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Everyone knew it when Bakusatsuou entered the battlefield.
In the entire in-game history of All For You, there had not been anyone with a quirk as powerful: Explosion’s AOE attack had the largest blast radius of any player’s, rivaling even that of several boss monsters, and it was accompanied by streaks of white and orange lightning granted by his unique class, One For All. To say King Explosion Murder was the main character of the game was no exaggeration, when his story quests determined the plot as much as his quirk determined the landscape.
It was a nearly game-breaking level of power for any one player to have, especially with the max-level class bonus that made Bakusatsuou’s stats rise the greater the attack stats of his enemies were - except that, as the community knew from the player’s public announcement, his combat prowess was only truly possible because of intense practice and extremely fine control.
His talent, all agreed, was what had let him do the work to really make the class his own.
What a shame, then, that he’d chosen to become a villain.
Izuku still didn’t know why Kacchan - his childhood friend, teenage bully, and young adult rival - had switched factions in the middle of the story quest. He’d confronted him about it after the great betrayal that led many of the top 100 heroes to their deaths; Bakugou had refused to explain himself, only told Izuku he would get his answer at the end of the story like everyone else.
Now, staggering to his feet in a field of rubble, Hero Deku wondered what it would be.
Behind him, the bodies of the top 25 heroes - the last of the hundred from that fateful day - lay dead and dying on the ground, dragged outside the blast radius by a diminishing crew of support-class heroes and player civilians. Hero Deku made his way, slowly, forward, to the center of the combat zone, knowing both his HP and his MP were almost at zero, but knowing, too, that he was the last one left.
Him, and the enemy.
And Bakusatsuou only had 1% of his HP left.
The moment itself was a blur.
Deku had dragged his feet to where the Number One Villain was barely standing, back braced against a crumbling concrete wall. King Explosion Murder had watched him with burning red-orange eyes, but done nothing - still caught in Hero [Pinky]’s “MP Draining Acid” debuff, his quirk was out of energy.
There was a rush of air, the feeling of his fist striking the enemy’s face.
There was the echoing chime of a completed boss battle.
There was the dimming view of a piece of rebar suddenly piercing his middle, and the cold numbness of his HP draining to zero, vision going dark.
There was a flash of red light that he recognized, fading, as coming from the strange black crystal pendant he’d earned in a side quest, whose purpose he’d never divined.
[Your character, “Deku”, has died.]
[Because you died during a story quest, your character will be locked.]
[Calculating your overall score for the leaderboard…]
[Final Ranking: 1 / 5,822,103]
[Congratulations, Hero Deku!]
[You will now be logged out. Please choose or create a new character to return to the game.]
I can’t believe it, Izuku thought. Number one? I barely landed the last blow!
That meant - he’d beaten Kacchan. He’d never beaten Kacchan. Wow… he couldn’t wait to look at the leaderboard online. Even his mom, who didn’t know anything about videogames, would be proud of this accomplishment!
[Error: logout failed. (Error Code 841.)]
[Loading repair protocol…]
“Wait, what?”
Izuku sat bolt upright in his VR capsule, drenched in a cold sweat. He’d never heard of a logout error before - the functionality was hard-wired into the capsules, completely separate from the software of the games. He ran a hand through damp hair, catching his breath, and got out of the capsule on shaky legs to grab his phone and look up the error code.
He almost dropped it when he saw the date.
March 1, 22X1. The day of the much-anticipated All For You launch.
He’d been sent back in time?!
It was only minutes until launch, so Izuku postponed ‘freaking out’ in his schedule and got back in the capsule. He started character creation, which was opened thirty minutes ahead of the game map for players to join as soon as possible, and recreated his sort-of alter ego from last time, with a few simple tweaks to his natural appearance - just enough that he wouldn’t be recognized in real life, of course.
All For You was a virtual reality MMO set in approximately the modern world, except with a little more magic added in: anything living had a chance of spawning with a ‘quirk’, a superpower, which cost MP to activate and had a great variety of possible effects. Combat-oriented quirks, like Bakusatsuou’s “Explosion”, were the most popular in PVP and damage-dealer adventuring parties, but there were all sorts, and combat was far from the only way to play the game.
For new characters, quirks were randomly generated only once you logged into the game, at least partially based on the player’s self-reported gaming style and biometric data from their capsule - there had been plenty of players in the future with three or four characters that all had similar quirks. But quirks weren’t universally helpful, or even useful, so there was little envy of the quirked from the quirkless, who started out with higher stats and a better early-level growth rate.
Izuku, for his part, had sacrificed Hero Deku’s quirk, Small Object Attraction, for a stat redistribution within the Underground Hero story questline, midway through the game, and never regretted it.
As the countdown approached zero, the prompt Izuku had been waiting for appeared on the screen.
[Name Your Character: _]
Quick as lightning, Izuku input, Bakusatsuou.
[Confirming…]
Heh. Kacchan would hate his guts if he pulled this off-
[Error: Name already in use. Choose another: _]
Okay, okay, fine, he thought, chuckling to himself. Wow, Kacchan was a quick draw as always. He typed in something else.
[Confirming…]
[Confirmed. Welcome, Yamikumo. ]
[The tutorial will begin in 10 seconds.]
All right, Izuku thought, getting hype as the timer went down. Time to get started. He’d already started working out a plan for this run of the game: speedrun the first 10 levels, so he could be the first to enter UA, the training ground that accepted only a set number of new players every “season” for the [Hero Academia] class quest. Bakusatsuou had admitted in an interview to getting his unique class quest through the Academy; the Number One Hero, All Might, was the quest giver, and the requirements were apparently pretty tough, but Izuku was confident he’d make it on sheer determination.
He spawned in a neighborhood in Musutafu, one of several starter cities in Japan’s servers, and immediately opened up his status window to see what quirk he’d gotten.
[Player: Yamikumo]
[Level: 1]
[Quirk: None. Class: None.]
Well, that was kind of convenient, wasn’t it? Izuku revised his speed-leveling plan slightly: it would take even less time than he’d thought it would, at this rate.
He ignored the quest box - Tutorial (E) - and closed out of the status window altogether, before making his way north, toward the subway station.
Normally, you weren’t able to leave the tutorial area until you finished the tutorial, a quest which took about two hours in total to complete. This early in the game, however, there was a certain exploit that hadn’t been patched from the development stage - new players could leave the tutorial zone, as long as they hadn’t started the tutorial quest.
Izuku was taking full advantage of this exploit right now, as he slipped through a crowd of NPC civilians going about their day and caught the first train to Yokohama, a level-20 hunting ground.
Yokohama was a normal enough zone, popular with beginners: there were several small dungeons, and it was one of the first cities with real estate that players could buy, which would let it become a hub of player activity in the near future. What had made Izuku choose Yokohama over other, similar cities, however, was its just-as-vibrant criminal underbelly - and the hidden puzzle-dungeon, “Hands Labyrinth”, that had taken more than a year for anyone to beat.
It was a non-combat dungeon, which meant even at level 1, Izuku could clear it - could be the first to clear it, even, which would be more than enough of an achievement to get him into UA.
But Izuku’s plans, solid as they were, shortly went awry.
The streets of Yokohama, when he left the train station, were all but deserted. As Izuku walked down toward the labyrinth entrance, some ten blocks from the station, he could hear the distant echoes of multiple emergency vehicles’ sirens, and his nose registered a familiar, ominous smell in the air.
He still wasn’t prepared to turn a corner and have the rest of the city be gone.
“What the fuck,” Izuku whispered, equipping the goggles he’d picked out during character creation and peering into the dust cloud rising off the landscape. It seemed like half of Yokohama had been reduced to rubble.
Did this happen in the game? Izuku leaned against a lamppost, gazing out over the rubble. Blurry emergency vehicles drove in packs through the dust. Nothing like this devastation had been mentioned anywhere, as far as he knew.
He was a little curious.
By far the most hazardous part of any large-scale battlefield, Izuku had learned from his first run, was the terrain. Concrete rebar, live wires, unstable ground where rocks hadn’t completely settled - it was easy enough to trip and fall and become one of the casualties you were supposed to be there to rescue. Fortunately, Hero Deku had become something of an expert at rescue missions, and that knowledge carried over to Izuku even in his new character.
Under cover of dust and the bright rescue lights, he snuck closer to the place where ambulances were gathering, down in the middle of the rubble. NPCs bustled around the encirclement, barking orders and setting up a triage tent, while others investigated. Izuku saw civilians in suits speaking just a little too loudly about media censorship, and needing to cover this up, and supposed that the government had taken action to conceal the site of the battle before the first players ever got there. But why so urgent?
He got his answer when he was close enough to see the ambulance, and the body on the stretcher being lifted into it.
All Might. The Number One Hero who retired and became a UA teacher shortly before the timeline of the game. He was - grievously injured, Izuku saw, with a surge of nausea that he had to suppress. And if it was All Might who was injured, then no wonder the government was trying to cover it up.
Well… it didn’t have anything to do with Izuku, really, beyond that he had a little more in-depth knowledge of the game’s lore than he had had before being sent back in time. His plans remained unchanged - get into UA, obtain [One For All] from All Might, lead the heroes to ultimate victory at the end of the storyline. This mysterious battle was just a distraction on his route to the [Hands Labyrinth]-
Something closed around his ankle, and Izuku nearly jumped out of his skin when he looked down to see what it was.
Something - no, some one - lay there in the shadows, a bloodied mess in pieces on the ground.
“Hey, you,” the stranger, somehow alive with only the lower half of his face, rasped out. “You don’t have a quirk, eh?”
“N…no?”
The grip on Izuku’s ankle squeezed for a second, pulling him closer, before it let go. He knelt beside the body, utterly confused, and shivered at the way the stranger’s face still turned to him, even without eyes.
“What d’you want most in th’ world?” he slurred. “Anything, jus’ tell me.”
Does he have a wish quirk? Why wouldn’t he use it for himself? Or did it only work for other people? Izuku’s mind whirled, but in the end, he spoke the first thing that came to mind: his goal.
“One For All.”
The stranger laughed, convulsing on the ground. Black blood sprayed from his mouth. (Gross.) “Shit, you too? C’mere.”
A hand came up to cover his face, and Izuku was reminded of that player, [Shigaraki Tomura], who’d notoriously fumbled the villain questline and been usurped by [Bakusatsuou] early in the story. “Go forth and conquer, successor mine,” the stranger declared, punctuated with a wet cough, and a weak laugh, and red-black lightning flickered to life in his palm, filling Izuku’s vision. A sensation unlike anything he’d experienced in years of playing All For You overtook his body, briefly.
When it was gone, he opened his eyes again. The stranger’s body was naught but dust, drifting away on the wind. Where he had lain, only a tiny black stone, where his heart had been, remained.
(It looked familiar.)
And Izuku felt… strange.
[You’ve leveled up!]
[New Class obtained!]
[Your status window has been updated.]
“...Eh?”
Izuku hurriedly opened his status window, and was even more confused by what he saw.
[Player: Yamikumo]
[Level: 1 (+100)]
[Quirk: Give-And-Take (Unique) (Meta)]
[Class: All For One]
"Huh?!"