Fresh ocean air flooded Izuku's lungs as he gazed out at the rising sun over Takoba Beach. Towering piles of junk rose up behind him with a few dozen sea-birds picking through them.

After the events of last night, Izuku had been desperately combing through the various hero agencies for heroes without useful quirks that he might be able to emulate through support items he might be able to build. None of them really stood out to him, however, since the pros generally had found some sort of creative way to apply their quirks that wouldn't be easily copied.

Izuku bent down and wrapped his hand around a flat stone by his feet. Standing back up, he clenched his hand around the stone and looked over the ever brightening horizon in front of him.

He turned around and paced back up to the tide-line where the trash-heaps ended and faced back to the water. Slowly, he picked up pace towards the water, readying the biggest throw of his life. Upon reaching the water's edge, Izuku tried to spin around like some of the old olympian shot-putters from the really old videos he had seen on the internet and launched the stone as far and high as he could. He stumbled over himself at the force he had pushed through his arm and watched the stone sail through the air. His frustrations had lent him strength it seemed to travel much further than Izuku had gotten in the school's softball-throw tests, but it was still much shorter than Kacchan's throws.

Izuku screamed in frustration before collapsing to his back on the beach. Tears began to flow all over again as he lay sprawled out on the ground. It wasn't the first time he had broken down since his conversation with his mother. He hadn't slept well, and each time he had woken up he had dissolved back into tears.

He lay there, wallowing in his misery for a long moment. It must have been at least a few minutes though, since when he refocused on the world around him the brilliant colors of the sunrise had faded into the bright blue of the day.

Steeling his nerves, Izuku sat back up and looked back over the water. It was a calm morning. The water was exceptionally still and the air was just as motionless. Gradually, the sounds of traffic and other city activity reached his ears as nearby people began their work-days.

Standing up, Izuku looked down at his backpack which was sitting by the trash-heaps. He could see the outline of his binders protruding from the canvas.

He grunted as he hefted the sizable bag over his shoulder and began to make his way back up to the road to head to school. A flash of light caught his eye though and he set his backpack back on the ground.

There.

Near the bottom of the closest pile of trash was some sort of bright red capsule. Upon closer inspection, he found a broken needle-shaped shard of metal protruding out of the capsule at a weird angle like some sort of broken syringe. It didn't look like anything that Izuku had ever seen before in any classes at school and it certainly didn't look like anything he'd seen at home.

Carefully, with two fingers, he picked it up and twisted it to get a better look from all angles. As he did so, he could tell that the metal shard was, indeed, some sort of tube that seemed like it might have once been used to empty the capsule of whatever contents were inside. The red part of it was what really caught his attention, though. What he had initially thought to be some sort of shiny plastic casing was actually a reinforced, hollow metal cylinder. It must have been designed to undergo significant force without rupturing.

"Some sort of poison dart? But who would be making something like this?"

Nobody answered of course. Regardless, Izuku pocketed the cylinder and hefted his bag again before setting off for another undoubtedly torturous day of school.

Izuku was not looking forward to seeing Kacchan again as he would probably be even more bad tempered after the whole fiasco with the sludge villain yesterday.

—

School could not have gone any better, all things considered. Kacchan had been withdrawn to the point of silence almost all day. He had only spoken up when the teacher had called on him and his companions had all been lost without his leadership.

He wasn't sure why he was so quiet, but he supposed that he must have been humbled by his inability to fight back against the sludge-like villain. The overwhelming power of the number one hero must have had some impact on Kacchan's sense of humility.

Not wanting to push his luck with the day so far, when the bell rang, Izuku launched himself out of the classroom and was down the hall before any other students had even cleared the doorway. Izuku made his way straight home. He didn't even get side-tracked by the heavy booming in the distance that was almost certainly a fight between another villain and some hero. Izuku assumed that his interaction with All Might must have dulled his will to be around and analyse the heroes' quirks.

Upon reaching his and his mom's apartment, Izuku quickly unlocked the door and strolled inside. Izuku kicked off his shoes by the door and made his way to his room. His mother wouldn't be home for a while yet as she was off at work, so he had the house to himself for another couple of hours.

He unloaded all the books from his bag and set the important, homework-related, books on his desk to be worked on. Once he had emptied the bag of all the books, he reached in and pulled out the dishes from his lunch and set off to stroll back out of the room to wash them.

He had only taken a couple of steps before his eyes were caught once again by the glint of red from the capsule he'd found that morning. Setting his dishes to the side for a moment, Izuku reached over and picked it up. He made his way over to the reading-lamp on his desk and flicked it on.

The cylinder, upon closer inspection and under the bright reading lamp, seemed to be kind of melted and warped on the end opposite the metal piece as though melted by an explosion.

Is it some sort of bullet or something? Did it belong to a hero or something? Or maybe a villain?

He set it down on the desk and proceeded to deal with the dishes he had left on his bed. While he was in the kitchen, he pulled out a small piece of scrap paper from a basket on the counter and wrote a quick note to his mother saying that he would be out until later that day for dinner and stuck it to the refrigerator with a small magnet.

Once that was finished, Izuku returned to his room and grabbed the little red object and his bag and returned out the door, locking it on his way out. From there, Izuku made his way down the road towards the library. He would have stronger access to the internet there and he would be much less distracted than at home.

—

Izuku kicked half-heartedly at a road-sign on the sidewalk as he passed. His research at the library hadn't turned up anything worth noting with regard to who might have manufactured the trinket. From what he could find on the hero registry, most heroes didn't see guns and bullets as worthwhile. They were older technology and most heroes and notable villains had quirks that were already much stronger anyways. In Japan the only big-league hero that used them was Snipe and he only used them because projectiles were a part of his quirk. The only significant party that Izuku had been able to find on the internet that might fit the 'combative' nature of guns and bullets without having powerful quirks but still have the resources to create weapons was the Yakuza.

Izuku looked back at the little projectile in his hands, he was sure it was a bullet of some sort now. He could identify from his research that the melting and scorch marks on the red part of the bullet were similar to what was generally found on bullet casings. It must have been melted by the gunpowder or whatever else was used to fire it. It obviously wasn't professionally made and it seemed more like a prototype than something that had actually seen combat. He had managed to split it open with a pen he had snagged from a librarian's desk and had found out it had been hollow inside. It had not, however, been entirely empty. Some sort of reddish fluid had been inside it and had spilled over the table when the shell had been broken open. Before Izuku could leave to get a paper towel of some sort though, he had been stopped by the effect the liquid had on the wooden table. Before his eyes, the old, processed wood that had been touched by the solution had grown green and grown bark before simply vanishing completely. It had left a sizable hole in the table and Izuku had quickly and carefully grabbed the shell of the bullet and left for home not wanting to get into trouble for wrecking the library's property.

He didn't want to think that the Yakuza was designing some sort of bullet that could erase tables from existence. Izuku didn't even want to know what would happen to a person the solution had touched. He tried reasoning that it just displaced the chunk of table, but for some reason he couldn't shake the feeling that the portion of wood had simply ceased to exist. It was almost as though he was trying to convince himself that it had even been there to begin with.

Looking around, Izuku's eyes landed on a Seven-Eleven across the street and he made his way over. Inside, he quickly purchased a small bag of gummy-type candies and devoured them all. He then took the little plastic bag, the real reason he had bought it, and tucked the two pieces of the bullet in so that he wouldn't be touching it anymore.

He made his way outside and headed back on down the street in the direction of home.

—

The sun was only just setting on the horizon when Izuku reached his apartment. His mom, Inko Midoriya, was in the kitchen cooking some udon noodles in a pot and she called out in greeting,

"Hey baby! How was school today?"

"It was actually really good. Nothing out of the ordinary happened and I managed to stay out of the way of most of the nastier kids."

"Oh, that's great honey. Come on in here and help me with the vegetables. You can tell me about what you did after school while we work."

"I'll be right there. I just need to put my things away in my room first."

It was only a couple of minutes before Izuku was back in the kitchen to help his mom. His stuff was lying on his bed for him to deal with later.

"Alright Mom," Izuku started as he entered the tiny kitchen. "What are we making tonight?"

"I have the ingredients for a pork cutlet bowl but I was meaning to leave it until tomorrow. What do you think of sukiyaki tonight?"

"Fine by me."

As Izuku's mom prepared the beef for the table-pot, the teen set to work on the mushrooms and vegetables. They worked in relative silence until it was all ready to be cooked and they sat down at the table together.

"So, what happened at school today, honey?"

"Not much today, I finished the work before anyone else and then did some research of my own at the library."

"That's nice honey. It's good to know that you're keeping up well with school."

Izuku steeled himself for a moment before asking,

"Mom?"

"What is it, honey?"

"What do you think of heroes who use support items?"

"Why do you ask honey? Don't tell me you're going to become a hero using only support items? What if they're disabled somehow? You'll be defenceless!"

"Just answer the question, Mom. Anyway, it's no different to any other hero that doesn't have an applicable quirk to any given situation. You saw the heroes the other day when Kacchan was being attacked."

Inko Midoriya eyed her son warily at that but opted to answer him anyway, if hesitantly.

"I guess they're doing their best to use their quirk in as many useful ways as possible." She paused for a moment to consider, "Some heroes, like All Might, don't use support items because they're more of a hindrance though because they can be bulky and awkward and aren't always used."

"Do you think it is okay for heroes to use any means at their disposal to win? Even things that people more or less condemn for being too violent?"

"Baby…"

"Mom, just answer."

Inko sighed resignedly,

"I think that so long as they are in control of whatever they use and it gets the job done without hurting people too badly, heroes should use whatever they can get their hands on to keep people safe."

Izuku fingered the tiny plastic bag in his pocket under the table thoughtfully.

"Maybe I can't be a hero on the front lines," Izuku started. Inko's expression visibly brightened. "But maybe I could help them from behind the scenes."

Understanding dawned on Inko's face as her son continued.

"Do you think I might be able to make it into a support course somewhere?"

Inko almost shed a tear in relief that her baby wasn't still actively trying to make it into a hero course, let alone the one at UA.

"I think that's a great idea, Baby. Maybe you'd even get a chance to go to I-Island at some point! Wouldn't that be fun?"

Izuku paused for a moment to consider. I-Island probably wouldn't be his choice of vacation considering quirk usage was nearly unrestricted there normally and he'd be one of the only ones left out.

Izuku forced an excited smile,

"Yeah! It would be."

—

Izuku grunted in frustration as the microscope he had borrowed from the school's science closet again only turned up some sort of cell. He had been very careful not to wash away the solution from the broken bullet and had hoped to get some sort of clue as to what had caused the erasing effect from the previous day. From what he could tell, since he was only finding some sort of living tissue (or at least what was once living tissue) it must have come from some sort of quirk.

He grimaced at the thought. Who would willingly give their own tissue to produce some sort of weapon? The revelation that it was someone's body that made up the bullets had only cemented the idea that the Yakuza had been the ones to make the bullet. The morality of using human tissue in the production of weapons could only be found in under-the-table dealings and organizations.

Anyways, with the microscope not turning up anything useful to Izuku, he decided he might as well investigate the bullet some more. Now that he had given up on the liquid,he decided to wash it away. It wasn't yielding results and he didn't want to be caught with something that could erase matter.

He left the capsule in the little tray he'd had it in and ran it under the tap until it was clean. He moved back over to his station and used a pair of pliers to pull apart the capsule. This way he would be able to see how the thing worked better.

From what Izuku could tell, the bullet was pretty much just a simple hollow compartment with a single opening to where the needle was. It seemed as though the fluid was supposed to exit the cavity through the needle into whatever it hit, but it occurred to Izuku, that with such a small opening, not much of the solution would exit the capsule. Additionally, it seemed as though the needle itself wasn't optimized to withstand much force considering it was broken short and bent sideways.

Izuku pulled his notebook from his back to make some notes just as his teacher passed in front of him.

"Mr. Midoriya," the teacher seemed somewhat resigned to whatever Izuku was doing, but he continued anyway, "I hope you're not destroying pens instead of finishing your experiment."

"Of course not, sensei." Izuku gestured to the side where his filled-out worksheet sat, ready for evaluation.

The teacher only grunted in acknowledgement and plucked the worksheet off the table before walking back to his desk at the front of the room. Izuku watched him sit down again before he opened the notebook to a blank page and started scribbling in notes on the capsule and how he could improve it.

By the end of class, he had made changes to the design of the bullet, first of which was to split the compartment into two pieces: one cavity and the other solid metal. The cavity-part of the bullet would have a second bit that would cover the solid part, but when the bullet impacted something, the solid part of the bullet would force more of the filling through the needle. The second change Izuku had considered was with the needle. He marked in his book that the needle should be able to retract into the bullet in case whatever it hit was too tough to pierce. He also marked that if the filling of the cavity was combustible, the bullet could be used as a low-powered explosive.

Time in his science class was coming to a close so Izuku tucked his things back into his bag and looked around the room. His eyes landed on Kacchan who was sitting in the back corner of the room looking down at his left hand in silence. Izuku paused for a moment before he pulled his notebook back out and set it back on the table. He scribbled in under the needle-related note,

Some sort of nitroglycerin mixture.

Izuku looked at his blueprint for the improved bullets for a moment. He then closed the book and wrote on the front cover,

Support Hero Analysis for the Future.

If Izuku couldn't become a hero the traditional way, he would use his ideas to construct his own quirk. His own weapon. His brain.

Izuku set to work.