Quirkless

My name is Itsuki Ren. I was reincarnated into the world of My Hero Academia. When I first realized this fact, I was excited. Who wouldn't? I could have a quirk – real life super powers! I could be a hero, or a villain, and meet all the characters that I only saw through a screen.

My first disappointment was that I was born 5 years before the main characters. That meant that even if I went to Yuuei, I wouldn't even be their senpai. I would have already graduated before they entered high school.

My second disappointment was when I turned 10 years old and I didn't even have a spark of a quirk that awakened. Most children awakened their quirks at 3 to 5 years old. So at 10, it was hopeless. Damn. 

I was very quickly known as a quirkless person, a rare minority in a world where heroes and villains with powerful quirks roamed the streets and even the average person had a somewhat useful power.

I wasn't that affected though. Sure it sucked that I would only be a normal person in a world with superpowered people. But I was "quirkless" in my previous life as well. It wouldn't be that big of a deal to be quirkless in this new life.

My school life wasn't that bad either. I mean, there were a few bad eggs that bullied me for being quirkless, but there were also more than a few aspiring-heroes that always stood up for the weak and enacted justice for me.

It was kinda fun to role-play the role of a weak and innocent bystander while the mock-villains and pseudo-heroes clashed while play fighting.

I decided to just focus on my studies instead. Since I didn't have a quirk, I could at least do well academically and try to get a lucrative job right?

Wrong. Turns out, the brain of this new body was as bad as my previous one. Even though I already went through middle school once before in my previous life, turns out I retained none of the knowledge. And I was slow to relearn it too.

In the end I received below average grades for my entrance exams and could only get into a below average high school in Hosu City.

And in the field of romance? I was shit out of luck. I wasn't particularly bad looking, though I couldn't be considered good looking either. But I forgot how to socialize with teenage girls. If you added up the age of my previous life and the years I spent in this new body, I was mentally almost 40 years old.

Asking a 40 year old man to hang out with teenagers and try to date a highschool girl would be horrible. 

Not that I wasn't attracted to them. My interactions with high school girls essentially amounted to good mornings and good byes. I felt too awkward and creepy trying to court these young girls.

Older women didn't even consider me as a potential boyfriend. I had an average appearance and my family wasn't wealthy. What aspect of me would be attractive to the women who were more age-appropriate?

In the end, I graduated high school and entered a vocational school in Musutafu City that had an accelerated two year program for high school graduates that couldn't do well enough to enrol in a university. It was a trade school where we could learn practical trades like plumbing and electrical engineering.

I chose to specialize in electrical engineering since I was an electrician in my previous life. Shit, this life was looking like it would just be a repeat of my previous life except in Japan.

It wasn't exactly my first choice of what my new life should be like, but it wasn't terrible. Though we lived in a society of heroes and villains, truth be told the life of regular civilians weren't much different from the Earth I remembered.

Villain attacks were rare and sporadic, probably because All For One was still keeping a low profile at this point in time. And Heroes would always arrive quickly to stop them. All Might was still rather active, so with the Symbol of Peace around, crime rates were low.

In my entire life so far, I had only encountered a villain once. It was a C-class, small time crook that was robbing a convenience store opposite the beef bowl chain restaurant I was eating at. I watched the entire thing while eating a cheap bowl of gyudon.

The villain was caught before he made it 5 steps out of the convenience store.

So, life wasn't that bad. It could definitely have been worse. I could have been born with a useless quirk that was debilitating in daily living. I saw some on TV, like a kid that was born with flippers instead of limbs yet had no gills to breathe underwater. So he could only flop around and needed to rely on his parents to feed, clothe and clean himself.

That would have sucked worse than having no quirk at all.

I thought that I would have a calm and peaceful, albeit boring, new life like in my previous life.

But tragedy struck. I was caught up in a villain attack while on the way to my class. This time, it was a serious one that was wreaking havoc with his quirk.

I had been injured in the ensuing fight between the hero that arrived to stop him. It wasn't the villain that injured me, but the hero instead.

A piece of rubble was tossed towards the villain but missed and struck me instead. It cracked near every rib in my body and I was in the hospital for months. I would have died if not for doctors with quirks that could stabilize my condition, though not as miraculous as Recovery Girl's healing quirk.

I made a full recovery after spending a few months in the hospital. The hero visited me almost daily with an apologetic look on his face, crying and sobbing. It was a rookie hero that had just graduated from a B-List hero school.

Though I was really upset at first, I could feel his sincerity in his apologies and seeing how sorry he looked, I forgave him. I was pretty easygoing like that.

Fortunately for the rookie hero, his family was rich and he not only fully paid for my hospital bills, I also received a generous settlement of 100 million yen. I had to sign a waiver not to sue his ass though. His family brought in lawyers to negotiate the settlement and the NDA was iron-clad.

Not that my family could afford a lawyer to sue him anyways, at least none that could get me a more generous settlement than what they were offering what with the squadron of expensive lawyers they had on retainer.

What sucked worse was that because of my time in the hospital, I wasn't able to continue my studies and my peers graduated without me. The school offered me the privilege to return whenever I was ready to finish up my degree, but I wasn't really interested anymore.

 A 100 million yen was more than I could save in 10 years of working as an electrician, and with the lump sum payment I could invest most of it in an index fund and live off the annual returns. It wouldn't be a very affluent life, but I could live a modest and comfortable lifestyle.

Taking 20 million yen I directly bought a studio apartment near Yuuei High School in Musutafu City and then invested 80 million in an index fund with 10 - 20% annual returns. Ta-da, I now had a small piece of real estate and passive annual income of about 8 - 16 million yen excluding taxes. Enough to afford a modest and comfortable lifestyle and still have enough leftover to reinvest.

I didn't really put more thought in the long-term. Who knew how the villain uprising would conclude in the future, why bother planning years ahead when the future wasn't certain anyways. I was someone who lived life one day at a time in the first place.

Thus, I became a 20-year-old NEET. Considering the date, the main cast of My Hero Academia must have just gotten into Yuuei. Well, it didn't really have anything to do with me anyways.