==========================VI==========================

[Takoba Municipal Beach Park, May 24th, 2234]

"Toshinori-san?"

"Yes, my boy?"

Izuku fidgeted on the bench. "Tenno-kun, what should I tell her about my quirk? I don't have one yet, but when I get One For All…"

"Ah, you're worried about explaining your sudden power to her." Toshinori mused. That was an excellent question. The girl had only been friends with Midoriya for a few days, and they'd only interacted once since last Monday. "Well, she doesn't know that you are currently quirkless. You could tell her the story we originally came up with about it being a dormant stockpile quirk. Or you could simply tell her the partial truth that you are quirkless and if you feel comfortable telling her about One For All later on I have no problem with that."

Izuku stared at him in shock. "B-b-but it's supposed to be a secret!"

Toshinori nodded. "I trust that Tenno-kun can keep One For All a secret." After all, she was harboring an arguably bigger one than his transferable quirk. "And… I know how hard it can be to keep something like this secret from your friends." He admitted with a sad look on his face. "As All Might and Toshinori, I don't have many people in the loop about the true nature of my quirk. Only a select few know. I have kept it secret from some of my closest friends out of fear of them being targeted." He sighed. Maybe once he passed on the quirk he should come clean, especially to Cathleen, Zhongli, and David. "But you don't have to worry about the villain I was so afraid of."

"I guess…" Izuku decided.

"Young Midoriya," Toshinori started. "I know that I haven't… been particularly attentive when it comes to your social life." Most of the time he spent with Izuku was supervising his training. He still had his duties as All Might, and preparing for his next year of teaching at U.A. (Which Izuku didn't know about yet.) "I know from experience how hard it is to grow up quirkless."

"Wait," Izuku's eyes widened. "You were…"

"Quirkless? Yes. I was quirkless until I received One For All when I was eighteen." He looked at Izuku guiltily. "I guess that makes me a bit of a hypocrite after what I told you, huh."

Izuku waved his hands rapidly. "N-no! You were right! You didn't become a hero until you got your qui-"

"No. I was wrong. I allowed my own experience to cloud my judgment. When you saved your classmate, you acted like a hero even without a quirk." He patted Izuku's back. "The definition of a hero isn't something that came about with quirks, as some people seem to forget. A hero is someone who does their best to save everyone, with or without powers. I think that even without a quirk, you could become an amazing hero."

"Really?"

"Yes, my boy. I'm not infallible. Could you be a hero like me without a quirk? Probably not. But you could be a hero nonetheless." He said honestly. Realistically it would be too dangerous to try to fight villains on the level that he did, even for people with quirks. Intense training can only carry you so far against an overwhelming force. He could tell by the look in young Midoriya's eyes that he understood.

"Thank you Toshinori-san." Izuku gave the man a tearful hug.

==VI==

Haylee and Izuku were friends now, but unfortunately, daily life got in the way of being able to hang out the past week. Between Izuku having school for most of the day and Haylee studying this world to blend in better and spending time with Ordan and Natah, the two hadn't bonded further.

Natah and Ordan had been ecstatic upon hearing Haylee had made a friend. Well, Ordan was. Natah just smiled warmly and said she was happy for Haylee. Ordan totally didn't cry at all.

But finally, it was the weekend, which meant Izuku would be at the beach nearly the whole day. Sure, it would just be more training but it's not like she had any other ideas of what to do.

She made her way down to the beach while snacking on a chocolate bar. The candy version was even better than the protein bar. She'd put a not-insignificant amount of her food allowance into chocolate. It wasn't like the extra sugar in her diet would be unhealthy or anything. Her unique biology made sure of that. Plus the dopamine made her feel really good.

It wasn't like she was the only one with an obsession. Ordan spent far more than her on purely soy sauce. It was the first topping he'd had with his new body and the man had developed an addiction to it. Most of what he ate was more sauce than food. Eurgh.

But the item most of their food budget went toward was tea. Hunhow, Ordan, and Natah all loved to drink it. (Mostly because Ordan wasn't allowed to drink caffeine after the incident.) Barring the occasional argument between the two men about refilling the jug whenever Ordan drank the last of it there weren't any issues. Considering that the drink was the sole thing that Hunhow enjoyed, as long as he had a supply his murderous rage would be sated.

Oh, hey she's at the beach now.

"Hey! Midoriya-kun!" She waved to the boy sitting by the beach with Yagi-san in his civilian form. "Been a while! Started training yet?"

The boy's face visibly brightened. "Tenno-kun!"

"Ah, young Tenno," Toshinori greeted her with a smile. "You're looking well." The girl had a much happier air about her since the last he saw her. She was even smiling, albeit slightly. "Today we are taking a break from training. Young Midoriya has been going above and beyond in his training. He needs this weekend to rest so his body can recover." Toshinori explained, pointing to the large segment of the cleared beach.

Now that he mentioned it, Midoriya did look a bit tired. Whenever she'd been at the beach he'd been working basically non-stop, only pausing for short breaks in between to rest and eat. Doing that for weeks on end had to be taxing. Maybe he had an endurance quirk that was helping him. Either that or he was just determined beyond reason, which she could respect.

"So, you have the weekend off?"Haylee inquired. "What do you usually do in your free time?"

"W-well, I uh…" He looked away shyly, unused to someone legitimately being interested in hanging out with him. "I like to study heroes, and, uh… write about quirks. I don't really have anything in particular that I do."

Well, shit. She was trying to defer to his knowledge of what normal teenagers did in this world. That just sounded like a hobby he did alone. Haylee looked over to Toshinori with a look that screamed "I have no idea what I'm doing." Sure, she had a friend, and that was great, but she was so emotionally and socially stunted that she didn't know where to even start.

The #1 hero cleared his throat. "Perhaps you should find something you're both interested in? Something you both enjoy?"

Haylee put a hand to her chin. Something that they both enjoyed? She'd already shared the little things she did like carving and sewing. Most of the other stuff she liked to do wasn't really possible here. Midoriya was almost as bad as her, but… he liked quirks…

"You like to study quirks right? Do you… want me to show you mine?" Void, it felt weird calling her powers a quirk, but that was what they were now apparently. "Wait, crap, we can't do it in public. Quirk laws."

Toshinori waved his hand. "Actually, if you do it on the beach you will be fine. As a pro, I can authorize quirk usage, but even then I have a service form filled out to allow quirk usage for this beach cleanup." Which he'd obtained in case Midoriya was ready to use his quirk to train there. Also, he was curious about how Haylee's powers worked as well. He'd only seen her use her energy Void energy manipulation and transforming her arm. Apparently, it was that of her "Warframe", which if he understood correctly used to be a sort of drone she controlled before it somehow became a part of her body.

"Alright." She nodded.

The three of them walked down to the cleaned area of the beach. It was only a small segment of the beach, one with the least density of trash that had been cleared down to the shoreline.

"So, my quirk is pretty… complicated." She looked at Toshinori, who nodded. "I can produce a type of energy that I can manipulate to do different things." She held out her hand, wisely deciding to aim toward the open ocean. Taking a deep breath, she fired a beam of Void energy into the water. It was a low-power blast since she didn't have an Amp to focus the energy. An unrestrained Void blast could completely disintegrate a fully armored Grineer so she didn't want to accidentally delete something from existence.

She turned back around to see Izuku scribbling in a notebook. "Where did he get that?" Haylee shook her head. "I can fire the energy in a beam like that," she held her palm out flat and made a punching motion. Her hand pulsed with a blue-violet aura, creating a shockwave that blasted the sand in front of her away. "Or in a short-range burst."

Toshinori peeked over Izuku's shoulder. He already had half a page of notes on the girl's energy beam along with a fairly detailed sketch of Haylee firing a beam from her palm.

"What else can you do?" Izuku asked with excitement. Any trace of nervousness vanished the moment he started to write it down.

"This." Haylee crouched and then reappeared a few meters in front of them.

"Teleportation?" Toshinori guessed. That was certainly a surprise.

Haylee shrugged. "I mean… kinda? It's not teleportation per se. I still have to travel the distance between where I start and where I end up. Think of it like a grappling hook that I reel myself toward, except really fast."

"How far can you go? Is there a limit? Do you need to travel while invisible or can you move normally?" Izuku rapidly fired some questions that Haylee was surprisingly able to follow.

"About… fifteen to thirty meters if I charge it up, and I need to recover my stamina after doing it rapidly. And yes, I can move normally. Also, it's technically not invisibility. I'm…" Haylee paused. Wait. How did that work? Void walking put her in the Void plane parallel to reality, but the Void didn't exist in this universe. "Not exactly sure how it works." She said with a look of sudden confusion. "But I can't interact with anything while I'm doing it. If I try to do anything it breaks me out of the invisibility. The upside is that nothing can hurt me while I'm doing it either."

Izuku scribbled down that information. Her quirk was amazing! It had both offensive and defensive capabilities. She could hit people from afar or sneak up on them without being noticed! He suddenly remembered when he first talked to her and she cut her finger only for it to heal nearly immediately. "And you can heal too with that energy right?" He looked up from his notebook. "What about the thing with your arm and the energy sword? That was different than what you just used, right?"

Haylee faltered. Oh. She'd forgotten he saw that. It would've been so much easier to explain the Void powers, but the Warframe was something else entirely.

For one, it didn't exactly scream "natural". It was more like a hero outfit than a quirk in appearance. Her Void energy manipulation could be explained as a quirk. Being able to transform into an armored sci-fi-looking warrior? Slightly less so. Yagi-san said that people didn't have more than one quirk, right?

The second issue is that transforming was fucking painful. She missed being able to just transfer into a Warframe whenever she wanted. It was just as easy as breathing to her. But now whatever happened to her made it a part of her powers, not another entity. She hadn't even known she could do it when she changed her arm, acting purely on instinct to cut that fridge in half. Considering she passed out from a mixture of pain, exhaustion, and shock afterward she didn't exactly get a chance to think about it. The multi-day coma hadn't helped, and she didn't transform during their stay at U.A.

But once they'd moved into the privacy of her new home she'd practiced her new ability. The first time she'd fully transformed she nearly passed out from the pain. Over time, it got easier but it was still uncomfortable as hell and pretty fucking gross.

At least she had the option. She would've preferred other Warframes over Excalibur, but she had to take what she had. It gave her some measure of protection and offense that her human body didn't have. Excalibur still had its shields thankfully, since they were generated by a specialized organ. The downside was she didn't have access to any of the mods or implants the frame used to possess. A fully upgraded Warframe was the equivalent of dropping a thermonuclear warhead on a battlefield. An unmodified one was just a smaller bomb, but it was still a fucking bomb.

This just meant she had to be more careful as she didn't have a reliable means of regenerating the Warframe's health and energy other than transforming back.

Naturally, she'd tested this in the most logical way possible.

She'd stabbed herself in the stomach with Exalted Blade while transformed.

At least she had the foresight to do it in the bathtub, with the window cracked open. Burning infested flesh smelled really bad if you let it stew. The wound didn't close until she transformed back into her human form. She'd also put a hole in the shirt she was wearing at the time. Thankfully any clothes she wore when she transformed changed with her. It would've been really embarrassing if she ended up naked whenever she changed back. That said if she took damage to her body while Excalibur, it would still leave damage on her clothes when she turned back.

She snapped out of her train of thought. "Do you really want to see it?" Haylee cringed.

"S-sorry I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable…" Izuku shied back.

She gave him a curious look. "I'm not," Well, she would be physically. "It's just not pleasant to look at when I transform." They probably didn't see her arm transform back then. Seeing how they weren't backing down, she sighed. "Alright. I hope you don't lose your breakfast. If it sounds like I'm in pain just ignore it."

==VI==

Toshinori was about to question the last part of what she said when the girl took a deep breath, cracked her knuckles, and closed her eyes.

First, her body began to grow, which was obviously painful judging by the loud pops and grunting sounds she made. Her clothes seemed to melt into her body like a liquid while her visible features faded. It formed a shell of purple and gold metal around her body. Haylee's chest flattened out, taking on a more muscular and masculine shape. Her skull narrowed and gained visible extrusion that looked like a small horn. With a few final pops and a muffled scream, she finished transforming. Her skin remolding into purple and dark turquoise armor with golden accents.

"Holy shit," Toshinori whispered. "No wonder she said it was painful."

"Woah," Izuku said with wide eyes, already sketching a picture of Excalibur. "That's incredible! Such an unusual quirk! So you have a dual quirk then?"

"Huh? A dual quirk?" Haylee asked. Her voice sounded modulated and had a slight echo to it now.

"It's when someone gets the quirks of both their parents merged into a single quirk. It's pretty rare since they usually combine into something that uses both but not impossible." Izuku explained.

Well, at least she had an excuse for having two different quirks. It wasn't a perfect one but she'd take it. "You're not… freaked out by this?"

"I mean it is a little freaky but it's fascinating simultaneously," Izuku said. "What can you do in this state?"

"Huh, he really was a lot more confident when discussing quirks," Haylee noted. "I can use the same energy that I used in my untransformed state to do a few different things. Besides that, I'm a lot stronger and faster in this form." To demonstrate, she performed a bullet jump, reaching about fifteen meters in the air before punching toward the beach with a ground slam.

"This one is called Slash Dash." With a flash of blue violet, she surged forward with a single slash of her newly manifested energy sword.

"You might want to cover your eyes for the next one," She instructed, turning around as they did so. She fired off a low-power Radial Blind so as to not blow out their eardrums or blind them through their hands. "That was Radial Blind, it can temporarily blind and deafen people around me." It was probably best not to mention that it could permanently blind someone if she cast it at high enough power.

"Wow!" Izuku's eyes sparkled.

"There are only two more moves I have. Radial Javalin and Exalted Blade. I can't really use the Javalin without a target but it makes summons a floating blade that slams into the target." Radial Javalin was probably one of Excalibur's most dangerous abilities in terms of raw killing power, aside from the final one.

"And this," She raised her hands and pulled them apart, summoning the energy blade she used for Slash Dash. "Is Exalted Blade." It was a sword of pure light, which was unusual since it normally had a physical form. Another change to her power but not important enough to be an issue. She could already feel the steady drain of energy from having the weapon out though.

"This is my strongest ability, and it can hit things at a range too." She swung the sword toward the water, releasing a violet arc of energy that split an incoming wave in half before dissipating. "It drains my energy reserves to keep it active though." With that, she deactivated the ability. "So, uh… what do you think?" Haylee nervously asked while taking a shy pose that looked fairly ridiculous considering she was a tall armored space ninja guy now.

"Very impressive! You have fine control over your quirk young lady." Toshinori praised. Though in the back of his head, he knew that experience came at the cost of the poor girl's innocence.

Izuku, on the other hand, was absolutely enthralled with all the information he'd been given about her quirk. He rushed over to her to get a closer look at her Warframe form. "It's incredible! Your quirk is so cool Tenno-kun! You'd be an amazing hero with it!" He gushed while scribbling in his notebook.

Haylee was taken aback by that last bit. "Me? A hero?"

Izuku looked up from his notebook. "Sorry, I just thought with how skilled you were with your quirk you must have been training a lot to become one… I'm sorry for jumping to that assumption." He shrunk back.

"Y-you don't need to apologize… I just… never really thought about it before…" Haylee clarified. The Warframe was a weapon of, you know, war. It wasn't designed to save lives or bring in criminals. Warframes were made to do one thing: slaughter the enemies of the Orokin on-mass. Sure, she could bring in targets alive, but alive didn't necessarily mean "entirely intact". People don't need their limbs to live after all.

But… Ordan and Natah were training to become heroes, and their powers were just as dangerous if not more than her own. Surely it wouldn't be too difficult to train her powers down to a non-lethal level, right?

What did she even want to do in this world? She had power, more than ever before. There was no war here, so what use did it have? All she'd done in the past few weeks was wallow in self-loathing and trying to suppress everything. She hadn't put a lot of thought into what sort of life she wanted to live.

Izuku wanted to be a hero, and he made it sound like he didn't have many friends, if any. She was supposed to be his friend now, so shouldn't she try to get into U.A. with him? Friends stick together, right?

Her reasoning wasn't entirely selfless. Having tasted the sweet nectar of friendship, she didn't want to lose it after only a few months. Hero school was most likely time-consuming like the training he was doing now. Izuku was a pretty nice kid. He'd gone out of his way to befriend her despite her… less than approachable attitude. He reminded her of people long dead she'd been close to.

He seemed to believe in her. "I mean, why not?" She said aloud. It wouldn't hurt to try.

"I guess Nezu was right about the possibility she would want to be a hero." Toshinori thought.

==VI==

Haylee's quirk was one of the most complex ones that Izuku had ever heard of. Energy manipulation, regeneration, and transformation all bundled together. It was incredible, not to mention it looked cool.

He did have some questions though. Half her quirk was an emitter, the other a transformation that bordered on a full mutation. Plus her "Excalibur" form, as she'd called it, looked like something out of a science fiction game. She obviously had extensive training and control over her quirk, but she hadn't thought about becoming a hero until now. There were a lot of things about her and her quirk that didn't make sense.

Toshinori said she didn't have an easy life, and it sounded like Haylee was adopted. Her guardians were apparently pros, so maybe they trained her? It would explain their outfits when they washed up on the beach. He would ask her himself but it seemed a bit insensitive after only knowing her a week.

Haylee transformed back to her normal form, showing off some moves she'd forgotten like a wave of energy that could suspend things in the air temporarily.

Toshinori had gone to get them some ice cream after her display, which was another thing Haylee apparently didn't know existed. This left the two teens alone on the beach.

"So, I noticed that book you were writing about my quirk in. What is it?" Haylee asked, taking a look at the book. "Hero Analysis for the Future No. 13?"

Oh gods she was asking about his notebooks. "O-oh this? You know how I like to write about quirks, and uh, I keep them in notebooks. I just think they are so cool and…" Was she going to think it's creepy like everyone else?

"Can I see?" She held out a hand and he nervously handed the burnt notebook over. Haylee began to flip through it. It was basically a mini codex entry on various pro-heroes and what looked to be classmates of Midoriya. Fairly decent information gathering for someone his age. Her eyes wandered over her own pages. "Wow, these are pretty good. You got pretty close on how some of my powers work." He even had some suggestions on ways she could experiment, not that they would work. It was impossible to create new abilities for a Warframe.

"Y-you don't think it's c-creepy?" Izuku stuttered.

"No, what?" Haylee balked. "Why the hell would I be creeped out by this? They're good notes for just watching me explain my powers briefly. If people think this is creepy then they're fucking idiots. Did you learn this all yourself?"

She didn't think it was weird and creepy? In fact, she sounded impressed by it, just like All Might had been. He wiped the beginning of tears from his eye. "N-no, my dad used to do quirk analysis overseas and he left me a bunch of his books. I read through them a bunch to learn about quirks since mine didn't… come… in…" Izuku trailed off, eyes widening as he realized what he just said. He didn't mean to say that!

Haylee seemed pretty nonplussed about the reveal. "So you don't have a quirk? That just makes it more impressive. I thought you had a stamina one or something with how hard you've been pushing yourself in training. Quirklessness isn't common if I remember correctly, right?"

"N-not in people our age." Izuku clarified. "It's more common with those over sixty."

"So do you like, want to be the first quirkless hero or something?" Haylee inquired. "You certainly have the attitude for it in my opinion."

"You really think so? Toshinori-san and my mom are the only other people who have believed in me like that… Everyone else says you can't be a hero without a quirk."

Haylee raised an eyebrow. "That's stupid. You don't need a quirk to beat the crap out of someone or save a life. It's just a tool." She knew plenty of people, like those in the syndicates that didn't have any special powers. Even her enemies, well, ones that didn't have Eximus enhancements used weapons and armor. She remembered seeing that one clip another Tenno uploaded onto the Lotus network of a Corpus crewman beating the everliving shit out of an infested Phorid, something that usually took a fully armed Tenno hit squad to eliminate. "Why do you want to be a hero Midoriya-kun?"

"I want to be a hero that saves everyone. Not just people in trouble, but the villains, the people society left behind." Izuku stated. "Like how All Might save everyone with a smile, I want to be a hero that brings everyone hope."

"That's a noble dream." She didn't exactly agree with saving the villains. Some people didn't deserve to be saved. "A Symbol of Hope."

"But I- I don't think I can do that without a quirk."

"I mean, your probably right." Izuku's heart sank. "But you still saved me."

"What?" He blinked.

Haylee poked him in the arm. "Remember a few days ago when I was being an asshole?"

"Y-you weren't!"

"Don't lie, I'm admitting to it dammit! I was being a jerk and lashing out at everyone. I didn't even want to talk to you, but you tried to befriend me anyway." She sighed. "If you hadn't done that, I probably would've gone home and never come back. You, Midoriya Izuku, saved me when I didn't even know I wanted to be saved. So I think that has to count for something, right?" Haylee gave him a faint smile.

Izuku felt a faint spark of confidence. Haylee believed in him. Toshinori believed in him. His mom believed in him. Two times today he'd had people tell him he could be a hero without a quirk. Sure, he couldn't save everyone without one, but he'd saved Kacchan from the sludge villain. Haylee just said he saved her from herself. He couldn't be the hero who saved everyone now, but he was off to a good start. Once he got All Might's quirk, he would be able to save even more people!

"Thank you, Tenno-kun I needed-"

"I AM HERE! WITH ICE CREAM!" All Might shouted as he appeared behind them.

"Ahhh!" Both teens screamed and fell off the bench.

"Sorry!" Toshinori apologized sheepishly and transformed back into his civilian form, holding a box with three ice cream cones. "The line was long and I wanted to get these back before they started to melt!" He handed each of them a cone. "Here, chocolate fudge for you, Tenno-kun, and Vanilla All Might Soft Serve for you, young Midoriya." He pulled out a vanilla dairy-free yogurt for himself too.

"Thank you, Toshinori/Yagi-san!" They both bowed.

"So uh… how do I eat ice cream?" Haylee held up the cone. "Do I just bite it?"

"You can, or you can lick it, like this." Izuku demonstrated.

Haylee stared at the cold treat in her hand. Chocolate fudge… she was already drooling just imagining the taste! She gave it a cursory lick and let out an uncharacteristic squeal. "Yummy!" She began to furiously lick the ice cream, even taking small nibbles out of it.

Toshinori chuckled and pulled out a small spoon. He laughed even harder when the young lady got her first brain freeze.

==========================VI==========================

So that's how Haylee's quirk works. It's a combination of her Excalibur and her Tenno Abilities of the Naramon school, which is why she could use Void Levitation on objects. It fits with her personality of "hit things harder". So she's half void eldritch abomination with the MITW's dormant power and half-infested abomination.

I've seen a comment or two questioning why I made her and other Warframe characters' powers quirks, and there is a good reason for it in-universe, not just something arbitrary that I decided. I won't say much since the reason is a very important plot reveal later on in the story.

Izuku's ice cream is one from the MY HERO ACADEMIA: SMASH! spin-off Manga, which isn't canon but it's the only thing I found him eating ice cream in.