"Heh," Izuku chuckled to himself as he walked at a snail's pace. At last, he could move while under the effects One for All. It had taken all of three hours of dedicated practice to get this far and he was sure he was pulling less than five percent of all the power stockpiled in One for All, but progress was progress.

Moreover…

Izuku sighed as he lifted his phone to check for the umpteenth time. Surprise, surprise, All Might had yet to respond to his messages.

He had nothing better to do with school out and about a week before U.A. mailed out the results. So… what better way to spend his ample free time than by getting used to his Quirk? Even if he didn't make it into U.A, a very possible outcome given his total score amounted to less than twenty points before he took it upon himself to save someone and run away, Izuku was confident enough in his academics to make it into U.A.'s General Department.

In the very worst case scenario, he'd just have to apply to another hero school; maybe a semester or year down the line. In any case, he was bound to need proficiency with his Quirk sometime in the future. So, he thought it best to start practicing… but this practice didn't end. He was just walking around his room, after all.

Eventually, Izuku broke the monotony of it all when his eyes found the current set of dumbbells he worked out with. He started shoulder pressing the weights over his head, but almost instantly stopped when he felt they were practically weightless.

"Hmm..." Izuku squinted at the twenty kilogram weights he was balancing on his index fingers. "This won't do at all," he sighed as even then, his finger barely felt any strain.

So, he went over and picked up his bedside drawer. Pressing it with one hand was still way too easy for him, so he moved on to his bed and at last he found some decent resistance.

Izuku did shoulder presses, walking squats, and eventually he forgot about walking together as he started working on other muscles that required him to stop moving around; to prevent muscle imbalances, or something…

He kept working out autonomously as his body had built up a routine over the past ten months, and like many times, Izuku automatically began drifting out of his room as his internal clock reminded him that his mother was bound to call him over for dinner any moment now.

"Izuku!" He smirked internally as he had called it, "Dinner's— Izuku?!" She sounded concerned…

"Yes, mom?" Izuku asked, not knowing what was wrong.

"You…" She froze, opening and closing her mouth in the following moments, but no sounds would come out.

"Are you al—" that's when Izuku realized he was still actively holding One for All. He might have left his bed in his room, but he was still covered with static arcs of green lightning. "Oh..." He promptly cut it off.

"Uh… surprise?" Izuku shrugged.

"You… You. You! You have a Quirk?!" His mother, Inko, eventually said.

"Yeah," Izuku succinctly said.

"Wh— How? When? Why? What?!" She fumbled her words, as she failed to comprehend the current situation. Who could blame her when her son was acting so strangely. Having watched him grow up Quirkless, she expected him to jump for joy and show her immediately if he ever got his own Quirk.

"Mom," Izuku said, getting her to calm down. Once she started breathing normally, he rather calmly said, "I… I didn't really know how to break the news to you with so much happening. But… I really don't know either," he felt a pang of guilt as he lied through his teeth. "It just kind of came out on its own during the practical exam, probably because of how much I've been exercising and building up my body over the past year."

"Honey, that's wonderful! I'm… I'm just baffled by your reaction. I mean, you've wanted a Quirk for so long and all, and now that you have one… this is how you react?"

Izuku took a deep breath, "I… I'm just frustrated, is all." He looked away as he continued, "I mean, for it to have manifested during the entrance exam… I just think that maybe..." He bit his lip, "Perhaps, if I had taken becoming a hero a bit more seriously earlier; a month, a year, anything… sooner… Maybe I wouldn't have been so unprepared and done a better job."

"Oh, sweetie," Inko walked over to give him a hug and comfort him on what she thought was him being hard on himself despite all his hard work.

…

After a relatively peaceful dinner with his mom, Izuku continued with his bedroom practice until he decided to shower and turn in for the day.

When he woke up the next day, he decided to take his practice outside and continued to work on walking until it felt natural. By that point, the sun had crossed its zenith and since hours had passed since Izuku ate breakfast, he opted to visit the nearest convenient store to pick up a quick lunch.

Absentmindedly, he entered his chosen convenience store and picked a selection of nutrition and protein-dense foods as well as a drink before heading to the cashier and waiting for his turn to pay.

When the time came for the money to be exchanged, the cashier looked at him, then the money, and shrugged before accepting it. Izuku wouldn't have thought twice about the event, but then the cashier said, "Yo, I aint ever seen a harmless lightning Quirk, bro. Shit's sick."

"Oh," was all Izuku could do as he nervously scratched his hand, One for All deactivated, and accepted the compliment. "Sorry, I sometimes forget it's even on."

"It's all good, my dude. In fact, now I can tell the homies after my shift that I literally touched lightning."

"Uh… Yeah..." Soon thereafter, Izuku left the store.

Before he got very far, he paused and continued on his way with One for All active. 'Quirk use in public is heavily restricted,' Izuku reasoned, 'But that's only under the context that a person actually use their quirk for something.'

Plenty of people, especially people with Mutant type Quirks, had their Quirks constantly active. It's only when they did anything considered superhuman that there was a chance they could be stopped for public Quirk use.

Moreover, a look at his exchange with the cashier revealed to Izuku that despite One for All manifesting in him as green lightning, the would-be shocking arcs were actually harmless. At the thought, Izuku paled for a second as he recalled the practical exam.

'I can't imagine how bad things would have turned out if I'd been shocking that girl when I was shoveling the rubble off her body...'

Eventually he shocked the thought from his head and found himself at the now trash-free Dagobah Beach. Having mastered walking, it was now time to try running.

So, he took a step.

And then another.

And then a third.

And then the world turned black and he was a facial twitch away from swallowing a mouthful of sand.

"Blagh!" He spat, knowing the rest of the day was bound to be a long and arduous one.

...

Running, it turns out, was several degrees harder than walking while under the reinforcement of One for All. Izuku expected it to be harder, just not the biomechanical equivalent to transitioning from basic addition to integral calculus.

Taking a step down from running to try jogging didn't help. After all, any step he took faster than he'd use for simple walking while using One for All had enough explosive force to launch him meters. Even after lowering the power output to the bare minimum, which Izuku felt was around 1% of the Quirk's total capacity, his sense of balance just couldn't quickly adapt.

Fortunately for him, he had a couple weeks to readjust.

After a day, he reached the point where it would take around ten steps before he fell on his face. On one hand, he could blame his lack of progress on the fact that he was learning how to run on a relatively unstable surface in sand. On the other hand, he more appreciated the many injuries he was spared thanks to the sand's softness.

After another day, Izuku's limit rose to around twenty-five steps. It was arguably more impressive how his recoveries improved to the point where he could save himself from falling to a complete stop with an average of once every five tries.

By day three, while Izuku's progress continued slowly, he realized the implications involved with him being perfectly fine spending all of three days training with hardly any rest. It had been three days and he had arguably working the hardest so far, and yet… He was perfectly fine?

More importantly, One for All never ran out of power. It should have been obvious, given All Might's career and past history of attaining heroic world records for endurance, but like many things with his Quirk, Izuku was slow to internalize the facts. He didn't have to stop to recharge and when it was active, so long as he kept the output of power below his limits — which he had yet to even test — he also didn't tire; at all…

By day five, Izuku no longer tripped. Instead, he would jog or run a couple dozen paces before he stumbled. Even then, by the end of that day, he hardly faltered at all. So, the next day, on the Saturday that marked the sixth day after U.A.'s Entrance Exams, Izuku decided to jog outside of the sand for the first time and hit the streets.

He left his house early like he usually did, at around five in the morning before dawn. Taking care to not trip and eat asphalt, he focused harder than he'd done in the past couple days before taking off.

With school out and the weekend in session, there was almost no traffic at all so early in the morning. So… Izuku's shock could be imagined when less than an hour later, he found himself in a completely different city. He looked at his watch and narrowed his eyes.

"Forty-five kilometers?!"

He hadn't even broken a sweat.