Chapter Text
The first message had been an accident.
Kirishima hadn’t meant to stay up that late. He’d only meant to check the hero forums for training tips, maybe watch a few clips of pro fights before going to sleep. Instead, he found himself stuck in a comment thread under a competitive online battle game he barely understood.
The thread was on fire.
Not literally, but close. Lines of text scrolled past so fast he could barely read them. People argued about builds, quirks, mechanics, and something called “frame data.” He hovered his cursor over the reply box, hesitated, and then typed without really thinking.
“Wouldn’t raw power beat all that strategy stuff if you just trained hard enough?”
He hit enter.
Immediately, three people told him he was wrong.
A fourth replied a moment later.
NitroKing:
“Only if you’re strong enough to back it up.”
Kirishima stared at the username. NitroKing. The avatar was a stylized explosion, orange and black jagged lines bursting out from a black background.
He smiled before he could stop himself and typed back.
“Then just get strong enough.”
A pause.
Then:
“Idiot. That’s the point.”
He laughed quietly into his pillow so he wouldn’t wake his parents.
They argued for forty minutes.
It wasn’t mean, exactly. More like clashing sparks. NitroKing was blunt, sharp-edged, and weirdly intense about everything. Kirishima—using the painfully uncreative username StoneSolid13—kept pushing back, insisting that grit and effort mattered just as much as technical mastery.
Somewhere in the back and forth, the rest of the thread faded away. Other replies stopped coming. It was just the two of them now, messages stacking neatly one after another.
“You can’t just yell and punch your way to the top,” NitroKing wrote.
“Watch me,” Kirishima shot back.
“You’d lose.”
“Only if you gave up first.”
Another pause.
Longer this time.
“…Tch. You’re annoying.”
Kirishima grinned at his screen.
“You replied first.”
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, the next night, there was a private message waiting in his inbox.
From: NitroKing
“You play this game or do you just talk?”
Kirishima stared at it for a solid ten seconds before scrambling to type a reply.
“I play! I’m just not great yet!”
“Get on.”
No greeting. No introduction. Just a challenge.
His heart thumped a little faster than it should have as he logged in.
Their first match was a disaster.
Kirishima’s character got launched across the map three separate times by perfectly timed, brutally aggressive plays from NitroKing. He barely had time to react before he was respawning again.
But every time he went down, NitroKing barked instructions in the in-game chat.
“Don’t dodge early.”
“You telegraph everything.”
“Stop hesitating!”
It was harsh.
It was helpful.
When they finally won a round together, scraped out by stubborn teamwork and a last-second reckless push from Kirishima, NitroKing didn’t celebrate.
He just typed:
“…Better.”
Kirishima sat back in his chair, sweaty-palmed and breathless like he’d actually been fighting.
“You’re really good,” he admitted.
“Obviously.”
“…Teach me?”
A beat passed.
“Log on tomorrow.”
That became a routine.
Tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that.
They never exchanged real names.
They never shared pictures.
But they talked.
Between matches, during loading screens, in the quiet minutes after midnight when the rest of the house was asleep, their messages shifted from game strategy to everything else.
Training injuries.
Teachers that didn’t understand.
The weight of expectations.
“You ever feel like if you’re not the best, there’s no point?” NitroKing asked one night.
Kirishima blinked at the screen.
“I feel like if I’m not trying my hardest, that’s when there’s no point.”
“…Hah.”
“What?”
“That’s stupid.”
“You asked!”
“Yeah. And your answer’s still stupid."
But he didn’t change the subject.
Instead, slowly, piece by piece, they started talking about why they were there at all.
Heroes.
Not the flashy rankings or the popularity polls. Not the merch or the interviews.
The real ones.
The kind that stood back up after being knocked down. The kind that scared villains just by refusing to quit.
Kirishima admitted, one night, that he wasn’t sure his quirk was impressive enough.
There was a long silence on the other end of the chat.
Then:
“Quirks don’t make heroes.”
He stared at the words, surprised.
“You said raw power matters.”
“It does.”
“…So which is it?”
“Both. Damn it.”
A second message followed immediately.
“Power’s useless if you’re a coward. Courage is useless if you can’t protect anyone. You need both.”
Kirishima read that three times.
Then he typed, carefully:
“You’re going to be an amazing hero someday.”
The reply came back so fast it was almost defensive.
“Of course I am.”
But a minute later, quieter:
“You too.”
The first time NitroKing logged off without saying goodnight, Kirishima felt strangely hollow.
The first time he came back online to find NitroKing already waiting, he felt something warm bloom under his ribs.
It took months before he realized what that feeling was.
It took one terrible day at school to make him say it.
He’d frozen during a mock rescue exercise. Not for long. Just long enough to matter. Long enough to see the disappointment in his teacher’s eyes.
That night, his messages were shorter than usual.
NitroKing noticed immediately.
“What happened.”
Not a question. A demand.
Kirishima hesitated, then told him.
About the hesitation. About the fear. About the way his quirk hardened his body but didn’t seem to harden whatever part of him mattered most.
There was a delay before the response.
When it came, it was furious.
“So what?”
Kirishima blinked.
“You screwed up. Fix it.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It is.”
Another message slammed into the chat.
“You don’t get to quit because you messed up once. Real heroes don’t get retries. Next time, you move faster.”
Kirishima swallowed.
“What if I freeze again?”
“Then I’ll be there to yell at you until you move.”
He laughed weakly as he typed:
“Through the screen?”
“Shut up.”
A beat.
“I’m serious.”
The words sat there, stark and bright against the dark background.
I’m serious.
Something twisted tight in Kirishima’s chest.
“I know.”
He didn’t remember deciding to type the next line.
“I’m glad I met you.”
The cursor blinked.
Once.
Twice.
“…Yeah.”
Then, after a pause that felt like standing at the edge of a cliff:
“Me too.”
After that, everything changed without either of them saying it out loud.
They still trained. Still argued. Still competed.
But sometimes they stayed logged in without playing at all, just talking about nothing.
Favorite foods.
Annoying habits.
The kind of hero costume they wanted someday.
“Mine’s gonna be flashy,” NitroKing declared.
“Mine’s gonna be manly,” Kirishima countered.
“…What does that even mean?”
“You’ll see.”
One night, long past midnight, when the world felt small and quiet and safe inside the glow of his monitor, Kirishima typed the words before he could lose his nerve.
“Do you ever think about meeting in person?”
The response was instant.
“When we’re heroes.”
His breath caught.
“Not before?”
A pause.
Long.
Heavy.
“I don’t want to meet you as some extra.”
Kirishima’s fingers hovered over the keys.
“I want to meet you when we’re both strong enough to stand next to each other.”
Something fierce and bright surged through him.
“Then let’s get there.”
Another pause.
Then:
“…Idiot.”
But the next message was softer.
“Together.”
That was the night they stopped pretending it was just friendship.
They never used the word.
They didn’t need to.
Good mornings appeared in his inbox before school.
Good nights lingered longer and longer before either of them logged off.
When one of them got hurt training, the other got angry on their behalf.
When one of them improved, the other bragged about it like it was their own victory.
It was easy.
It was terrifying.
And then the entrance exam announcements came.
U.A. High School.
The best hero course in the country.
The dream.
The chat went quiet for almost a full minute after Kirishima sent the message.
“I’m applying.”
Three dots appeared.
Disappeared.
Appeared again.
“…Me too.”
His heart leapt.
“Then we might actually meet!”
The reply came back slower than usual.
“If we both get in.”
Reality settled over the conversation like a weight.
Training would double.
Sleep would shrink.
There would be less time. Less energy. Less of everything except the single, burning goal ahead of them.
Kirishima swallowed hard.
“We’ll still talk, right?”
The answer took too long.
“…If we keep doing this,” NitroKing wrote, each word deliberate, “we’re going to start choosing this over training.”
Kirishima’s chest tightened.
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
A beat.
“So will I.”
Silence filled the space between messages.
Finally:
“Heroes first.”
The words hurt more than he expected.
But beneath the ache was something solid. Familiar. Unyielding.
Resolve.
Kirishima closed his eyes, then typed with shaking fingers.
“Heroes first.”
A final message appeared.
“When we meet at U.A., we start again.”
His breath hitched as she quickly typed.
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
Another pause.
“…Don’t fall behind, StoneSolid.”
A watery laugh escaped him.
“You better not either, NitroKing.”
The chat window went dark.
For the first time in months, there was no goodnight.
Just the quiet hum of his computer and the echo of a promise hanging in the dark.
They would meet again.
Not as usernames.
Not as strangers behind screens.
But as heroes.
Real.Fucking.Heros.