Chapter 3: The Last Machine
Ryuji Midoriya stopped labeling his late-night work sessions.
There was no longer a point.
Time blurred in the Support Course labs, days bleeding into nights under fluorescent lights that hummed like tired sentinels. The war outside U.A. drew closer with every news broadcast, every emergency drill, every tightened security protocol.
And still, Ryuji worked.
The Final Output Containment System no longer resembled a prototype.
It stood at the center of the lab like a skeleton of steel and light—layered energy channels, adaptive containment rings, quirk-reactive alloys that rewrote themselves at the molecular level under stress.
It was beautiful.
It was terrifying.
Mei stared at it the first time it powered on, her breath catching despite herself.
"That thing…" she said slowly, goggles pushed up into her hair. "That thing isn't just a support device."
Ryuji didn't look away from the control panel.
"No," he agreed. "It's a vessel."
The system didn't fight incoming energy.
It welcomed it.
Instead of resisting output spikes, it absorbed them, redistributed them, bled them off through controlled release points designed to prevent catastrophic overload.
It was the opposite of every quirk-regulation model on record.
And it worked.
For the machine.
For Ryuji… it was killing him.
Each test required more of his quirk. Each successful containment run demanded output levels his body was never meant to sustain, even for seconds.
He hid the worst of it.
The tremors.
The migraines that left him blind for minutes at a time.
The way his hands sometimes passed through objects when his neural signals misfired.
He logged the damage privately.
Estimated Remaining Lifespan: Declining.
He stopped calculating the exact number.
Some nights, when exhaustion dragged him low enough, Ryuji allowed himself to think about things that weren't equations.
About Izuku.
His brother trained harder than ever now, carrying the weight of One For All with the kind of reckless sincerity that terrified Ryuji more than any villain.
"Slow down," Ryuji muttered one night, watching Izuku on a muted screen sparring until his arms shook. "You don't need to burn yourself out to be a hero."
The irony didn't escape him.
Mei noticed the change before anyone else.
"You're saying goodbye," she accused one evening, voice unusually sharp.
Ryuji froze.
She crossed her arms, eyes blazing. "You've been double-locking your files. Cleaning your workstation. You hate cleaning."
He exhaled slowly.
"I'm preparing," he said.
"For what?"
He met her gaze.
"For the worst-case scenario."
Silence filled the lab.
Mei swallowed hard, anger flickering into something rawer. "You're not allowed to decide that alone."
Ryuji smiled softly. "That's the thing about worst cases. They don't ask permission."
He began leaving things behind.
Detailed schematics with annotations meant for Izuku to understand, even without his engineering background. Backup data cores hidden in places only Nezu would think to look. A sealed container labeled only with Izuku's name and a warning code that would lock it until specific biometric conditions were met.
And beneath it all, one small syringe.
Clear casing. Reinforced plunger.
Inside: a faintly glowing substance that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
A restructured fragment of his quirk factor—tempered, filtered, and contained.
Not enough to kill.
Not enough to burn.
Enough to stabilize something greater.
The night before the war began, Ryuji stood alone in the lab.
He placed a hand against the containment system's core.
It hummed back, recognizing him.
"You'll hold," he whispered. "Even if I can't."
For the first time since his quirk awakened, Ryuji activated Plus Ultra without fear.
The energy surged—vast, endless, beautiful.
And for a few perfect seconds…
It didn't hurt.
He shut it down immediately, gasping, body screaming in protest—but he was smiling through the pain.
It was ready.
So was he.
Ryuji Midoriya sat at his desk and opened one final notebook.
On the first page, he wrote a single line.
If you're reading this, it means I didn't make it.
Then he closed the book, locked the lab, and walked into the coming storm.
Next: The Blaze of a StarThis is where everything breaks.