…
Ten hours.
The jet hummed around us, a constant low-frequency vibration that had become background noise hours ago. Cybele sat across from us, tablet in hand, running through Japanese basics with the patience of someone who'd done this before—learned languages, adapted to new countries, rebuilt her life around unexpected turns.
We were failing spectacularly.
"Hi, name Midas. What you name?"
She closed her eyes. Breathed. "No. It's: 'Hi, my name is Midas. What's yours?'"
"Mom, this is way too hard!" The whine in my voice was embarrassing, but ten hours of grammatical structures I couldn't hear properly had worn through my discipline. "Why is learning Japanese so difficult?!"
"Learning a new language is always difficult, sweetie." She reached over, smoothed my hair back from my forehead—a gesture that felt too young for me, but I let it happen. "You didn't learn English in a day either. You just don't remember."
The cockpit door opened. Howard emerged, carrying something in both hands, wearing an expression I recognized from Tony: the look of someone who'd built something clever and couldn't wait to show it off.
"Oh, I have a present for you kids." He set two VR headsets on the table between us, sleek black units with Stark Industries branding. "Early birthday gifts, you could say."
Tony looked up from his book—Advanced Robotics, dog-eared and annotated. "The hell? We don't want games, Dad. And who's flying the plane?"
"My smart but stupid son." Howard settled into the seat beside Cybele, too close, ignoring her subtle shift away. "Did you forget we're in one of the planes I made? Autopilot's been engaged since Manhattan. I only stayed up front because Midas's mother was still mad at me for my… earlier joke."
Cybele's expression didn't change, but I saw her hand tighten on the tablet.
Tony shook his head. "What are those for?"
"Learning. I built these before Hydra complicated our departure. Integrated AI assistant, neural interface optimized for language acquisition." Howard picked up one headset, turned it over to show the contact points. "Increases learning speed by a factor of three. Maybe four, depending on your brain plasticity."
Silence.
Then Tony's voice, carefully controlled: "You bastard. You made us waste six hours struggling with basics when you had these the whole time?"
Howard chuckled. The sound built into full laughter, unguarded and genuine. "Oh yeah. It was genuinely entertaining, hearing you both butcher pronunciation. 'Kon-nichi-wa' with that American drawl—"
SMACK.
The golden bat appeared from nowhere—Cybele's Quirk, instant and precise—connecting with Howard's skull hard enough to make the cabin ring. He crumpled, eyes rolling back, collapsing across the aisle with limbs splayed.
"You damn asshole!" Cybele stood over him, bat still in hand, breathing hard. "You made me lose sleep teaching them when you had technology to do it instantly?!"
Howard groaned, semi-conscious, hand pressed to the rising welt. "Sorry, sorry… was bored, needed entertainment, you know how long flights—"
SMACK.
He stopped moving.
"Damn perverted prankster," Cybele muttered. She turned to us, bat dissolving back into nothing, and her expression softened with visible effort. "Alright, boys. Use the headsets. Learn as much as you can. Midas, mommy's going to sleep." She pointed toward the rear compartment. "Wake me when we land."
I nodded. She disappeared through the door, and I heard the lock engage.
Tony looked at the headsets. Looked at his unconscious father. "Alright, nerd. Let's hurry up. I'm too tired to stay awake much longer."
I didn't wait. Picked up the nearest unit, fitted it over my eyes, felt the contacts settle against temples and forehead. The world dissolved—
—into void. Absolute darkness, then color bleeding in, a landscape forming below my feet. I stood on nothing, then a chair materialized, then a table, then the space around me resolved into something like a study room suspended in starfield.
"So this is it?"
I approached the table. As I sat, the surface turned transparent, revealing an interface beneath—search bar, command line, something between computer and thought.
"Cool…"
I tapped the bar. A keyboard materialized, holographic but tactile. I typed: Japanese language and literature. Comprehensive. Include dialectical variations.
The search processed. An icon appeared: LEARN.
I pressed it.
Knowledge flooded through the neural interface—not reading, not studying, but integration. Grammar structures, phonemes, kanji radicals, literary traditions, cultural context, historical evolution, regional dialects, keigo, slang, everything compressed into direct cortical imprinting.
It was too much. The bandwidth exceeded what my consciousness could process, and—
Darkness.
I woke in a bed. Unfamiliar ceiling, unfamiliar walls, the particular quality of light that came from a different sun angle, a different latitude.
"Where am I?" The words came out automatically, shaped by reflex—
—in perfect Japanese. Native fluency, no translation layer, the language existing in my mind as naturally as English.
"…What the hell?"
I sat up, testing. "It worked…? Damn, it was that easy?"
Then I saw the room.
Everything was gold. The bedframe, the dresser, the walls where my Quirk had leaked during unconsciousness, transmuting the materials around me into precious metal while I slept.
"Fuck… not again."
I stood, sent the mental command. The golden door melted, reformed as wood and steel, and I stepped through into a hallway that suggested medical facility or research lab—clean lines, functional design, the aesthetic of institutions rather than homes.
I followed the corridor, found a larger space. Howard stood by a window, coffee in hand, talking with Cybele. Tony sat at a high-tech workstation, fingers moving across interfaces, coding something I couldn't read from here.
"Midas. You're awake." Tony didn't look up, but his announcement turned the adults toward me.
"Yeah." I approached, still cataloging the space, the situation. "And I'm guessing we're in Japan now? What part?"
"Musutafu." Tony's Japanese was as fluent as mine, the accent slightly different—more formal, perhaps, or just differently optimized by the same technology.
Cybele and Howard stared at us. Their expressions cycled through shock, reassessment, something like professional evaluation.
"I knew my son could handle the bandwidth," Howard said slowly, "but I didn't expect your son to process the same load." He looked at me differently now—not as a child, not as a curiosity, but as something that might be competition.
"Just because I don't build high-tech stuff doesn't mean I'm stupid," I said. The Japanese felt natural, the sentence structure intuitive.
"Yeah, kid, like you've ever shown any signs of having a brain."
SMACK.
Cybele's hand connected with Howard's head, same spot as before, the bruise already visible. "For the last time, stop with your snarky comments about my son, pervert!"
The force of it surprised me. Not the violence—I'd seen my mother angry—but the protectiveness, the absolute rejection of any diminishment of me, even as joke.
"Mom, calm down…" I said, sweat dropping.
"Midas…" She exhaled, reining it in. "Anyways, we need to go to our new house."
to be continued…
—Authors note—
Hey guys i apologize for taking so long well I was honestly busy with school and boxing.
And also im thinking of starting a patreon.
And im maybe thinking about making another fanfic of a mc reborn as a human in dragon ball but hes yujiro hanma. of course he'll have ki and will be the strongest and it'll not be a one shot.