"And you're sure you'll be ready for the test, Ken?"
My mother's worried eyes might have been unsettling when I'd first arrived in this new world of mine, but I'd gotten used to them. For a Mutant, her features were pretty restrained. Her slitted pupils and golden irises, in addition to the vaguely canine cast to her facial features, might have been a bit uncanny at the start. However, Ayase Sakura was not even remotely a woman with a hard bone in her body.
A laugh erupted from her side as my father made his presence known. "Let the boy rest, Sakura! You'll scare him off before he ever manages to get to the exam!"
Ayase Soichiro was pretty much the polar opposite of my mother in every way. Tall where she was short, aggressively human where she wasn't, and endlessly loud or overbearing depending on the occasion. Burly, with black, wild hair, and dark eyes, the man was who I took after the most, save for a few vulpine-sharp teeth and my slitted pupils. With shaggy, black hair that went down to my shoulders, it'd been combed and brushed back into a semblance of order, as I did my best to keep it out of my face. The familial resemblance was clear, even if I was skinny and lithe before I'd awoken in the body of Ayase Ken. After my Quirk had come in…
Well, I looked like I'd been active in sports all throughout my youth. Not rippling with muscle, but lean and toned, in a way that fit the 'diagnosis' the doctors had come to about my late activation of my Quirk. Not the fact that I'd ended up in the body of a teenager from another world.
Those first few weeks had been disorienting, with two conflicting sets of memories in my head. In one of them, I was a mild-mannered, meek boy who kept himself small and tried to fly beneath the notice of the bullies that'd made the Quirkless child's life unpleasant. That kid, whoever he was, was still there, still in me, but he'd been subsumed, as everything that was experienced as him felt like it was at the slightest remove.
The other set of memories was the dominant one, and they belonged to a man with only a tentative memory of the world that he was in. One where the notion of Quirks, superpowers, superheroes, and supervillains had only ever been words on a page or animated, rather than real-life issues that your average person might interact with over the course of their life. All of it from a decent anime that I'd dropped after one season.
Yeah, I was a little cooked. Outside of a tentative understanding of the setting and world, or what I'd recalled from my dives into rule34 and the various boorus, that wasn't enough to do much more than recognize a few different characters from the world.
If I'd just come in as a Quirkless kid, maybe I could have tried to pull a Charles Atlas and just worked out until I was physically capable of some crazy stunts. That was supposed to be a thing, wasn't it? I remembered some people talking about some guy from the spin-off material who did that on a Discord, what felt like another life ago. Knuckle-dragger, knuckle-sandwich, something dumb like that.
Blessedly, when I woke in Ken's body, staring up at the ceiling of a school infirmary, I'd gotten a little something extra along the way.
[QUIRK: FIGHTER; ONLINE]
[BEGINNING RESOURCE ALLOCATION…MINOR EVOLUTION DETECTED…]
Pangean Strength
Infinity Blade
Of course, what use is skill and technique if you do not even possess the strength to use it? As you may notice, the denizens of this world are stronger and more durable than you might have expected. As such, you also possess that very same physicality. For you, this means you now possess enough strength to leap over twenty feet into air and clash with monstrosities the size of houses, along with the durability to take their blows multiple times in a fight and keep standing.
Thus, I went from being the kid who collapsed in class randomly to the kid who collapsed and got a Quirk after literal years of not having one. The original Ken certainly had dreamed, but they were curtailed and limited by the standards that this society had placed on him. He'd been downtrodden, and that made put a ceiling on what he thought he was capable of.
I personally had no such compunctions or restrictions.
"It'll be fine, Mom," I assured Sakura, feeling something warm in my chest for the concern that the woman shared for me. Glancing toward my father, I felt the same for the man before me. "And thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad."
Someone might have sought to divorce themselves from these parental figures. Perhaps they'd feel as if they weren't actually their parents in any way that mattered. Personally, I couldn't see how I was meant to feel anything else but an outpouring of affection for the two of them. Despite the new memories I held, the old Ken was still inside of me. Not dominant, but the support and care they'd tried to give their Quirkless son had always been present.
Genuine, parental love and affection wasn't something anyone mentally healthy eschewed. Even when I felt like an imposter, the moment that my new powers had come into the fore, they supported me happily. Gleefully, even, when I told them my dreams of attending U.A. For the first time in their son's life, he was passionate about something.
What else were they meant to do but support it?
"That's my boy," my dad grinned, eyes blazing with excitement. "Now, the written portion of the exam is important. But the practical… make sure you knock em' dead, kiddo!"
"A-And make sure to take your time on the questions! There's no rush!"
"Oh, oh! Lemme know if there are any cute girls there too that catch your eye, eh?"
"Soichiro!"
"I didn't say anything wrong! The Ayase Bloodline must continue, Sakura!"
The two of them fell into a familiar, common banter and bickering, with no real heat into the matter. It wasn't the kind of thing I think most Japanese couples would have done in public, especially considering some of the looks that we were getting at the train station. That didn't stop me from laughing all the same, as I looked between them with a fond smile.
"I'll be sure to make you guys proud. I don't know about finding any cute girls at an exam, though. I think I'll be more focused on trying to pass…"
My mother nodded in pride and relief. "As you should be."
"The train's coming, though," I pointed out, to the vehicle coming steadily down the tracks towards our landing. "If you guys keep giving me advice, I'll end up missing the exam entirely."
That seemed to get through to both of my parents, as my father nodded sharply. "Right. Well then, best of luck, kiddo."
"Thanks, Dad." I spoke, stepping toward the open doors of the train.
"One last thing, though!" My mom spoke up.
"What is it—" I started, only to find myself seized in a quick hug by both of my parents.
Japan was one of those countries where this sort of open, public display of affection was a bit odd. It wasn't like I was a small child or anything. However, that didn't stop me from hugging back, drinking in the warmth before hastily breaking away. "Thanks! But I do have to go!"
"Best of luck! Stay safe! Be careful with those tests!"
"Try to pull some of those flashy moves I showed ya'!" My father yelled as the train began to take off. "This old wrestler's still got some tricks!"
Whatever other fair wishes they had for me were dying off as I got further away, failing to make it through the interior of the train to me. Still, I couldn't help but to have a grin on my face as I took a seat, trying to fight off the nervous jitters that were running through my body. Not that I didn't have very justified reasons to be that nervous about them.
Like I told my mother before, I didn't really know too much about running into cute girls that I'd recognize. Partially it was due to how much I'd been focused on preparing as much as I could for this late preparation for the U.A. High exam, given when I'd been dumped into Ken's body. The mysterious Quirk I had had been relatively silent, too, making it a mystery whether or not I'd receive further evolution or what the mechanics of it even were.
As far as powers for superheroism and careers as a professional hero went, my nominal set wasn't that bad. Super strength and the durability to go along with it were a classic. Hell, despite All-Might having the market basically cornered in every way, it was also still very much useful in pretty much every field of the professional landscape.
Disaster relief for picking up debris and working to save people, for example. Just being durable or strong enough to put down Villains was another. No, I didn't think the exam would realistically provide that much challenge to me.
There were other reasons for my apprehension as I rode the train toward my destination. Primarily a real lack of familiarity with the stations of canon that I knew.
Out of the many things that I expected to be different from this transmigration, the specifics of what era I'd shown up in weren't one of them. If anything, it was a surprise, considering how these sorts of stories usually went. The hapless protagonist would be dumped mysteriously into a neat and tidy way to step into the faction of the main cast, join their group, and go on a rip-roaring adventure for the ages.
It was safe and formulaic, and the isekai adventure I bet most people were sold on the brochure for these things.
Or so I'd been led to believe in those first few weeks, as nothing had given away otherwise. Whether for good or for ill, the world of My Hero Academia was a deceptively advanced one. Technically, it was a century in the future, with all of the science fiction technology that you'd expect, merely beneath the surface. For the most part, modern Japanese society resembled that of the early 21st century. Which was entirely by design.
After the turmoil that came from the introduction of Quirks, pushing humanity into more sizable shocks with highly advanced technology would have shook things up even further. So, the powers that be didn't even try, rolling out things very slowly. There were still smartphones that more or less looked like the items that would be out in ten or twenty years.
Nothing about the world told me that I was fourteen years early for the main plot. It was only after some irregularities in what heroes were active, at least relative to my understanding of the matter, that drew my eye. Now that was an unpleasant surprise.
Even if I only held the broadest strokes of what would happen in my head, given that I'd only seen season one of the anime, anything I did would ruin that foresight entirely. However, the notion of squandering my second chance in favor of… what? An unsure existence, timidly preferring to let the destined heroes handle the final boss?
Screw that.
If I was going to have to make my own fate in this world of mine, I'd have to get used to how much I'd end up disrupting the main plot. For better or worse, someone was going to have to stand up to be the next symbol of peace.
No matter how arrogant it might have sounded… why not me?
The fact that it'd come with wealth, fame, and power certainly didn't hurt things either. Maybe, just maybe, I could make things shake out a little better with my half-cocked recollections of the plot. Or perhaps I'd make them turn out worse. But I wouldn't know if I didn't try.
I'd admit, there was something surreal about standing at the gates to U.A. High. It was one thing to recognize the place from anime or little bits of the manga that I'd read before I'd been dropped here. But to see it in the flesh, that hulking structure wherein the best professional heroes of the country claimed as their alma mater, I could see why it held the reputation that it did.
Having walked from the train station into Musutafu, I filed in with all of the other hopefuls. So many people applied to the heroics program in U.A. every year, yet many of them didn't actually manage to get in. And frankly, going into the written test, I could see why.
While I wasn't sure if I'd call it hard, in the conventional sense, it was definitely designed as a filter. If you actually studied beforehand and put work into knowing stuff that was vaguely advanced, then while it was challenging, you would probably do serviceable enough. People who didn't put any effort in at all would likely find themselves flunking out just from this point alone.
If I had any specific advantage, it was the fact that my capacity for English was outstanding and that I remembered a bit of my college-level math. Everything else was all Ken's foundations, which weren't that shaky to begin with. However, I knew compared to some of the real geniuses in this world, I was probably going to be lacking.
That was fine. I was hoping to stake most of my score on the practical exam, depending on how different it was from the anime. If it was the same grind against robots, though, things would probably be okay.
It was a lot of hope to put into my performance here, but I was a glass-half-full type of guy. Standing before the entrance to the practical exam grounds, the vast, potemkin city that U.A. used for training, I had nothing but boundless faith in myself. Was any of it justified? Not in the slightest.
As long as I put my all into it, though, I figured it'd all work out. That was the motto of this school, after all.
I wasn't the only one trying to think positive thoughts, though. Around me was a crowd of other applicants and examinees, colorful, more traditionally humanoid or Mutant alike. Some of them were practicing their Quirks; others were stretching or warming up for the events ahead.
One of the benefits of waking up to find out your father was a mid-level professional wrestler was that getting him involved in your training could prove to have great results. Tiring, exhausting sessions of getting manhandled by a theatrical, overbearing, but well-meaning man, yet results all the same. One of the things that he'd hammered into me was the importance of getting limber.
His Quirk, Dynamo, didn't actually have anything to do with his bulky, muscular build. It mostly allowed him to absorb kinetic energy, which could be slowly broken down as fuel over time. All of those muscles were from his own hard work, and the notion of his son finally taking an interest in fitness after all of these years…
What else was a man to do but teach the boy everything he wished to know? So, I got a crash course in how to prepare my body for combat, or at least the highly ritualized, formalized, fake kind that he engaged in during his matches. In the modern age of Quirks, Japanese wrestling was even crazier than it'd been before.
And one of the few places where Quirk usage wasn't actually penalized, as it was meant for performance purposes. The flashier the better, really, and my youthful memories of visiting my father spoke of how much effort they put into training their powers. In many ways, no less than a professional hero, if turned down specific ends.
When you had someone with decades of experience wanting to pass it all down to their child, you didn't say no. I said thank you and took it all, running through the exam with the same routine I'd been taught.
It wasn't too long before everyone's attention was drawn to a nearby tower, though, as the shrill sound of speakers being turned on drew the eye. Standing atop it, with a microphone in hand, was a man who my memories took a moment to place. Unless I was mistaken, that had to be… The Sand Hero, Snatch?
He was big and built, with bright turquoise eyes and ash-blonde hair, tied back in a long ponytail that jutted out from his mask. His moustache, though, was the wild part, styled and angled to either side of his face. Finishing off the look was a green and silver combat vest. As for his powers? Basically, he was Sandman, from Spider-Man.
"HERO HOPEFULS!" His voice boomed out, immediately grabbing us in a way the more sedate examiner for the written portion of the evaluation hadn't. "You stand at the precipice of your dreams! But before we allow you freely to test your mettle, it's important to lay out the rules."
"Within the grounds behind those gates, you will find robots that must be defeated, with varying totals labeled. The harder the robot, the more points that you gain. However…" He trailed off, the space filling with some murmuring from the other students. "THERE IS ONE HAZARD. Robots that you will gain no points from fighting at all. These are worth zero points toward your entire score and are more meant to be traps. Be wary, young prospective heroes and heroines!"
I could have sworn this was a longer presentation in the anime. Then again, basing all of my recollections off of animated media was bound to backfire eventually.
"Without further ado," the man continued, as people began to realize that we were literallyabout to start. They shuffled, the air thick with anticipation as Crush spoke. "On the count of three. One… two… THREE!"
With a roar, he exploded into sand, and the gates began to wind open, revealing the landscape that the exam was going to take place in. Which… wasn't quite the dense, bustling cityscape that I remembered Izuku having to go through. It was still tightly packed by the standards of any Western neighborhood but was rather filled with residential homes. It looked like somewhere people lived, almost like where Ken had grown up.
And people were rushing forward the moment the gate opened. Rather than trying to push past them, though, I realized there were better ways to make my way to the front of the pack. Specifically, using one of the first tricks that my Quirk had told me of.
Getting a running start, I jumped, taking off into the air with a sense of freedom and sprightliness that brought a grin to my face as I soared past most of the examinees. Hulk-jumping wasn't very elegant, but a man with super strength had to get around somehow. I was more surprised by how effective it was to literally jump stories into the air at a time.
The first few times I'd tried it, wrangling that instinct and fear that came with crashing back down to Earth had been tough. Uncomfortable, even, until I realized that I could take the blow. Describing it that way wasn't even accurate, really, as I came to a rolling landing and kept on running ahead of the pack into the resident streets.
Nor did it take too long for the Villain Bots to come out from around side streets and out of view, crawling over homes in some cases. It was my first real chance to get a glimpse at them, from the flat, two-dimensional view that I'd only ever had up to this point.
They all looked a bit different from what I remembered of the anime. Not that they were drastically changed, but they seemed simplerfor lack of a better word? As if there'd been years of iteration, if subtle stuff, that hadn't quite been done yet. Whether that was for the better or the worse, I didn't yet know.
The only thing I knew for sure was that my enemy was in front of me. A construct, a machine that I could use to actually test out how strong I was. There'd been attempts to properly evaluate it, but outside of being superhuman in a way no regular fourteen-year-old should have been, in terms of lighting nearly a thousand pounds with relative ease at the gym, my family didn't know the limits.
All we'd put down for my Quirk on the registry was Fighter, with some vague nonsense about growing stronger through conflict. You could get away with a lot in terms of the description, as long as there was just enough for the bare basics of bureaucracy to be done. It'd be enough wiggle room for me if it worked how I suspected it worked.
Still, no time like the present to test myself. Rushing forward toward the one-pointer, it swung at me with the kind of ponderous, easily telegraphed blow that someone with actual training probably could have dodged with ease. Outside of some hasty introduction in the basics of grappling from my father, I didn't even have that much.
So I put my arms up into a block and took the metal hit head-on, grunting at the shock to my bones. Skidding back from the raw force of the blow, it did hurt… but not nearly as much as I thought it would. Given that I was supposed to be able to take multiple blows from creatures the size of houses, this might as well have been light sparring compared to what my body could supposedly take now.
The thought brought a smile to my face.
Then I moved to tear it apart. It was fast, faster than a person was supposed to shift, as my hands reached for whatever passed for the wrist and shoulder of the robot. With a flexing of muscle, I felt the robotic limbs begin to creak and then scream as servos and myomers were ripped apart.
[QUIRK ACTIVATION…]
[MINOR FOE SLAIN…EVOLUTION IMPENDING…]
Combat Skills
Cradle
Pick any one martial art, be it completely unarmed or using a weapon. You now have expertise with that style of fighting and can carry it to new heights with further training and trials against those who are equal to or stronger than you.
When I'd gotten the first 'evolution', the change had already happened before I'd ever opened my eyes. This time, though, I got to experience it with my eyes wide open. The sensation of ants tearing through my brain, as memories and knowledge poured into me, the kind that the original Ken had never known.
It was enough to make me shudder as I stood up straight, sucking in a breath as I overlooked the training grounds with fresh eyes. Robots, trainees, and Quirks flying to and fro. Everyone trying to stand out, earn points, and prove that they had what it took to be a professional hero. As they found their own fights and robots to dismantle. Me?
I was already seeing the new avenues in which I could inflict violence. Connections and routes between my fists and the world around me that had never existed in my mind before this. That was the experience that'd been given to me, and it immediately began to make a world of difference.
Cracking my knuckles, I rushed forward into the fray.
Just how far could my own Quirk force me to evolve?
I couldn't wait to find out.
Author's Notes
This is mostly a proof of concept, to see if there's actually an audience for this sort of thing. Fourteen years before canon isn't a small block of time, but at the same remove, MHA is a series that has 10/10 adult heroines too. So, like, by the time the main story comes around, there's no small amount of possible love interests.
Will this story be harem? Yes. A small one, but yes. It does feel like I should have done the whole exam in this chapter, but I'm trying to experiment with more compact, reasonable chapters that can be put out more frequently.