Stupid kid! You could have gotten yourself killed!" Death Arms boomed. Izuku, soot-covered and trembling, could only nod, his mind replaying the sequence: Backpack (improvised dispersive tool) → Momentary cohesion loss → Manual airway clearance → Successful. Outcome: Hostage survived. Cost: High personal risk. Efficiency: Low, but only available option.
He was a mess of conflicting data—relief, terror, and the cold, hard fact that his analysis had been correct, and his action, however reckless, had been the only variable change that could have altered the negative outcome in time.
All Might's rescue was a blur of power and light. The aftermath—clinging to the hero's leg, the rooftop, the shocking deflation of the Symbol into a gaunt, bleeding man—unfolded with a surreal speed. The words Izuku had dreaded all his life seemed to hang in the air, inevitable: "You cannot be a hero without a quirk."
But as All Might turned to leave, something in Izuku broke and reformed, not into tears, but into a frantic, final report. It wasn't a plea. It was the only thing he had left to give.
"The pros… their quirks were the wrong type," Izuku said, his voice hoarse but steady as he explained his actions to the skeletal hero. "Binding and impact against a fluid. It was a system mismatch. I calculated Bakugo's occlusion would be total before a suitable hero arrived. The backpack… it wasn't an attack. It was a dispersion tool. To create a momentary weakness in the biomass matrix around his airway. It gave me a 1.5-second window for physical clearance. The risk was high, but the alternative was a 100% probability of respiratory failure."
All Might stared, his sunken eyes wide. This wasn't a fanboy's impulsive bravery. This was… a tactical assessment and a conscious risk calculation performed under extreme duress. The boy had seen the problem not as a drama, but as a failing system, and had inserted himself as the only available patch.
"You… you worked all that out? In moments?" All Might asked, his voice a rasp.
"What… what else could I do?" Izuku whispered, the adrenaline fading to leave him hollow and shaking. "I can't… push him off. Or burn him. Or freeze him. All I can do… all I've ever been able to do… is see how things work. And try to find the place where even someone like me… might make a difference." His words echoed a philosophy he'd absorbed in a quieter classroom, from a calmer presence, but the fervor behind them was purely, desperately Izuku's own. It was the core of him: an unwavering belief that understanding and wanting to help were themselves forms of power, if only he could find the leverage.
All Might stared. He saw the intelligence, sharp and operational. He saw the courage to think when thinking seemed a luxury. And he saw, shining through the fear and the tears, an unbreakable, analytical heart that wanted to dissect a villain's weakness not for glory, but to find a way to save people. The ghost of a brilliant, quirkless friend who saw the threads of the world more clearly than any hero whispered in his memory. This boy wasn't just asking for power. He was demonstrating he already possessed a rare and formidable kind of strength.
The canned, crushing rejection died before it left his lips. It was true for the path of overwhelming, singular power he himself walked. But was it the only path to heroism?
"What is your name young boy?" All Might asked, his voice changed.
"M-Midoriya. Izuku Midoriya."
All Might took a deep, rattling breath. The sunset painted the rooftop in hues of fire and gold. In the boy's eyes, he didn't just see a fan. He saw a successor—not to raw power, but to a legacy of intellect and unwavering will. A successor to an idea.
"Midoriya, my boy," All Might said, a new weight and warmth in his tone. "Tell me. What is it you want to be?"
Izuku looked up, tears finally spilling over. "A hero," he said, with a conviction that was no longer a childish dream, but a conclusion reached through years of analysis and a moment of terror. "More than anything."
All Might smiled, a small, genuine thing. "Then… there is much we must discuss."
-
Back in the Toruko apartment, the evening wound down. Dave was back from his run, sipping water as he reviewed a schematic on his laptop—a refined design for a compact, multi-tool based on Kenji's earlier prototype.
"Ditched the sensor pack," he said, spinning the screen for his dad to see. "You were right about the power issue. It's just dead weight. Better to keep the design pure: jacks, filament, cutters. Simpler is stronger."
"Austerity build," Kenji nodded, approving. "Less to fail. Smart."
On the TV, the news cycled back to the sludge villain story. Aiko tsked softly. "What a horrible experience for that poor person. To be trapped like that…"
"Mmm," Dave hummed in agreement, his eyes still on his schematic. His mind, however, pulled the filed data forward. Sludge villain. Asphyxiation risk. Optimal counters: large-volume dispersal, dehydration, extreme thermal change. Rescue priority: clear airways immediately. He made a mental note to integrate fluid-based antagonists into his next rescue simulation series.
He felt no premonition, no ripple of connection. The distant thunder of destiny had passed over his classmate, altering Izuku's world forever. In the calm of his own home, Dave Toruko simply continued his work. His system was refined, his path clear. The final steps toward UA were laid out before him like a well-drawn map. He saved the schematic file, closed his laptop, and joined his parents in watching the tail end of the news, a quiet, steady point in the vast and turbulent city, patiently preparing for the storm he knew was scheduled to arrive—the storm of the entrance exam. All was proceeding according to plan.