[1] Hitman's Homework

Dying isn't like in the movies. It's not peaceful. It's not quick. It's cold seeping into your bones while your brain screams at nerves that won't respond. It's copper in your mouth and darkness at the edges of your vision.

"Should've just given us the drive."

I tried to speak, but blood bubbled past my lips instead. The warehouse lights dimmed, flickered.

My last thought wasn't profound. Wasn't about revenge or regret.

I just didn't want to die on this dirty warehouse floor.

Then everything went black.

And then...

The warehouse lights snapped back into fluorescent clarity. A piece of chalk hung suspended in the air, inches from my face. Not sodium lights. Not concrete floor. Not blood and cordite.

Classroom. Desk. Morning sunlight.

"NAKAMURA!"

Tanaka-sensei's voice could've stripped paint. She stood at the front of class 2-B, arm still extended from throwing the chalk, face twisted in that special kind of teacher fury reserved for sleeping students.

My brain refused to process the transition. One moment, dying on a warehouse floor. Next moment, staring at floating chalk while thirty classmates tried not to laugh.

The chalk dropped into my palm. I blinked at it.

"Care to explain why my lesson on modern literature is less engaging than your nap?" Tanaka-sensei's glasses caught the light.

"I..." Words failed me. The phantom taste of copper lingered on my tongue. My chest still ached where the bullets had hit. But my uniform was clean. No blood. No holes. "Sorry, sensei."

She crossed her arms. "Perhaps you'd like to share with the class what was so exhausting about your weekend that you couldn't stay awake for Monday morning?"

The weekend. What had I actually done this weekend? The memory slipped away like smoke. Something about studying? Training? The details felt wrong, overlapped with images of black suits and gunfire.

"I was..." I scratched my head. "Training?"

Snickers from the class. Tanaka-sensei's eye twitched.

"Training. I see." She turned back to the board. "Since you're so dedicated to your physical education, you can run laps during lunch break. Now, as I was saying about the symbolism in chapter four..."

I stared at my notebook. Blank pages. No blood stains. No bullet holes. Just clean paper waiting for notes I hadn't taken.

The guy next to me – Yamamoto? Yamazaki? – leaned over. "Dude, you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Yeah." I rubbed my chest where phantom bullets had torn through. "Just a weird dream."

"Must've been intense. You were muttering something about hitmen."

The girl in front of me turned around. Suzuki Mei. "Classic Nakamura. Probably dreaming about being a hero again while drooling on his textbook."

"I wasn't drooling." I checked my textbook. Okay, maybe a little.

"You were talking about drives and millions in crypto," Yamamoto-or-maybe-Yamazaki said. "Sounded more like a yakuza movie than hero work."

The dream was already fading, but something about it nagged at me. The names on the drive. The bigger picture. It had seemed so important, so real.

"Nakamura!" Tanaka-sensei's voice cracked like a whip. "Since you're so chatty now, perhaps you'd like to explain the author's use of unreliable narration in this passage?"

I stood, frantically scanning the open textbook. The words swam before my eyes. "The narrator... uh..."

"Page ninety-four, Nakamura."

I flipped pages, buying time. "The narrator presents events from their perspective, but..." Another student snickered. "But we can't trust everything they say because..."

"Because?"

"Because memory is unreliable?" The words came out before I could think about them. "We see what we want to see. Remember what we want to remember. Or maybe what someone else wants us to remember."

Silence fell over the classroom. Tanaka-sensei raised an eyebrow.

"An... interesting interpretation." She adjusted her glasses. "Though I suspect it owes more to your nap than actual analysis of the text. Sit down."

I dropped into my seat, head spinning. Where had that come from? The dream lingered like a bad taste, mixing with reality until I wasn't sure which was which.

The rest of the morning blurred past. English. Math. Something about vectors and conjugations that might as well have been another language. My notes were a mess of half-finished sentences and doodles of guns I didn't remember drawing.

Between classes, I caught fragments of conversation:

"Did you hear about the villain at Tatooin Station?"

"...some kind of giant villain..."

"...did you see how nice Mt. Lady's ass looked though..."

Each snippet sent weird echoes through my head, like déjà vu but backwards. Like remembering something that hadn't happened yet.

Lunch break came. I stood to head for the cafeteria, but Tanaka-sensei stopped me at the door.

"Nakamura." Her voice was softer now, concerned. "Is everything alright? You've seemed... distracted lately."

"I'm fine, sensei." The lie came easily. Too easily? "Just tired from training."

She studied me for a long moment. "Your quirk... it's not causing you any problems, is it?"

"No." Another lie? I wasn't sure anymore. What was my quirk, exactly? The answer sat just out of reach, like a word on the tip of my tongue. "Everything's normal."

"Hmm." She didn't look convinced. "Well, try to stay awake in class. Whatever's going on in that head of yours, you won't make it into UA if you don't focus."

I nodded and headed for the door. As I reached for the handle, she spoke again.

"Oh, and Nakamura? That bit about unreliable narrators and memory? Not bad. Maybe you absorb more than you realize, even while sleeping."

The hallway was packed with students heading to lunch. Faces I should know. Names I couldn't quite remember. Everything felt slightly off, like a photo taken from the wrong angle.

I found myself in the bathroom, splashing water on my face.

I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, water dripping from my chin. The face looking back wasn't the one I remembered. Wasn't the one I should have.

My eyes.

Silver-grey sclera shimmered with an otherworldly depth, like staring into infinite space. A twelve-petaled lotus pattern bloomed in luminescent blue-white, spinning lazily around pupils that pulsed with inner light.

"What the..." I stumbled back from the sink. My heart hammered against my ribs. These weren't my eyes. Couldn't be my eyes. Yet they moved when I blinked.

The lotus pattern spun faster as my pulse quickened. Each petal left trailing afterimages, like looking through a kaleidoscope into forever.

I pressed my palms against my eyes until stars burst behind my eyelids. When I looked again, the strange eyes remained. If anything, they glowed brighter, responding to my distress.

A student I didn't recognize entered the bathroom. For a split second, my body tensed, combat instincts screaming danger. Then reality reasserted itself. Just a kid washing his hands. Not a hitman. Not here.

But where had those instincts come from?

I headed for the cafeteria, trying to sort real memories from dream ones. The hallway stretched before me, too long and too short at the same time. Like the warehouse. Like...

No. Focus on what's real. Right now. This moment.

I was Nakamura Yoichi. Second year at Akudo High. I had a quirk (what was it again?). I lived... somewhere (why couldn't I remember my address?). My best friend was... was...

The cafeteria door loomed ahead. Normal door. Normal school. Normal life.

So why did everything feel like a cover story?

I reached for the handle, and for just a moment, I could have sworn I saw blood on my knuckles. But when I looked again, my hand was clean.

Just another normal day at Akudo High.

Right?

The cafeteria buzzed with activity (no, don't use that phrase), filled with students eating and chatting. I grabbed a tray, got in line. Normal routine. Don't think about warehouses or drives or betrayal.

"Yo, Nakamura!" Someone waved from a table. A friend? Must be. I headed over, trying to remember their name.

"That nap in Tanaka's class was epic," they said as I sat down. "What were you dreaming about anyway? You looked ready to fight someone."

I poked at my food. Rice. Fish. Normal lunch. Not last meals or dying thoughts.

"Can't remember," I lied. "Probably nothing important."

But as I ate, I kept scanning the cafeteria exits. Counting possible weapons. Planning escape routes.

Just in case.

After school, the library computer hummed as I typed "dying and waking up in another world" into the search bar. My chest still ached where the phantom bullets had hit, even hours after that dream. If it was a dream.

The results loaded. Hundreds of stories about people dying and being reborn or transported to fantasy worlds. They called it "isekai" - another world. Most involved magic and dragons, heroes fighting demon lords. Nothing about waking up as a high school student who couldn't remember his own quirk.

I clicked through forum posts and blogs, scanning for anything familiar. One caught my eye: "Real-Life Isekai? The Strange Case of Yamada Kenji."

The article described a man who claimed to remember dying in a car crash in 1985, only to wake up in 2018 with a quirk. The doctors diagnosed him with false memory syndrome. He disappeared three months later.

Another tab: "Memory Loss and Quirk Development - A Scientific Study." Too technical, full of terms like "retrograde amnesia" and "quirk-induced cognitive displacement."

"Having trouble finding something?"

I jumped. The librarian - Mori-san - stood behind me, peering at my screen.

"Just... research," I said.

"Isekai stories?" She adjusted her glasses. "Interesting choice for a high school student. Most kids your age are more interested in heroes."

Heroes. Right. This world had those.

I opened a new tab, typed "heroes Japan ranking." The results exploded with news about All Might, Endeavor, Hawks. Pictures of costumes and quirks that should have seemed impossible but felt normal somehow.

"All Might versus Toxic Chainsaw," I muttered, clicking a video. The footage showed a mountain of muscle in red, white, and blue, laughing as he fought a villain spewing acid. The way he moved... I found myself analyzing his footwork, noting openings in his guard.

Why did I know how to do that?

"Oh, an All Might fan?" Mori-san smiled. "Did you see the news about his teaching position at U.A.?"

I shook my head.

"Started this year. Quite controversial, actually. Some say he's slowing down, looking to train the next generation."

U.A. The top hero school. The place Tanaka-sensei mentioned. I opened another tab.

"U.A. University Entrance Requirements." Thousands of applicants, only forty spots. Practical exam. Written test. Recommendations for exceptional students.

"The entrance exam's in ten months," Mori-san said. "Planning to apply?"

"Maybe." If I was still here in ten months. If this was real.

She left me to my research. I dug deeper into hero statistics, quirk regulations, the history of this world. Each fact felt both new and familiar, like remembering something I'd forgotten I knew.

I checked social media. My account existed, full of posts I didn't remember making. Photos with people I should know but didn't. Comments about training and studying for U.A.

A message from this morning: "Good luck with the quirk assessment!"

What was my quirk?

I closed the browser, stared at my reflection in the dark screen. Normal face. Normal uniform. But something in my eyes looked wrong, like there was too much space behind them.

"Library's closing in five minutes," Mori-san called.

I gathered my things, head spinning with questions. The sun was setting outside, painting the sky orange. I should go home. Wherever home was.

My feet carried me through unfamiliar streets that I somehow knew. Past convenience stores and vending machines, apartment blocks and small parks. Everything normal. Everything wrong.

A hero patrol passed overhead - Kamui Woods swinging between buildings. No one else looked twice. This was their normal.

My phone had an address listed as "home." I followed the map until I reached a nice apartment building. Sixth floor. Unit 604. The key was in my pocket.

The apartment was fairly large, lived-in. Two bedroom, kitchen/living area, bathroom. Photos on the walls showed me with people I didn't recognize. A woman who must be my mother. No father in sight.

A notebook sat open on the desk. My handwriting, but the words made no sense:

"Quirk training schedule:

Morning: Control exercises

Afternoon: Range practice

Evening: Precision work"

What was I training? What could I do?

I picked up the notebook. Pages of notes about hero courses, exercise routines, quirk theories. The latest entry was from yesterday:

"Still can't maintain it for more than 3 minutes. Need to work on focus. Maybe meditation?"

Maintain what?

My head throbbed. Too many questions. Too many gaps where memories should be.

I sat on the bed - my bed? - and opened my phone again. More research. More answers that didn't fit.

Tomorrow. They'd expect me to demonstrate my quirk. A quirk I couldn't remember having.

"Marcus," I whispered to the empty room. "Who were you? What was on that drive?"

No answer. Just the hum of the air conditioner and distant traffic.

My phone showed photos of me training, hanging out with classmates, living a normal life. But I remembered dying on a warehouse floor with secrets I'd killed to protect.

Both felt real. Both felt false.

I pulled up more hero videos. All Might's fights. Best Jeanist's captures. Endeavor's flame techniques. I found myself predicting their moves, noting weaknesses in their styles. Knowledge I shouldn't have.

The clock hit midnight. School tomorrow. Quirk assessment tomorrow.

I needed to sleep, but I was afraid of what I might dream. Afraid I might wake up somewhere else again. Or not wake up at all.

The ceiling offered no answers. The photos showed no truth. The memories - real or false - gave no peace.

I was Nakamura Yoichi, high school student applying to U.A.

I was also someone who died in a warehouse protecting dangerous secrets.

Tomorrow, I'd have to demonstrate a quirk I couldn't remember. Tomorrow, I'd have to pretend this world was normal.

Tomorrow, I'd start finding real answers.

I closed my eyes, letting exhaustion win. As sleep took me, one thought remained:

In this world of heroes and villains, which was I?

=======

[Next time on "My Hero Academia: Limitless"]

"Oh. Right. I'm supposed to—" I ran a hand through my hair. "Look, full disclosure: I have no idea what I'm doing here. They told me to hype up next chapter but..."

Someone hissed from off-screen: "The quirk assessment!"

"That thing where I have to demonstrate powers I can't remember having?" I winced. "Great. Perfect. Exactly what I wanted to think about right now."

"Just read the prompter!"

"There's a prompter?" I squinted past the camera. "It's turned off."

The producer buried his face in his hands.

"Next time, watch me either discover amazing abilities or face-plant in front of everyone. Honestly, both seem equally likely at this point." I shrugged. "Though knowing my luck, I'll probably walk into the wrong room and—"

"Cut! Just... cut."

"Was that not what you wanted? Because I can try to sound more dramatic. Maybe add some explosions or—"

[Feed cuts]