Right. Nine months later, I finally managed to get my shit together and get chapter 2 out, so here it is at last.
As you can see, I removed the IzuMei pairing. Sorry to disappoint whoever is, but I only really wanna stick to two pairings right now.
I'm getting a lot of ideas for this fic, so I might have chapter 3 out by mid-September or October.
II: The Sparrow's Melody
"Again. The transition took too long."
"Damn it," Izuku cursed under his breath. Stifling the urge to groan, he broke his gaze on the wooden practice dummy in front of him and began walking away from it. Once he was back at his starting position, he turned back around and adjusted his grip on his practice katana, readying himself into another stance.
"Remember: it all has to be in one fluid motion."
He nodded mutely at the advice, and with a deep breath, closed his eyes and focused. A second later, his right arm became overcome with a sensation he could only identify as a sort-of tingling, which then as his dragon tattoo flared to life once again. That same tingling continued when the ethereal dragon circled around him, before it spread throughout his body as it entered through his back.
When he finally opened his eyes, Izuku's vision was filtered by a neon-green aura surrounding him, and he shot forward with a brief streak of the same colored light trailing behind him. Stopping in front of the dummy, he raised his katana for an immediate strike, ignoring the vibration emanating from it as the dragon sank into it. With a cry, the strike made contact with the dummy, where it subsequently broke and his sword splintered from the force.
"Much better," his father commended with a nod, and Izuku breathed out a sigh of relief as he released his hold on his Quirk, allowing it to coil around his arm and sink back into the tattoo. "Let's call it here. We've got a guest coming over for dinner in half-an-hour."
"Who is it?"
"You'll see." Izuku shrugged at the answer, and after cleaning up, taking apart the practice sword, and placing the broken pieces in the trash, he made his way to his bathroom to take a shower.
In the five years that had passed since that fateful day Tracer left Genji's journal behind, the contents of it had been...eye-opening, to say the least. Included was every single one of his techniques and several paragraphs' worth of theory regarding his Quirk, as well as minor tips and tricks that helped to answer any questions Izuku had.
One such technique involved using the latent energy the 'Dragon Force' Quirk possessed to propel oneself forward a short distance, aptly named Swift Strike. However, Genji noted that he had created it after joining Overwatch, meaning it was heavily reliant on his cybernetic enhancements in order for it to actually work properly.
And no matter how many times Izuku practiced with it, he was left tired out after only a single use, and left unable to use it again without resting his body and Quirk (a cooldown, one might even call it).
But what had excited Izuku the most to learn was the Ryūgekiken—channeling his Dragon into a weapon to greatly enhance its strength and durability. There was even a combo written down that involved using Swift Strike to engage enemies—whether it was in the air or straight into a group of them—and then immediately switching into a Ryūgekiken for a quick and powerful attack.
What he had been doing just now, in fact.
Naturally, Izuku thought it was the coolest thing ever, and spent nearly every minute of free training he had to perfect the technique, but because he was still young and wholly inexperienced with using his Quirk in combat, he would end up almost passing out after a single use of both Swift Strike and Ryūgekiken. It had seen drastic improvement over the years, and now that he was fifteen, was now much more able to withstand the strain of channeling his Quirk in rapid succession.
(Hisashi even offhandedly noted that their family's shared Quirk by itself was similar to something called a 'Stand' from the old manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, although Izuku thought that there were more differences than similarities.)
But alongside a guide to improve his Quirk to its fullest potential, Genji also included bits of information about his personal life, including secrets only known within the main branch of the Shimada Clan. Secrets that were assumed forever lost when the Shie Hassaikai wiped them and virtually all opposition out in Japan, forcing thirteen year-old Hisashi to run away and change his name to Shinya Kamihara.
Growing up with a Pro Hero for a father, especially one in the Top Ten, had itself obvious ups and downs. Sure, there were times when Hisashi was gone for more than a few weeks at a time because of missions, but Izuku had grown up knowing he was loved, and that everything his father did as a Pro Hero was so he could live in a safer world.
Naturally, this meant that there was a lot of difficulty on who the title of 'favorite hero' went to: his father, the pro hero Edgeshot, or All Might, one of the very pillars of modern society? After all, children usually stopped regarding their parents as their heroes after turning thirteen, but you really couldn't go wrong with the Ninja aesthetic.
After finishing his shower and changing into more comfortable clothes, Izuku then made his way to the kitchen to see if his mother needed any help with dinner, and as he approached the entrance, he heard an unfamiliar voice coming from the living room.
"-so that's when I said to the guy, 'An ass-kicking is here!'"
The stranger's joke was met with his parents' laughter, and Izuku walked in to see them sitting on the couch across from a lanky, blond-haired man. When he was finally spotted, the three adults all stood up as the two men stood up to greet him.
"Izuku," his father began. "This is an old friend of mine, Yagi Toshinori."
The blond-haired man stepped forward and briefly bowed, before he suddenly gained mass, and what took his place was a hulking figure who sported an eerily-familiar grin.
"It's good to meet you, young Midoriya."
Izuku just blinked. "...what?"
Ten Months Later...
Belts? Check.
Harness? Check.
Safeties on? Check.
"Yo, check out what she's wearing."
"Is that what I think it is...?"
"No way is she gonna be using that. What do you think her Quirk is, anyway?"
Ochako couldn't help but smile from the comments she was overhearing as several of the other test-takers watched her check her support gear for the fourth time since donning it. She had to admit, she would have never in a million years considered using anything like what she was wearing right now, but in hindsight, she really should have thought of it sooner. She had expected a belt or something to help with her nausea, but this?
Only someone like Mei Hatsume would think of trying to replicate something like the Omni-Directional Mobility Gear.
When Ochako asked her best friend to make her some support ear for the U.A. entrance exam, she didn't think she would go to this length to help her. But who was she kidding? The entire Hatsume family lived for doing the impossible when it came to technology (she recalled Mei wistfully talking about how she wanted to recreate one of the Bastion units from the Omnic Crisis during one of their sleepovers).
"Just remember to tell everyone who made this baby if they ask!"
But getting permission to allow her to actually use the gear in the exam, on the other hand, had been a bitch to do. Even after filling out all of the required forms more than two months in advance, Ochako didn't hear back from them until just a week before the exam. She wished it was only an issue having to pay some type of fee, but the truth of the matter was that it wasn't vital for her to be without it, which meant it took very low priority.
She felt a bit guilty about having to ask her friend's family to flaunt their name (and maybe even make a couple donations, according to what Mei told her) to the U.A. board of education, but she wasn't about to risk not getting into the school.
"And START!"
Interrupted from her thoughts, she looked up in confusion to see where the voice had come from, and was met with the sight of Present Mic looking down on them and pointing to the very large mock-city gate just ahead of the crowd of students.
"What?!" he yelled down at them. "You think we get countdowns fighting actual villains? Clock's ticking, folks, so get. Your. Butts. MOVING!"
'Is he serious...?'
Turning her gaze back to the students around her, Ochako saw several faces look at each other in confusion, before they collectively 'lit up' as they realized that yes, he really was being serious, and made a mad scramble for the massive door leading to the mock city with the rest quickly following suit.
When she finally reached the entrance, she saw that several students were already starting to rack up points from the various Villain robots in the vicinity, but she ignored them in favor of raising her right arm and focusing on aiming it towards the nearest building.
With the pull of a trigger and a simultaneous slap to her midsection, a cable sprung forth from the mechanism surrounding her arm, and she was pulled into the air with speed that made more than a few heads turn to marvel at the sight, before she eventually retraced the cable and repeated aimed her left arm.
After all—what use was wearing something with Mobility in the name if you didn't use it?
One of the biggest reasons why Ochako went along with using ODM was because Zero Gravity heavily if not completely mitigated the glaring issue of g-force strain and motion sickness on the body during swings. Moreover, she simply didn't have the time to spend countless hours building up core strength, what with having only a year to get with using the thing, but it was entirely smooth sailing.
The ODM Gear itself was adapted from the anti-personnel version from the latter half of the series, rather than the more iconic version that one would think of when they heard the words 'Attack on Titan', and with a few of Mei's personal additions.
Although the structure and mechanism themselves were largely the same (such as aiming the miniature grappling hooks using the arms instead of hips), the mineral that made the gas propulsion possible just didn't exist in the real world, which gave Mei the idea of adding a miniature jetpack rocket underneath the main housing.
...Except neither Mei's parents nor U.A. would allow it, so Ochako would just have to make do with her Quirk.
Alongside the lack of any weapons (for obvious reasons), the handles for each hand that held the triggers for the cables and the rocket propulsion were now connected to the main body through loose hinges that left Ochako able to switch between operating the ODM Gear and using her Quirk on herself or her surroundings in rapid succession.
It may have come from a 150-year-old show, but hot damn was it perfect for her Quirk.
Four points.
Fifteen points.
Thirty-two points.
Only three minutes had passed since the start of the practical, and already Izuku was making short work of every Villain robot he came across with his Quirk, with the last few robots having to be taken care of the old-fashioned way to avoid overextending himself. Unfortunately, he wasn't allowed to bring even a practice sword because weapons didn't count as support gear, but that didn't mean he wasn't allowed to grab a long piece of rebar from the rubble and use it as a makeshift staff.
(He even had to take a moment and stare in awe at the sight of someone swinging through the air with cables. He couldn't really help but be just a little bit jealous.)
Unlike the written part of the exam, the practical didn't have a minimum point requirement; the only way to secure a spot in the hero course was by scoring in the top thirty-six of students in all exam sites, according to All Might, but Izuku wasn't about to doubt the man's words—his place was already secured if he kept on going at this pace.
To be honest, he felt pretty bad for the other students in the exam. It wasn't fair at all for him with his training to be taking the public entrance exam instead of the recommended one, but the amount of people who knew that Hisashi Shimada and Shinya Kamihara were one and the same could be counted on one hand, and he kind of wanted to keep it that way.
As more time passed, Izuku continued to rack up more and more points alongside helping out any other students who looked like they needed help. He even took the time to help out a purple-haired boy with a brainwashing Quirk gain some of his own points by letting him take control of him and destroying several of the robots. But once he found himself back to his senses when the other boy finally relinquished his control on him, the ground suddenly began to rumble, and they looked up to see an ominous figure having revealed itself to the assembled mass of students.
The Zero-Pointer had finally come out.
A good moment of silence passed where the students did nothing but stare at the titanic robot, wherein it broke the silence by punching the ground just ahead of them, kicking up a massive cloud of dust. Several moments of shocked silence passed, before they all collectively made a run for it the other way. Izuku, however, instead shoved his way towards a distinctive bob of brown hair.
"Hey! You with the grappling hooks!" he yelled, running towards the girl. She had already had her arm outstretched and was ready to high-tail it out of there, but the call-out made her pause and look his way with a confused expression.
"I have a plan!" he said, when he stopped in front of her. "I just need you to grapple us towards that-" he pointed towards the zero-pointer. "-and throw me at it!"
"What?!" she yelled back, amidst all the noise from the robot wheeling its way towards them to the crowd scrambling to get away. "You want us to fight that thing?!"
"No! I just need you to get me up there so I can destroy it!"
The girl just gave him a look for a second, before briefly closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, and then looked back at him. "Okay, I'll do it!" She extended her left arm to him, and as the two of them clasped forearms, Izuku felt himself suddenly become weightless as he started floating in the air (her Quirk, maybe?), when she raised her other hand and fired a cable into the zero-pointer's torso, where they were then pulled up towards it at a high speed.
The zero-pointer, however, ended up immediately noticing them as soon as they entered its line of sight above the dissipating cloud of dust, and moved to grab them accordingly. And with a cry, the girl flung Izuku towards it, where he managed to land on one of its fingers with the help of her gravity-defying Quirk. Utilizing Swift Strike alongside said Quirk, it allowed him to leap a great length towards its head, and with his dragon tattoo flaring to life, he aimed his arm towards it.
"RYŪ GA WAGA TEKI WO KURAU!"
Elsewhere...
Siebren de Kuiper woke from his slumber with a sharp intake of air. For several moments, all he did was continue to breathe in and out while trying to recollect his thoughts, but when he tried to open his eyes, he grew confused at the inability to move his eyelids. And that was when he realized that it wasn't like seeing darkness with his eyelids closed; he couldn't see, period.
Why the hell couldn't he see? Did he just go blind all of a sudden?
Confusion and panic quickly turned to shock and horror as Siebren moved his hands to feel for his face, but where he expected to be met with the familiar sensation of bulging roundness, he only found a hauntingly empty space where his eyes and eyebrows were supposed to be, replaced by nothing but the uneven roughness that was scar tissue. Wordlessly, he reached behind his head, then proceeded to move his hands all around his scalp at the realization that he was completely bald.
"What..." he tried to say, before immediately having a coughing fit as his throat was extremely dry. All of a sudden, an unknown hand took hold of his own, pressing a glass of liquid into it, and Siebren drank eagerly.
"What happened to me?" he finally asked, once the water finally quenched his thirst.
"Do you not remember?" a low, baritone voice suddenly asked in Japanese, and Siebren sharply turned to his left at the surprise of there being another person with him.
Although Siebren's command of the language was rudimentary at best as a result of working with Japanese experts in the field of astrophysics, he didn't expect for the unknown man's words to register so clearly. It was as if he'd been speaking it all his life, even more so than Dutch, for some odd reason.
"The hell's wrong with him?" another male, but one that sounded younger, asked from the same general direction.
"This tends to happen from time to time, young Tōya, although it's been quite some time," the other man replied. "And shouldn't you be practicing with the upgraded Doomfist armor right now?"
"I'm working on it," the young man now known as Tōya replied. "And I'm still trying to figure out how to make it work with the Quirk Sensei gave me."
"You know that he will want to know your progress as soon as he is able."
Who was this Sensei...? The name oddly rung a bell in Siebren's mind, but he couldn't recall ever having met anyone who went by such a-
...Oh.
He remembered. He remembered. He was a murderer—no, a monster. He didn't deserve to be called human anymore.
"My son," he whispered. "Dear God, my son..."
He killed...he killed Yoichi, who finally gained the courage to stand up to him just months after he forced a Quirk on him. And then he killed Lena Oxton, as she tried to keep Yoichi's son—his grandson—out of harm's way. And then the ones who followed in Yoichi's footsteps, all the way up to that brave, brave woman who looked him in the eye defiantly...
Like all the others.
Except...it was never him, though, was it? Not really. Whatever happened when he tried to harness that black hole—it released something. Something that went inside him and took control from the inside out. He couldn't remember all of it, but in everything that he could, he had only ever been a spectator; there wasn't anything he could have done but be forced to helplessly watch as he (or whatever was masquerading as himself) committed atrocity after atrocity, all without so much as a nudge.
And then he felt it. That feeling, that sensation of something buried deep within himself...something that was trying to claw its way out. Something was happening to him, but the fear Siebren felt was quickly overpowered by the shame and sorrow of what he had done.
Shhh, it's all right now, someone...something whispered soothingly in his mind. Let me take care of you...
Before he could even blink, pain incarnate flooded his entire being. Only, it was something different from the physical sensation, but Siebren found that was the only way to describe what he was feeling. It was the familiar pain of his mind and soul being locked away once more.
"No...no, please..." He didn't know what these...these monsters were keeping him captive for, but he wanted no more part in it. Once upon a time, he wondered if this was what it felt to die, and even welcomed it if it meant finally having a reprieve from this curse. But as he was forced to relive it again and again, he realized that this was only a product of this Hell of his own making.
Was it too much to ask for peace? Did God hate him so much that he would be damned to forever be a stranger in his own body?
Once upon a time, Siebren longed for any reprieve from this Hell of his own making, and even found himself childishly wishing for someone, anyone to come rescue him. But the longer that time went on, the more he came to realize that there would be no one coming to save him.
There never had been.
He could only wish that that failed experiment truly killed him, all those years ago.
And in that brief window of time he had left as himself, Siebren wondered whether or not anyone still thought of him. If someone, anyone ever wondered where he was before finally giving up on him.
But that moment went as quickly as it came, as that damned melody that haunted his every waking moment filled his senses once again, and Siebren screamed out to the heavens in terror and sorrow before being silenced with knowing only peaceful nothingness as the Other once again took his place.
There was nothing but silence in the room for nearly an entire minute before Kurogiri spoke.
"Sensei? Are you with us?" he tentatively asked. The face that once belonged to Siebren de Kuiper wordlessly looked over to him, before closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.
"My apologies, Kurogiri," All For One murmured. "It appears I've had another lapse again."
I may or may not have overdone it a bit by giving Ochako ODM this early, but I've wanted her to have it while I was brainstorming chapter 1. And who really gives a shit? I no longer have the patience to spend 3-4 chapters building up to yet another Entrance Exam, not since I'm going balls to the wall with it in the DBZ fic.
You can thank Logar3 for coming up with the idea of Ochako using ODM Gear in his fic Restless. I even asked for permission and everything.
Would it be really that far-fetched to make Sigma older than canon, and then have the sinister alternate personality being All For One, as well as making him the first OFA user's father instead of older brother? Naturally, this would also merge the League of Villains with the current version of Talon, so make of that what you will. (EDIT 8/9: I seem to fucked up really hard here. I could've sworn Sigma was suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder ever since his origin story came out, but apparently it's actually not.
Fuck it, I can still make this work.)
By the way, this doesn't have any significance to the plot, but I used Sigma's failed experiment as the cause for Quirks appearing in the world.