Okay, so heads up, this idea is going to be more of an attempt at horror, or at least writing horror, so that means that things in this particular entry, especially the themes, are going to be a bit more visceral and triggering.
Dead Heroes
(Inspired by Dead Space, Outcast, and Higurashi)
In one of U.A.'s many exercises, Class 1-A is split up into pairs and sent to several different hero agencies and locations across the country, with Izuku and Ochako being paired together and sent off on their way.
Their place of internship is the town known as Saviour, home to a massive pro hero/civilian living complex and industrial zone known as the Pinnacle, with a massive tower in the centre marking it as one of the biggest hubs for the pro hero industry in the entirety of Japan.
Upon their arrival, Izuku and Ochako are greeted eagerly by the pro heroes and civilians and are welcomed into the town, seeing the sights and getting in touch with the people there. They are amazed by the sights and sounds of the massive complex, and are dazzled by the Pinnacle tower, especially of the view on the top floor.
They've arrived just in time too. In a few days, there's going to be a festival taking place to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the hero industry being established, and it will be the biggest one to date, with thousands of people coming in from all corners of Japan to experience the festivities of the day.
However, there have recently been some dark disturbances. A year ago, a minor religious cult known as the Almighty moved into Saviour and occupied the rural houses that were abandoned within the town's outskirts when everyone moved into the big buildings of the nearby cities. Though they are considered to be an annoyance by many of the town's populace, especially considering their worship of All Might and quirks as signs of the gods, they have nonetheless entrenched themselves within Saviour and become a rather popular group within the local community, creating divisions within the local community.
But worse have been the growing cases of insomnia and dementia within the town, as pro heroes and civilians alike have been experiencing hallucinations and mental breaks in their psyches, sparking outbreaks of violence within the town and its massive industrial complex and living spaces, usually resulting in murder, rape, and eventually suicide on the part of those suffering from delusions.
For some odd reason, the authorities have been intent on gathering up the corpses of the dead and refusing to release them to their families or even the reasons for their deaths. This is to both keep the populace calm and to not give the heroes a reason to cancel the festival, what should be their most profitable venture to date, but also for a more insidious purpose...
This has in turn spurred on the members of the Almighty, who's members have also begun to suffer from delusions as well, but have been seeing them differently from everyone else, their faith translating them into messages from their gods. Suddenly, the group begins to transform. Orgies become as commonplace amongst the cult's members as increasingly aggressive acts of worship, and the splits amongst the townsfolk have begun to grow more violent as the Almighty shifts into a violent breeding cult (ala Event Horizon and Aniara) intent on creating what they consider to be the next heirs to the world, and have begun to horde the bodies of those who have died, worshipping them as angels and soon-to-be gods. And thanks to the increasing cases of dementia and insomnia, many people suffering from hallucinations have begun to drift to the cult as well, increasing their numbers as the divisions continue to grow worse and worse.
Izuku and Ochako are disturbed by the growing violence within Saviour, and are not comforted by the authorities and pro heroes attempting to crack down on the town's infighting, only resulting in further tensions and violence. The two end up making friends with a girl belonging to the Almighty cult known as Sara, one of its most faithful members. However, she immediately comes under persecution due to her being part of the Almighty, and Izuku and Ochako come under fire themselves due to their association with her.
But then, as the tension begins to escalate and the authorities still try to push on with the festival, even as tourists begin to flood in and more violent incidents begin to stack up, Izuku and Ochako find that they are increasingly unable to use their quirks...
And worse, they would begin to experience bouts on insomnia and hallucinations as well. Izuku's connection to One for All would grant him some immunity to this, but Ochako would not be so lucky, and she would start to suffer from violent bouts of dementia as well.
And then, the two of them are dragged into a dangerous situation when a pharmaceutical worker is taken hostage by a crazed man after the countless sleeping pills that he is given refuse to help his insomnia...
And it ends with the pharmaceutical worker being murdered, and the man taking his own life as well.
And Ochako swears that, as the bodies were being taken away, that they were still moving...
Izuku and Ochako are both horrified by the sight, and Ochako, fuelled by insomnia and fresh trauma, immediately wants to grab Sara and Izuku and leave Saviour as soon as possible. To hell with this internship and to hell with this town, everything's going to pot and they need to leave as soon as they can. Izuku, however, wants to stay. People are dying and things are only getting worse, and they need to do something about it. They're heroes. It's what they do.
Reluctantly, Ochako agrees to stay, but she still sends a communication to Aizawa to let him know what is happening.
That communication is never received. Transmissions in and out of the town are being blocked as of the local authorities' choosing. As far as anyone knows, everything in Saviour is perfectly fine.
And then, finally, the day of the festival arrives. Thousands of people, even hundreds of thousands, arrive to attend to the festivities. Izuku and Ochako try to enjoy the sights but are still haunted by what they have seen in this town, and are on high alert for anything that might happen around them.
However, the two end up getting separated during the event, and Izuku comes across a group of Almighty members, including Sara, performing a demonstration in the middle of the Pinnacle complex, much to the consternation of the townsfolk and pro heroes around them.
And this is where things finally begin to kick off, as elsewhere, Ochako comes across a fresh corpse in an alleyway...
And the corpse begins to move.
Elsewhere, Izuku tries to pull Sara away from the escalating verbal conflict between the members of the Almighty, who are already growing increasingly hostile as it is, and the pro heroes, who have been plagued by insomnia and dementia.
But then, suddenly, a punch is thrown, and the verbal spat becomes a brawl.
A brawl becomes a riot.
And then, in the aftermath, the pro heroes end up murdering almost every Almighty member there... and the head priest of the church slits his own throat, laughing in response.
Izuku, utterly horrified by what he has seen, barely has time to drag a still living Sara out of the mess before the corpses on the ground begin to rise up again.
Elsewhere, Ochako is horrified as she sees the corpse before her stand up once more, its body and limbs twisting and morphing, the necrotising tissue remoulding itself as the reanimated carcass mutates and mutilates itself, becoming a snarling, undead monster that roars at her with blood on its shattered mind...
And Ochako, once again unable to use her quirk, can do nothing but flee in terror.
All around Saviour, the dead are waking up, from the morgue and the freshly deceased to the old graves and the long-dead to the bleeding bodies in the town square. The bodies are rising, twisting, mutating, screaming...
And now, they're killing.
The Pinnacle tower and complex becomes a slaughterhouse as thousands of innocent people are killed en masse by these undead monsters. Izuku and Sara barely have time to flee as the reanimated carcasses of the Almighty murder every single pro hero and civilian in the vicinity, their bodies being reanimated too by flying infectious creatures and turned on their former comrades.
Saviour quickly becomes a bloody hellscape, and with all communications now being blacked out, there is no way in and out of the killing fields. Thousands of people are now trapped in the town as they are slaughtered, and no one is coming to save them.
By the time that Izuku and Sara are able to find a safe(ish) haven, 60% of everyone who was in the town is already dead, their bodies reanimated into monsters or being melded into the walls as fleshy growths. Everyone else is either trying to run for their lives or holding up inside improvised bunkers and shelters.
Ochako, meanwhile, is wandering around the town and the massive complex as it begins to burn, her bouts of dementia and her hallucinations only getting worse. She is barely able to avoid the monsters now patrolling the streets and buildings before she begin to succumb.
Meanwhile, Izuku begins to try and save as many people as he can, but each time it is no avail, as the people that he tries to save either die to the monsters, have gone mad from the dementia and insomnia and attack him, or simply take their own lives out of insanity and guilt.
What's even worse are the lost wanderers. There are people walking amongst the monsters, their minds having completely shattered and having been subsumed into the mental hivemind of the undead monsters, and now they walk with them (which for the purposes of this exercise, we shall handily dub as Necromorphs for convenience) and join them in slaughtering their fellow humans, letting them into buildings and safe havens and adding their bodies to the piles of writhing corpses.
Despite all of this, Izuku refuses to give up, and even as he is being assaulted by vivid and violent hallucinations, he is determined to save as many people as he can. Sara, having a crisis of faith due to what is happening, suggests that they find shelter in the Almighty's compound on the outskirts of the town. Izuku is reluctant to do so, but eventually agrees.
Elsewhere, Ochako is further assaulted by visions and hallucinations, being met in her mind by memories of her loved ones, now twisted and corrupted and painted in blood. Slowly, her brain begins to rewire itself, and she starts to speak with a woman in her mind. A woman being the collective consciousness of the entire Necromorph hivemind.
Soon, Izuku and Sara are able to sneak their way through the blood-soaked town to the Almighty's compound. Along the way, they come across Necromorphs slaughtering entire shelters' worth of people, crazed wanderers letting the undead abominations inside, and are continuously assaulted by hallucinations and visions. The vestiges inside One for All, through their now strained connection to Izuku, are barely able to keep the delusions that are assaulting Izuku's mind, but even they begin to feel the effects of whatever is happening to them...
Which is made worse when the woman in the visions begins to take notice of the vestiges.
On the other side of town, Ochako is continuing to break. Saviour is burning down around her, the dead are roaming the streets, and her insomnia and dementia is chipping away at her piece by piece as the woman in her mind continues to whisper to her, tangling her mind and rewiring her thoughts.
Her mind begins to conflate pain with lust and the spread of the infection as something to find joy in, and when she brings down a piece of rubble onto the head of a Necromorph, Ochako can't help but feel happy at the sight and feeling of blood running down her form.
Soon, Izuku and Sara are able to make their way through the devastated town into the Almighty's central compound, and find the rest of the Almighty cult there, sheltering in the main church. Sara tries to warn them of what is going on, and that they need to gather as many people as they can and escape from Saviour as soon as they can.
But the rest of the Almighty refuse. This has been what they have been waiting for for years. This is the Day of Reckoning that they have prophesised, the day that the most perfect people with the most perfect quirks would finally grace their world and make them one of themselves. That they must die to make that happen is merely a necessary sacrifice for them to make.
Their minds have been broken. There is nothing left here to save.
And then, the rest of the cult are joined by dozens of other survivors, their minds having also been shattered by the psychic attacks by the Necromorph hivemind.
The survivors and the Almighty, all gathered together now, begin to tear into each other, either engaging in acts of sexual depravity or performing ritualistic suicide and allowing themselves to be turned into Necromorphs. Soon, the entire church is stained red with blood and gore, and Izuku and Sara, the latter now having completely lost her faith, quickly flee as the church, and the entirety of the Almighty compound, is turned into another extension of the Necromorph colony.
At this point, Izuku finally realises that he is completely out of his depth. Survivors now number in the dozens, many of those survivors have become wandering mad men intent on killing anyone and everyone that is still alive in the town, any corpses that haven't been turned into fleshy growths across the walls of the town are wandering the streets, and Ochako is nowhere to be seen.
Saviour and the Pinnacle tower have fallen, and it's time for them to get out of this hellhole immediately and tall the heroes what is happening here so that they can firebomb the town to oblivion.
However, Izuku still can't access the full power of his quirk, and the Necromorphs are crowding around all the exits of the town, waiting to spread out and begin infecting everything else around the country. If they want to escape the town, then they need to climb to the top of the Pinnacle tower and restore communications.
But elsewhere, Ochako's mind finally breaks under the whispers of the woman in her mind. Now, pain is pleasure, blood is lust, and death is joy and love, and she leaves with the other wanderers to climb the Pinnacle tower and spread the infection further.
Izuku and Sara soon reach the Pinnacle, sneaking through the devastated compound and beginning their assent up the massive tower, sneaking around mad wandering humans and hordes of undead Necromorphs (which is when the story takes a turn from Dead Space into Alien: Isolation) as they climb up and up. Up at the top, they realise that much of the Necromorphs' collective reanimated tissue is gathering around the base of the tower, becoming a massive, malformed heart that serves as the centre of the infection.
Worse yet, the Necromorphs are beginning to break out of the town and attack the nearby villages and settlements, killing dozens, if not hundreds more people and beginning to add them to the collective. This is what finally spurs the rest of the outside world into realising that something in Saviour is going terribly wrong, but by then it is too late, and the infection is beginning to spread into the nearby cities, adding more corpses to the hordes of Necromorphs.
Izuku and Sara finally make their way up to the top floor of the tower, and there they find the highest ranking authorities in the town sheltering in a private suite, watching the world outside begin to burn. Izuku and Sara demand to use their communications, to let the outside world know what is happening and what is attacking them.
But they are refused.
The authorities had wanted this infection to break out.
Originally, when the outbreak of insomnia and dementia had begun, the people in power had begun to cover up the attacks in order to monitor and evaluate the incidents. They had quickly deduced that it was the result of a quirk, and began to plan on how to weaponise it against any undesirables, first the Almighty cult, and then against villain groups, protesters, and anyone else that might try to disrupt hero society.
But, as the bodies of the dead were being recovered and the first of the Necromorphs were rising up and being studied in secret, the people in power began to see these undead monsters as something more than just a weapon, but as the next stage of human evolution, as a way of cheating death themselves.
In their arrogance, hubris, and greed, they too have become afflicted with insomnia and dementia, succumbing to the mental whims of the Necromorph hivemind. Izuku and Sara are horrified by everything that Saviour's leaders have admitted, but said leaders know that Izuku will not do anything. He's a hero, a good guy deep into his core. He wouldn't have stayed behind all those days ago to try and help the doomed people of this town if he didn't have that heroic spark in him. He won't lay a single hand on them, simply because it isn't in his nature to harm others.
But Izuku is enraged by what he has heard, what the higherups have done, and is currently being egged on by the woman in his mind, the voice of the Necromorphs' collective consciousness.
In a fit of blind anger, he overrides the Pinnacle's lockdown procedures, and the last of the mad human wanderers and the horde of Necromorphs at their command swarm the upper levels of the tower and ransack the place, catching the higherups just as they are about flee onboard a helicopter and bring it crashing down into the base of the tower, killing everyone aboard and leaving the tower unstable and tilting to the side.
Coming back to his senses and realising what he has just done, Izuku is wrought with guilt and terror and is left almost catatonic. However, it is Sara, whom has now done a complete reversal from her earlier position in the beginning of the story, who is able to convince him to get back up and moving.
But what is there left for them? Ochako is most likely dead, as is everyone else in Saviour. The town has been cleansed of all living people, the dead now number in the hundreds of thousands, and now those same undead monsters are swarming out like a tide across the country, having wiped out several towns and villages already and are now attacking the cities, adding everyone of their victims into the collective.
There's only one thing that they can do now. They have to go into the heart of the Necromorph infestation, find the one who is using their quirk to perpetuate this nightmare, and destroy them. It might not stop the Necromorphs, but it should at least destroy their hivemind and stem the infection from spreading any further without coordination.
And so Izuku and Sara travel down the Pinnacle tower, through the blood-soaked streets of Saviour, and right into the depths of hell, grabbing an explosive as they do. As they venture down, they see more and more Necromorphs flooding out from Saviour and into the wilds, being birthed either from the corpses scattered across the town or from the gelatinous sludge formed from the melted corpses that now cover the walls.
Then, soon, they reach the centre of the infection's heart, filled with methane gas and organic tissue, and find a literal heart in the centre of a massive room, made from the corpses of dozens of people.
But they are stopped and contested by a new opponent.
It's Ochako, having been driven completely mad by the Necromorphs' collective consciousness and now intent on adding Izuku and Sara's bodies to the Necromorph's vast horde.
Izuku and Ochako, still unable to use their quirks, begin to brawl with each other whilst Sara carves her way into the literal beating heart of the infestation. Izuku finds himself being overpowered by the crazed and blood-soaked Ochako, and is being subsumed by the collective consciousness of the Necromorphs' hivemind, with the woman in his mind dragging him down further and further until he is almost complete consumed...
However, with the help of the vestiges, Izuku is able to summon the willpower needed to overcome the Necromorph hivemind and cast it out, using his will to expel the collective consciousness out of Ochako as well, freeing her from its control and returning her to sanity, though it ends up knocking her out.
And Sara, meanwhile, finally cuts through the heart to find the person who is controlling and spreading the Necromorph outbreak, prompting Izuku to drag an unconscious Ochako over to her, and they see-
Not a Marker, surprisingly, but a child.
An infant child who has just unlocked their quirk, that essentially being the powers of the Marker, and is currently screaming and panicking, unable to understand what is going on around it.
All the death, all the blood and the terror and the violence... can be traced back to an infant child with an incredibly unstable power, simply crying out for its mother and father.
But there's no longer any time to do anything else. The hivemind has recognised the three uninfected children as a threat, and as it begins to defend itself, Sara is grievously wounded by one of the Necromorphs.
Recognising that they have no other options, Sara tells Izuku to take Ochako and flee. Realising what she is about to do, Izuku begs for her to come with them, but it's no use. She's too injured to move, and she'll bleed out before they can reach the surface.
This is the only way.
So, with tears in his eyes, Izuku grabs the unconscious Ochako and flees the heart, and as the Necromorphs descend upon them, Sara cradles the crying infant child, the source of the undead infestation, and apologises to it.
She then triggers the explosive, killing herself, the child, and every single Necromorph in the immediate vicinity.
The explosion, meanwhile, immediate ignites the methane floating about in the air, creating a massive secondary explosion that consumes most of the Pinnacle complex, sending the tower crashing down into the earth below.
But, more than that, with the heart of the infestation destroyed and the infant dead, the quirk that was giving the undead life once more is gone, and the vast hordes of Necromorphs all die off, dissolving into puddles of rotting flesh and bone all across the country, whilst the corrupted walls of writhing flesh covering Saviour begins to melt into puddles of blood and gore.
The Necromorph threat is over, and Ochako finally wakes up. At first, she attacks Izuku in a blind panic, holding a knife to his throat. However, she quickly comes to her senses, and she walks hand in hand with Izuku out of the ruined, burning town covered in blood and gore.
Izuku and Ochako walk out of Saviour as the only survivors, torn and scarred and covered in blood and pieces of gore. They are greeted by a crowd of heroes that have begun to gather outside of Saviour in the wake of the Necromorphs' rampage across the region, and all they can do is break down and cry, traumatised by all what they have done and the endless death that they have been witness to.
In the aftermath of the Necromorph infestation, hundreds of thousands of people have died. The entire population of Saviour have been massacred, as have hundreds of thousands of tourists, and thousands more people, in both the surrounding towns and villages on top of many in the closest cities, have been added to the slaughter as well.
Izuku's words about what the higherups and leaders within Saviour brings a measure of uncertainty to the Japanese Diet and the leading figures within Japan. However, they decide to cover up that information, and burn any evidence of the experiments and neglect of authority.
Meanwhile, Saviour is burnt to the ground and paved over. Any traces of the Necromorphs are gathered up into the burning town and incinerated, and all remaining biological traces of the infant child are destroyed to make sure that no one can attempt to replicate what has happened in this place...
All except the government themselves, of course, who take several samples of the dead infant child and the Necromorphs for study and further experimentation.
But, above all else, untold amounts of people have died, and Izuku and Ochako, now having returned to U.A., are left shattered and utterly traumatised by all that they have done and what they have witnessed...
And soon, they begin to hear the voice of Sara in their heads, cheering them on...
And encouraging their darker thoughts, as the thoughts of lustful violence and death begin to flicker within them once more.
Again, this is probably my first real attempt at making a horror idea for MHA, so apologies if it's not very good.
Now, a few things to note, if I was to write this kind of story, it would probably be a bit more visceral. Despite not being a veteran of horror, I have written gore before (see my Ascendancy series), though I'm not so much keen on the other horror themes that would probably need to be present in this story as well.
Secondly, the monsters in this story obviously wouldn't be called Necromorphs. That's just a placeholder name so that you can understand what I'm going for here. I'm sure that the titular creatures in this fic would be named something different.
And thirdly, there would probably have to be a lot more that would need to be added to this fic to actually make it scary, or at least within the horror genre. Considering how all of these ideas are essentially up for grabs, I'll leave that all to you.