Chapter 1

Just what I needed right now; a villain with a troublesome quirk.

The Symbol of Peace was doing his best to keep his signature smile up; it had been less than a year since the battle that had ruined his body, and while he was still more than a match for all but the most powerful villains he was most definitely not back to full strength yet... at least, whatever would pass for full strength after the injuries he had received. Ordinarily, he could have smashed this villain flat before the scoundrel could even use his quirk, but at the moment...

"What's wrong, 'All Might'? You haven't hit me once! Come on, charge me again!"

"As you wish! DETROOOOOOIIIIT—"

Before All Might could get even a few feet toward the enemy, he found himself landing right back where he started; clearly, this "Warp Master" lived up to his name. The nature of that warping, though, still escaped him somewhat.

No sign of any portals or something like that; I just can't seem to travel any distance no matter how many times I charge at him. I keep ending up at the same spot... it's not illusion, but whatever it is it's really starting to piss me off. Maybe...

All Might, acting on his hypothesis, quickly leapt to the left, landing and planting his feet against a nearby building before shoving off toward his foe again... only to find himself hurtling in the opposite direction.

Hmph. Now I see... it's not teleportation, he's twisting space itself. A dangerous quirk indeed... but it's clearly not passive. This time, he didn't use it on me until I was about to close in on him from a different direction; that means he had to guess where I was coming from and target the area I was going to pass through. In other words...

The smile nearly slipped. In other words, I can't worry about my injuries. I have to stop holding back and put him down before he can react to my movements. Hopefully I don't make my injuries worse...

All Might looked up at the smugly grinning villain. "Ha. You think you've won, Warp Master? I was just warming up! Time to show you what a pro hero can REALLY do!"

A small hurricane swept the immediate area as the Symbol of Peace vanished from Warp Master's sight in an instant; the villain hardly had time to be surprised at the impossible speed before the smiling Symbol of Peace was right in his face, fist held back.

"As I thought! You can't warp space right next to you—it's a distance attack!"

"NO! Nonononono!" The panic on Warp Master's face was palpable, though the obvious insanity was just as clearly displayed. "I won't let you take me in! I WON'T LET YOU!"

Just as All Might's fist connected, Warp Master raised his hands and strained his power to its maximum limit... and without realizing it, tapped into power he never knew he possessed. The world around them twisted and contorted, and then the disturbance spread out like a shockwave, like ripples on a pond. As they spread out, cracks appeared in the sky, the ground, and elsewhere, opening up into holes in space itself that began to suck in or spit out whatever got too close.

And Warp Master was falling right toward one of those portals, along with All Might himself. The former screamed in terror and pain, a scream that was silenced the moment he passed through; thinking quickly, All Might fired off a smash, causing a shockwave of air that would hopefully stop his momentum enough to avoid following his enemy. It worked... but just barely, and he had to struggle against the power of the event horizon even as the portal began to close. As he struggled, he looked up, and saw something that horrified him.

Three bodies emerged from a portal in the sky—a young man, an elderly woman, and a small child—all three falling among slightly different trajectories. If they hit the ground from that height, they would die, but that wasn't what horrified All Might.

What horrified him was that due to the circumstances—the portal he was struggling to escape from, his waning strength, the speed and direction of their fall—he knew he would not be able to save them all.

Without hesitation, the Symbol of Peace made his choice, pushing off the ground with everything he had in order to escape the pull of the rapidly-shrinking hole in space, hurtling toward the smallest form...

It happened out of nowhere, on what was supposed to be a happy occasion.

I had just turned 18 and was holding my high school diploma with pride as I walked with my parents to their waiting car. I had initially wanted to drive my own car to the ceremony, but my mom and dad insisted that they drive me to school one last time, for the sake of memory. I couldn't deny them that.

"So, how's it feel?"

"Pretty good," I replied, smiling back at my dad. "It would have been a little less embarrassing if mom didn't cry and shout my name when I got this."

Mom wiped her tears away before smirking at me. "Oh hush. Can't a mother show emotion when her little boy finally graduates?"

"Most mothers don't shout out 'Oh, my baby's a man!' at the top of their lungs."

Dad chuckled. "Well, if that's the way you feel about us old folks being happy for their son, maybe we should go out to dinner without you?"

We laughed in unison. As embarrassing as that moment was, I couldn't help but be moved a little by it anyway; I had struggled with emotion a bit myself when they called my name. Knowing they felt so much that they couldn't help but show it meant a lot to me.

And that was the last happy memory I would ever have of them.

In a moment burned into my brain forever, a hole appeared. It had no entrance or exit, it shimmered in and out of existence, it was only half-visible, but hole is the only word that could describe it, for we all fell into it.

Inside the hole, nothing made sense; up was down was left was right, today was tomorrow was yesterday, and I couldn't tell if I was falling, rolling, rising, or staying still. I can't remember much of what I saw, aside from my hands; at one second, they were my own, the next they belonged to an infant, and then those of a middle-aged man. My screams shifted as well, from the terrified cry of a toddler to the helpless shrieks of a shriveled old man, and sometimes they seemed to be everything in between, all at once. I don't know how long I stayed in that hell; all I know is that I blacked out after a while.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, my head tilted to the side, my body strange and weak to me; looking at my hand, I saw that of a small child; my head was swimming, and my memory was hazy. I knew my name, I knew vaguely where I had come from, and while I didn't quite know how old I really was I knew that whatever age I was now wasn't my original age; any thoughts beyond that flew out of my head when I looked up at a smiling face. I knew that face from somewhere, but in that moment I couldn't place where; the face was that of an impossibly-large muscular man in a colorful costume, smiling down at me. The smile was not a happy one, though; it held a great deal of sadness and sympathy in it.

"Don't be afraid, kid... everything will be alright." The voice was soft and comforting, but carried the same sadness as the smile. "Just keep looking at me..."

Puzzled at his words, I looked around anyway, only to see why he didn't want me to turn my gaze from his smile.

Two bodies, nearly flattened from impact, lay some ways away; one was a young man, one an elderly woman, but in an instant I knew exactly who they were.

"Mom... Dad..."

The words were barely a whisper when they escaped, and I nearly choked trying to get them out. I wanted to cry out, to rush over there to shake them awake, but my body wouldn't move no matter what I tried, and instead of a scream I found myself simply opening and closing my mouth, begging for words to come out.

"M-m-om... D-dad..."

Again, my words barely made it out of my mouth; the large man held me close in a tight embrace, whispering softly in my ear.

"I'm sorry I couldn't save them. But you're safe, and you'll stay safe. I promise you, everything will be alright... somehow..."

As I shivered in his grasp, my treacherous mouth finally obeyed my commands, and I screamed at the top of my lungs. No words came out—at least, none that were intelligible through the cries and shrieks and tears. The large man kept his hold on me, patting me on the back or stroking my hair, trying in vain to calm me down, telling me—in a voice that knew otherwise—that everything would be alright, because he was here.

One of the hardest things about being a superhero was the simple fact that you couldn't save everybody. As the world's Symbol of Peace, this weighed more heavily on All Might than on others; One For All gave him unparalleled strength, speed, and endurance, and yet there were times when even that simply wasn't enough. This wasn't the first time he'd had to comfort a crying child whose entire world had been so cruelly ripped away from him, and he knew it wouldn't be the last; that being said, how does one even begin to give any comfort at all in such a situation?

Fear not citizens. Hope has arrived. Because I am here. Those last four words, combined with his smile, were all it took most of the time. Everything will be just fine. Because I am here. But what hope can you give to someone in the deepest depths of grief and despair? How do you assuage the fears of someone whose existence was in shambles? How can you possibly say that everything will be fine when their life has been completely shattered? And yet, All Might continued saying the words to the wailing child, because those words were all he had at the moment.

At first, the child referring to the two other victims as his mother and father confused him; the ages were far too disparate for such a thing to be possible. It only took a few more seconds to decipher, though; clearly, whatever Warp Master did, the villain had twisted both space and time, and these three were victims of that awful power. It was even possible that the child he was holding wasn't quite a child... but that no longer mattered. What was done, was done. And All Might knew that it could easily get much worse.

These three aren't Japanese, I can definitely see that; the boy spoke with an American English accent. I'll try to see if there's any record of him or his family, but if not... he'll be a ward of the state.

All Might had seen wards of the state before. The care and treatment of orphans had improved greatly since the 21st century, particularly in Japan; that being said, the system was still not perfect, and he had seen time and time again what that system could do to a child, what it would likely do to this child.

He couldn't save the boy's parents, and he most certainly couldn't restore them to life. But he'd be damned if he let the child's life be ruined further, not when he could help it.

Grabbing a phone from a pocket on his costume, he dialed an old friend. "Koji? It's Toshinori. Listen, depending on the next couple of days I might have to ask you to pull a few strings for me... yeah, it's about a kid. I'll fill you in later... thank you. You're a good man and a good friend. I'll talk to you soon."

All Might had just enough time to get the boy to the nearest police station before he had to leave lest anyone see his muscles fade away into his new skeletal form; the moment he was certain no one could see him, Toshinori Yagi did the last thing All Might could ever be seen doing, the thing he couldn't help but do when he had failed someone as thoroughly as he had that day.

He wept.