..
"Where… am I?"
Darkness. Not the comfortable dark of a closed room, but something viscous and pressing. I tried to open my eyes and found I couldn't—my body wouldn't respond to anything I asked of it. Everything felt wrong. Tight. Warm. Slick. Like being squeezed through a tube that breathed around me, walls pulsing, pushing, forcing me forward whether I wanted to move or not.
Suffocating.
The last thing I remembered was my couch. One Piece Film: Gold playing on the screen. Luffy's final attack against Gild Tesoro—that ridiculous golden giant form. I'd been muttering to myself about how Tesoro could've won if he'd just turned his own body into gold instead of relying on external constructs, because honestly, if you're going to have a Logia-type power—
Then nothing.
Now this.
The pressure surged suddenly, unbearable. The walls tightened, gripped, shoved.
"Wait—am I moving?"
Another contraction. Another shove toward the light I could sense bleeding through from somewhere ahead.
Panic hit then, real and chemical, flooding a body I didn't recognize. The brightness grew—sharp, white, wrong—
Huge hands clamped around my skull, guiding, pulling. One final crushing pressure and then—
Air.
Cold hit my skin like a slap. Sound rushed in—voices, sharp and overlapping, speaking words I couldn't process yet. My eyes cracked open, blurry, burning, slowly resolving shapes that loomed wrong, too big, figures in white looking down at me with faces I couldn't read.
Nurses.
"…No way."
The thought crystallized before I could stop it.
"Oh—oh no. Don't tell me…"
I tried to look down at myself. Tried to move an arm, a leg, anything. Everything felt distant, wrapped in cotton, but what I could feel was small. Wrong-sized. Limbs that ended too soon, a torso that compressed when I tried to draw breath.
"…I'm a baby."
[Cybele]
"Alright, Cybele—one more push. Your son is almost here."
The head nurse's voice cut through the haze of pain and exhaustion. Cybele's fingers found Karl's hand and clamped down hard enough to make him hiss.
"Fuck!"
"Language, Karl."
"…Sorry."
"Focus. The head's out—keep going!"
She pushed because there was nothing else to do, because her body demanded it, because this was the only way through. The pressure released all at once, sudden and absolute, and she heard it before she felt the lack of it—the wet sound of birth, the silence that followed.
The room went quiet.
"…His eyes," someone whispered.
Cybele lifted her head, breathing hard. They'd pulled him free, this thing she'd carried for nine months, and he wasn't crying. Wasn't screaming. The nurses had frozen around him, and when she managed to focus past the sweat and the ache, she saw why.
Gold. His eyes caught the overhead lights and threw them back wrong—too bright, too liquid, like someone had melted precious metal and poured it into a newborn's skull.
"And his body…" another voice, uneasy.
"He's muscular." Disbelief there. "That's not—newborns don't have definition like that."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Cybele watched a nurse's hand hover over her son and pull back, just slightly, just enough.
"This isn't normal."
[Midas]
They put me in her arms, and I felt the warmth of her before I could make out her face properly. Everything was still blurry at the edges, my new eyes not quite calibrated to this world, but I could smell her—salt and sweat and something sweet underneath, the chemical signature of mother that my infant brain recognized even if my adult mind was still screaming.
I wasn't crying. Wasn't flailing. I just looked at her, trying to process the face that swam into focus above me. Young. Tired. Beautiful in the way of someone who'd just done something impossible.
Her smile started uncertain and grew real.
"Oh… you're going to be a heartbreaker, aren't you?"
Her thumb brushed my cheek. The touch felt enormous, gentle, terrifying in its intimacy.
"My little Midas."
She handed me back too soon. I didn't want to go—some infant reflex I couldn't control made my hands reach for her, grasping, and I found the nurse's finger instead.
Crack.
The sound was small but distinct. The nurse screamed, a sharp bark of pain that made me flinch in the other nurse's grip. He'd caught me when the first one recoiled, hands shaking where they held me under the arms.
I stared at my own hand. Five tiny fingers, pink and creased and wrong, and I'd just—
"I didn't mean to," I thought, helpless, the words forming in a mind that couldn't speak them. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't know—"
The injured nurse clutched her hand to her chest, face white. No one looked at me with anything but fear after that.
They took me to another room. Ran tests I didn't understand, machines beeping and whirring around my too-small body. I let them. What else could I do? I was hours old, helpless, and every time I tried to move deliberately—to control this meat I'd been stuffed into—I found myself fighting reflexes that weren't mine. The grasp reflex. The startle response. A brain that wanted to sleep sixteen hours a day and scream when it was uncomfortable.
I focused on listening instead. The nurses talked like I wasn't there, or like I couldn't understand, and they were half-right.
"Muscle density four times adult standard."
"Bone density matching muscle tissue—do you understand what that means? His skeleton can support forces that would crush a normal human."
"Cardiovascular readings are off the charts. Respiratory efficiency… I've never seen anything like this."
"And the neural activity." A pause. Someone had pulled up a chart, was pointing at spikes. "This pattern isn't infantile. It's structured. Organized."
They stepped back from my crib. Lowered their voices, but not enough.
"This child is a monster," someone said.
"Superman syndrome," another corrected, clinical, afraid. "Accelerated cellular development, enhanced metabolic efficiency, probably structural reinforcement at the genetic level."
"And this is all pre-Quirk." The head nurse's voice. "Baseline human potential, if you can call it that."
Silence.
"Can you imagine what his actual Quirk will manifest as?"
Quirk.
The word landed like a stone in still water. I'd been drifting, half-aware, fighting the biological imperative to sleep, and suddenly I was awake.
They were speaking English. Normal, unaccented English, the same language I'd fallen asleep speaking on my couch. But that word didn't belong to my world. Quirk. The specific terminology, the clinical usage, the cultural weight behind it—
My Hero Academia.
I knew this world. I'd watched the anime, read the manga, argued about power scaling on forums at 2 AM. The society of heroes and villains, the genetic lottery that determined whether you'd breathe fire or grow extra limbs or just… be strong. Be fast. Be more than human in ways that mattered.
And I'd been reborn into it. Not just reborn—reborn special. The body they were measuring and fearing, this infant tank they'd called a monster, was my starting point. My baseline.
A grin spread across my face, muscle memory from a life I still remembered pulling at unfamiliar features. I couldn't help it. The fear in the room, my own helplessness, the nurse's broken finger—all of it faded against the sudden, absurd potential of this moment.
Reincarnated.
Overpowered.
And now this world, with its infinite variety of abilities, its culture built around being extraordinary, its future that I could navigate with foreknowledge and a body built to break limits?
Yeah.
This might actually be fun.
To be continued…