'Well, this was a disappointment.'

That was all that DIO could think as his blue-hued soul drifted upwards. The angle at which he was suspended gave him the most wonderful view of the aftermath of his battle with Jotaro, or to be more precise, his - well, partially his - decimated corpse. A battered steamroller, so completely mangled that it was no longer identifiable as such, smoked in the background after being crushed virtually flat in those two seconds that it was caught between the impossibly rapid fists of The World and Star Platinum. Some feet away, the aforementioned Joestar stood bloody, beaten, bruised and victorious.

It was rather surreal, to say the least. Had DIO entertained such an idea of his demise in as utterly humiliating of a manner, he would have expected it to feel any number of emotions, most of which were some synonym for either terrible fury, seething anger or unholy rage. After all, who could possibly have bested him, DIO the mighty? DIO the immortal? DIO, the owner of the most powerful Stand ever to walk the Earth? The very notion was taboo, and he would have ruthlessly executed and devoured anybody who implied as much; keeping appearances up in front of his subordinates was something he considered highly important.

Now that the moment had arrived, however, DIO couldn't say that he felt much of anything. Rather, he would have described his current emotional state as merely peeved, or perhaps mildly irked at a stretch. Whether that was because of the new experience of becoming a disembodied soul taking up the majority of his focus, the shock of having his entire world crumble before him - no pun intended - or something else entirely, he couldn't say. Whatever the truth may have been, this sudden acceptance was a huge leap from the defiant passion he had displayed merely moments ago during the climax of the encounter. To go from howling at the top of Jonathan's lungs in pain to whatever this was in such a short time was quite the display, even for him.

As he steadily rose to the heavens, he couldn't help but entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, everything he'd done since becoming a vampire wasn't worth it. Over the course of his unnaturally long life he had taken part in such activities as endlessly torturing JoJo in his youth, slowly poisoning and then stabbing the kindly elder Joestar who took him in off the streets without a second thought, defiling the corpses of 300-year-old historical figures, dedicating his unlife to exterminating his adoptive brother's descendants and much more. Even then, that was before you considered the quite literal hundreds of innocent lives he had snuffed out to further his own desires. And for what? What had he actually accomplished, besides mass murder, psychological trauma and extensive property damage? He hadn't attained Heaven, eliminated JoJo's bloodline or done anything resembling a real achievement throughout his life. For God's sake, he hadn't even finished his education in law. Nothing had come of all the misery he had brought into the world; after all was said and done, there was no end to justify his many atrocities. So, wouldn't that mean that his unholy existence was also a wasted one? That his many years spent formulating his plan to attain Heaven weren't actually worth the hefty price that the rest of humanity had paid in his stead with their tears, blood and very lives when he finally surfaced?

Was he sorry?

'No.'

As soon as that single thought passed through his mind, DIO felt his steady ascension jump to a rather abrupt halt. If DIO had to compare it to something, then he would have settled on the feeling that one experiences when mindlessly meandering, consumed by their own thoughts, only end up being violently pulled back to reality after accidentally colliding with a lamppost. It was a very jarring experience, almost as if he was somehow snagged on the masonry of the bridge beneath not unlike a waistcoat on a doorknob. To add to that bizarre sensation, the fact that he currently lacked any sort of physical form that could be snagged on something meant that whatever this mysterious force was, it was acting upon his very soul. However, not even this alarming revelation was as troubling to DIO as the realisation that, while he was preoccupied with its existence to begin with, the power had intensified.

While DIO was merely suspended before, only being kept from rising up, he was now actively being dragged down. Even more pressingly, it was growing stronger still. He could feel the increasing pull everywhere on and in him, from the surface of this poor substitute for a body right into the deepest reaches of his mind. And DIO, in his blue, ethereal state, could not fight back at all. The force had complete dominion over every aspect of his being, and that was something that he feared. Not like the dull, unsure pulse of anticipation from when he had offered his Stand to Enrico, or the cornered-animal fury he had displayed moments ago against Jotaro. No, this was different, this was absolute, and he knew that he had no chance of escape whatsoever.

For the first time in over a century, Dio Brando was truly terrified.

Even if he could have fought back, it was too late to try anything now; the magnitude of that otherworldly attraction had increased to the point where it would be useless to resist, even with his overwhelming vampiric strength. As he approached the tarmac of the bridge, the last thing he saw before being swallowed by the ground was Jotaro staring down at his - Jonathan's - demolished body. The last thing he heard was, warped through the blue tint around him almost as if he was submerged, the teenage punk's choice of a final, scathing one-liner.

"There's only one reason why you lost, Dio. Just one simple reason. You pissed me off."

And then the world was still.

For a while, at least. Then the world was red.

Red, everywhere. Reds of every imaginable shade bled from the surroundings, flooding his eyes with offensive scarlet hues. The onslaught of colour infiltrated all of his senses even through the bluish tint to everything, painting them all with bizarre, eldritch sensations that culminated as a redness that even a vampire such as himself, who had dined on the sanguine nectar of the human vascular system as a fun pastime, could never have imagined. He tried to squeeze his eyelids shut and push on them with his fingers, to rip his very eyes from their sockets, to do anything that would stop the assault on his vision. Alas, he was only reminded of the fact that he couldn't do any of those things without eyelids, fingers, eyes or any other body parts to work with. There was nothing he could do to escape, DIO realised. He was powerless, a mere slave to this torture, doomed to a fate of descending deeper and deeper into the crimson nightmare.


After what seemed to DIO like a time comparable to his century-long confinement beneath the waves, the swimming shades began to disperse slightly. While scarlet, vermillion and various other shades of red were still the dominant colour of the environment, making up the entirety of the vast, swirling vortex of a sky above him, different colours had started to pierce through the monochromatic veil and take various forms around him. He appeared to be staring up at a cheaply painted ceiling with visibly sloppy brush marks, in the centre of which was a lampshade decorated with the impossibly wide smile of a blond man with a face made of sharp angles. For whatever reason, looking at it for too long evoked the strangest feeling of nausea.

Slowly sitting up as the last vestiges of redness faded, DIO found that the rest of the small space was decorated with similar images of the same character. Through the darkness surrounding him he could see other faces here and there, but this grinning buffoon was definitely the most popular by a mile. Posters, figurines and every other imaginable breed of memorabilia were crammed in wherever they would fit. There was even a full-body cardboard cutout poking out of a closet that fully displayed the man's inhumanly muscular figure and ridiculous costume. He certainly appreciated a good figure, but this was borderline insane. Whoever owned this room obviously had a very unhealthy obsession.

Before he could inspect anything further, the door a few feet in front of him swung open with a crash and revealed a short, stocky woman wearing a plain-looking red cardigan and long, green hair tied in a ponytail. Panic was written over her face in the form of pouring sweat and wide eyes.

She rushed to his side and, to DIO's boundless disbelief, snatched his hands up in a clammy grip that managed to be simultaneously vice-like and gentle and launched a torrent of foreign foreign words directly into his face. Despite his best efforts, the confused vampire understood only the basics and got a mangled string of words for his trouble.

"Honey! I hear shouting! Okay? Hurt bad you, need hospital?!"

DIO sat speechless, taken aback by the woman's audacity. This woman was getting ahead of herself! How dare the notion of treating him, DIO, like a defenceless babe cross her undeveloped excuse of a mind even for a moment? Who did she think she was? Only the most extraordinary of concubines would he allow to breathe the same air as him without being drained of blood and discarded with as much care as an empty bottle out of a window in a London slum; his standards as an undying creature of darkness would allow not even an iota less. To have such a plain, utterly unremarkable human show concern for him was a sickening insult to the immortality he had claimed a century prior!

With the affronted disgust befitting of a god such as himself, DIO tore himself from her grasp and rose to his full height as a golden tempest of Stand energy erupted from him like a floodgate of pure power, bathing the tiny space in otherworldly light. He felt the imposing figure of The World manifest behind him and raise a single aureate fist in anticipation of the punishment - and afterwards, fresh meal - it would supply.

At least, he tried to. In reality he couldn't bring the limbs before him to move even the smallest amount no matter how desperately he tried, nor would his Stand appear. He couldn't feel the familiar sensation that tugged at his soul whenever he used The World or the feeling of absolute power he loved to revel in when he brought it out. No, what actually happened was that he leaned forward against his own accord and wrapped his arms around the short woman in a tender hug and responded in a voice that wasn't his.

"Worry too much you, have bad dream no hurt," soothed the voice. It was young, shockingly so after spending over a century used to the smooth, bassy tones of his adulthood. The tone was gentle and caring, and the love it held was obvious. At these words the woman's agitation visibly faded as the startled expression relaxed into more of a relieved one, though not completely.

"Tell truth you do? Lie not for make me calm?" she asked, her grip slightly tightening in response to her uncertainty.

"What son I would be, lie to you?" he smiled while pulling away. "Back sleep now, tired I. Please, fine I, promise."

At this the woman turned, shuffled out of the doorway and, with one last uneasy look, closed the door, leaving the yellow glow coming from the gap beneath it and a dim night light in the corner as the only sources of illumination.

Left with only his thoughts and bereft of distractions, the full force of DIO's panic was finally allowed to hit him like a freight train. What was going on?! Why couldn't he move?! More importantly, why couldn't he feel his Stand? He considered for a few terrifying moments the possibility that he had somehow lost it forever with his earlier demise, but quickly dashed the thought. The World was a part of his soul, the all-important part of any person that made them truly alive and was imperative for existence, so the notion of it disappearing was laughable. He could still think and was undoubtedly self aware, so he hadn't lost his soul and thus he still had his Stand. Didn't his friend Enrico's ability prove as much?

Still, that left the matter of his inability to move his body, or rather his inability to control it. It wasn't that he couldn't feel his body, far from it; every flex of a muscle, every brush of the bedding against his skin was as rich and vivid as if he was back with the body of his adoptive brother, laying among the many shelves of his expansive library and absorbing all the knowledge that wonderful treasure trove had to offer. He could even feel the cold, which was an almost dreamlike sensation after becoming a vampire left him mostly immune to discomfort stemming from temperature. No, his concern was that while he could feel everything just fine, not one bit of it was under his control. From moving limbs or eyes right down to controlling individual cells with his vampiric powers, none of it was available to him. It was almost as if he was in another person's body just along for… the ride…

'That couldn't be it. Could it?' thought DIO. 'Is it really possible for two souls to inhabit a body simultaneously? The idea is outlandish, but the more I consider it the more it makes sense… Yes, that must be it! After I died my soul must have clung to life and, with no other option, invaded someone else as a last-ditch effort avoid being destroyed! I'm stuck spectating in another person's body!'

What would he do with this information? More to the point, what could he do with this information? It was obvious now that he couldn't control his host's body. From the looks of things they didn't even realise he was there unless that talk about bad dreams was anything relating to having one's body invaded.

At least he recognised the dialect, though: Japanese. The only reason he understood the language was because Japan was becoming a fascinating force of innovation in the world and some of his mercenaries hailed from the distant island nation. It was also the tongue he had lifted his Stand cry from, but back to present matters.

Once the sound of the short woman's footsteps against the aged wooden floorboards vanished, the pair of arms attached to him reached out into the darkness and flipped a switch somewhere on the wall. New light flooded the room, the sudden brightness burning his eyes - another forgotten sensation - and forcing him to squint. The body pushed itself up and walked over to a small mirror on a shelf DIO hadn't noticed until now. What he saw within almost made him die a third time.

Looking back at him was not the handsome, angular visage framed with golden locks of which he had been the proud owner for over one hundred years, but the frail and meek-looking face of a young teenager. Gone were his high cheekbones, sharp nose and intimidating glare, replaced with juvenile features such as a smooth jaw and anxious eyes so wide that looked like they belonged in a cupboard of dinner plates rather than on any human. Dark green hair flowed in every direction in an unchecked mass of curls and patchy freckles dotted both cheeks.

Whoever this person was, they looked absolutely pathetic.

DIO could only watch as they proceeded to give themselves a full-face examination, stretching the skin to every possible angle as if looking for some type of disease. What kind of host was this?! He, DIO, should inherit a strong body from a powerful fighter! Instead he was stuck with some flimsy-looking juvenile that looked like he'd struggle in a boxing match against a newborn deer!

He would have found the entire process insufferably dull were it not for the fact that he noticed something lurking just beneath the collar of the red, white and blue pyjamas he wore. A bruise, dark and ugly and greenish around the edges, blemished the otherwise pale skin of the boy's neck like a blot of ink spilled onto a blank canvas, seeping deep into the fibres and spreading its black influence wherever its many tendrils could reach. Such sights swiftly brought back unpleasant memories.

'A helpless child abused by someone much larger and stronger than themselves…'

DIO shook himself from that train of thought. No, he wouldn't even go there. That man was nothing, little more than a grim reminder of his days as a helpless, weak human, and deserved to be treated as such. Besides, his pleasant exchange with that short woman, his host's mother from the sound of it, coupled with the room still filled with valuables that could easily be sold for a bottle of cheap booze were quick to rule out that possibility.

The ritual continued on for about five more minutes by DIO's reckon, during which the owner of his new body had examined every part of his face right down to the roof of his mouth. It appeared to be for naught, however, as the boy promptly let out a sigh of resignation before trudging back to his bed and flopping down on top of it. 'What could he have been looking for?' was DIO's last thought before the child succumbed to slumber's sultry seductions and dragged both of them into a world of darkness.

But, just like before, it didn't stay dark for long. The infinite depths of the void quickly receded and gave way to one of the most concurrently captivating and baffling things the ancient undead had ever laid eyes upon. He stood on a flat plane beneath a shifting sky of muted rainbow hues that melted in and out of shapes in a manner not dissimilar to if someone managed to animate the colours on the inside of a mussel's shell. The ground he found himself on was perfectly level to the most precise measurement and looked around be constructed of smooth, pale marble plastered with intricate patterns, though these ones were considerably more stationary than the enigmatic ceiling above. Off in the distance was a horizon that stretched off further than he could see, blurring off into nothingness long before he could get anywhere near to seeing where it ended.

But wait, something felt profoundly different about himself. His eyes were drawn downwards and, to no small amount of glee, DIO found that he was back in his own body once again. Barely believing his luck, he raised his arms to verify it. The extremities that greeted him were not the bone-thin arms of a meek teenager, but muscled tree trunks ending in two sets of wicked sable nails that looked strong and sharp enough to cleave flesh as easily as a ship's bow through still waters on a calm summer's day. Further down his body was JoJo's massive barrel chest, as wide and well-muscled as he remembered, and moving even further led him onto the lower body, legs and feet that he had been the proud owner of for a hundred years. A hand rose unbidden up to his left shoulder and…

He grinned. Yes, it was good to be back.

To DIO it felt almost like reuniting with an old friend, which on some level it really was. After the initial euphoria wore off enough to allow rational thought, he noticed that his clothing was not in fact what he had been wearing when he died, but instead the more comfortable outfit he spent most of his time relaxing in. His skintight top had vanished, leaving his upper body open for the world to marvel at, and his legs were covered by a pair of baggy yellow trousers that lacked the heart-shaped kneepads of his battle attire. His bracers were not of golden rings but fine cloth, each decorated with a polished emerald that stood out against the brown like a pair of green suns. Most notable of all was his hair, which cascaded freely down his neck and shoulders in a lustrous golden mane instead of being bound by a green headband or pushed up into short spikes. So a wandering soul like him didn't necessarily wear what they died with, but what they enjoyed dressing in the most? Intriguing.

"WAH! W-Who are you?! Where am I?!"

DIO spun around on reflex with his fangs bared in a catlike snarl. However, it faded instantly after he realised exactly who was standing across from him. After all, just those few minutes meant that he'd recognise the unruly mop of green hair, wide eyes and scrawny figure anywhere. Staring back from a mere few feet away was his new body.


Somewhere in the sprawling city of Musutafu a young man glanced at the time on his phone and sighed. The sun was getting ready to sink down behind the city skyline, its deep orange glow seeping into the surrounding clouds and casting long shadows over the metropolis. Many individual noises intermingled to form an urban ambience and the familiar scents of exhaust fumes, cooking and about a hundred other olfactory flavours tickled his nostrils. There was a chill to the wind characteristic of this time of year which nipped at his nose and cheeks like a child seeking constant attention.

Midoriya sighed again as he continued his steady slog home. He hadn't expected to take this long, but like most things in his life, it was what it was. He'd been attending cram school to try and boost his grades - not to say they were particularly bad, but his mother always said that every little helps - and had then been roped into helping clean up. Well, he said helping, but his 'teammates' had promptly abandoned him to take care of work fit for three people on his own. To top it all off, Kacchan and his friends had cornered him after finally walking out and… well, the ever-present throb of his neck intensified at the memory. So, here he was, red sneakers plodding forth one after the other over the uneven asphalt-

"Gah!"

A car flew by barely a metre away from the plucky fifteen year old's face, the artificial wind sending his hair into a frenzy and the pure fright knocking him flat onto his rear. The automobile's horn blared angrily as the driver stuck their arm out of the window and flipped him a rather rude hand signal. "Watch the road, you damn kid!" they yelled over the sound of their vehicle before they turned a corner and disappeared for good.

Izuku went to apologise like always, but his voice trailed off once the futility of calling after a driver that had already vanished from sight dawned on him. "Oh, what's the point?" he mumbled dejectedly as he dusted himself off and crossed the road, this time keeping a cautious eye out for any speeding boxes of metal and crass drivers.

He counted himself lucky as the car drove away - a second earlier and it would've reduced him to a red smear on the road. Ah, well, at least the towering apartment block before him meant he was home now. Maybe his mom wouldn't be too worried this time.

One climb of a concrete stairwell later and Izuku was standing in front of his apartment door, the veneer surface sun-bleached from overlong exposure. A silvery key was clutched between his fingers and glinted in the overhead light, trembling slightly. Taking a deep breath, the greenette mentally prepared himself for the oncoming storm as he slid the metal tool into the lock and turned.

The moment he put the key in the door it swung inwards, very nearly carrying the short student with it, and revealed an extremely worried-looking Inko Midoriya. Her face was pale and dripping with sweat, and her hands were clasped at her chest in a white-knuckled death grip.

"IZUKU! Oh, thank the lord you're home! You weren't back for dinner and I started getting worried but you didn't return any of my calls and then it started to get dark out and I started thinking maybe I should call the police-"

For the second time in five minutes, Izuku Midoriya sighed. It had been a long day, and from how things were shaping up it wasn't going to end any time soon.


Dinner was a fairly normal affair. A hearty meal of rice, fish and vegetables had been lovingly prepared by his mom, which the two of them polished off in short order what with Izuku having not eaten since lunch and Inko being unable to eat while as worried as she had been. The older woman had peppered her son with question after question in an odd sort of manner, showing concern but trying to rein herself in so as to not smother her child.

Did he tell her the truth? How today had been one pitfall after another? How Kacchan had added to his collection of bruises and welts for the mere fact that he was Quirkless? No, of course not. She didn't deserve that. She'd just end up worrying even more and running herself ragged as though she didn't already do that every day at work just to keep a roof over their heads. To her, he'd had another average day at school where he behaved, learned and didn't get walked over by just about every Quirked kid in the school. A difficult lie to tell, but a necessary one.

As of now, the duo of mother and son were about finished with the cleanup. They stood near the sink with their forearms submerged in soapy water, suds falling off of both them and the dishes they scrubbed in chubby white clumps.

Izuku pushed the final cleaned plate away from himself. "Uh, Mom? May I be excused?" He didn't usually just leave after doing the bare minimum like this and would instead stay and take over his mother's work while waving off her protests about fairness, but after the disaster of a day he'd just endured the only thing he wanted was to sleep.

Inko, who had been daydreaming into her own pile of dishes, started and looked up. "What? Oh, yes, that's fine. Go ahead, sweetie."

Izuku frowned as he dried himself off with the nearest towel. His mother had a sort of depressed look on her face, the sort a person gets when something bad's happening but there's not a thing they can do about it. He set down the towel and moved over to his mother. Sleep could wait just a bit longer.

"I love you, Mom," he said, and wrapped his arms around her in a loving embrace. He poured every bit of his affection into it, and secretly half-hoping that it would convey the emotions he so desperately wanted to voice but couldn't find the courage for.

Inko looked shocked for a split second before softly smiling and returning the squeeze. "I love you too, honey. Now go on, you look tired and I can handle the rest myself."

The younger Midoriya nodded, planted one last kiss on her cheek and headed off towards his room. The door closed behind him and a light switch flicked on, dousing the darkness and revealing the sacred safe haven that was his room.

And what a room it was. Well over a decade of unhalted hoarding of hero-themed memorabilia crammed wall to wall with all sorts of hero merchandise. From every inch of every space the always-jovial face of All Might stared back at him with his trademark impossibly wide grin, radiating pure confidence from each scattered sheet of paper and plastic toy. Practically speaking, however, it was a more simple affair. A single computer, quite the dinosaur by modern standards, sat on a desk against the wall. A modest wardrobe had been crammed into the corner next to a bed, the latter of which was decorated with yet more All Might. Reaching into the closet's interior, the green-haired boy's hand found what he was looking for and tugged it out to behold in all the yellow-tinted light's glory: his limited edition All Might pyjamas. Slipping his school uniform off and exchanging it for the red, white and blue bedclothes, Izuku could feel the urge to strike a heroic pose coursing red-hot through his veins.

Unfortunately, the urge to sleep was stronger still.

Izuku flopped down onto the mattress with all of the grace and beauty of a dead sloth, making it squeak in protest as it adapted to his weight. He just happened to collide face-first with the Top Hero's grinning visage, the contrast of his shaded eyes and incandescent smile the only thing he could see.

'Don't listen to what anyone else says, keep your chin up and keep charging ahead, was it…?' he mused as he blinked away some uninvited tears. 'This is the path I've chosen, so I guess I'll just do like the Pro Heroes do, and tough it out!' With one last muffled "ha, ha ha," into the bedsheets, Izuku's consciousness faded and he nodded off.

Pain!

Painpainpainpainpainpain!

PAIN!

Izuku writhed and howled in agony as his vision turned a bright shade of red and sent scarlet waves of pain through his being. Red, red, red was the only thing he could see, the only think he could hear, taste, smell, think about. All of the muscles in his body tightened like coiled wires as he tried to claw at his face when even squeezing them tightly enough to hurt did naught to halt the crimson onslaught. Alas, the sensory overload made it nigh impossible to think, let alone force his paralysed limbs to obey him. The agony was far greater than anything else he had ever experienced in his life; it was as if he had been thrust into a pool of boiling blood.

What was this? When would it stop? Would it stop? Izuku could only barely comprehend these concepts as he was ravaged from the inside by the redness that grasped and clutched and cut and scraped and stabbed him from the inside. The only thing left of his mind at that moment was one of the most basic instincts humankind possessed - flight. The need to run, to call for help, to do anything to escape the torture he was in! Anything! Anyone!

Help!

HELP!

"This can't be! I'm Dio! I'm Dio!"

But then, as quickly as it had appeared, the agonising redness vanished without a trace. There was no residual soreness, he could see things other than that terrifying crimson veil and his body was no longer locked in one position. Daring to sit up in spite of the fear that he'd just incite another fit, Izuku took a brief moment to check that he hadn't died and gone to the afterlife or something. Yep, there was the cardboard All Might peeking out of the closet - had he dislodged that when he fetched his pyjamas? - a poster of Hawks the Wing Hero, a few Endeavours scattered amongst their fellow Pro Hero figurines… Yes, this was definitely his room, the comforting constant where nothing ever changed and there were no unpleasant surprises.

Beads of cold sweat rolled down his face. Raising his hand to his chest, he gave the stylised sleep shirt a pat test and groaned at the results. Sodden. Still, though, that problem was considerably lower on his list of priorities than the top two questions currently running rampant through his head: what was that redness, and who was that talking at the very end? If he remembered rightly, they had been shouting that their name was… Dio?

He almost jumped out of his skin when his door flew open with a resounding crash as it hit the corner of the computer desk and almost dislodged a tiny All Might from his perch, ripping him away from his thoughts in a flash. With speed unseen from the stocky woman since she was about twenty kilos lighter, she rushed over to her son and snatched up his hands in her own.

"Honey! I heard you shouting! Are you okay?! Are you hurt anywhere?! Do you need the hospital?!"

Izuku immediately moved in for a gentle and comforting hug, stopping his mother's breathless ramble in its tracks when he enclosed her short body in an embrace.

"I'm fine, Mom. I just had a bad dream, it's okay," he soothed, patting her softly on the back and looking into her green eyes that shone with tears ready to fall at a moment's notice. It wasn't a lie, either. No matter how vivid it had been, that suffocating red veil had to have been a dream, otherwise he would've been left with some sort of reminder of a pain as unbearably horrific as that, surely.

"You really mean that, Izuku? You're not just lying for my sake or anything, are you? You can tell me anything, you know," she prompted, waiting for her son to respond with baited breath.

"What kind of son would lie to their mom?" he joked, hoping to dilute the tension somewhat. "I'm gonna try and go back to sleep now since I'm pretty tired. Trust me, please. I'm fine, I promise."

She looked like she was about to protest, but seemed to decide against it as she shut the door behind her and left Izuku alone in the darkness. Once her footsteps disappeared back towards the kitchen, the teenager stood from his bed, flicked on the light and walked over to his mirror. There were a few things that he needed to check.

It sounded weird, but behind all the pain there had been something more, distinctly of substance that the swimming splotches of crimson didn't have. The closest thing Izuku could compare it to was seeing, say, a plastic cube amongst a pile of paper squares, which was admittedly a pretty crappy metaphor but the best that his shaken-up mind could formulate at that time. For a brief moment he'd been lucid enough to notice, and for that brief moment it was as if he'd transformed. And it had all felt so real. His toothpick arms had been replaced with enormous behemoths, his curly mop discarded in favour of a flowing mane, and he could have sworn he'd had fangs. In that second, he'd gone from a skinny weakling to a god.

Obviously he couldn't trust what was most likely some sort of unnaturally vivid nightmare, and he certainly didn't, but something at the back of his mind just would let up nagging until he gave it the time of day and looked in the mirror. At the very least, doing it would mean one less distraction from a nice eight hours of sleep.


Just as he expected, the ten minutes of searching turned up absolutely zilch. No bulging muscles, no cascading hair and no fangs were to be found. He was, without a doubt, the same old short, weak, Quirkless Izuku Midoriya he'd been for fourteen years. He let out a disappointed huff as he walked back to bed and clambered under the quilt, too miffed to pay any mind to his sweaty clothing. If anything good came from that fit of his, it would have been the sadly temporary sensation of power it had given him. He'd actually dared to dream that it was some sort of extremely late sign of his Quirk blooming. How stupid. But it was okay to dream, wasn't it? Of course, he'd been dreaming constantly ever since that fateful day at the doctor's office ten years ago.

And speaking of dreams, this was shaping up to be a particularly pretty one. At some point he'd fallen asleep without noticing and was now standing on a flat plane of pure white stone under a multicoloured sky that was like viewing a rainbow through ten camera filters.

'This is sort of odd, but nice,' thought Izuku, 'I guess I can enjoy this for a while.'

At least, that's what he thought until he pivoted around and saw what could very well have been the largest man he'd ever seen his life. As soon as Izuku laid eyes on him the dreamlike atmosphere faded and was replaced by a cool chill that permeated down to his very soul. He didn't know why, but some primal instinct began to activate in the form of a crescendo of alarm bells going off all through his mind. This man… Something about him wasn't right. Thinking about it, something about this whole place wasn't right. The crystal-clear images, the lucidity, the sharpness of every sensation… This felt far too real to be just a normal dream!

"WAH! W-Who are you?! Where am I?!" Izuku yelled before thinking, an action he immediately regretted when the man whipped around to face him.

He was gargantuan, an absolute titan of a human being with powerful musculature to match visible across his entire shirtless torso. Blond hair fell down his shoulders like so many threads of spun gold right out of an old fairytale, while yellow trousers and and almost comical pair of curved shoes clothed his lower half. Glossy black claws tipped his fingers, which were curled into half-fists as though he couldn't decide whether to strike his enemy or carve them to pieces. Two eyes the colour of burnished gold glared directly into his own, emanating a menacing aura that sapped him of all his willpower and glued the helpless teenager to the spot.

A pang of pure, undiluted terror passed through him. This wasn't like the relatively tame fear of simple bodily harm he felt when he was confronted by Kacchan, either. No, this was completely different. For the first time ever, Izuku Midoriya feared for his life.


Hello readers old and new, and welcome to my new story! It's my first attempt at anything MHA, so I hope I don't disappoint. With that brief introduction out of the way, there are a few things I'd like to address.

Firstly, for DIO's appearance I'm using his Stone Ocean appearance without the shirt, like when he's reading with Pucci. This is a notice for people who haven't read SO yet, just in case they don't know.

Secondly, I want to make it clear that this won't be a ripoff of the popular JoJo/MHA story "Filthy Acts Done At A Reasonable Price". It may not be finished, but from what's already published I can safely say I'm going down a different route. Nevertheless, if anyone knows about any other similar stories to this one then I would ask them to please inform me so I don't accidentally end up making a carbon copy.

Please don't hesitate to leave any sort of criticism whatsoever, and don't be afraid of sounding rude. It's the only way I'll improve, after all.