A/N: Thank you everyone for your kind reviews! I do intend to update this frequently through at least the month of November (FanNoWriMo, y'all). Feel free to check this story out on SufficientVelocity or Spacebattles if you want to join in on the discussions there!
Being a victim was exhausting.
For days after the incident at the Tatooin shopping plaza, classmates who I passed in the hallway were forced by social obligation and custom to pretend to care about my health. "Dude, I heard what happened, glad to see you're okay." You aren't, but that's alright. I acknowledge your participation in this social ritual, and hereby discharge you from your responsibilities. "Hey man, I saw what happened to you on the news, are you all right?" Hmm, what answer will end this conversation fastest? Oh, yeah, I'm fine. "Are you sure you're okay? Do you need anything?" Not really, but I'll take any excuse to skip out of gym class. "Did you really get saved by All Might? What was he like?" A blur receding rapidly into the distance, because all of us victims that he saved were apparently beneath his notice, but I can't exactly say it like that so I'll just say he seemed busy.
As bad as school was, home was worse. Rather than relaxing comfortably at home, I spent far too much time having to hang out with my adorable little sister in order to reassure her that I wasn't suddenly not going to come home one day. Even my parents came home from work in time for dinner several days in a row immediately after, then took turns being home in the evenings for a while to 'make sure that we were alright.' To be sure, I loved my family. And I didn't hate having my parents around, especially early enough in the evenings that they were awake enough to hold a conversation. Even Komachi's pestering was endearing in its own right, though having to console her every time she had a nightmare and woke up crying was something I very much could have done without. But between school and home, for several weeks after the incident I had zero time to myself, to sit, think, or relax. For a person as used to peaceful solitude as myself, it was hellish.
Naturally, I resolved that I would never become a victim again.
One week after the Tatooin incident, things had quieted down enough at school and at home for me to finally be able to test out the powers I had copied. All Might was the most notable one, of course, but in the aftermath I had also managed to 'express my thanks' to some of the other pro heroes who had been at the scene. I had half a dozen pro-level quirks burning a hole in my pocket, and I hadn't had the chance to test any of them yet! "Oi, Komachi. I'm going out for a run," I called out, lacing up the shoes of my sneakers as I did so.
"Whoa, my big brother is suddenly getting fit? What will I do if a girl at school notices and takes you away from me? Ah! I earned a lot of Komachi points with that one!" My sister, unlike me, is a person who possesses the four necessary prerequisites to become popular - she's cute, pretty, has a good face, and has a good quirk. Despite that, she is still somehow willing to continue associating with her uncool older brother, which I can only attribute to her still being young and innocent. It occasionally gets a little obnoxious when she pops up like she did then, her eyes sparkling, making a big deal out of a simple run, but somehow I managed not to mind too much.
"Yeah, yeah," I responded. "Don't worry, I wouldn't forget about you even if I had a girl on each arm."
"Sis-con!" She said with an accusing finger pointed directly at me. Oi, don't you know that's rude? " Also, eww! A girl on each arm? You need to stop reading so many skeevy light novels, onii-chan!"
"Says the girl who spends all day watching television," I retorted, rolling my eyes at the familiar argument. "Anyways, I'll probably be out for a bit, but I should be back by dinner."
"Eh? For that long?" she said, surprised.
I replied with a shrug, not really wanting to explain. "Yeah. Why, something wrong?"
"Nuh-uh." Komachi shook her head, kind of a soft smile on her face. "It's fine, I was just surprised. Good luck, onii-chan!" And then, softly, almost under her breath - "Just as long as you run away properly, next time."
… Like I said, Komachi has a tendency to make a big deal out of some things too often, but she's just too cute for me to stay annoyed with her.
In any case, although I had said that I was going for a run, naturally, I was going out to test my new quirks. In theory, unlicensed quirk use in public areas was technically illegal; in practice, as long as you were careful not to damage anything, make too much noise, or otherwise gave other people cause to complain, nobody really cared. It was one of those sorts of laws that was mainly used as a reminder to keep things on the down-low if you lived in a nicer area, and was used give the police an excuse to mess with you if you lived in a low-income or minority community. Personally speaking, my 108 skills were typically all weak enough that you could barely even tell if I was using them, so I had never bothered with trying to find a special training area or anything like that in the past.
Unfortunately, that meant that the first time I tried out the quirk that I was calling Stockpile, rather than being in a secluded location where no-one could hear me yell, I was in a public park at the basketball court.
A quick digression: because my quirk lets me identify the specifics of the quirks that other people when I copy them, I am unusually well-informed about things that have to do with being a Quirk Counselor. In fact, my junior high Quirk Counselor had frequently suggested that I look into it as a career, since according to him 'my quirk itself wasn't really good for much else.' Specifically, something he said once stood out to me. "You don't really have to worry about this, Hachiman, since your quirk is so weak - that is, since it copies quirks so weakly - but if you're ever advising someone with a more powerful quirk in the future, you should know that a lot of copy quirks often just copy the main effect of the quirk, and don't copy the physical conditioning or the minor heteromorphic mutations that the quirk causes in order to use that quirk safely. Some people with copy quirks have really hurt themselves trying to copy unsuitable quirks, so in a way, you should probably be grateful that your own quirk is so… gentle."
On the plus side, not only did I jump high enough to dunk a basketball, I jumped high enough that I could have stepped on the hoop.
On the minus side, I nearly broke both of my legs just jumping, and hurt them even more when I landed.
Back on the plus side, I have a frie… hm. I have an acquai… hm. I have a gym partner named Zaimokuza Yoshiteru, whose strength at recovering from critique of his shitty light novel parodies is matched only by the fortitude that his Regeneration Quirk gives him at recovering from actual injuries. Despite the fact that a single jump had thoroughly strained every muscle in my legs and sprained both of my ankles as I landed, if I used 1/108th of his Regeneration Quirk to heal myself up I should be able to walk home in time for dinner.
Back on the minus side, Zaimokuza's Regeneration Quirk didn't exactly have a pain suppression ability associated with it, so healing up my busted legs was just as painful as injuring them in the first place had been. Suffice it to say, I wasn't exactly quiet about the whole process.
After a few endless minutes of groaning, moaning, and whining as all the muscles in my legs reknit themselves, I was eventually able to hobble over to a nearby park bench and to sit on it instead of lying on the ground in a heap. It was a good thing that I did, too, because not long after I sat, a police officer on a bicycle came pedaling up to me. "Everything all right?" he called out.
"Uh.. Yeah, everything's fine." Despite the fact that I was still really quite sore, I did my best to maintain a poker face.
"I see." He said, shining his flashlight over me. Luckily, although I had landed pretty hard, Zaimokuza's Regeneration Quirk was keeping me from bruising too much. "We received reports of screaming noises nearby, possibly a woman or a small child according to the caller. Have you heard anything like that?"
Like a woman or a small child!? No, keep your poker face, think of a lie, think of a lie… "Uh, actually, yeah. There was this blonde kid & two of his friends who were all chasing someone in that direction," I said, waving towards the arcade. Petty? Maybe, but I figured that if they were known troublemakers in the area that it'd be a more believable excuse.
Also, it was possible that I was still holding a grudge.
Still, the police officer either believed me, or figured that I had been suitably admonished to stop making noise, and so headed off in search of those fictional hooligans. Similarly, once I had healed up a little bit more, I decided to hobble away to somewhere more private where I could lick my wounds and berate myself for being so stupid. All Might was the invincible hero, a man who could defeat practically every villain, or rescue people from even the most dangerous situations. Unsurprisingly, slightly less than 1% of near-infinity was still really, really, really big. Just because I had copied his power didn't mean I could actually use it; even tapping into that well of power for a brief second had strained nearly every (admittedly underdeveloped) muscle in my body and placed incredible pressure on my tendons and joints.
That's why, if I was going to be honest, the most useful power I had copied that day wasn't All Might's. Nor was it any of the quirks of Death Arms, Backdraft, Mt. Lady, or Kamui Woods, all of whose hands I had shook 'in order to thank them for trying to rescue me', nor the quirk of that blonde kid I got trapped with. No, the most useful power I had in my entire collection of 108 skills... was the one that I had gotten from that slimy pile of ooze.
It hadn't seemed like it was worth much at the time, but that Ooze Quirk fit my 108 Skills to a T, like it had been made for me. Yes, yes, I'm aware of the joke potential, thank you. You see, normally my 108 stored quirks sit in their own silos or slots, none of them interacting with another, leaving me able to only access one slot at a time. The Ooze Quirk, however, had the ability to copy every quirk that its holder was touching, simultaneously. And since I was constantly touching myself - not like that, you deviant - that meant that in theory I could also use every quirk I had, simultaneously. Of course I had only copied it at 1/108th strength, so really I could only use two quirks simultaneously, but that was one more quirk than I was able to use at once before.
The possibilities were endless! It wasn't just that if I found two people with fire quirks, I could use both at the same time and have a quirk that was 1/54 of a fire quirk; heck, the reason that hero teams were so common was that 1+1 didn't always have to equal 2! I could take fire quirk and use it together with an oil quirk, or a water quirk with an electricity quirk, or a strength quirk with a size increase quirk, or a flight quirk with a wind quirk, and so on, and so on, and so on. It was a situation perfect for a loner like me who always wound up the odd man out during team activities, because now I could be on a team with myself! Out of all of the possible combinations I could use, though the most tempting was the thought of using one of my 'lesser' quirks together with All Might's Stockpile.
As far as I could tell, his Stockpile quirk (though he probably called it something cheesy like his 'I AM A HERO' quirk in badly-accented English) was part generalized strength enhancement, part power storage. While I couldn't turn off the strength enhancement, I was pretty confident that if I got used to that power that I could also use it to store up my 106 other quirks and potentially use those as one-off blasts with actual force behind them. It was everything I could have hoped for and more in a quirk… that is, if I dared to use it.
At the time, I assumed that the fact that All Might had a storage quirk was the reason that he kept the precise mechanisms of his quirk a secret; I assumed that he didn't want anybody to know that if his bank of stored-up power was exhausted, he could theoretically run out of power. The idea that I knew the secret vulnerability of the most powerful man on Earth was frankly a terrifying one. If I blabbed carelessly, I could give villains a way to destroy him; more importantly, if All Might figured out that I had stolen his power and knew his secret, who knew what he would do to keep me quiet? Sure, the media portrayal of him was that he was the nicest, most generous soul ever to walk the face of the planet, but wasn't that obviously just good P.R.?
Between the guilt I already felt for betraying All Might's kindness, and the frightening thought of what could happen if I was publicly accused of my crimes by the most powerful and popular man in the world, I was all but prepared to go home, celebrate the fact that my Quirk was a bit more useful now, and then take every necessary action to avoid ever being put into the public eye where someone could possibly figure out what I had done. Even though I still had lingering dreams of being a hero from my chuunibyou phase, even though all of the versatility and flexibility that I had prayed for my quirk to develop as a child had finally become a reality, I was still unwilling to take the risk for the mere sake of indulging my lingering childhood obsessions. Yet because of those old dreams, I couldn't quite give the idea up either.
For a few days, I teetered on the edge, torn between fear and longing, until finally I found a tiebreaker - seething anger and contempt.
"Yes, come in, come in. Don't worry, you two aren't in trouble, I just wanted to go over some things with you in regards to your high school applications." Although the vice-principal said that, for some reason I couldn't relax. It wasn't because he was a half-bat heteromorph, with huge ears and an unusual nose; honestly, between the coke-bottle glasses and the fuzzy sweaters the man liked to wear, he looked more like a Disney character than anything. It was because the other person in the room with me was Orimoto Kaori. She wasn't horrifying to look at either; in fact with her frizzy brown hair and wide smile she was actually pretty cute, which was the problem. You know, since I had been brutally rejected by her not so long ago.
Desperate for a distraction, I cleared my throat. "Our applications? Is there a problem?"
"Not as such, no, not as such. I just wanted to make sure that the two of you had both thought through writing U.A. as your first choice of schools, especially as your second picks were both also very competitive. You do both know that, given two students with similar scores, high schools prefer to admit the student that placed their school higher up on their list, correct?"
I nodded in assent, and next to me Orimoto did as well. "Don't worry, sir. I know how tough U.A.'s hero course is to get into," she said with a smile. "I'll be working hard this year to make sure I meet the mark."
The vice principal chuckled kindly. "Well, with your quirk Orimoto-san, I'm sure you'll have a good shot at passing the practical part of the exam - just don't forget to study hard this year so that you meet the academic requirements!" Naturally, Orimoto smiled and gave him a determined nod. Then he turned to me. "As for you, Hikigaya-kun, your average marks are high enough that you're on track to make the grade already, though that's no excuse for you to slack off, especially in math and science. It's just… are you sure that you want to apply to the hero course, rather than general studies or the business course? It's true that U.A. does sometimes accept students in general studies who failed the hero course, but in your case the practical... well, UA's medical staff is excellent but … I can understand wanting to test yourself, but it's not like the level of danger is zero, you know. Does your family support your decision?"
"I -" To be honest, I was tempted. A large part of me did want to give up, wasn't ready to deal with the stress of potentially compromising the secret of having stolen a piece of All Might's power. Even more so, there was the fact that I was naturally a pretty lazy person, used to coasting on my admittedly superior intelligence, and getting into U.A. would require real, actual work. And finally, my whole reason for wanting to get into the hero program in the first place was to impress and emulate a girl who I had recently realized was a complete and utter hypocrite.
"Actually, sir -" But just as I was about to concede, I saw it. That subtle, half-hidden sneer. I'm not particularly a stranger to being looked down upon, but somehow this was different. Look down on me because you think I'm weak? Fine, so what, not like you're wrong. Because I'm antisocial? Hah, I accept your scorn with pride. But Orimoto Kaori was looking at me like I was scum. Like I was a toad lusting after a swan's flesh, that I was unworthy of breathing the same air that she breathed. That somehow, in having dared to presume that I could possibly be an equal to her in any way, that I had wronged her.
When news anchors interview superheroes on television, they ask superheroes what inspired them to take up the mantle. Typically, the answers are always something suitably inspiring - a tragedy that they witnessed or that happened to them, or an idol that they admired, something wholesome and positive. Before I become a pro for real, I'm going to have to come up with a lie that sounds better than 'to rub the fact that I got in and they didn't in my classmate's stupidly pretty face.'
"Actually, sir, my mind is made up. I'm going to U.A." I said it with conviction, and the vice-principal's bushy eyebrows rose up over the rim of his heavy glasses.
"I see. Well, work hard, young man," he said, giving me an encouraging pat on the shoulder.
And for the next ten months, that's exactly what I did.
If someone was going to make an anime of my life, well, first of all it would probably be really low-budget, because who the heck would watch anything like that? But secondly, the ten months between that meeting with the vice principal and the day of the entrance exam probably could be summarized with a several minutes-long montage that went on as inspirational music played in the background. It would have to, because the actual process of going through those ten months was incredibly tedious. Note to self: track down someone with the montage quirk. Even making training 1/108th less tedious would be a noticeable improvement!
The first scene of the montage would probably be me sitting in class, feverishly scribbling training plans into a notebook. Possibly there would be '10 km run, 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, EVERY SINGLE DAY' written in one corner, because that show was awesome, but most importantly for the benefit of the watchers it would have FOCUS ON TRAINING PRO-LEVEL QUIRKS written in easily-readable letters in the middle. Frankly, my fractional power copying skills were so weak that I only got a noticeable benefit out of the really powerful quirks, so the natural first step for me to take was to get comfortable and familiar with those.
Next, there would probably be a scene explaining how a lazy slacker like me actually got fit enough to pass a hero exam. Picture me sitting perfectly still glowing faintly orange and sweating profusely as I did my best to channel All Might's Stockpile, then a cutaway shot to pictures of muscles tearing, bones beginning to fracture. Then, suddenly the glow around me switches to green, as I channel Zaimokuza's Regeneration perk, and a shot of muscles and bones knitting back together, slightly stronger than before. Yeah, that's right, I figured out how to get a full-body workout done in about five minutes! Before you get too jealous, though, it's just as painful as suffering through an entire workout was, except all packed into five minutes.
Also, it didn't train cardio, so probably there would be several shots of me going running in all sorts of weather, sometimes alone, sometimes desperately trying to keep up with my little sister. You see, Komachi's quirk was sort of like mine, except superior in almost every way. If the anime was about my life, it would probably take the chance to introduce Komachi's powers now; they would show Komachi lightly skipping backwards as I ran forward with all of my might, then show her at the gym with me, holding 30-kilo plates lightly in each hand while I did my best to struggle with two hands holding just one plate, maybe even a scene of her casually doing one-handed handstands as I sweated through pushups, before finally switching to a splash page with an announcer voice-over. 'NAME: Hikigaya Komachi. QUIRK: Homomorphic Chimerization. Unlike her big brother who primarily copies Emitter quirks, Komachi only copies quirks that make physical changes to her body. Due to this, her body has the benefit of multiple passive boosts to her strength, speed, and toughness! However, those changes are limited to ones that would maintain a normal humanoid shape.' Basically, my little sister is a humanoid bio-weapon, a tyrannosaurus rex shrunk down to fit inside the body of a little girl. I swear I'm only slightly jealous.
Anyways, I did have a copy of her quirk in my 108 skills. Normally, I didn't bother to copy heteromorphism quirks, since none of them had ever seemed to have any effect on me. I mean, only something like .01% of cells in the human body are replaced during any given day, and my quirk would only affect something like 1% of those, i.e. .0001%. If one hundred-thousandth of the cells in your body were made slightly more efficient, how would you even tell? However, I had a little bit of hope that something would be different this time. First, there was the fact that ever since I copied the Ooze quirk, all of my copied Transformation quirks had gotten a little bit easier to use, without quite as much soreness after. Also I was deliberately going out of my way to damage my body, thus upping the number of cells that needed to be replaced, and then using Regeneration to spur on rapid cell division multiple times a day, so I figured that if I started channeling Komachi's quirk while I healed that maybe it would eventually be noticeable?
So maybe there would be a scene in the montage where it zoomed in on an individual cell, that cell got all ooze-green and started to melt, only to reform as a larger, spikier, metallic-looking muscle cell. Maybe not, too - because I was doing so many other things to try and get stronger at the time, I still have no idea if it had any impact at all.
In between scenes of me working out, of course, there would be scenes of me experimenting with the other pro-level quirks just to remind everybody what quirks I had so far: using Death Arms' quirk to easily lift a bar that I had trouble with before, causing water to spray out of my hand like it was a garden hose from Backdraft, slowly creating a wooden staff out of an ordinary stick with Kamui Woods' quirk, creating small explosions in the palm of my hand due to Explosion Boy, and finally growing to five meters tall with Mt. Lady's quirk (I lucked out there on that last one; originally I thought that since her quirk was to grow thirteen times taller, I would only have been able to grow an extra nine inches taller, but luckily her quirk worked by increasing her volume, which just happened to increase her height. Mount Lady's volume increased by a little over two thousand times, which meant I could grow in volume by a factor of not quite twenty, or an increase in height of about two and a half times.)
Then, a key change! The soundtrack gets to the good part, and the montage shows me finally running around with the Stockpile quirk active, moving so fast that my humanoid T-Rex of a little sister actually has to work hard to keep up! It shows me storing up bursts of power for the Explosion quirk to make actually respectable blasts, and me shaking out my hand in pain due to the backlash! It shows me combining Backdraft's water spray quirk with someone else's soap quirk to make a huge, bubbly mess for people to slip on! Me combining Stockpile and Death Arms to punch a small tree in half, then running away before anyone came to see what that noise was! Possibly a scene of me studying an actual textbook, just to remind viewers that I was doing that too! By the end of the ten months, I was totally ready for the pro hero test, completely certain that I was going to get in.
And then, of course, I threw all of that hard work away by jumping in front of a speeding car.