James Carter Jr. did not expect to die on a Tuesday.
Tuesdays are like off-screen days after all, barely enough to register even their existence on your mind.
And the even more problematic thing was, his death. Yes, he was scared of his sudden death, no, it would be safe to say he was terrified. But, there was also some disappointment...
His death was... well, very unremarkable.
All he heard was gunshots, there was a scream, and a body fell down.
He lived in USA, so yes, shootouts were not exactly unheard of, but the thing was, the body that fell at the start... Yup, that was him.
The first victim who only served as an alarm for others to run away...
He had been walking out of his school to the busy streets of New York, headphones in, half-thinking about an unfinished math assignment and half-thinking about nothing at all.
James never even saw the shooter clearly. He died too fast for all that...
Sadly, as he fell down, no one even bothered to check up on him, maybe he would have lived in someone called in an ambulance or something? Probably not since he was shot in the neck...
He could sense everything around him turn into chaos, people running away at the fastest they could, with their lives on the line, literally.
He remembered staring at the sky between buildings.
'So this is how it ends?'
He was twenty years old. An only child. He had many plans for his future. College applications half-finished.
A fight with his mom yesterday over something stupid as her not agreeing to him going with his friends for a vacation before he left for uni.
'Maybe I should have made up with her and hugged her before leaving today?'
His dad had told him to be careful that morning.
He had just rolled his eyes.
Maybe he had raised some red flags there?
Then, everything went quiet...
Yet, the next sensation was not darkness.
Strangely... It was light.
Sharp, blurry.
And an unbearably loud crying.
His own crying.
James tried to focus and check his surroundings but found that he could not control his body.
His limbs felt wrong... as if all strength had been drained from them.
He couldn't even form coherent thought for several seconds because his brain felt… compressed?
Voices echoed around him.
Strange language, definitely not English... Probably some Asian language, he didn't know which one though, the only time he had heard those was when he tried some subbed anime, only to switch back to dubbed ones within a minute.
He tried to move his hands.
They were tiny.
What…?
Thankfully, his vision cleared gradually, allowing him to check his surroundings.
A white ceiling with warm lighting. And a massive face hovering above him.
It was a woman.
Tears in her eyes, yet she was smiling.
She whispered something as she hugged him, her embrace was warm.
He didn't understand the words. But he understood the emotion.
Love. And maybe relief.
James tried to speak, to reply.
But all that came out was a weak, newborn cry.
And somewhere deep inside, a realization formed.
I'm not dead.
This was a very very familiar concept, he got Isekai'd.
Although there was no truck involved, he was getting a new chance at life.
And that was all he could think before falling asleep.
It took months for coherent awareness to settle in. He remembered that sensation...
In his life it had happened somewhere around when he was three, one day, you suddenly become conscious, and everything before that feels like a background story, which you don't remember.
His memory gradually became more clear.
His old life. His name. His parents. The shooting incident. The feeling of falling dead.
But now he was…
Small.
Helpless.
Carried.
Fed.
Rocked to sleep.
Scratch that, it was awesome, no need to feel anything, no need to work, no assignments, anything.
His new name came to him slowly.
Hayato Fujiwara.
He learned it from repetition.
From the way the woman, his mother now said it gently.
From the way the man, his father said it with quiet pride.
He was Japanese now, because the name Hayato sounded like one belonging to an anime, and his mother called him Hayato-chan, now unless his parents were freak level weebs, you don't do that.
He learned Japanese as a baby would, but faster. Far faster.
Because he was not a baby.
Not entirely.
His new family was very rich, that much he had come to understand, he was fully prepared for a life of luxury.
But, by the time he was two, Hayato understood something was very wrong.
The television showed things that shouldn't exist.
People flying.
People shooting fire from their hands.
People stretching their limbs unnaturally.
Explosions in city streets that were followed not by panic, but by interviews.
There were costumed individuals looking straight out of a cosplay called heroes.
And criminals called villains.
And commentators analyzing "quirk compatibility."
The word repeated constantly.
Quirk.
Quirk.
Quirk.
His father had one.
He saw it once by accident.
A subtle distortion in the air around his hand, like space itself bending inward. Objects shifted position without crossing the space between. Clean. Controlled. Spatial manipulation of some kind.
His mother's was different.
Gentler.
Probably some kind of healer like ability, she would sometimes use it on him while he was sleeping, he found that out by faking his sleep one day.
God, that was comfortable, I mean, whatever her quirk was, it made my body feel completely recharged.
They never showed off their quirks.
But they didn't hide it either.
Because in this world, having a quirk wasn't strange.
Not having one was.
Hayato realized it slowly.
Painfully.
When a news segment flashed a familiar title.
"U.A. High School Entrance Ceremony."
He froze.
The building.
The logo.
The hero rankings.
The name All Might being spoken with reverence.
His heart pounded in his tiny chest.
No way.
But the more he observed, the clearer it became.
This wasn't just a world with superpowers.
It was structured exactly like something he had once watched on a laptop at three in the morning.
My Hero Academia.
The realization came not with excitement, but with unease.
He was inside a fictional universe.
Or perhaps…
It had never been fictional at all.
But whatever, he knew one thing for sure, this was a fucked up world, not exactly the best place to live in, not with so many villains around.
By age three, Hayato was disturbingly observant. He was not, actually, but everyone thought he was. Acting like a child was difficult, after all.
On the hindsight, he discovered that acting on whims with no filter at all doing whatever you wanted was the best child act one could pull off.
Still, his father noticed his intelligence "You're sharp," he would say with a small smile, patting my head.
His mother would laugh and say he got it from both of them.
They were wealthy... very wealthy.
They even had that rich laugh going on.
His father ran multiple international corporations focused on logistics and infrastructure technologies, personally overseeing operations despite having enough executives to retire twice over.
His mother led one of the largest private hospital networks in Japan and Southeast Asia. She still worked long hours. She still wore her doctor's coat herself.
They loved him deeply.
That part felt real.
Too real.
And that was the problem.
Because he remembered loving someone else too.
Another mother.
Another father.
Another life.
Now, he wasn't an emo kid, so he won't say that he only loved one set of his parents, and did not consider the other one his parents.
No, both of them gave birth to him, theoretically, in this life, he should love only this life's parents, but since he had his last life's memory, loving his another set of parents won't be considered cheating, right?
As he reached the milestone age of four years old, Hayato understood one thing clearly.
He was expected to awaken a quirk soon.
Most children did between four and six.
Society would categorize him based on that, though, with how rich he was, maybe he could pull off a batman even if he did not have a quirk.
He was sure his parents won't exactly care much about his quirk, with how disinterested they were about heroics, if anything, they expected Hayato to inherit all their businesses, and live a happy life.
But the same could not be said about him, he was very much anticipating his quirk, no matter how common, he wanted a superpower of his own.
What it would be, only time would tell.