Age: 14
The air in the abandoned quarry was still, heavy with dust and silence. The afternoon sun beat down relentlessly on the limestone rocks, creating a perfect natural oven for my sweat.
I stood in the center of the clearing, shirtless. At fourteen, puberty had hit me hard, and coupled with a decade of relentless training, my body was no longer a child's. It was a compact machine of dense muscle and superficial scars from small burns.
I looked at my hands. Sweat pooled in my palms, glistening like oil.
Nitroglycerin.
In canon, Katsuki Bakugo was an artist of violence. An instinctive prodigy who sowed chaos on the battlefield. His body moved before he could think, creating combat sequences that were pure aggressive poetry.
I retain those instincts. My body knows, on a cellular level, how to twist my hips to maximize a punch or how to dodge a blind attack on pure reflex. That is the genetic inheritance of the beast.
But I am not just an artist. I am an engineer. And when you combine a predator's instinct with applied physics, you get something far more dangerous than a simple explosion.
I raised my right arm, aiming at a granite block located forty meters away.
"Instinct: Aim for the center of mass," I muttered. "Science: Shaped charge."
Instead of fully opening my palm for an expansive detonation, I curled my fingers into a circle, leaving only a tiny opening between my thumb and index finger. I turned my hand into a pressure chamber.
Bakugo's instinct screamed at me to unleash the power. The OC's mind calculated the fluid compression.
I tensed my forearm to absorb the massive recoil.
"Piercing Shot: High Pressure."
CRACK-FSSSH!
It wasn't a roar. It was a sharp, deafening snap, like the whip of a steel cable snapping. A beam of concentrated light, no thicker than a pencil, shot from my hand at supersonic speed.
The beam struck the rock.
There was no massive fireball wasted on the outside. Just a clean, perfect hole piercing through the solid stone from side to side. The edge of the hole glowed red-hot due to extreme thermal friction.
I lowered my arm. A trail of white smoke drifted from my fingers.
One point five percent dispersion. Total penetration.
In the original story, Bakugo didn't develop this technique until the provisional license exam at sixteen, and he did it out of pure necessity. In my case, I have it operational at fourteen by design.
I crouched down. My legs tensed like coiled springs.
"Now, mobility."
BOOM-BOOM!
Two quick, controlled explosions behind my back launched me into the air. It wasn't a simple jump; it was a ballistic takeoff.
This is where the fusion truly shined. My mind calculated the thrust vectors needed to counteract gravity and wind, but my body automatically made the micro-adjustments to maintain balance in mid-air. I didn't have to consciously think about moving my left foot two degrees; my cerebellum did it on its own.
I soared thirty meters above the quarry. I flipped in the air, hanging upside down, watching the ground rapidly pull away.
The original Bakugo used the Howitzer Impact, creating a tornado to add rotational inertia. It was devastating, but its setup was slow and predictable.
I preferred atmospheric compression.
I brought both hands together in front of me as I nosedived. I accumulated sweat, but I didn't detonate it. I let it vaporize between my palms, saturating the air and creating a dense cloud of supercritical aerosol around me.
"Delayed ignition."
The ground rushed up toward my face. Twenty meters. Ten meters.
My instinct screamed: NOW! My logic dictated: Wait one more millisecond to reach maximum impact pressure.
At the absolute last instant, right before smashing into the ground, I released the spark.
KABOOM!
The shockwave didn't disperse in all directions. By using my own falling body as a plug and the cupped shape of my hands as a directional nozzle, I managed to focus all the thermal and kinetic energy downward.
The air turned into a solid hammer.
I landed at the epicenter. The quarry floor didn't just shatter; it liquefied for a fraction of a second. A five-meter diameter crater violently opened beneath my boots, and the shockwave kicked up a dust cloud that blanketed the entire clearing.
I stood in the center of the smoke, breathing calmly. My knees had absorbed the impact flawlessly. I felt that dull, familiar ache in my shoulders that indicated muscle growth.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.
I was at a level the canon Bakugo only reached during the Sports Festival, perhaps even a bit more refined in terms of control and efficiency. I had the brute strength of a beast and the absolute precision of a surgeon.
I'm still taking too long to reload, I reprimanded myself as I walked out of the crater. The interval between the piercing shot and the flight boost was zero point four seconds. In a fight against someone abnormally fast like All Might or that USJ Nomu, that's enough time to die.
I walked over to my backpack and grabbed my water bottle.
Destructive power wasn't the problem. I had enough firepower to level any middle school to its foundations. The problem, as always, was chassis resistance. My body was constantly adapting, but my tactical ambitions were always one step ahead of my biology.
I drank the cold water while gazing at the city skyline in the distance.
There were two years left until the U.A. entrance exam.
For most kids my age, that was a long time. For me, it was the home stretch. I had to perfect the Stun Grenade, master long-distance sustained flight, and most importantly, make sure my team (Izuku and Toga) was up to par for the nightmare that was coming.
I squeezed the plastic bottle until it crunched in my hand.
"I'm not just going to be number one," I muttered to myself, feeling Bakugo's signature, arrogant smirk curve my lips on pure instinct. "I'm going to be untouchable."