On the solitary peak of I-Island, the afternoon sun reflected off the pristine metal and crystal surfaces, creating an almost blinding glare. Inside a lab with high security, the only sound was the soft hum of servers and the occasional beep of a monitor. The face of David Shield, framed by his glasses and blond hair, showed deep concern. The holographic screen in front of him flickered with slight interference, displaying the gaunt, skeletal image of his best friend thousands of miles away.

“I don’t understand, Dave,” Toshinori Yagi’s voice was a hoarse whisper, barely audible over the lab’s ambient noise. He was interrupted by a deep, dry cough that shook his frail body, causing the image to distort for a second. “I’ve done everything you told me. I’ve searched actively, I’ve observed the best prospects at U.A., I’ve consulted the records of young heroes… I’ve seen dozens of candidates.”

He paused to catch his breath, a visible effort. “Young people with powerful Quirks, with noble hearts… Mirio Togata is the perfect example. He’s bright, he’s strong, he has an unbreakable spirit. He’s everything a hero should be. He’s the very image of hope. But…”

“But he’s not the one?” David finished, his tone soft and understanding. He adjusted his glasses, leaning closer to the holographic projector, as if physical proximity could shorten the distance between them.

“It’s not that he isn’t worthy,” Toshinori clarified, slowly shaking his head. “If something happened to me tomorrow, he would be the best choice, no doubt. But there isn’t… that spark. That necessary bit of madness, you know what I mean, Dave? The kind you and I saw in Nana.”

David nodded, a shadow of memory crossing his face. “The kind that made you jump from one rooftop to another using unstable prototypes because it ‘seemed faster’.”

A faint smile pulled at Toshinori’s lips. “Exactly. Mirio is logical. He calculates the risks, chooses the best option. That’s what a smart hero should do. But One For All doesn’t always respond to logic. It’s a burden, Dave. It’s a torch that must be carried through the darkest storm, one that threatens to be extinguished with every gust of wind. It needs someone who, upon seeing a building collapse on a civilian, doesn’t think about the evacuation plan or the best way to support the structure.”

His gaze grew intense, his sunken eyes burning with an old flame. “It needs someone who doesn’t think about what must be done, but simply jumps. Someone whose instinct to save others is so fundamental, so ingrained in their being, that it completely overwhelms their own survival instinct. And I can’t find him. I can’t find that kind of idiot.”

Silence settled between the two continents, heavy and dense. David examined Toshinori’s biometric readings displayed in a corner of his screen. The numbers were alarmingly low.

“Have you considered expanding the search outside of the hero academies?” David asked, changing tactics. “Sometimes the best material isn’t polished. Sometimes it’s raw.”

“I have. I’ve watched high school sports festivals, I’ve read news about acts of civic bravery… Nothing. I only find good people, brave people. But I don’t find that successor. It’s as if the new generation is… too sensible.” Toshinori rubbed his hollowed face, the skin stretched over his cheekbones. “And the worst part is, I feel like I’m running out of time.”

“Don’t say that, Toshi.”

“It’s the truth, my friend,” All Might continued, his gaze lost somewhere beyond the camera, as if seeing ghosts in his own office. “I feel it in my bones. There’s something… a pressure in the air. Like the calm before an earthquake. My old contacts in the underworld have vanished. Small criminal organizations are being absorbed or destroyed at an alarming rate. It’s as if someone is setting the stage.”

David frowned. “You think it’s him? All For One?”

“I defeated his body, but not his legacy,” Toshinori whispered. “The evil I spawned by not eradicating him completely is dormant, regrouping in the shadows. I feel its influence spreading, corrupting everything. I need to find my successor, and I need to find him soon. The next generation must be prepared for something worse than what we faced. Much worse.”

*****

The next morning, at a busy newsstand in Musutafu, the headline of the tabloid magazine “The Weekly Hero Buzz” screamed in fuchsia capital letters, designed to catch the eye of any passerby:

“MT. LADY’S SECRET LOVE? THE NEW GIANT HEROINE ON A ‘DATE’ WITH A MYSTERIOUS TEENAGER!”

The main photo took up most of the cover. It was grainy and obviously taken with a telephoto lens from across the street. It showed Yu and Izuku in their booth at “Uncle Tetsu’s Katsudon.” The lighting was dim and warm, and the way they both leaned over the table, laughing at the exact moment the photo was taken, created a false sense of conspiratorial intimacy. Other smaller photos, inserted in circles, showed them walking together down the street. One captured Izuku talking animatedly with his hands, and another showed Yu looking at him with an expression the article, in its cheap prose, described as “enraptured adoration.”

In her elegant downtown apartment with panoramic city views, Nemuri Kayama took a sip of her morning coffee, an exclusive Ethiopian blend that cost a fortune. She almost spat it out on her marble countertop when she saw the magazine cover her assistant had left for her.

A genuine, throaty laugh escaped her lips.

“Oh, Yu, you’re a magnificent disaster,” she said to herself, a mischievous smile on her red lips. She picked up the magazine, the cheap paper contrasting with her perfectly manicured nails. “Not even a week as a pro and you’re already wrapped up in a scandal with a minor? This is better than any reality show. I should send her flowers… or maybe a box of chocolates with a ‘condolences’ note.”

Her amusement, however, began to sour as she turned from the cover and read the text inside. The insinuations and the lewd tone, which sexualized Yu and presented the boy as some kind of conquest, turned her stomach. Her smile vanished, replaced by a sneer. Professional rivalry was one thing. She enjoyed competing with Yu for media attention, for a higher spot in the rankings. It was a game. But this wasn’t a game.

“Vultures,” she muttered, slapping the magazine shut on the marble. “They live by tearing apart other people’s lives to sell a few more copies.”

The paparazzi who took those photos was a parasite, and while Yu’s situation was comically unfortunate, this crossed a line. Nemuri felt an unexpected flash of protectiveness toward her rival. Yu was an impetuous and sometimes naive rookie, but she had potential. This kind of scandal, so early in her career, could permanently poison public perception.

And then there was the other piece of the puzzle. That kid. Izuku Midoriya.

She opened the magazine again, ignoring the text and focusing on the photos of him. There was something about his face. The night before, at the restaurant, he hadn’t acted like a starstruck fan. Nor like a hormonal teenager. There was a conviction in his eyes, an almost alarming intensity. The way he had defended her… it wasn’t normal. Most boys his age would be asking for an autograph or stammering. He had acted like her equal.

“There’s more to you, isn’t there, you perverted kid?” Nemuri thought, drumming her fingers on the blurry image of his face. She felt a pang of curiosity that went beyond gossip.

She pulled out her phone, found Yu’s contact, and typed a message:

“Just saw the ‘Weekly Buzz.’ Hilarious and pathetic. Don’t let those parasites get to you. If you need the name of a good defamation lawyer, let me know.”

She reread it. Maybe it was too nice. She deleted the last sentence and changed it to:

“…Don’t ruin the competition by getting kicked out in your first week. It would be boring.”

She smiled. That was better. She pressed “send” just as her phone began to ring with her agency’s caller ID. No doubt they wanted her “unofficial” opinion on the scandal. The media circus was already in full swing.

****

Meanwhile, in Yu Takeyama’s apartment, the scene was a cliché of despair straight out of a teen movie. If a film director had seen it, they would have yelled, “Cut! Too over the top.”

Yu was curled into a ball on the sofa, wrapped in a thick wool blanket as if she were a cocoon of misery in the middle of summer. She wore pajama pants with a cloud print and an old, faded All Might t-shirt that was too big for her, a memento from her student days. Her blond hair, normally styled with care, was up in a messy bun with several strands escaping. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying.

In her lap, she held a liter of ice cream, flavor “Rocky Road of Despair,” which she ate directly from the container with a large spoon, not caring that it was melting on her hands. The television was on, tuned to a 24 hour news channel where a panel of “experts” (a retired hero with outdated opinions, a social commentator who had never been in a fight, and a pop psychologist) heatedly debated the “lack of professionalism” and “questionable judgment” of the new heroine Mt. Lady.

“My career is over,” she moaned, shoveling a spoonful of ice cream with chocolate chunks and marshmallows into her mouth. “It hasn’t even started and it’s already over. The Public Safety Commission is going to call me. They’re going to take my license. I’m going to be a joke. They’ll call me ‘the cradle robber’ forever. I couldn’t even get a shampoo sponsorship and now this!”

Izuku, sitting in the armchair across from her, watched her with an expression of intense, dispassionate concentration. He didn’t seem worried, or guilty, or even sympathetic. He looked like a scientist observing an unpredictable chemical reaction. He held a notebook and a pen, and every so often, he jotted something down.

“From a nutritional perspective,” he said with complete seriousness, without looking up from his notes, “the massive intake of sugar and saturated fats in a state of elevated stress can lead to a glucose spike followed by a drastic crash. This, in turn, will exacerbate feelings of depression and lethargy in the long term. I would recommend switching to Greek yogurt with blueberries for antioxidants and probiotics.”

Yu stopped chewing and shot him a death glare over the ice cream container. “Seriously? That’s your contribution right now? A dietary analysis of my emotional breakdown?”

“I am trying to help,” he replied, unperturbed, finally looking up. “The first step in solving a problem is to analyze all the variables. And right now, you are introducing a negative physiological variable into an already compromised situation. The problem isn’t the ice cream, or even the article. The problem is the narrative being built and your response to it.”

“The narrative is that I went on a date with a teenager!” she exclaimed, waving her spoon and splattering a drop of melted ice cream on the rug. “And it’s true! You said it yourself! Your exact words were: ‘Technically, this is a date’! The entire restaurant heard you!”

“It was a factual statement based on the commonly accepted social definition of the event: two individuals sharing a meal in a social setting to get to know each other better,” he corrected with robotic precision. “The error was underestimating the presence of hostile observers with long range surveillance equipment. A failure on my part in assessing environmental risks. It will not happen again.”

Yu dropped her head back on the sofa with a groan that sounded like a small animal dying. “It doesn’t matter. It already happened. Everything is lost. My agent isn’t answering my calls. He’s probably meeting with the agency’s lawyers deciding how to fire me without paying severance.”

Izuku set his notebook aside. The sound of the pen hitting the coffee table was surprisingly loud in the misery filled room. He stood and walked over to the sofa. For a moment, Yu thought he was going to try to give her an awkward pat on the back, but instead, he sat carefully on the edge of the cushion, at a respectful distance.

The tone of his voice changed. It lost its analytical edge and became softer, lower.

“When my Quirk manifested, everyone thought it was useless,” he said suddenly, his gaze fixed on the ice cream tub as if he were reading a script from it. “Training dogs. That’s all it did. Controlling animals. In a world of people who can fly, who throw fire, who freeze buildings… I could make dogs shake with one hundred percent efficiency.”

Yu stopped eating. The cynicism on her face faded, replaced by a confused curiosity.

“All my dreams of being a hero, of being like All Might, turned to ash in an instant,” Izuku continued. “For years, every time I saw a hero on TV, every time my classmates talked about which agency they wanted to join when they became heroes, I felt… what you’re feeling now. Like the whole world was pointing at me and laughing at my failure. They told me to give up. To accept my place. ‘You could work at a kennel,’ they’d say. ‘Or be a really good dog walker’.”

He raised his head and looked directly at her. Yu was surprised to see the shadow of an old, familiar pain in his green eyes. It was the same feeling she had at that moment: the public humiliation, the sense of your dreams slipping through your fingers because of something beyond your control.

“People are always going to talk,” Izuku said, his voice regaining some of its firmness. “There will always be vultures waiting for you to stumble, for you to show a weakness, so they can feast. It’s their nature. You can’t change it. You only have two options: you can let them devour you, or you can fly so high that their squawking becomes mere background noise.”

He stood up, and his posture changed completely. He was no longer the weird kid or the clumsy assistant. His back straightened, his shoulders squared. There was a new authority in him, the same he had shown briefly in the restaurant the night before. It was as if a different version of Izuku Midoriya took control.

“So you have two options, Takeyama san,” he said, his voice firm and clear, cutting through the self pitying air of the room. “Option one: you can stay on that sofa, drown your sorrows in ice cream until your blood sugar sends you into a coma, and wait for your agency to call and terminate your contract over a morality clause. Option two: you can get up, put on your costume, and come with me to the urban combat training gym I’ve rented for this afternoon.”

Yu stared at him, her spoon halfway to her mouth. She blinked. “A training gym?”

“Of course,” he replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He walked over to the chair where Yu’s hero costume lay in a wrinkled heap. He picked it up with unexpected care and held it out. “This scandal will pass. Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap. In a week, some other hero will do something stupid and everyone will forget about you. But for that to happen, you have to give them something new to talk about. You have to be so good, so spectacular, so undeniably heroic, that this anecdote becomes a footnote in your legend, instead of your epitaph.”

Izuku’s logic, though strange and direct, was irrefutable. The panic that had paralyzed Yu all morning began to be replaced by a spark of defiance. It was true. Hiding would only confirm the vultures’ narrative.

“Your debut kick was perfect in its execution, but predictable in its application,” Izuku continued, examining the costume. “We can improve it. We can increase the power output if you adjust the angle of your hip at the moment of impact. We can reduce the movement’s preparation time if we work on your balance during the growth phase. We can analyze your weak points, like your vulnerability to fast, coordinated attacks while at your maximum size, and turn them into strengths by using the environment to your advantage.”

His voice filled with a cold, intense passion. “We’re going to train until your ‘Canyon Cannon’ isn’t just a debut move, but the most devastating attack in the arsenal of any hero in your category. We are going to make them forget about this stupid magazine. We are going to make it so that when people hear the name Mt. Lady, they don’t think of gossip, they think of power.”

For the first time all morning, an emotion other than misery stirred in Yu’s heart. It wasn’t hope, not yet. It was rage. A cold, focused rage. Rage against the magazine, against the TV “experts,” against her own stupidity for getting carried away.

Slowly, she put down the ice cream container, setting it on the coffee table with a dull thud. She wiped a stray tear from her cheek with the back of her hand.

She looked at Izuku, and for the first time, she didn’t see the boy who had gotten her into this mess. She saw her only way out.

“And what about you?” she asked, her voice still trembling but with a new edge of determination. “What are you going to do in all this? They’ve put you in the spotlight too.”

A confident smile, the first genuine and self assured smile she had seen from him, appeared on Izuku Midoriya’s face.

“Me,” he said, folding the hero costume with methodical efficiency and offering it to her. “I’m going to train you.”