The last thing I remembered was the sterile smell of a hospital room and the slow, steady sound of a heart monitor.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I was 27 year old otaku who was a massive fan of My Hero Academia, and I was dying.
Some rare, stupid blood disease that the doctors liked to use big words for.
My final, bitter thought before the machine flatlined was that I wouldn't get to see how the story ended. I'd never know if Deku became the greatest hero.
Then, I woke up to the smell of miso soup.
My eyes snapped open, and I was met with a textured, off-white ceiling I didn't recognize. A woman's face swam into view, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, a gentle smile plastered on her face.
"Kenji? Kenji, honey, you're awake. You scared me to death."
She cried, her voice a familiar, soothing melody I'd never heard before. She pressed a cool hand to my forehead.
"You collapsed in the kitchen. I was so worried. How are you feeling?"
Memories that weren't mine flooded my brain.
My name was Kenji Hayashi, born in July 15th. I was four years old. And this woman in front of me was my mother.
For a week, I played the part of a dazed four-year-old recovering from a fever dream, while internally, I was having an existential crisis.
I had transmigrated. I was reborn in a world that was unmistakably, undeniably the setting of my favorite manga.
I saw it in the news reports of heroes stopping bank robberies, in the kids on the playground showing off their quirks, and in the ever-present, skeletal figure of a blond man with sunken eyes who sometimes walked past our apartment building.
All Might. In the flesh. Or, at least, the deflated version of him. I almost choked on my breakfast rice the first time I saw him.
The panic eventually subsided, replaced by a newfold curiosity. I was a fan who had been given a front-row seat to the greatest show on Earth.
My goal was simple in this lifetime, just observe.
I wasn't some power-hungry protagonist from the fanfictions I used to read. I didn't want to fight the League of Villains or steal One For All. I just wanted to live a quiet life and watch the story unfold.
Years passed in this strange, peaceful rhythm. I went to school, made a few friends, and kept my head down.
I was a background character in my own life, content to watch the main plot from the sidelines. My own quirk manifested when I was five, Void.
It was underwhelming to say the least.
I could create a small, perfectly silent, and invisible sphere of absolute nothingness about the size of a marble. It didn't absorb light or matter; it just was a space where nothing was.
It was utterly useless for anything other than making my friends lose their marbles during hide-and-seek.
...
Time passed and the day I'd been both dreading and anticipating finally arrived.
The day the story truly began.
I was fourteen, on my way home from middle school, when I heard the commotion. A sludge-like villain was oozing out of a sewer grate, causing chaos in an underpass. And there, frozen in the entrance, was the boy with messy green hair and terrified eyes.
Deku.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
Ba-thump. Ba-thump.
'This is it. The beginning. Just stay back and watch.' I told myself again and again as I watched the entire scene unfold.
This is his moment.
I knew what was supposed to happen. All Might would show up, Deku would try to save Bakugo, and he'd prove himself worthy of One For All.
But as I watched Deku, his whole body trembling with fear yet still rooted to the spot, staring at the boy trapped in the sludge, something cold settled in my gut.
The others, the extras, were all running away, screaming. But not Deku. He was paralyzed by his own heroic instinct.
And then I saw them. A few people, further back in the crowd, filming on their phones.
Just watching. Waiting for a hero.
Just like me.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. I'd spent fourteen years convincing myself I was a spectator, that my role was to watch the story.
But standing there, watching a real kid struggle to breathe inside a monster, my carefully constructed logic crumbled.
This wasn't just a story. This wasn't a manga panel I could just turn the page on.
This was reality, my own new reality.
That was Bakugo Katsuki, a loud, arrogant, but ultimately human boy, and he was suffocating. His eyes, wide with panic and fury, weren't pixels on a screen. They were real.
I looked at Deku again. He was about to do something incredibly stupid and brave. He was about to run in with absolutely zero power, against a villain that had already bested the pros. He was going to be the hero I was too afraid to be.
"Tch."
The sound escaped my lips before I could stop it. I thought of my quirk. Void. Useless. A marble of nothing. What could that possibly do against a giant sludge monster?
And then, I knew.
All Might's giant, buff form hadn't arrived yet. He was still on the roof, watching, letting this play out as a test.
In the original story, the Pro Heroes were useless because they were too powerful; they couldn't hit the villain without hurting Bakugo.
They needed a precision strike, something to break the villain's cohesion just long enough for Bakugo to get a breath.
They needed nothing.
Deku took his first step forward, his mouth opening to shout. But before he could, another voice cut through the chaos.
"Oi. Sludge-face."
My own voice. It was high-pitched and shaky, but it was mine.
Every head, including the villain's, turned toward the source. I stood at the edge of the underpass, far enough to be safe, close enough to be seen.
"What did you just call me?"
The villain roared, his beady eyes fixing on me. The pressure on Bakugo lessened for a fraction of a second.
I focused, visualizing the small, silent sphere. I didn't need to be strong. I just needed to be precise. With all my concentration, I manifested my Void directly inside the villain's left eye.
There was no flash, no sound.
The villain simply stopped. One of his eyes was just gone.
Not popped, not blinded—it was simply no longer there, replaced by a tiny, invisible orb of absolute nothing. The sensory input from that eye was completely, utterly erased. The disorientation was immediate and absolute.
"MY EYEEE. WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY EYE?"
He shrieked, thrashing wildly. The sludge holding Bakugo loosened, and the explosive boy gasped, sucking in a precious lungful of air.
I didn't wait. I threw my hands out, pumping my quirk for all it was worth, creating marble after marble of Void throughout the villain's liquid body.
Each one was a pinprick of sensory deprivation for him, a tiny hole in his consciousness where his own body simply ceased to exist from his perspective. He became a creature of holes, of gaps, of terrifying nothingness in the middle of his own being.
The effect was instantaneous. The sludge monster, no longer able to feel or control the parts of his body where my Void spheres existed, began to lose cohesion. His grip on Bakugo became a useless, liquid grasp.
"NOW, BAKUGO." I screamed.
It was all the opening he needed. With a feral roar, Bakugo's palms ignited in a massive, point-blank explosion that blasted the villain's weakened form away from him and sent him splattering against the wall of the underpass.
The pro heroes, who had been frozen in indecision, finally sprang into action, swarming the dazed and disoriented villain with capture equipment.
Bakugo landed on his feet, coughing and gasping, his eyes wild. They immediately found me. There was no gratitude in them, only a fierce, questioning glare.
Deku stood frozen mid-step, his mouth agape, staring at me like I'd just grown a second head. I had just stolen his moment. I had just fundamentally changed the story.
And as a skeletal, blond man landed on the scene with a gust of wind, his sharp, knowing blue eyes scanning the aftermath before settling directly on me.
I realized my days as a spectator were well and truly over. The epilogue of my old life was just the prologue to this one, and I had just written the first line of a brand-new chapter.
I looked down at my hands. Ordinary hands. The hands of a 14-year-old boy. But they were trembling. Not from fear, but from the excitement that I was trying to hide alone all these years.
I saved Katsuki Bakugo. And I had no idea what kind of butterfly effect that would unleash.