Episode 2. "The path forward". Part I.

"Can you believe it? I actually have a superpower!"

The impossible dream of a teenager from my world has come true! After all, it's something I fantasized about (well, maybe about something less complicated, but still). And who wouldn't dream of something like this in my old world? It's like I spent my whole life dreaming about magic, and then I reincarnated in another world where it exists, and I have a talent for it! But it's not magic, it's a quirk... and I wouldn't say I have a talent...

In general, from this day on, my preparation to become a superhero skyrocketed.

That same evening, I gathered my relatives in the kitchen and held a stern military council. I put the question bluntly:

"Mom... Dad, I'm going to be a professional hero."

And I stared firmly into their faces with the serious look of a four-year-old, as if to say: just try to argue!

My eyes, by the way, are almost normal, without any mutations. Dark, with a constantly dilated pupil, as if I'm on cocaine, and a narrow ring of blue iris. If you don't look closely, they're just ordinary Japanese... anime eyes. Quite round, with a European shape.

And with white sclera, of course, I'm not some X-Man... Although, I remember there will be a cute pink mutant girl in UA with black eyes...

My father was naturally delighted by my declaration, felt proud, and was ready to support me in every way possible. My mother... well, she started lamenting, wringing her hands, and dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief. I didn't expect anything different.

But no one actively argued against it—apparently, they also understood where everything was heading with such a stubborn me.

To hammer the final nail into the coffin of any possible resistance (from my mother's side), I organized a demonstration of my undoubtedly combat-oriented Quirk. This time, outside in the park. A baseball (this is Japan, after all—everyone here who isn't a hero or a villain is into baseball, though I personally would have preferred volleyball or football) ball hit a young tree I picked with such force that the trunk snapped, leaving my parents impressed.

Although later, we had to pay a fine to the municipal services. Yeah. I hadn't thought about collateral damage. I suspect there will be at least one subject in the Academy where I'll have problems...

And from the next morning, my favorite – productive, time-consuming – routine began!

For the next two years – while my body was still not developed enough for anything other than stretching, running, and general strengthening exercises, and no school classes interfered – I focused entirely on developing my Quirk and understanding all its strengths and weaknesses.

There were many strengths – I could actually duplicate any of my hits in any spot, push, or throw any object from any position, and even with a fairly long distance (at least several tens of meters, regardless of whether the target was in sight) and for a long time, the "charge" dissipated in about an hour.

But there was one very big and serious "But." For the Quirk to work, I had to clearly remember the specific point of force application down to centimeters – forget exactly where you hit or pushed, lose focus, blink at the wrong moment – and it wouldn't work.

It was difficult. Really difficult because it's one thing to constantly concentrate on one or two points, especially in familiar surroundings, and quite another – on six! And especially in a fight... where you set these "markers" in real-time... and when they are constantly changing, being used in new places and different points...

When this thought came to mind, I would just bite my lip and silently go to train again, even if I had just returned from it. Unhealthy, of course... but right now, it mostly strained my brain, so it wasn't so scary – there was no chance of hurting myself, just burning out. But I'm in a shounen anime about overcoming obstacles! I need to match that, so to speak...

Among the few "peers" and their parents I might encounter, I gained a reputation as a withdrawn young genius. Meh, I just shook my head and asked not to distract me, remembering what and especially who I would have to face… in less than ten years.

No, seriously – even without my adult and, I dare hope, disciplined mind, the original chubby Nirengeki got into UA, so one could relax. There were some completely helpless and clumsy guys even without him.

But there was also that girl with vine-like hair she could control over vast areas, ignoring physics... and blonde Bakugo with superhuman reaction speed, capable of blowing up an entire building... and the runner-class president from Class A... what was his name, faster than any race car. And there's no way I could defeat any of them!

And yet, I needed to aim not at them, but at the monsters who could wipe an entire city off the face of the Earth – all the Todorokis who could burn the city down, all the Nomus who could destroy it with brute force, Tomura who could disintegrate any matter into atoms – at a distance! – and Gigantomachia or whatever that Godzilla is called...

And even then, All Might, All For One, and potentially the main character of the anime, Midoriya, far surpass even this inhuman level...

And there's me.

And now I need to become not less strong, with only what I have at hand, to be able to influence the known future events. And the unknown ones too.

It's almost a pity that I didn't stay in the world for another year in my past life and didn't watch the sixth season. Or read the manga.

"Ugh, stop regretting that you weren't an anime fan," I told myself and went back to training.

And so time went on... quietly, calmly, but... tough.

Most of the time, I was incredibly busy and trained until I was blue in the face, and more than anything, my brain got tired. The good thing was that because of the concentration exercises and the flexible mind of a child (I don't know how this reincarnation thing works and what's going on in my brain), my overall attentiveness, ability to notice details, work capacity, memory... well, nothing special – I'm still not "talented," but a "hardworking" type.

I still couldn't activate multiple repetitions simultaneously. Judging by the feel, it won't work – something inside tenses up and interferes as soon as I try to activate at least two strikes in different places at once. Only sequentially, waiting a bit after activating the previous one.

As for two effects in the same place, that wasn't even up for discussion. I couldn't even place two "markers," each of which felt like an invisible weak link to some point in space, in one spot. So only if I first activated one effect, then marked the same place again, then activated it... so I had to forget about the uber-perk of cumulative strike effect with the resulting power of All Might.

At least for now.

Therefore, the priority task for the coming years was to minimize the time between placing a marker and activating the effect, which now was just under a second. Why?

Because if I succeed – and I do believe in this – in achieving almost instant Quirk activation at the moment of placing the marker, I will be able to imitate the work of a strengthening-type Quirk! That is, essentially, I'll fight in close combat like Deku! True, I won't have his speed... but I'll be able to work at any distance, including long-range...

That's if I can manage it.

...By the time I turned six in my new life, I could hold five or six points at once, ready for action, and during unhurried activation, I could replenish this list in about fifteen minutes. And I hoped that in the future, there would be more points and the activation speed would be higher.

There was also a limit to the number of repetitions and points I could activate in succession, and it wasn't just limited by memory – I had a couple of ideas for tracking important places.

The other thing was that I got tired. Like all other 80% of gifted people, my Quirk consumed stamina like there was no tomorrow, and it was bad enough that I couldn't activate them simultaneously, but in any serious battle, I would have been exhausted and down in just a couple of minutes!

This wouldn't do.

I can't even remember how it looked, but the original chubby had some sort of device on one of his eyes that supposedly allowed him to remember such points.

It's a good idea, but no – I would prefer to rely on my brain if possible. Firstly, it's not a good idea to engage in direct contact with an opponent in close combat with such a fragile visor, but that makes sense – that Niren was pure support from a distance. Secondly, in a world with users of technokinesis and electric (especially the latter) Quirks, relying on such devices is risky if not outright dangerous.

By the way, despite my improved memory, I had long and hopelessly forgotten all the details of the anime... would have. But like any competent reincarnator, as soon as I could hold a pen, I immediately wrote down everything I remembered in a notebook. The messy handwriting followed me to the new world, so the mishmash of Russian, English, and Japanese written in Cyrillic turned out to be quite a cipher.

Having finished recording this "alternative chronology," I thought for a moment – and then started another stack of notebooks, where I began to write down, without a cipher, all the useful information about various Quirk users – Heroes, Villains, my future allies and opponents, my own thoughts on the right tactics, tricks, superhero moves...

In the process, the thought even arose to create a classification of Quirks for my own convenience, but... that's where I hit a complete wall: I wasn't the first to try, and even much smarter and more thorough specialists had suffered crushing defeats.

The thing is that in any system for dividing skills into groups, so many exceptions are revealed that you start adding new subcategories, but even for them, there are exceptions, and you keep trying to divide and divide Quirks until you completely lose yourself in the thickets of sprawling skill trees.

Not to mention that I had a total mental block just when I tried to classify my own Quirk into any group.

In general, I couldn't do it alone. Maybe later, working with someone smart and science-oriented...

Quirks – got used to them. In fact, I even stopped calling them with a capital letter in my mind pretty quickly. As they say, people quickly get used to good things – and it didn't take long for me to stop being amazed when I saw heroes flying through the air or jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Or not heroes.

The only thing is that, initially raised in the realities of a completely different world, I still couldn't always look at passers-by without shuddering – some Quirks deformed people so much that it was hard to recognize not just a person, but even a living organism in them.

And this is a surprising moment. The society of this country, no, even most of the planet, was... tolerant. Truly civilized. People stopped looking at appearances and began to value the inner world of others first, their mind, their personal qualities...

Only unicorns are missing, right?

Of course, in reality, everything wasn't as rosy.

Radicals and racists existed here too, but they were a very rare phenomenon or rather very carefully monitored and quickly neutralized by government services, which allowed minimal publicity.

And of course, there was an invisible but significant division in society into "castes." Based primarily on my observations and feelings, I divided it into four conditional groups.

The first could include the losers who didn't receive a Quirk at all. Many children, like Midoriya in the anime, became outcasts. Despite a generally civilized and cultured society, bullying flourished. Kids without Quirks were mocked and abused by more fortunate children, and this attitude didn't go away with age. Alienation, a constant unspoken reminder that you're worse, that you lost in the evolutionary lottery – and that's not to mention the entirely legitimate advantage the gifted had when looking for a job.

A thin invisible line separated the first group from the second, which could include my parents. Thin but unbreakable. Though these people, in most cases, could only create a rainbow, lengthen their fingers, or draw frost patterns on glass, they could – and that was enough. Moreover, such simple people, in fact, made up the absolute majority – and having not lost in the Quirk, they also won in appearance, retaining a human appearance.

Yes. Human appearance... after reviewing political and sociological reports from the past twenty years, I concluded that the course toward tolerance of the appearance of "people" who acquired seriously deforming Quirks arose primarily because significant changes in appearance were often associated with increased combat potential. I don't know whose bright idea this was first, but all humanity now owes this person for the humanity of our civilization.

Otherwise, there would have been a war of extermination, and the victims would mostly have been those with dominant human features.

So yes: the third caste in society was relatively few but mostly dangerous "people" with pronounced anatomical Quirks. They were not to be touched, offended, or even avoided, but certainly not excluded from the collective or otherwise mistreated. Because it would have consequences.

The law of strength in action, in general. Somewhere it's cushioned by the safety pads of tolerance, and somewhere it's bare, revealing unseemly crimes.

Hence the absolute monolithic taboo on mocking the appearance of those with anatomical Quirks. Japanese culture, in general, has always (I've been a native Japanese for seven years, I know my stuff!) been built on the principles of caste stratification and numerous behavioral restrictions, so this rule took root easily.

What's ironic – and would be familiar to people in my former world – is that this taboo doesn't work in reverse. On normal people.

And of course, rules are rules, but exceptions happen. Even the very high density among all the villains of those with inhuman appearance – and here there are official government websites with profiles of wanted villains and heroes, can you imagine – already hints at how well they live among more ordinary people.

And yet such characters, albeit much less often, were found among the fourth category. Well, you guessed it yourself, right?

Pro-Heroes. "Puro-hiro." A caste of semi-gods, Olympians, who have almost entirely replaced actors and athletes and even partly politicians. People follow their lives. They bet on them. They have fan clubs. Movies are made about them... in which many of them star as themselves. They have their own lines of clothing, perfumes, and shampoos.

And merchandise...

The anime repeatedly claimed that the extremely low crime rate (here it's necessary to emphasize that we're talking about successful crime, that is, where the criminal managed to escape/kill someone/kidnap something, etc., and not was caught and beaten) – was entirely thanks to All Might. By the time I was seven, I found this claim quite debatable.

You see, this low level exists worldwide, not just in Japan. Yes, All Might is capable of covering vast distances, and he has visited other countries more than once, and lived a third of his life in America, but in my opinion, it's not just because of him.

I'm still talking about merchandise. Seriously. This is the country that created and got hooked on manga and anime, which collaborates closely with America – the consumer paradise. Comics are drawn about the supers, their prints are made on T-shirts, fanfics are written about them, selfies are taken with them, they are made into figurines, they are invited to talk shows, documentaries are made about them – and all of this is sold (except for the fanfics, and even then, not always), and they receive popularity, money, connections, and opportunities for all of it...

Do you understand how many people want to become heroes and fight crime?

Those who "can" and make it into the Top 100 Heroes of the country receive almost everything one could imagine and want. In exchange for public life, hellish training, and the risk of dying young and on the job, of course. But those are details.

At least that's what all those who fall on these "details" think. But there are so many of these "everyone" that in every damn city, there's a patrol of young idiots with fanatical fire in their eyes. They don't make it into UA – they go to other academies. They don't have the strength to become pros? They become sidekicks; one Endeavor has about twenty of them. They can't even get in? They become street vigilantes... and naturally, get beaten by the police and real heroes.

But nevertheless, all this hype really drives real criminals deep underground. Crime doesn't like noise – because if you make too much noise, a really big fish will swim in.

Speaking of fish.

"By the way, animals don't have Quirks..." I would say if I didn't remember the principal of UA Academy. But the principal existed, and he was a mouse. Wild, crazy stuff. And yet, it is under the leadership of a mouse that has gained intelligence – a genius mind that has nothing to do with humans, likely absolutely different in its logic, possibly perceiving all of humanity as the natural enemies of its biological species – that the best professional Heroes of this world, called to protect humanity and promote moral and ethical values, are nurtured.

Creepy.

When this thought first came to me, I seriously wondered if there was a chance that this very mouse was the main villain of the franchise. Seriously: what if it was he, the mouse, who pitted the strongest groups of Japanese heroes and villains against each other, with the aim of simply wiping out most of the strong Quirk users?! And when, after a massive battle, there would be no one left who could oppose him, he would bring billions of mice and rats out of the sewers and dumps to finish off the survivors, gnawing on women and children, and no one would stop the rodents from eating and reproducing?...

Sounds like a trashy horror movie.

And no matter whether All Might, One For All, the government, or even the Yakuza wins, this fluffy creature with cold black eyes would be fine with any outcome!

Brrr.

But maybe he's a good guy after all?... this is still the universe of live-action teen cartoons...

And if not?

Anyway, I vowed to myself to prevent such a thing and expose the rodent when the time came.

Meanwhile, as I said, I turned six. And no matter how special, smart, reincarnated, and so on I was, my parents enrolled me in elementary school in the first grade. And without any compromises – that's the law.

What can I say about school...

A zoo, if summed up in one word.

In Japan, as I knew from my previous world, the strategy for raising children is very, let's say, "contrasting" – in the early years, children are practically not restricted, not punished, and not scolded, which supposedly lays the foundations for a whole and strong personality.

And then, as soon as a child fully enters society, dozens of strict and even harsh restrictions fall on them: how to behave in public, how to speak correctly, how to show the right emotions, how to show respect for elders, and so on.

In addition, in the Japanese society I was familiar with, constrained by the high population density on the small area of the islands, the concept of "not noticing" something that doesn't concern you was taken to the absolute. Hence the numerous incidents.

In this Japan, fortunately, things were much simpler, mainly due to the heroes and their Quirks. Otherwise, I wasn't sure I would have the patience not to notice some crazy stuff – but I didn't want to become an outcast either.

Anyway, I managed – and even in the class, in school, and during lessons, there was a fairly relaxed atmosphere where children freely used their Quirks (despite the public ban on their use), flooding the classroom with water, setting fire to curtains, sticking classmates together, flying in the air, stretching their limbs, growing hair, and who knows what else.

I tried to sit in the corner, away from all these little monsters, and pretend I wasn't with them, and generally, I was an adult and goal-oriented guy. I was becoming a true Japanese before my very eyes...

In the first week, some budding bullies with conditionally combat Quirks (like, can you imagine having toothy mouths opening all over your body) approached me, but a single public demonstration of power – a desk cracking and tilting from a light slap of my hand (they wouldn't know how much time I trained for that) – was enough for them not to bother me for all six years of elementary education.

And yes, I had to pay for the collateral damage again.

The years flew by even faster...