Chapter Text
Japan, 2170 C.E
10 years after the Sludge Villain Incident
If someone had told Kota Izumi a decade ago that he would end up training to get ready for the U.A Hero Course Entrance Exam, he'd probably have kicked them in the balls.
Looking back at himself now, it was easy for him to see why people would assume he'd always wanted to become a pro hero. He had been surrounded by heroes for his whole life, first with his parents, and then with his aunt and current legal guardian, Shino Sosaki-the Pro Hero Mandalay and the leader of the Wild Wild Pussycats.
Unfortunately, it just so happened that he'd hated heroes back then.
Everyone had told him that his parents were - had been - great people because they were the Water Hose hero duo. He'd hated that. He'd hated how that seemed to be the only reason people cared about them.
As if his parents hadn't died fighting a villain because of that.
As if their deaths hadn't been celebrated because of that.
As if it was a good thing he'd become an orphan.
His aunt could never have understood. Her teammates could never have understood. Had his parents been still around, they probably wouldn't have understood either. How could heroes say they were fighting for justice when they saw his mom and dad dying as honorable? Why did people like heroes anyways? He hated how nobody even wondered why heroes were so great. He hated how everyone looked down on him just for disagreeing with them.
Things had gotten even worse not long after when he'd ended up having to deal with not one, not even four, but dozens of heroes, even if most of them were just heroes-in-training. Needless to say, he hadn't gotten along with any of them. A training camp for them, his aunt had explained. She'd been training more people to become heroes, so they could die like his parents did, and there had been nothing he could do to stop her.
There'd been one particular hero student who had green curly hair, green eyes, and way too many freckles to count. He'd tried to be nice to Kota, as if he was anything more than another hero wannabe with a death wish who refused to understand that heroes weren't all that good.
So a five-year-old Kota had kicked a fifteen-year-old Izuku Midoriya, the future Pro Hero Deku, in the balls.
At least he'd apologized for that later.
It had eventually turned out that the training camp really was a terrible idea, though not for the reason Kota had expected. The whole reason Aunt Shino and her teammates had hosted the camp was because they'd thought it would be a safe place from villains. The villains had found the camp anyways and attacked, and one of them happened to be Muscular, the villain who'd murdered his parents. It turned out Muscular had no care about what the other villains had planned and just wanted to kill people, and because Kota hung out deep in the woods, he'd become the first person Muscular found.
He would probably have died that night if Izuku Midoriya hadn't stepped in to protect him.
For as long as he lived, Kota would never forget the sight of Muscular being punched so hard that he got embedded into a cliff. Only later did he realize how much of a risk the student had taken and how badly he'd been hurt-and all for the sake of someone who had hated him and kicked him in the balls just days ago. If he had been in that position, he was pretty sure he'd have gotten the hell out of there, the safety of others be damned.
It was because of that Kota had come to realize just what it truly meant to be a hero. Heroes weren't looked up to because they were heroes, but because they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others. That was why his parents were praised for dying in the defense of others. Quirks weren't evil, they were tools that could be used to help as well as to hurt others. It only came down to what kind of person you were.
Ever since that night, he had wanted to be the kind of person who would be there for someone else when they needed help, too. He wanted to become someone like Izuku Midoriya.
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Heartbeat and Thunder: Earphone Jack and Chargebolt officially announce engagement
Article by Yosuke Komoshita
Coming right on the heels of the wedding between Nejire-chan and Lightning Archer, another pair of U.A alums brings news that the next hero wedding isn't far off. After seven years of romance, pro heroes Chargebolt (#21) and Earphone Jack (#12) announced their engagement on last Tuesday, putting an end to years of speculation as to the direction their on-and-off relationship was heading. The two heroes, both of whom are Hell Class alumni, had been publicly known to be a couple since their third year...
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Even into the third year of junior high, Kota still couldn't get used to how noisy it could get in his school and how many people of his age were there. He'd grown up largely isolated from other kids; there just weren't many people his age living out in the countryside, and after his near-death experience Aunt Shino had decided that it would be safer for him if he was home-schooled, taking online lessons instead of sending him to the closest elementary school that was over thirty miles away from home.
By the time he‘d graduated from his online elementary school, however, Aunt Shino had figured that he'd grown up enough to leave home and get a taste of the "real" junior high experience. It had been the first time he'd ever had to be in the company of so many people on a daily basis. He still remembered his first day of school when he'd been overwhelmed by his new classmates all introducing themselves to him. Over two years later, he still wasn't too good on that whole socializing thing.
There were ways he'd figured out how to handle being around so many other people, of course. He almost always kept to himself while at school, occasionally listening in on conversations but only getting involved if someone really pissed him off, and even then having boundaries set up for himself that he wouldn't dare cross. He had a reputation as the lone wolf of the class, but he didn't mind. It was better than making an ass of himself because he didn't knowhow to act in a social situation.
During class, their teacher was strict enough to prevent them from chatting, so Kota could just focus on the lesson and ignore everyone else. As soon as the last class of the day ended, however, the background chatter started up again.
"Which people are better? People who serve the greater good because they'll get paid for it or people who will do it because it's right?."
And already one of his classmates, a boy with pincers at the tip of each of his fingers, was giving him a headache. Crabby Fingers-Kota had never bothered to memorize his name, though he didn't use that nickname to his face-was not a fan of heroes. He was, however, very much was one of those people who thought all heroes were overrated and vigilantes should be allowed free reign to do their job instead of them. People like that had been around since Kota had been a little kid, especially after that life-changing night, but they'd mostly disappeared by the time he'd graduated elementary. Now, however, they were back and in greater numbers than ever before.
Fortunately, at least some of his classmates were just as fed up as he was with Crabby Fingers badmouthing heroes, and they were already trying to make him shut up. "Maybe you should go and talk to a psychiatrist about your issues. I get that there are vigilantes like Arsenal that are insanely effective, but that guy's murdered, what, twenty villains? Almost killed a Top Ten hero a while ago? Sorry, but you're either crazy or a Stainist if you think those people deserve any respect."
Kota remained silent, aware of his lack of social skills; things tended to get ugly whenever Crabby Fingers started an argument about heroes and vigilantes and he wanted no part of that. But internally, he disagreed with him. Why were vigilantes needed when heroes could do their jobs, and do it better? Sure, heroes received payment from the government for their work, but they needed money like anyone else. Most people didn't know how hard heroes often had it in their line of work and just assumed they got privileges they didn't deserve. Living with his aunt had taught him a lot about that.
"Dynamight was practically asking for it!" Crabby Fingers argued right back. "Arsenal had basically done his job for him and was even willing to leave him alone to make the arrests. It was his stupid idea to go and pick a fight with a vigilante who had just single-handedly wiped the floor with the Creature Rejection Clan. And have you seen how much of a pretentious asshole the guy is most of the time?"
"Sure, I agree Dynamight's a bit of a douche, but-"
"If you're going to say that he's at least good at his job, stop, because the last hero who people made that particular excuse for was Endeavor." Crabby Fingers had the attention of everyone in the classroom by now. "Being a fan of a vigilante who kills villains and fights assholes like Dynamight is wrong, but being a fan of heroes who treat everyone else like trash and abuse their families is fine? Can we trust anything heroes say to make themselves look good?" Then, lowering his voice, he whispered, "Anyone else suspicious about how Deku became Number One two years ago? He jumped three ranks between two rankings announcements. Nobody's that good."
Before Kota knew what he was doing, he'd pushed his way in between the loose gathering students and right in Crabby Fingers's face, intent on giving him a piece of his mind. If there was a time for him to break his personal "lay low when your classmates are talking" rule, it was now. How dare he accuse Izuku of cheating his way to Number One?!
"For someone who pretends to know what you're talking about, you sure don't do your research." He told him. "If you'd actually bothered looking at what he'd been up to in between those two rankings, you'd know that in that time a new law he'd been supporting was passed, and that everyone liked that law. It's why his approval went up so quickly that he jumped from Fourth to First in half a year." Despite their less-than-polite first meeting, Kota had been a fan of him ever since that night he'd saved his life. He was proud to call himself the very first Deku fan (and there was a letter to prove it!), even if he was one of the few people that got to call him by his first name. For him, and for many others, Izuku practically defined the word "hero", and he objected to anyone who was willing to say anything bad about him.
A girl with blank white pupils now chimed in. "So Deku should get special treatment because of a new law that any other high-ranking hero could have advocated for? And there are other heroes who could do as good or better of a job as him against the villains. Just the other day he failed to capture the villain made out of living smoke-"
"You're missing the point!" Kota yelled back. "Deku didn't fight the smoke villain to catch them, but so that he could save the hostages the villain was trying to suffocate. How can you say he didn't do a good job of being a hero when the job of heroes is to save people?"
"So people aren't allowed to criticize heroes for not being as good as they should be?" She demanded. "Being an apologist much? Maybe that aunt of yours has brainwashed you so they can keep pretending that they're real heroes, when they abandoned everyone during the war."
It was all Kota could do to not throw a punch or even use his quirk to mess up the girl's face. Did she even have any idea how much Aunt Shino had gone through because of people like her? Did she have any idea how hard it was for his aunt and her teammates these days? The Wild Wild Pussycats had taken a months-long leave of absence after the Battle of Kamino Ward, and that had made people think they weren't taking the whole heroics thing seriously. Their rankings had dropped very far, other heroes had stopped asking for their help with various agencies, and the people they tried to rescue didn't cooperate with them, making them not as good at saving lives. His aunt had become concerned enough about money that she had to cut his allowance several times-apparently, heroes who weren't as effective received less money from the government.
But regardless of how offended he was, it was all but certain that he'd be suspended from the school for a few days if he started a fight, so he settled for just threatening her. "Maybe you should realize that U.A doesn't just give out offers to random kids just because of who they live with. Or do you want me to show you the actual reason I'm able to seriously consider going to U.A, while your quirk does nothing but make your eyes look creepy?"
That was enough to get her to shut up, though he felt more than a few glares as he left the classroom.
It was ironic that right as he'd stopped hating heroes, many other people had started to do so. Kota had been just five years old when the Paranormal Liberation War had all gone down, so so didn't remember much about how things used to be before then, but the adults around him would always talk about how everything had changed. Izuku had been in the thick of it from the start when villains had attacked him and other heroes-in-training in the USJ incident, which people later realized was the first move of the war made by the villains. His class had even become known as the Hell Class thanks to how many times they had to fight villains in their first year of high school, including the training camp attack Kota had been part of.
Hopefully his own first year of high school wouldn't be that crazy.
Within a year, the war had escalated to breaking point as the villains plunged all of Japan into chaos. Virtually every major city suffered its share of damage, and many had been completely destroyed-only the Pacific War of the pre-quirk era had led to a similar level of destruction.. Even once All for One had been finally defeated, new villains had shown up from everywhere to fight over the scraps, creating another crisis. Yet, despite all that, things had eventually gotten better thanks to the new generation of heroes, Izuku most of all.
The adults called him the next All Might, though Kota had never understood what that was supposed to mean. He did, however, very much agree that Izuku was the best hero out there. His track record in both rescues and villain arrests spoke for itself, but that wasn't all. What made him different from other heroes was that he saw heroics as something more than just being active in the field. What Izuku really wanted was to fix the problems with the world that had led to the Paranormal Liberation War in the first place. It was why he'd pushed for the law that got rid of heroes who weren't pulling their weight and just gave other heroes a bad name. It was why he used his influence to make a stand against issues ranging from mutant discrimination to abusive households. He had told Kota once that villains were still people, and that the best way to get rid of villains was to remove the things that force normal people to become criminals.
That was exactly how Izuku had dealt with the Stainists; by understanding that they had a point about there being too many corrupt heroes, and then introducing a law that got rid of those corrupt heroes, he'd satisfied the Stainists and gotten all but the most extreme members of the group to accept the compromise. There were still a few higher-level villains running around Japan, such as the remnants of the Meta Liberation Army, but they weren't a serious threat to anyone now. In fact, things had improved to the point that Kota couldn't remember a time when things had ever been better.
But Aunt Shino and other adults, and even Izuku himself, had told him that there was still a long way to go before things returned to normal. Even though he had no idea what "normal" was, he knew he wanted to help make that happen.
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Frostburn in Hot Water Again: Remark about brother-in-law earns massive public backlash
Article by Taneo Tokuda
Pro Hero Frostburn (#14) is no stranger to infamy, with his controversial origins, the consequences of his very existence and his lack of tact in public interactions making him a prime target for critics of heroes and the subject of black comedy for many others. His latest scandal, however, comes from an unexpected direction. During a recent event hosted by Hawks (#4) to announce the third pregnancy of his wife Fuyumi, Frostburn's older sister, the bicolored hero declared his brother-in-law to be "an attack dog of the Commission", much to his sister's disapproval and the Winged Hero's fury. On his Chatter, Frostburn has stated that he "was only telling the truth" about Hawks, but the Winged Hero's numerous fans were quick to accuse the Elemental Hero of rank envy, much as had been the case with his father...
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The spookiness of the run-down apartment complex in front of Kota was making him regret his idea of training here.
After leaving his school and his noisy, sometimes bothersome classmates behind, he hadn't gone straight home as he almost always did. He'd heard U.A did a lot of urban training simulations and that the practical portion of the entrance exam would also consist of such. Up until he started middle school, he'd lived out in the countryside, so he had plenty of practice using his quirk in outdoor environments. Urban environments, however, were a different matter. His aunt had drilled into him that cities were a whole new ball game from the countryside. Collateral damage was a far bigger concern, there were more civilians to be worried about, and it was much easier for villains to hide by taking cover indoors or blending in with the crowd.
So he'd come up with a plan to get used to all of that. On bus rides from his one-bedroom apartment (which his aunt had rented out for him) to his school and back, he'd noticed that, due to ongoing repairs to war damage, many parts of the city had been abandoned. He'd scoped out this particular spot a few days ago and found it was rarely visited during daylight hours. As long as he left before it got dark and some bad people started hanging around the place, he should be fine.
In theory, anyways.
There wouldn't have been a need him to go this far just to do a couple of hours of quirk training if not for the fact it was illegal to use your quirk in public-unless, of course, you had a hero license. Back before the war, one might still have been able to get away with it as long as their quirk wasn't too destructive, but nowadays everyone was more suspicious and threatening. At any rate, his quirk had become strong enough that he doubted people would just ignore him if he started using it. His parents might had have been rescue heroes, but Kota knew that his temper and personality just wasn't cut out for it and he saw himself as more of a fighter. Sorry Mom, Dad, wherever you are. I'm not going to be your type of hero. But I'll still be a hero you can be proud of.
Of course, trying to become a combat hero meant he had to train by using his quirk to destroy things, but out here there were plenty of unused buildings to use as targets. Plus, this entire area was marked for demolition anyways. Once he'd made sure the coast was clear, Kota took aim and activated his quirk, holding both of his hands together in front of him like he was holding a gun and shooting out a high-pressure stream of water. It took him only a few seconds to gouge out a ragged hole in the wall of the apartment right in front of him. He spent the next few minutes working the building over, practicing his aim and figuring out how to adjust his power output.
Then his head was almost hit by a refrigerator-sized chunk of the wall.
He'd thought his water jets had enough range to allow him to hit targets from a safe distance away, but it seemed he still needed to work on that. Carefully, he backed off, keeping an eye on the damaged structure so that he could start running if it started to collapse completely; fortunately it seemed that he hadn't done that much damage. He wondered whether that was really a good thing or if it meant he needed to get stronger, before he went off in search of more targets.
After another half an hour of vandalism, Kota decided to take a short break, having exhausted his quirk. He still needed to work on becoming more efficient, to conserve his water while maintaining a similar amount of hitting power. Right now I'm using too much water to get the job done. If I constantly fought like this, I could easily run out of water at a critical moment. It at least gave him something to work on in the ten months he had between now and the entrance exam.
"Kota, if you'd told your aunt you needed to train somewhere I could have given you access to Might Tower's facilities."
He didn't need to look around to know where, and from who, that voice had come from. "What are you doing here?" He asked, knowing that Izuku was standing behind him. "Don't you have better things to do, like holding autographing sessions and being on talk shows?" Most people would've been awestruck if the Symbol of Hope suddenly showed up to meet them, but after having known each other for so long, Kota was used to Izuku's presence. Even so, it wasn't exactly every day that he came around to visit; he was just too busy most of the time.
"Maybe I should be, since I already postponed an interview last week because an earthquake happened up in Hokkaido and they were short on hands." Izuku joked. "But come on, you know I only do that sort of thing as little as possible, just enough to keep people happy and to bring up my own thoughts on the hero system. Anyways, I'm here because I needed to talk to you about preparing for U.A - you're planning to go there, right?"
"Of course I am," Kota replied indignantly. "You think I'm going to go to some place like Ketsubutsu or Isamu?" He'd researched all six of Japan's hero academies just in case he didn't make it into U.A. Seiai was a girls-only school, so was right out. Seijin had that whole ninja schtick that he found too gimmicky. Isamu Academy had the highest acceptance rate out of all six schools, but it didn't have a particularly good reputation for producing successful heroes, and they mostly worked with students who had unusual, less powerful quirks. Ketsubutsu was held in higher regard, and their more relaxed academic curriculum sounded nice; Kota had applied to it just in case he needed a last-ditch solution. But it still wasn't where he really wanted to go.
The two best hero schools in Japan, and the two hardest to get into, were U.A and Shiketsu, and Kota had sent in applications to both of them. He already knew, however, that U.A was his calling. He didn't like some of the stuff he'd heard about Shiketsu, such as how strict they were, and U.A was truly legendary even on the international scale for having produced most of Japan's greatest heroes. The debut of the Hell Class had only provided further evidence of its quality.
"Hey, don't be disrespectful to the heroes who graduated from Ketsubutsu or Isamu, unless you think Epicenter doesn't know what he's doing. But it is true, going to U.A does give you a better chance of success as a hero. Which is why I came all this way to talk to you about helping you make it into the hero course."
"What, you're going to bribe the school or something?" That was illegal and the sort of thing that would ruin Izuku's career if he got caught doing it. Not to mention it would kill Kota's own chances of being taken seriously as a hero. But surely he wouldn't go that far just to get him into U.A., would he?
"No, bribery would be very wrong and illegal." Izuku chuckled. "But there is a completely legal way I can help you get into U.A."
"Which way?" Okay, now he was interested.
"How would you like to become a recommendation student?"