MHA x Ben 10 – WHAT IF IZUKU TELEPORTED IN BAN 10 VERSE AND GOT OMNITRIX

The day had started exactly the way most of Izuku’s days started — badly.

Not catastrophically. Not the kind of badly that ends up in history books or gets mentioned in morning news segments sandwiched between traffic updates and weather forecasts. Just the quiet, grinding, soul-scraping kind of badly that fourteen-year-old Izuku Midoriya had come to accept as his personal atmosphere. The kind of bad that had no villain, no explosion, no dramatic moment of cruelty — just the slow accumulation of a thousand small humiliations that stacked on top of each other until they formed something that felt, from the inside, like a wall.

He’d been quirkless for as long as the doctors could determine. The joint in his right pinky — that was the tell, they said. One joint instead of two. A small, quiet biological footnote that translated, in practice, into being the only kid in Class 1-A of Aldera Junior High without a quirk. The only one without a power. The only one who, when the teacher asked everyone to demonstrate their abilities during orientation, had stood at the front of the room with his hands at his sides and nothing happening.

Nothing. Not a flicker. Not a spark. Not even the vaguest sensation of potential.

He’d sat down to twenty-six faces either pitying him or pretending not to look, and Katsuki Bakugo — golden-haired, explosion-palmed, already burning with the particular arrogance of someone who’d been told since birth that they were exceptional — had laughed. Not loudly. Just enough. A small, sharp sound like a twig snapping underfoot.

That had been three years ago, and very little had changed.

Izuku walked home from school with his backpack hanging heavy on his shoulders and his notebook — Hero Analysis for the Future, Vol. 13 — tucked under one arm. He’d filled twelve volumes already. Observations about hero movements, tactical assessments of quirk applications, structural analyses of hero costumes and their aerodynamic implications, ranked lists of rescue efficiency by hero type in urban versus suburban environments. He couldn’t be a hero himself. He’d accepted that — mostly. But understanding heroes, cataloguing them, thinking about what made them effective, what made them good — that was something nobody could take from him. Not even Bakugo.

He was still thinking about the fight he’d witnessed near the school gates that morning — a pro hero called Death Arms had contained a window-shattering villain with a bone-density manipulation quirk in approximately forty seconds, impressive response time, though Izuku had noted in his margin that a left-side feint followed by a low tackle would have cut that to maybe twenty-five — when he heard the sound.

It was coming from the alley between Okamoto Plumbing and a shuttered dumpling shop.

A wet, sloshing, rhythmic sound. Like something large moving through liquid. Like a drain trying to swallow something it couldn’t quite manage.

Izuku stopped.

He knew, even before he looked, that he should keep walking. He was quirkless. He had no way to help. Any hero-in-training, any actual pro would tell him the same thing: civilians don’t engage. Civilians call emergency services and get clear. Civilians stay alive by not doing the exact thing Izuku was already doing, which was turning toward the mouth of the alley instead of away from it.

He looked.

The sludge villain was exactly as revolting as sludge villains typically were — a massive, semi-sentient mass of dark brown and green liquid in roughly humanoid shape, with two yellow eyes floating in the upper portion of the mass like raisins in pudding. It hadn’t noticed Izuku yet. It was busy. It was trying to pull itself down into the storm drain at the far end of the alley, clearly attempting to escape from something or someone, the liquid body contracting and expanding in rhythmic pulses.

Izuku’s feet were already backing away. Good. Smart. His brain was operating correctly.

Then the sludge villain’s eyes swiveled and found him, and the thing grinned with a mouth that hadn’t existed a moment ago, and said, in a voice like wet gravel: “Oh. A small one. That’ll do.”

Izuku ran.

He was not particularly fast. He was, however, terrified, which added approximately fifteen percent to his normal pace. He made it to the end of the alley, burst onto the sidewalk, knocked into a woman carrying groceries, bounced off a mailbox, and kept running. He could hear the sloshing behind him, growing louder, and when he glanced back over his shoulder the sludge was flowing up and out of the alley with horrible fluid speed, moving across the pavement like a wave.

He turned a corner. Then another. He cut through a park, vaulted a low fence with more desperation than athleticism, landed badly in someone’s garden, scrambled upright and ran some more.

The sludge was still behind him. He could tell not by sound now but by sensation — the air behind him feeling suddenly thick and wet and wrong.

He ran onto a footbridge over a narrow canal, looked down at the water below, looked at the sludge gaining on him from the bridge entrance, made a decision that was probably the worst one he’d ever made and jumped.

He did not land in the canal.

He landed in nothing.

That was the only way to describe it, in the fractured seconds between jumping and wherever he ended up: nothing. A space that was not a space. A between-place. He was aware of falling but there was no air rushing past him, no sense of gravity having a specific direction. There was light — but sourceless, ambient, casting no shadows. There was sound — a low harmonic thrumming, like standing inside a struck bell — but no identifiable origin.

He was scared, but the fear had a distant quality, like hearing about something terrible happening to someone he didn’t know. His brain had, apparently, exceeded its fear capacity and temporarily switched to a kind of stunned observational mode.

I’m in some kind of spatial anomaly, he thought, which was a very Izuku Midoriya thought to have while tumbling through a dimensional rift.

He had his notebook. He didn’t have a pen uncapped. He reached for one anyway, because if he was going to die in an interdimensional void, he was going to document it.

Then the nothing ended.

He hit grass.

Real grass — he could smell it, wet and green and alive, with a sharp undercurrent of pine sap and woodsmoke. He lay face-down in it for a moment, cataloguing the sensation of being alive and having ground beneath him with intense gratitude, then pushed himself upright.

Forest. Dense pine forest, the kind that blocked out sky in patches and let it through in others, sending columns of early-morning light down between the trees. The air was cool and thin — mountain air. Somewhere not far away a bird was making a noise he didn’t recognize. Behind him, in the space where the rift had presumably deposited him, there was nothing — not even a residual shimmer. Just trees.

In front of him, embedded in the forest floor where it had clearly just fallen, was something green.

Izuku stood very still and looked at it.

It was roughly wristwatch-shaped. The casing appeared to be some kind of metal that was not any metal Izuku could identify — it had an almost organic quality to its surface, faint ridges and indentations that suggested engineering complexity beyond anything he’d seen in hero support items. The faceplate was circular, domed slightly, bearing a stylized hourglass symbol that seemed almost to be backlit from within. Around the perimeter, smaller indicators of unknown function. On the side, a winding mechanism or button of some kind.

It was, objectively, the strangest object he had ever seen.

It was also clearly some kind of technology, which meant it belonged to someone, and Izuku’s deeply ingrained habit of not taking things that didn’t belong to him kicked in immediately. He looked around. No one. He looked up. The tree canopy was too dense to see sky properly, but through the gaps he caught a glimpse of something that made him freeze: a light, moving fast, trailing what looked like fire or energy discharge of some kind. Two lights, actually. One chasing the other.

A battle. Aerial. Up in the atmosphere above the clouds.

The falling object had come from up there.

And now, distantly, below the sound of the chasing aerial lights, he heard something else: a crackling. A deep, electronic growl. And then, unmistakably, movement in the trees. Heavy, deliberate, getting closer.

Something was coming toward the fallen device.

Something that did not sound like a person.

Izuku acted before he’d made a conscious decision. He picked up the watch.

The moment his fingers closed around it, it moved. He almost dropped it — it moved, the casing shifting and realigning against his palm with a series of small mechanical sounds, bands extending and contracting, and before he could process what was happening, it had slipped around his left wrist and clicked shut.

He tried to pull it off. It didn’t move.

He tried harder. Nothing.

“Okay,” Izuku said, in a voice that was much calmer than he felt. “Okay. That’s fine. That’s — okay.”

The device on his wrist hummed. The hourglass symbol on the faceplate glowed green. And then the faceplate itself popped upward, rotating outward, revealing a holographic interface below — a circle of alien symbols, each one somehow both completely illegible and strangely intuitive, each one accompanied by a three-dimensional silhouette that rotated slowly above its corresponding symbol. Ten of them. Ten different shapes, ten different sizes, none of them human.

Izuku stared.

The sound in the trees got louder. A branch broke. Something very large stepped into the clearing.

It was roughly ten feet tall and built like a military vehicle given biological form — a species of alien that Izuku had, obviously, never seen before, with rocky grey plating over dense musculature, two pairs of arms, and a sensor array where a face should have been. It wore what appeared to be a uniform or armor of some kind, dark material with markings he couldn’t read. It scanned the clearing. Its sensor array fixed on Izuku.

It said something in a language that sounded like rocks being fed through a shredder.

Izuku said, “I don’t — I don’t understand—”

It said the same thing again, louder, and raised one of its four arms, and at the end of that arm there was something that was unambiguously a weapon, and it was pointed at him.

Izuku looked at the alien. He looked at the device on his wrist. He looked at the rotating holographic silhouettes, each one representing something unknown, something he hadn’t analyzed, something he had absolutely no tactical data on.

He looked at the weapon.

He picked a silhouette — not strategically, not with any real thought, just the one that was currently facing him on the rotation, a broad, four-armed shape that seemed at least physically imposing — and he pushed the faceplate down.

The green light erupted.

It wasn’t painful, exactly. It wasn’t like anything he had a reference frame for. It was like being taken apart and reassembled, but fast — so fast that the experience compressed into a single overwhelming instant. Heat, then cold. Expansion — a sense of outward rushing, of space inside himself that hadn’t existed before. His vision scrambled and then recalibrated to something with a wider field, different spectral sensitivity. His hands — he looked at his hands — were stone. Grey and smooth and dense. He had four of them.

He was approximately eight feet tall.

He was, in some way he couldn’t yet understand, made of living rock.

The alien with the weapon stopped.

Izuku looked at his four rocky hands. He clenched them experimentally. He could feel the ground through the soles of his feet — heavy, planted, like two small mountains. He felt, for the first time in his memory, like he was taking up exactly the right amount of space in the world.

The alien said something that, given the context, was probably a question about what he was looking at.

Izuku said, “I’m sorry for the trouble. I don’t know where I am or what I’ve done to your device by accident, and I’d very much like to speak with someone who can help me understand the situation. I’m not going to fight you unless I have to.”

The alien stared at him with its sensor array.

Izuku stared back with his new, wide-spectrum, stone-being eyes.

A long moment passed.

Then, from somewhere above the treeline, a ship descended — smaller than the fighting lights he’d seen before, a single-occupancy scout vessel that settled into the clearing with precise, quiet efficiency. Its hatch opened, and a figure stepped out that was not the rocky alien type, not a species he recognized, but was holding what appeared to be a scanner of some kind directed at his wristband.

The figure said something in the same shredder-rock language.

Then, after a pause, it said, in accented but understandable Japanese: “Translation matrix initializing. The Omnitrix has selected a new wielder. This is… unexpected.”

Izuku blinked four eyes. “You speak Japanese?”

“The Omnitrix translates. Or tries to. You’re — what are you? Your biometric baseline reads as human but your DNA mapping is—” The figure paused. Looked at a readout. Looked back at him. “Incomplete? No registered markers for—”

“I don’t have a quirk,” Izuku said, automatically.

“A what?”

“A… power. I don’t have one. I’m quirkless.” The word felt different here. Outside of Japan. Outside of his world, apparently. It felt less like a verdict and more like a simple fact.

The figure lowered the scanner very slowly. “The Omnitrix has never activated for a human before. It was programmed for a specific—” A pause. “You’re not from this planet.”

“I’m from Japan,” Izuku said. “On Earth. Our Earth. I’m… not sure it’s your Earth.”

Another long pause. The alien with the weapon had lowered it. Not put it away, but lowered it, which Izuku decided to treat as progress.

The figure from the ship said, “The Omnitrix contains the DNA of ten thousand species. It was intended to be a tool for understanding — for preserving biological diversity across the galaxy. It chooses its wielder.” A look, long and searching, at Izuku’s rocky form. “It appears to have chosen you.”

Izuku looked at his hands again. Four of them. Stone-grey, enormously strong, part of a body he’d inhabited for approximately four minutes and which already felt, somehow, more like him than anything had in years.

He had, in the span of about twenty minutes, been chased by a sludge villain, fallen through a dimensional rift, arrived on a different version of Earth, been threatened by an alien, and accidentally become one.

He opened his notebook — which had, remarkably, survived the transformation and the rifting and was still tucked under one large rocky arm — and uncapped a pen.

He began to write.

Alien Form 1, he wrote. Physical type: silicate/carbon composite. Approximate height: 2.4 meters. Strength significantly enhanced — estimate 40-50x baseline human. Durability likely very high. Possible enhanced senses (wider visual field, ground vibration sensitivity?). No observed flight capability. Tactical applications: frontline defense, rescue operations (structural support), engagement with large-scale threats.

Need more data.

Also need to figure out how to get home.

Also need to figure out where home is from here.

Also — and this is important — need to learn everything about this device as fast as possible, because if this is real, if this is actually real, then for the first time in my life—

He stopped writing. The sentence sat unfinished in the notebook. The figure from the ship was watching him write with an expression that, across whatever biological divide separated them, was clearly readable as bafflement.

Izuku looked up. Then, for the first time in what felt like years — maybe the first time since the doctor had looked at his hand and said those words that had defined his entire childhood — he smiled.

For the first time, he thought, but didn’t write, because some things felt too large and too fragile to commit to paper just yet, I might actually be able to help people.

The green light came again, and Izuku Midoriya — fourteen years old, quirkless, son of Inko, would-be hero, most thorough note-taker in the Musutafu school district — shrank back to human size in a clearing on a mountain in a version of the world that wasn’t his, with an alien device locked to his wrist and ten thousand species sleeping in its memory.

The watch face glowed.

He stared at it.

Somewhere up in the atmosphere, the aerial battle had ended. One of the lights was gone. The other was descending toward them.

“You should know,” the figure from the ship said, still in its careful, translation-assisted Japanese, “that the device you’re wearing is one of the most powerful and most hunted pieces of technology in the known universe. That there are entities who will kill for it. That there are empires that have gone to war over it.”

Izuku nodded, slowly.

“You should also know,” the figure continued, “that whoever wears it is not only its user, but in some sense its guardian. The Omnitrix doesn’t merely give you access to these forms. It expects something of its wielder.”

“What does it expect?” Izuku asked.

The figure considered this. “The same thing any weapon of great power expects, when it ends up in the right hands instead of the wrong ones.” A pause. “To be used well.”

Izuku looked at the watch.

The watch pulsed, once, green.

He thought about All Might — towering, impossible All Might, who smiled in the face of everything and whose laugh could make a crowd of frightened people feel safe. He thought about what his mother had said once, very quietly, when she didn’t know he was listening: He wants it so badly. I’m afraid of what that wanting will cost him. He thought about Bakugo, whose cruelty was at least honest. He thought about every pro hero in every volume of his notebooks, and the annotations he’d made about the gaps between what they could do and what they chose to do, and how those gaps were often where people got hurt.

He thought about being quirkless. He thought about what quirkless meant — not here, where nobody knew the word, but at home. What it had cost him. What it had made him. Whether those two things were connected in ways he hadn’t yet fully understood.

“I don’t know anything about this device,” Izuku said. “I don’t know this world, or these species, or the political situation, or who those people fighting in the sky were. I’m fourteen years old and I have no formal combat training and I’ve never successfully used a quirk.” He paused. “But I’ve been studying heroes my whole life. And I have a notebook.” He held it up. “And I’d like to learn.”

Above them, the descending light resolved into a ship. It landed at the edge of the clearing, and from it came a voice — young, male, somewhere around his age, with an accent he didn’t recognize and a tone of combined urgency and exasperation that was, actually, quite familiar to him — the tone of someone who’d expected one thing and found something completely different and was trying to recalibrate without admitting how disoriented they were.

The voice said, in English (the Omnitrix translated immediately, smoothly, the words arriving in his head a half-step behind the sounds): “Grandpa, I’m telling you, the Omnitrix came down somewhere in sector four, I tracked it all the way — wait. Who’s this? What’s he got on his wrist? Is that—”

A boy about Izuku’s age stepped into the clearing. Brown hair, green eyes, wearing a white t-shirt with a black stripe across the chest and cargo shorts. Looking at the Omnitrix with an expression of absolute recognition and approximately seven different complicated emotions.

“That’s mine,” the boy said.

Izuku looked at him. He looked at the watch. He looked back at the boy.

“I think,” Izuku said carefully, “that it might be a bit more complicated than that.”

The thing about Ben Tennyson, Izuku decided within the first hour of knowing him, was that he was simultaneously exactly what you’d expect and nothing like it at all.

On the surface: loud, confident, competitive, the kind of boy who led with his chin and figured the rest would sort itself out. The kind of boy Izuku had spent three years sitting behind in class, watching get called on first, watching teachers smile at without meaning to. The kind of boy the world seemed to have been specifically designed to accommodate.

But underneath that — and Izuku was good at underneath, he’d spent his whole life learning to read the people who weren’t reading him back — there was something that felt familiar. A weight. The particular posture of someone carrying a responsibility they hadn’t asked for and couldn’t put down.

They sat on opposite sides of Max Tennyson’s enormous RV — which was called the Rustbucket, a name Izuku found both charming and accurate — while the vehicle rolled down a two-lane highway through terrain that was simultaneously familiar (trees, road, sky in roughly the correct configuration) and wrong in small, uncanny ways he couldn’t quite articulate. The signage was in English. The road markings were slightly different from what he was used to. The radio, when Max had briefly turned it on, had played a song he didn’t recognize sung in a style he couldn’t place.

America. He was in America. That much had been established.

A different America, perhaps. Or the same America seen from a different angle. He hadn’t resolved that question yet.

Ben sat across from him with his arms folded and his expression doing the elaborate non-expression that people did when they were trying very hard to seem like they weren’t bothered by something that was absolutely bothering them. His eyes kept dropping to the watch on Izuku’s wrist.

Izuku’s eyes kept dropping to it too.

It sat there, green and quietly luminous, doing nothing. Waiting.

“So,” Ben said, for the third time since they’d gotten in the vehicle. He didn’t follow it with anything else.

“So,” Izuku agreed.

Max, driving, glanced at them in the rearview mirror. He was a broad-shouldered man in his early sixties, white hair, calm in the specific way of someone who had seen enough genuinely alarming things that a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy accidentally bonding with an alien superweapon in a Colorado forest registered only as moderately surprising. He had said, when Ben had explained the situation: “Hm.” And then: “Well. We’ll figure it out.” And then he’d made what appeared to be a peanut butter sandwich using some substance that was not peanut butter and not butter and possibly not bread, and offered it to Izuku, who had accepted it out of politeness and discovered it tasted like concentrated everything-good-about-autumn.

“You wrote down everything,” Ben said. It wasn’t quite an accusation. Almost.

“I write down everything,” Izuku confirmed.

“While you were transformed.”

“I had the notebook in my hand. The form I took — Four Arms, you called it? — has significantly larger hands than baseline human but the fine motor control seemed intact. I wanted to document the proprioceptive experience while it was fresh.” He paused. “I may have been somewhat in shock. Writing helps.”

Ben stared at him. “You were in shock so you took notes.”

“I find it grounding.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard, and I once fought a giant robot made of living fire.”

Izuku opened his notebook. It was a new section — he’d drawn a quick dividing line and written BEN 10 UNIVERSE — INITIAL OBSERVATIONS at the top in his neatest handwriting. Below it were two and a half pages of densely packed notes from the last ninety minutes, including a rough sketch of the alien soldier he’d encountered (labeled: SPECIES UNKNOWN — four arms, sensor array face, rocky integument, likely high-gravity world origin based on body density?), a diagram of the Omnitrix interface with the ten holographic silhouettes labeled by what he’d been able to observe or infer, and a timeline of events starting from his departure point.

“Can I see?” Ben asked.

Izuku handed it over.

Ben read it with an expression that went through several stages. Surprise. More surprise. Something that looked like it might be respect wrestling with something that looked like it might be competitiveness. He flipped back to the previous section — Izuku’s regular hero analysis pages — skimmed a few lines with his brow furrowing, flipped forward again.

“You were writing about heroes. Pro heroes. Before.”

“Since I was four,” Izuku said. “I want to be a hero. Wanted.” The tense felt complicated suddenly. “I want to be a hero. I just — in my world, you need a power. A quirk. A natural ability. I don’t have one.”

“But you got the Omnitrix.”

“I got the Omnitrix by accident. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or possibly the right place at the right time, I’m not sure yet which.” He retrieved the notebook, turning back to his new section. “Can you tell me more about the alien forms? You’ve used them before — you have operational experience I don’t. The tactical data would help me calibrate.”

Ben looked at him for a long moment. “You’re really going to approach this like homework.”

“I’m going to approach this like it’s the most important thing I’ve ever had to learn quickly,” Izuku said. “Which it is.”

Something shifted in Ben’s expression. The competitiveness faded a little. He uncrossed his arms.

“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. Fine.” He leaned forward. “You already used Four Arms. That one’s pretty self-explanatory — strength, durability, four arms. Good for smashing. Good for lifting things off people. Not subtle.”

Izuku was already writing. “Weight limit on the lifting? Observed maximum force output?”

Ben blinked. “I don’t know the exact — I lifted a building support column once.”

“Material? Estimated mass?”

“It was… concrete? And steel? I didn’t weigh it, I was kind of busy—”

“Rough estimate is fine. Length of the column, approximate diameter—”

“It was a big column!”

“Meters? Feet? I can convert—”

“Izuku.” Max’s voice, calm from the front. “Maybe let the boy breathe between questions.”

Izuku looked up. Ben was laughing. Not the sharp, dismissive laugh he associated with Bakugo. A genuine, slightly helpless laugh, the kind you produced when something surprised you into it.

“Sorry,” Izuku said. He said it reflexively, the way he always did.

“Don’t be,” Ben said, still grinning. “It’s just — no one’s ever taken notes on my aliens before. Grandpa just tells me to be careful and not break anything expensive.”

“You can be careful and break things,” Max said mildly. “The key is knowing which things.”

Izuku looked at his notebook. Then at the watch. Then at Ben.

“Can you walk me through all ten?” he asked. “As much operational detail as you have. I want to understand what each form is capable of before I need to use it in an actual situation. Going in without data is—” He stopped. Bakugo’s voice in his head, saying useless, useless, you’re useless without data anyway so what does it matter— He pushed it down. “Going in without data leads to mistakes. I’d rather understand what I have before I have to rely on it.”

Ben was quiet for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s actually — that makes sense.” He reached over, plucked the notebook and pen from Izuku’s hands with the confidence of someone used to taking things and handed them back after flipping to a fresh page. “You take notes. I’ll talk.”

For the next forty-five minutes, while the Rustbucket rolled through late afternoon light across a stretch of American highway that smelled of pine and road dust, Ben Tennyson talked and Izuku Midoriya wrote.

The Ten Forms, as documented by Izuku Midoriya in Hero Analysis for the Future Vol. 13 (Addendum: Omnitrix Species Database, Preliminary):

Heatblast. Pyronite. Ambient temperature roughly 900°C at surface. Plasma/magma biology. Flight capable (thermal propulsion). Primary application: large-area thermal projection. Vulnerability: apparently significant to water/ice-based countermeasures. Note: Ben reports this was first transformation ever. Psychological significance? Investigate.

Wildmutt. Vulpimancer. No visible eyes — sensory quills. Quadrupedal. Speed — Ben estimates faster than most ground vehicles at sprint. Tracking ability appears exceptional. No ranged attack. Close combat and pursuit specialist. No vocal communication while transformed — this would be operationally limiting, need to plan communication alternatives.

Grey Matter. Galvan. Approximately 12cm tall. Vastly enhanced intelligence and processing speed while transformed — Ben describes solving complex mechanical systems intuitively within seconds. Can interface with machinery directly. Obvious vulnerability: size. Not a combat form. Investigation/infiltration/technical problem-solving primary utility. CRITICAL NOTE: Galvans are apparently the species that created the Omnitrix. More to learn here.

Four Arms. Tetramand. Already documented. Note additional: Ben mentions the form produces enhanced adrenaline/aggression as biochemical side effect. Something to monitor.

Stinkfly. Lepidopterran. Flight. Flammable adhesive fluid projection. Optic blast capability (compound eyes — energy output?). Speed in air appears significant. Fragile wings are obvious vulnerability. Useful for aerial reconnaissance and rapid area response.

Ripjaws. Piscciss Volann. Aquatic specialist — gills, bioluminescence, powerful jaw force, lower body restructures to fin form underwater. Dry environment severely limits operational utility. Highly specialized.

XLR8. Kineceleran. Speed. Ben says faster than 500km/h. Tail for balance at speed. Enhanced reaction time in form appears to scale with speed to allow environmental processing. Applications: rapid response, evacuation, search and rescue. Traction limitations on wet/unstable surfaces.

Ghostfreak. Ectonurite. Intangibility. Partial/selective intangibility. Flight. Tendrils. Perception of fear response in form apparently significant — Ben becomes uncomfortable discussing this one at length. Flag for further investigation. Psychological component to transformation appears stronger with this form than others.

Diamondhead. Petrosapien. Crystalline silicate biology. Structural manipulation — can extend/reshape crystal from body. Can refract and redirect energy attacks. Incredibly high durability. The defensive/counter-offensive potential here is exceptional. This may be the highest tactical ceiling in the current rotation.

Upgrade. Galvanic Mechamorph. Techno-organic. Can merge with and enhance machinery. Liquid metal composition. Adaptive. Ben describes “upgrading” a go-kart to move at aircraft speeds. Full application potential not yet understood — needs significant experimentation. This one is genuinely difficult to categorize tactically because the form’s utility is entirely dependent on available technology in the immediate environment.

Izuku looked at what he’d written. Ten species. Ten completely different modes of existing. Ten different ways to be in a body, to interact with the world, to do something that could help people.

His hand was cramping. He didn’t care.

“You’ve been quiet for a while,” Ben observed.

“I’m thinking,” Izuku said. “About combinations. The forms aren’t isolated tools — they’re a system. If I go into a situation with Grey Matter first to assess, I can identify structural vulnerabilities before switching to Diamondhead for engagement, then XLR8 if evacuation becomes necessary, then—”

“You’re already planning combo chains?”

“Isn’t that how you use it?”

Ben opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked slightly embarrassed. “I kind of just… hit it and pick whatever comes up. Or whatever feels right.”

Izuku processed this. “And it’s worked?”

“Mostly!”

“But not always.”

Ben’s jaw tightened. “No. Not always.”

Izuku nodded slowly. He wasn’t judging — he recognized the approach. It was the All Might approach, in a way: trust your instincts, act fast, adjust mid-engagement. There was genuine tactical merit in it. Speed of decision-making, adaptability, unpredictability. But there was also a significant cost, and the cost was the situations where instinct wasn’t enough. Where the wrong choice in the first second cascaded into something unrecoverable.

He’d written about that in Volume 8. A section on hero response time versus hero response accuracy, and the correlation between hero casualty rates and teams versus individuals.

“I’m not saying your approach is wrong,” Izuku said carefully. “You’ve been using this for — how long?”

“Almost two weeks.”

“Two weeks.” Izuku held that number in his mind. Two weeks, and already Ben had fought enough to have operational knowledge of ten alien forms, been chased across multiple states, apparently fended off alien soldiers, and was still alive and functional and basically untraumatized. That was either very good instincts or extraordinary luck or, more likely, both working in concert. “You’ve kept yourself alive and succeeded in your objectives.”

“Mostly,” Ben said again.

“Mostly is actually a very good record for two weeks without training.” Izuku said it simply, not as flattery, because he meant it. Ben blinked. “But I haven’t got two weeks to build up operational experience the way you have. I need to compress that somehow. So — yes. I’m planning combination approaches. It might not always work, but having a framework is better than having nothing.”

Max said, from the front: “Smart kid.”

Ben made a noise that was not quite agreement but not quite disagreement either. He was looking at Izuku with an expression that had moved past startlement into something more evaluative. The look of someone deciding whether a person is going to be useful or annoying or both.

Izuku had gotten that look from teachers and support staff and pro heroes at meet-and-greet events. He knew how to wait it out.

“Okay,” Ben said finally. “You want to run through the forms. Actually use them. Get the feel for each one.”

“When it’s safe to do so,” Izuku said. “I don’t want to practice in an area where I could damage infrastructure or risk bystanders.”

Ben waved a hand. “We’re heading into the desert stretch anyway. Grandpa knows a spot.”

“Are we also monitoring for—” Izuku checked his notes from the first meeting with Xylene’s contact “—for Vilgax’s forces? The alien soldier I encountered suggested active search operations in this area.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. The evaluative expression had settled into something more straightforward. “Yeah, they’re probably still looking. Which means we might not get a ton of practice time before—”

The Rustbucket lurched.

Not a road bump. Something heavier — a concussive impact from the side, followed immediately by a sound like sustained electrical discharge against the hull. Max’s hands tightened on the wheel, and he said, with the calm of someone who had done this before: “Boys. We’ve got company.”

Izuku was already on his feet — or trying to be, as the vehicle shook with another impact. He caught himself on the overhead rack, looked at the watch, looked at Ben.

Ben’s hand was already on his own watch. He looked at Izuku’s. Something complicated crossed his face.

“You know,” Ben said, “we’re going to have to figure out the whole — both of us having one — thing eventually.”

“Later,” Izuku said. “Right now: what’s attacking us, what does it want, and which form is most appropriate for the immediate situation?”

Ben looked out the back window. His face went through about three different colors.

“DNAliens,” he said. “At least six. Ground vehicles, modified. They’ll be trying to disable the RV and capture—” He glanced at Izuku’s wrist. At the Omnitrix. “Yeah. They want that.”

“Capture, not kill?”

“Vilgax wants the Omnitrix intact. So yes. For now. That changes if he decides he can’t get it back.” He paused. “Or if his soldiers decide that capturing us is taking too long.”

Izuku looked at his notebook. Looked at the door. Looked at the watch face as it opened, the holographic silhouettes rotating slowly.

“I want to observe your combat approach before I engage,” he said. “I’ll support from a position that lets me watch how you operate. If you get in serious trouble I’ll intervene. Is that—”

“You want to watch me fight while I’m fighting?”

“I learn faster by observation. And you have two weeks of operational experience with these forms that I don’t have. It would be wasteful not to use it.” He saw Ben’s expression and added: “If it becomes dangerous, I’ll stop observing and start helping. I promise.”

Ben stared at him for a full three seconds.

Then he threw open the back door of the moving Rustbucket, slammed down his watch face, and in a flash of green light where a boy had been standing there was now something fast and scaly and bipedal with a thick muscled tail and claws like short blades — XLR8, Izuku’s mind supplied from his notes, Kineceleran, speed form — and then there was a blur and Ben was simply gone, already outside, already engaging.

Izuku watched through the open door.

He counted. He wrote. His pen moved in short efficient strokes. Ben moved at speeds that blurred the air itself, circling the attacking vehicles (dark, modified SUV-type craft, elongated, with external weapon systems mounted at front and side — DNAlien design language noted, angular and organic simultaneously), using the speed not just to move fast but to disorient — creating the impression of multiple attackers, never committing to a position long enough to be tracked. He wasn’t trying to destroy the vehicles. He was trying to steer them, Izuku realized. Away from the highway. Away from civilian traffic.

Note: Ben Tennyson’s instinctive tactical priorities align with hero-standard protocols even without formal training. Civilian safety appears internalized, not conscious. Important.

One of the DNAlien vehicles adjusted its targeting, bypassed Ben entirely, and fired at the Rustbucket directly.

Izuku made a decision.

He hit the watch.

The form that came was Diamondhead — he’d consciously aimed for it, using the intuitive interface sense he was beginning to understand, pushing the dial toward the crystalline silhouette — and he emerged through the back door of the still-moving vehicle as facets and angles and compressed geological time, caught the energy blast with one arm raised and watched it refract away from him in three directions, none of them pointing at anything important.

He landed on the road. The vehicle attacking from the rear was twenty meters away and closing.

Izuku looked at it. He looked at his hands — crystalline, hard-edged, catching the late afternoon sun in prismatic flares. He thought about what Ben had told him: can refract and redirect energy attacks.

He thought about the vehicle bearing down on him, the weapon systems tracking, and the four-lane highway behind it where a distant cluster of civilian vehicles were slowing, drivers rubbernecking, someone probably already calling emergency services.

He did not charge the vehicle.

He planted his feet, reached into the structural logic of his new form the way he’d taught himself to reach into the logic of any complex system, and began to grow. Not himself — a wall. A crystal wall, extending from his position across both lanes of the highway’s shoulder, angled precisely at forty-five degrees. The angle he’d been calculating since he’d read his own notes about Diamondhead’s energy refraction capability and thought: that has architectural applications.

The DNAlien vehicle fired again.

The blast hit the angled crystal face and redirected ninety degrees — straight up into the sky. No collateral. No civilian vehicles in the firing line. The energy dissipated into atmosphere.

The DNAlien vehicle, confronted with a six-foot crystal wall across its path, had to swerve. In swerving, it overextended on the road shoulder and went into a controlled spin.

Not destroyed. Disabled. Izuku noted the difference and logged it under proportionality — good outcome.

Ben was suddenly beside him, blurred back to human form, staring at the crystal wall.

“You built a mirror,” he said.

“A redirector,” Izuku corrected. “Mirrors reflect. This refracted the angle of incidence to produce a perpendicular output vector rather than a direct—”

“You built a mirror,” Ben said again, but he was grinning now. Wide and genuine. “With your hands. While standing in the road. That’s actually really cool.”

Izuku felt something warm and unfamiliar in his chest, which he attributed to the residual heat of the Diamondhead form’s metabolic processes and absolutely not to the fact that someone had just called something he did cool.

“There are still four vehicles,” he said.

“Yeah.” Ben’s hand was back on his watch. He glanced at Izuku sideways. “You want to keep observing, or—?”

Izuku looked at the remaining DNAlien craft, already reorganizing their approach, already recalibrating their tactical formation. He looked at Ben. He looked at the notebook, which he had somehow kept hold of through both transformations and was already open to a new page.

“Both,” he said. “I’ll document while we work.”

Ben laughed.

The watch flashed green.

And for the next eleven minutes on a desert highway in a world that wasn’t his, Izuku Midoriya fought alongside someone who understood — maybe for the first time since he’d learned what quirkless meant — what it felt like to carry something enormous and choose, every single day, to carry it toward people who needed help instead of away from them.

He documented everything.

The pen never stopped moving.

Later, when the DNAlien vehicles were disabled and their occupants — bio-engineered humanoids in full tactical gear, not particularly interested in conversation — had retreated into the desert on foot, Izuku and Ben sat on the Rustbucket’s rear bumper while Max assessed the vehicle’s damage with the efficiency of someone who’d patched up far worse.

The desert smelled like warm stone and something faintly electrical from the discharged weapons. The sun was getting low. Everything was orange and long-shadowed.

“Eleven minutes,” Izuku said. “You switched forms four times. The XLR8-to-Fourarms transition was particularly effective in the third engagement cluster — you used the Tetramand mass to stop the lead vehicle and XLR8’s speed to clear the debris radius before it settled.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about it,” Ben said.

“I know. That’s what makes it worth studying.” Izuku turned a page. “Your instincts are good. Better than good. But there are gaps.”

“Gaps.”

“The second vehicle, the flanking approach from the east — you didn’t see it until it was twenty meters out. A pre-engagement aerial reconnaissance with Stinkfly would have given you full field awareness before the engagement started. You could have selected your forms and positioning in advance rather than reactive.”

Ben was quiet for a moment. He was doing the non-expression thing again, but less effectively now. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. I missed that one.”

“You compensated well. But compensation is reactive. Preparation is—”

“Better. Yeah.” He picked up a small stone and turned it over in his fingers. “My gym teacher used to say something like that. Before I stopped going to gym.”

Izuku looked at him. “You stopped going to gym?”

“Kind of a lot of things got harder when I got—” Ben looked at his own watch, his own, the one he’d had and Izuku now had on a different wrist “—when I got this.” He said it simply. Not complaining. Just factual. The voice of someone who’d accepted a specific cost without necessarily having been asked if they wanted to pay it.

Izuku recognized that voice. He used it himself, sometimes.

“My school too,” Izuku said. “Not gym. Everything.” He looked at his hands — human again, small, smudged with pen ink on the right side of the right index finger, the way they always were. “I spent more time in notebooks than in class sometimes. It was easier to study heroes than to be somewhere that kept reminding me I could never be one.”

Silence. The comfortable kind, the kind that has weight without pressure.

“You could, though,” Ben said finally.

Izuku looked at him.

Ben shrugged, in the way of someone who doesn’t entirely know why they’re saying something but feels like it needs to be said. “Be a hero. I mean — I just watched you stand in the middle of a road and redirect an alien energy blast with your arm and also take notes at the same time. That’s extremely hero-coded behavior.”

“I had a quirk to do it with. Technically.”

“Yeah, but the thing that made it work wasn’t the quirk. It was the…” Ben gestured vaguely at the notebook. “The knowing. The figuring out the angle. The—” He stopped, looked slightly embarrassed at having said this much. “Whatever. Point stands.”

Izuku looked at the notebook. Looked at the watch. Thought about All Might saying you can be a hero and imagining how those words would feel, how they would land, and whether he’d believe them.

He wasn’t sure yet.

But he wrote it down anyway. Not the words Ben had said, but the feeling behind them — a quiet, empirical entry: Evidence, preliminary, that competence in crisis does not require a natural gift. That a system of knowledge applied to any tool, however alien, might constitute something worth calling strength.

He underlined it.

“Okay,” Max said, straightening up from his assessment of the Rustbucket’s side panels with the expression of a man who had seen worse and would see worse again. “She’ll hold. Let’s get moving before they send a second wave.” He looked at both of them — Izuku with his notebook, Ben with his stone, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bumper. Something in his face softened, very briefly. “You two eat anything since this morning?”

“No,” they said, simultaneously.

Max nodded. He went back inside. A smell emerged that was either something wonderful or something deeply alien passing for wonderful, and Izuku’s stomach, which had been politely waiting through dimensional rifts and alien combats and emotional revelations, chose this moment to make its position known loudly.

Ben laughed again.

Izuku, to his own mild surprise, laughed too.

Maxwell Tennyson made breakfast out of what appeared to be three unidentified purple vegetables, something that smelled like motor oil but tasted like maple syrup, and eggs from a species Izuku decided not to ask about.

It was, objectively, the best breakfast he’d ever eaten.

He sat at the small fold-out table inside the Rustbucket with his notebook open beside his plate, a fresh page headed DAY 2 — OBSERVATIONS, and watched Max move around the cramped kitchen space with the practiced economy of someone who had spent years operating in confined environments. Every movement precise. Nothing wasted. The kind of physical intelligence that didn’t come from training alone but from a specific combination of training and experience and genuine necessity.

Izuku had written about that distinction in Volume 9. The difference between a hero who had learned to be efficient and a hero who was efficient, the way water is wet — not as a skill but as a state.

Max was the second type.

Ben was still asleep, folded improbably into the back bunk with one arm hanging off the edge and his own watch — the empty-cased one, the one that matched what Izuku was wearing, the one that didn’t light up anymore — visible on his wrist. Izuku had looked at it once, this morning, and felt something complicated that he’d logged in his notes as ethical ambiguity, unresolved — the device selected me but was intended for someone else. Need to understand the mechanism of selection before drawing conclusions about legitimacy of possession.

What he meant, in the language underneath that language, was: it doesn’t feel right to just have this. Even if it chose me. Even if I didn’t take it.

He poked at his purple vegetable. It poked back slightly, which he decided to treat as a textural quality rather than evidence of continued biological activity.

“You’ve been up since four,” Max said. He wasn’t looking at Izuku. He was doing something to the stove that involved a wrench.

“Five-thirty,” Izuku corrected.

“Still.”

“I had notes to organize.” A pause. “And I couldn’t sleep.”

Max grunted. It was the kind of grunt that contained actual words — of course you couldn’t, you fell through a hole in the universe yesterday and fought alien soldiers, most people would find that sleep-disruptive — compressed into a single sound. He set the wrench down and turned, and for the first time that morning he looked directly at Izuku with the specific focused attention that Izuku had noticed from the start and was still trying to categorize.

It wasn’t the look of someone sizing him up for threat potential. It wasn’t the look of someone deciding whether to trust him. It was something quieter and more careful than either of those things.

It was, Izuku realized, the look of someone who had known a lot of young people carrying a lot of weight, and who recognized the shape of it.

“You want to ask me something,” Max said.

Izuku straightened. “Several things.”

“Start with the most important one.”

He didn’t hesitate. He’d been ordering his questions since five-thirty. “The device — the Omnitrix. Ben said it was intended for a specific wielder. Xylene’s contact said the same thing, that it had never activated for a human before. But it did activate for me, and the bonding sequence completed before I understood what was happening.” He looked at the watch. The hourglass symbol glowed its steady green. “In my world, there’s a system — quirks are inherited. They’re biological. You’re born with one or you’re not. There’s no mechanism by which something external can grant a power permanently or semi-permanently.” He paused. “But this isn’t my world. And this device isn’t a quirk. So I need to understand: what does it mean that it chose me? Not ethically — I’ll work through that — but mechanically. How does the Omnitrix’s selection mechanism work, and what does it imply about the nature of whoever it selects?”

Max looked at him for a long moment.

Then he pulled out the chair across from Izuku and sat down with the deliberate ease of someone settling in for a real conversation.

“How much do you know about genetic engineering?” he asked.

“General secondary school level,” Izuku said. “Plus self-directed study of quirk-factor genetics, so I have somewhat more depth on heritability mechanisms and expression variance.”

“Close enough.” Max folded his hands on the table. “The Omnitrix was created by a Galvan — that’s the species you’ve got in your notes as Grey Matter’s type — named Azmuth. Probably the most brilliant mind in the known universe. When he built it, he didn’t just build a weapon or a tool. He built an ark.” He paused, watching Izuku’s face, apparently satisfied by the quality of attention he was receiving. “Not for organisms. For DNA. The Omnitrix contains the genetic baseline of ten thousand species — a living record of biodiversity that would otherwise be lost to war, extinction, environmental catastrophe. His stated purpose was preservation and understanding. That if people could become other species, even briefly, they might stop treating those species as enemies or resources.”

Izuku was writing fast. “And the selection mechanism?”

“The watch is smart. Not like a computer — like a judge. Azmuth built it to seek a specific kind of mind. He wanted it in the hands of someone who would use those ten thousand species with respect. Not a soldier. Not a conqueror. Someone who would value what the forms were rather than just what they could do.” Max looked at the watch on Izuku’s wrist. “When it activated for you, it wasn’t a malfunction. It was a decision.”

Izuku processed this. “It evaluated me. In the moment I picked it up.”

“Probably before that. The scan is passive — it’s been scanning everything in its vicinity since it landed.” A slight smile. “You were taking notes on it before you touched it.”

Izuku looked at his notebook. The sketch he’d made of the watch, careful and detailed, with annotations about likely engineering complexity and speculative function labels. Before he’d known what it was. Before he’d known it was anything other than a strange object lying in a forest.

He’d documented it because it was interesting.

Not because it was powerful. Not because he wanted it. Because it was interesting.

Something in his chest did a quiet, complicated thing.

“What about Ben?” he asked, carefully.

Max was quiet for a moment. In the back, Ben shifted in his sleep and muttered something about a cheeseburger.

“Ben was intended to receive it,” Max said. “The wielder it was programmed for — a specific individual selected by Azmuth’s criteria — that’s a long story involving Xylene and a miscalculation and intergalactic courier logistics that I won’t bore you with. The point is: Ben was supposed to find it. The watch spent most of its transit scanning for a mind that matched Azmuth’s parameters. It found one.” He paused. “Apparently it found two.”

“Ben’s criteria and mine overlap.”

“More than overlap, from what I’ve seen so far.” Max’s voice was matter-of-fact, not gentle. He didn’t seem like someone who deployed gentleness as a tool. He deployed it the way good heroes deployed force — sparingly, precisely, when nothing else would serve. “The watch doesn’t have an algorithm that says ‘find a hero.’ It has a more specific requirement. It wants someone who thinks the life inside it is worth protecting. Who would use its forms to help rather than harm, and who would be genuinely curious about what each form is rather than just what it can do for them.”

Izuku looked at his notes. At the careful species breakdowns, the ecological and biological speculation, the question marks where he didn’t have enough data to draw conclusions. He thought about the moment he’d first seen the silhouettes on the interface — ten different shapes, ten different bodies, ten different ways of being alive in a universe that was apparently so much larger than he’d known — and the first thing he’d felt, even before curiosity, even before tactical assessment, had been something that felt very close to wonder.

He hadn’t written that down.

He wrote it down now.

The Omnitrix selected based on something that might be called character, he wrote. Not power. Not potential. Character. This is either the most sophisticated piece of technology ever created or the most idealistic.

He thought about it for a moment and added: Possibly both.

Ben woke up at seven-fifteen, ate three portions of breakfast without commentary on its origins, and immediately challenged Izuku to a competition he called “fastest switch to XLR8,” which Izuku declined on the grounds that competitive speed drills without a structured objective were tactically wasteful, which led to an argument about what constituted tactical waste, which Max ended by announcing they were driving to a location he called the ‘old Plumber cache site’ approximately forty miles east.

They were on the road by eight.

“Plumbers,” Izuku said, watching the desert roll past the window. He had the word underlined three times in his notes. “You’ve mentioned them twice now. In my world that word means—”

“Yeah, yeah, pipes and toilets, I know,” Ben said, from the bunk where he was playing what appeared to be a handheld game with aggressive dedication. “It’s like a cover name. Or it was. The Plumbers were a secret organization — Earth and alien members — that handled extraterrestrial threats and incidents. Been around for decades.”

“Were?”

“Mostly disbanded now. Went dormant.” Max said it from the front, without looking back. “About ten years ago, the organization made a collective determination that the major threats had been neutralized. Members retired or moved on. The infrastructure remains — caches, safehouses, communication arrays — but active operations ceased.”

Izuku wrote: Organizational collapse as risk factor. Infrastructure without active personnel is a liability — knowledge doesn’t transfer to next generation, response capacity atrophies, threat assessment becomes reactive rather than proactive.

“But the threats didn’t stop,” he said.

“No,” Max said. “They didn’t.”

“And there was no institutional continuity to respond.”

“There’s me,” Max said, simply. “And now there’s Ben.”

Izuku looked at the back of Max’s head. Sixty-something years old. Retired organization. One grandchild — Ben, who was approximately as prepared for galactic-scale threats as you’d expect a ten-day-trained fourteen-year-old to be, which was to say: surprisingly well, but with significant gaps, and without anyone to fill those gaps except a retired grandfather who was clearly extraordinary but also clearly alone.

He thought about the hero agency system in Japan. Imperfect, bureaucratic, prone to political complications and image management problems he’d catalogued extensively — but organized. Designed. Multiple redundant response layers. Ongoing training infrastructure. Communication protocols.

He thought about what it meant to fight Vilgax, who Ben had described in terms that suggested cosmic-level threat capacity, with a system that was basically: Max, Ben, and a well-maintained RV.

“You need more people,” Izuku said.

Max glanced at him in the rearview. “Yes,” he agreed. “We do.”

“The Plumbers — the retired members. Are they — could they be reactivated?”

“Some of them. Given sufficient cause.”

“Vilgax trying to acquire the most powerful piece of technology in the known universe in order to build a weapon capable of—” Izuku checked his notes from yesterday’s briefing “—’conquering every inhabited world in three galaxies.’ That’s not sufficient cause?”

“It requires proof,” Max said. “And communication. And convincing people who’ve been comfortable for ten years that the comfortable time is over.” A beat. “And frankly, it requires the person doing the convincing to be someone they’ll listen to. My reputation within the organization is—” He paused in a way that was itself a sentence. “Complicated.”

Izuku filed this under institutional politics — investigate further and moved on.

“Then until reactivation is possible,” he said, “we need to operate as efficiently as a full response unit with three people. Which means no wasted capacity and no redundant effort.” He looked at Ben. “You fight. You have more experience with the forms and better instinctual decision-making than I do. In engagements, your role is primary response.”

Ben lowered the game. “Are you assigning me a role.”

“I’m proposing a framework. You can reject it.”

“…What’s your role?”

“Analysis and support. I identify threats before engagement, assess tactical situations in real time, provide alternative approach options when your instincts are working against you rather than with you, and handle civilian safety and evacuation where your forms can’t.” He paused. “I’ll also fight when necessary. I just shouldn’t be the primary.”

“And me,” Max said.

“You know things we don’t,” Izuku said. “About the Plumbers, about alien species and their capabilities and political contexts, about the history of incidents and the likely tactical approaches of specific threat types. Your role is intelligence and counsel. You’re the brain of the operation, even if you’re also capable of significantly more.”

A silence.

Then Max said: “You’ve thought about this for a while.”

“Since approximately five forty-five this morning.”

Ben made a sound that was part laugh and part something more serious. He set the game down entirely. “You know,” he said, “when I found out I’d missed the watch — when I got there and you had it — I was pretty angry.”

Izuku looked at him. “I know.”

“I’m less angry now.”

“I know that too.”

Ben looked at the watch on Izuku’s wrist for a long moment. Something passed across his face — not quite grief, not quite relief. Something in between. “Do you think there’s a way to—” He stopped.

“To share it?” Izuku asked.

“To — I don’t know. To use it. Both of us. Some way.” He was looking at the Omnitrix with an expression that Izuku recognized because he’d seen it in mirrors. The expression of someone looking at a thing that felt like their destiny and trying to figure out whether they were allowed to want it.

Izuku was quiet for a moment. Then he uncapped his pen.

“That’s the second most important thing I want to figure out,” he said. “After getting home. If there’s a mechanism — a way to transfer access, or create a secondary interface, or—” He was already writing. “The Galvan who created it — Azmuth. Is there any way to contact him?”

Max made a sound that suggested contact was an optimistic description of interactions with Azmuth.

“He doesn’t love visitors,” Ben said.

“But it’s possible.”

“…Technically possible.”

“Then it’s on the list.” Izuku wrote it down. “After we assess the cache site, after we establish baseline communication security, and after—” He looked up. “How much do you know about dimensional physics? Specifically the mechanics of the rift that brought me here.”

Max and Ben exchanged a look.

“None,” Ben said.

“Very little,” Max said, more honestly. “But there are Plumber databases at the cache site. Forty years of cross-species incident documentation. If there’s any recorded precedent for what you described — the spatial anomaly, the transit experience, the dimensional displacement—”

“There might be data on the origin point,” Izuku said. “Or at least on the physics involved. Which would be a start.”

They drove east. The desert widened and the sky turned the particular deep blue of high altitude and low humidity, and Izuku filled four pages while Ben leaned over his shoulder and pointed out things Izuku had gotten slightly wrong about form capabilities and Max occasionally inserted factual corrections about species biology in a voice that suggested he’d read a great deal and remembered all of it.

It felt, uncomfortably and wonderfully, like a study group.

It felt like something Izuku had never had before and hadn’t known he was missing until it was, suddenly, present.

The Plumber cache was buried under what looked like an abandoned ranger station in the middle of nowhere in particular. Max pressed three points on the exterior wall in sequence, the floor panel behind the front desk descended on hydraulics, and they went down a set of concrete stairs into a space that was a remarkable collision of the completely mundane and the absolutely extraordinary.

Rows of metal shelving held equipment in various states of maintenance — weapons, communication devices, containment units, environmental suits for non-Earth-standard atmospheres. Filing cabinets — actual physical filing cabinets — stood beside data terminals of alien design. A workbench held partially disassembled tech of multiple species origins. Everything had a fine layer of dust but was clearly still functional, maintained by someone on a long, irregular schedule.

Ben said “whoa” and immediately reached for a piece of tech on the nearest shelf.

Max said “don’t touch that” and Ben put it down.

Izuku walked slowly down the first row of shelving, looking at everything with his hands behind his back — the habit of someone who’d spent years in hero exhibitions and support labs where you absolutely did not touch the merchandise. He catalogued as he moved. Cross-referenced with what he knew. Made notes.

The database terminal was in the back.

It was, as Max had promised, extensive. Forty-plus years of incident documentation, organized by date, species, incident type, threat level, and geographic location. The interface was primarily in a script Izuku didn’t recognize — presumably an intergalactic standard of some kind — but a translation function was accessible, and within twenty minutes he’d found the English-language data layer and begun searching.

Dimensional. Transit. Spatial anomaly. Rift. Cross-dimensional.

The search returned forty-seven incidents.

Izuku read every summary in under an hour. Most were brief — unexplained sensor readings, anomalous energy signatures, unconfirmed reports of displaced individuals who’d disappeared before investigation was possible. Seven had more substantial documentation. Of those seven, three described incidents with characteristics similar to Izuku’s account: spatial instability triggered by a specific high-energy event in proximity to an existing point of dimensional thinning, transit duration perceived by subjects as instantaneous, arrival at a target universe with no perceived choice of destination.

He wrote down the relevant incident numbers, cross-referenced the energy signatures described, and began building a hypothesis.

“You’ve been at that terminal for three hours,” Ben said, from behind him.

Izuku startled. He’d lost track. He did that. “There’s relevant data,” he said. “Incident reports that match my transit profile. The dimensional rifts aren’t random — they occur at specific coordinates that correlate with…”

He trailed off. He looked at what he’d just figured out.

“Correlate with what?” Ben asked.

“High-energy events,” Izuku said slowly. “The transit that brought me here was triggered by a high-energy event in proximity to a naturally thin point in dimensional geometry.” He tapped the screen. “The sludge villain. When I jumped off the bridge — the villain was using a significant amount of energy to pursue me. That energy, combined with whatever pre-existing dimensional thinness existed at that location—” He stopped. Started again. “In my world, the discovery of quirks happened about a hundred years ago. That much biological change in a century — the ambient energy in my world is different. The quirk factor changed the baseline. And that change might have created regions of unusual dimensional geometry.”

Max had come up behind them both without sound. “Naturally thin points,” he repeated.

“Quirk-related energy has been saturating the atmosphere of my world for a century,” Izuku said. “I don’t have the physics background to calculate the effect on dimensional membrane stability, but if the Plumber databases have any records of unusual sensor readings in Japanese urban areas—”

“Tokyo area,” Max said. He reached past Izuku to a secondary search field. “I remember a report. 2001. Something the sensors couldn’t classify.” He typed. The report appeared.

It was brief. Anomalous energy readings, Tokyo metropolitan area, attributed to local electromagnetic interference, filed as unresolved and archived. The coordinates were precise.

They were five hundred meters from the bridge where Izuku had jumped.

He stared at the screen.

“The thin point was already there,” he said. “The villain’s energy output pushed through it.” He paused. “Which means—”

“It might still be there,” Max finished.

“And if it’s still there, and if we could generate a comparable energy signature at the same coordinates—”

“You might be able to go home,” Ben said.

The word landed quietly. Home. Izuku had been treating it as a long-term problem, something to work toward gradually, because the alternative — treating it as urgent, as something that needed to happen now — made the distance feel like a physical weight that would crush him if he let himself feel it fully.

His mother didn’t know where he was.

She thought — she would think — he’d fallen into the canal. She would have called the police by now. She would be—

He closed the thought. Locked it in a specific compartment. He had a technique for this — he’d developed it around age eight, when Bakugo had started making the cruelty systematic, when emotional flooding became a genuine operational risk for getting through the school day. He called it in the field. When you were in the field, you kept the weight in the compartment and you did the work in front of you. When you were somewhere safe, you opened the compartment and dealt with it properly.

He wasn’t somewhere safe yet. He was in the field.

“A return transit requires replicating the energy profile of the triggering event,” he said. His voice was steady. “The villain was approximately the mass of four or five adult humans, projecting kinetic energy across a radius of — I’d estimate eight to ten meters. Call it…” He looked at the watch. “Can any of the alien forms generate a concentrated energy burst in that range?”

“Heatblast,” Ben said immediately. “Plasma output, concentrated — yeah. Easy.”

“Diamondhead can redirect and concentrate ambient energy if there’s a suitable source—”

“Stinkfly’s optic blasts are more precise than Heatblast—”

“The optic blasts might be too narrow. We need distributed energy across the radius, not—”

They were both at the terminal now, pulling up species capability data, talking fast, building the framework for a plan the way both of them apparently built things — together, finishing each other’s sentences, Ben’s instinct and Izuku’s analysis moving around each other without collision.

Max watched them from a short distance away.

His expression was unreadable in the specific way of someone who was feeling something they weren’t going to perform.

“Boys,” he said.

They both looked up.

“The plan is good. It’s worth pursuing.” He paused. “But there are two problems. First: the Plumber database doesn’t have enough data on the specific energy profile of your transit to be certain replication will work. You need someone who understands dimensional mechanics at a much deeper level than this archive can provide.”

“Azmuth,” Izuku said.

“Azmuth,” Max confirmed. “Second problem.” He looked at the facility around them — the forty years of accumulated response capacity sitting in organized, dust-covered silence. “Vilgax knows approximately where the Omnitrix landed. His search pattern is tightening. We have days, maybe less, before he stops sending scouts and comes himself.”

“Then we need to move faster,” Ben said.

“We need to move strategically,” Izuku said.

They looked at each other.

“Both,” they said, simultaneously.

Max’s expression moved through several stages and arrived at something that was not quite a smile but occupied the same space. He turned away before it got there fully.

“I’ll start reviewing the communication equipment,” he said. “See what’s still functional. If we’re going to contact Azmuth — and I’m not promising he’ll answer, or that he’ll be helpful if he does — we’ll need a working long-range array.”

He moved off between the shelves with the unhurried precision that was, Izuku had decided, his primary characteristic: the particular competence of someone who had needed to be reliable for so long it had become involuntary.

Izuku looked at his notebook. At four pages of database findings, a hypothesis about dimensional transit mechanics, a framework for return-trip planning, species capability analyses cross-referenced with tactical applications, and — in the top corner of the most recent page, small and in parentheses, the way he’d written things he wasn’t ready to fully commit to since he was a child — (note: this might actually be possible. all of it.)

He looked at the watch.

The watch pulsed. Green and steady.

“Hey,” Ben said. He was leaning against the shelving, arms folded, watching Izuku with an expression that was working hard at casual and not entirely succeeding. “For what it’s worth. When you go home.” A pause. “You should tell them. Whoever decides about heroes in your world. That the quirkless thing — that it’s not—” He stopped. “I don’t know how your world works. But the thing that makes the Omnitrix choose someone. That’s not a quirk thing. That’s not a biology thing.” He shrugged, with the aggressive nonchalance of someone saying something important while pretending not to. “That’s just who you are.”

Izuku didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then he wrote it down.

Not in the technical section. Not in observations or analysis or preliminary hypotheses.

In the back of the notebook, in the small personal-log section he’d maintained since Volume 1, that no one had ever read:

Someone who didn’t have to said something kind today. In a universe that wasn’t mine, where nothing knew my name or my history or what I didn’t have. And it felt, for reasons I haven’t finished understanding yet, like evidence.

He underlined the last word.

Evidence.

The warning came at three in the morning.

Not a sound — at least not one that woke Izuku first. What woke him was the watch.

It had been dormant on his wrist all night, warm and faintly luminous the way it always was, and then at three-fourteen by the small clock on the cache wall it pulsed. Once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession, each pulse slightly stronger than the last, the hourglass symbol shifting from its resting green to something deeper — an urgent, almost angry shade that threw moving shadows on the ceiling of the small rest area where Izuku had been sleeping on a folding cot.

He was sitting upright before he was fully awake, notebook already in his hand by reflex, pen uncapped.

He sat in the dark for three seconds, cataloguing sensation. The watch, pulsing. The facility, quiet. The ventilation system, humming its regular frequency. Ben in the bunk across from him, still asleep. From Max’s corner of the rest area, the slow deep breathing of someone genuinely at rest.

Nothing wrong.

Everything wrong.

He wrote: 03:14. Omnitrix alert behavior — three escalating pulses, color shift from standard green to deeper/more saturated green. No external stimulus visible in immediate environment. Device appears to be responding to something I’m not detecting.

He looked at the watch.

“What is it?” he whispered.

The watch pulsed again. The green deepened further.

Izuku got up very quietly and padded to the cache’s sensor array, which Max had spent two hours the previous afternoon reactivating. He sat down at the console and pulled up the proximity display.

The display showed a radius of approximately two hundred kilometers around their position. For six hours, since Max had activated it, it had shown nothing of note — background readings, atmospheric fluctuation, one commercial flight at high altitude.

Now there was something.

Approximately forty kilometers southeast. A mass-energy signature that the Plumber system’s classification algorithm was returning as: UNKNOWN — THREAT LEVEL UNCLASSIFIED — NO MATCH IN DATABASE — RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE EVACUATION.

The signature was enormous.

Izuku stared at the numbers. He did not have enough frame of reference for alien-scale threat metrics to translate them into something intuitive, but he understood comparison values, and he could see the column showing the DNAlien engagement energy profiles from yesterday and the column showing this new signature, and the new signature was to the DNAliens approximately what a nuclear power plant was to a birthday candle.

He went back to the rest area.

“Max,” he said, at a normal volume, because the situation did not feel like a whisper situation anymore.

Max was awake and sitting up before the word finished. His eyes were completely clear. No grogginess. Izuku filed that away — Max Tennyson sleeps combat-ready, involuntary vigilance, career-long — and pointed toward the sensor console.

Max looked at the display for four seconds.

He said, very quietly: “Ben.”

Ben did not wake up like Max did. Ben woke up like a person being dragged from deep water, which was — Izuku suspected — how most fourteen-year-olds woke up. He surfaced through several layers of confused protest before his eyes focused and read the room, and then he was upright and alert in the specific way of someone whose body had learned to override morning inertia under duress.

“What—”

“Sensor contact,” Max said. “Southeast. Moving northwest. Speed approximately—” He checked the display. “Two hundred kilometers per hour. Consistent. Straight line approach.”

“Straight line,” Ben said. His voice had gone flat in a way Izuku hadn’t heard from him before. “Toward us.”

“Toward the Omnitrix signature,” Izuku said. “If the Omnitrix is broadcasting a locator signal at any frequency, a sufficiently advanced tracker could—” He stopped. Looked at the watch. “Is it? Broadcasting?”

“In stealth mode it’s suppressed,” Max said. “But combat activation pulses are detectable if you’re close enough and know what to look for.” He looked at Izuku. “Three alert pulses at high intensity.”

Izuku looked at the watch. The watch that he’d, apparently, woken up to let announce their location to whatever was forty kilometers away and closing.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“Now you do.” Max said it without blame. He was already moving, pulling equipment from the shelving with practiced speed. “Stealth mode is the dial held for three seconds before pressing. Suppresses all emissions. Learn it.”

Izuku held the dial for three seconds and pressed. The watch’s glow dimmed to almost nothing. The pulsing stopped.

He committed the sequence to memory and wrote it down anyway, because writing things down was how he committed them to memory.

“Is it Vilgax?” Ben asked. He was watching the sensor display, and his voice was doing the flat thing that Izuku now recognized as what Ben Tennyson sounded like when he was genuinely scared and not letting himself show it.

Max looked at the signature profile. He looked for a long time.

“Yes,” he said.

The plan, assembled in eight minutes while Max packed critical equipment and Ben ran a rapid check on the Rustbucket’s emergency systems, was not a good plan. Izuku noted this explicitly in his notebook — current plan: inadequate, improvised, high-variance outcome — because accurate self-assessment was important even when, especially when, the assessment was uncomfortable.

The plan was: drive northeast while Max contacted every former Plumber whose communication frequency he still had. Get distance. Get support. Do not engage.

“We don’t fight Vilgax with three people,” Max said. He was driving at a speed that suggested the Rustbucket had capabilities its exterior appearance did not imply. “Not tonight. Not without preparation.”

“Agreed,” Izuku said.

Ben said nothing. He was watching the rear sensor display that Max had rigged to a secondary screen near the passenger seat. The signature behind them was no longer moving in a straight line. It had adjusted its trajectory.

“He’s following,” Ben said.

“He’ll follow anywhere,” Max said. “The Omnitrix is a beacon to him. Always has been. But he can’t catch the Rustbucket in atmosphere at—”

The roof of the Rustbucket dented inward with a sound like a car crash.

Max didn’t flinch. He executed a sharp turn, changing their heading by ninety degrees, and the vehicle corrected with the stability of something with much better suspension than it looked. “Drone strike,” he said. “Advance ordinance. He’s outside sensor range but he has drones forward.” A pause. “The distance is less than the display shows. He may have launched before we detected him.”

Izuku looked at the ceiling of the Rustbucket. The dent was approximately thirty centimeters across and five deep. He thought about what kind of projectile made a dent like that and what the same projectile would do to a human body without a vehicle shell between them.

He thought about this very quickly, locked it in the compartment, and moved on.

“The drones need to be cleared before we can run effectively,” he said. “How many and what type?”

“Can’t tell from interior sensors.” Max glanced at him in the rearview. “Someone would need to go outside.”

Ben was already moving toward the rear door.

“XLR8,” Izuku said, quickly. “Speed in the open air to locate them. But XLR8 can’t take a hit — if the drones have tracking ordinance—”

“Diamondhead,” Ben said. “Armored. Ranged attack.” He paused at the door. “You should take it.”

Izuku blinked. “Why me?”

“Because you had an idea at the crystal wall yesterday about refraction angles that I wouldn’t have thought of in a week.” Ben said it directly, without apparent resentment, with the straightforward tone of someone doing tactical math. “You’re better with that form than I’d be. I’ll run support — Max, can you open the roof panel on the east side? I can go Stinkfly, fly visible, give the drones a target to track, Izuku takes them out while they’re focused on me.”

Silence, brief, in the moving vehicle.

“That puts you at significant personal risk,” Izuku said.

“I know.”

“The drones will fire on you.”

“XLR8 as secondary form if I need to dodge. I’ve done harder.” He looked at Izuku steadily. “Can you do it?”

Izuku looked at his notebook, where he had two pages on Diamondhead’s energy-refraction geometry. He looked at the watch. He thought about standing in the road and angling a crystal face to redirect an energy blast into the sky, and how the physics of that had arrived to him instinctively — not as calculation but as perception, the way notes on a page arrived to a musician as sound rather than symbol.

He thought about what it meant that a boy he’d known for less than two days was trusting him with the safety of that boy’s life.

“Yes,” he said.

The roof panel opened. Desert air screamed in. Ben hit his watch, and where a brown-haired boy had been standing there was suddenly an insectoid creature with four wings and six legs and compound eyes that caught the darkness and turned it into a hundred thousand moving images — Stinkfly, Lepidopterran, Izuku’s memory supplied, flight and adhesive projection and optic blast — and then Ben was gone, through the roof panel and into the night sky.

Izuku hit the rear door.

Diamondhead arrived like geology arriving — slow in concept and instant in reality, the sense of mass and structure and compression, the world through crystal-facet eyes that saw in spectra beyond human range. He stood on the running board of the Rustbucket, holding on with one crystalline hand, feeling the desert wind like a pressure wave, and looked up.

Ben was visible as a moving shape against the stars, swooping and banking, and behind him — three drones, angular and dark, moving with the fluid precision of automated targeting systems that had locked onto a heat-and-motion signature and would not let go.

The drones were firing.

Short, high-energy pulses, the same signature as the strike that had dented the roof, and Ben was moving fast between them but not fast enough — one pulse clipped a wingtip and the Lepidopterran form banked hard, losing altitude before recovering, and Izuku heard the sound that came out of Ben in that moment and locked it in the compartment with everything else he couldn’t afford to feel right now.

He let go of the Rustbucket.

He landed on the desert floor at forty kilometers per hour, rough, rolled, came up in a crystal crouch and oriented fast. The Rustbucket continued ahead. Three drones, high and tracking Ben. Energy weapons. Automated systems — which meant they responded to targeting logic, which meant they could be predicted.

He grew a structure.

Not a wall this time. A lens. A curved, concave crystal surface angled at a precise degree that required him to know three things simultaneously: the drones’ firing angle, the desired deflection vector, and the structural crystallography of Petrosapien biology well enough to shape it accurately on demand.

He knew all three.

The first drone fired at Ben.

The pulse hit the lens and redirected upward into the lead drone’s undercarriage. The drone died in a shower of burning components.

The second drone recalibrated. Faster than he’d expected. It swiveled from Ben to Izuku, identified the crystal structure as a threat, and fired three rapid pulses in a spread pattern designed to defeat a single fixed reflector.

Izuku dissolved the lens and grew three smaller angled facets in the spread’s path, positioned in a triangular arrangement that directed all three pulses toward the same convergence point in the air between the second and third drone.

The convergence point produced a result that he hadn’t entirely calculated in advance but had estimated as likely: an energy feedback bloom that fried both drones’ sensor arrays simultaneously.

They dropped.

Silence.

Ben descended, Stinkfly-formed, and landed on a rock beside him, folding wings carefully. One wing had a scorch mark across it. Izuku looked at it. Ben looked at Izuku looking at it.

“I’m fine,” Ben said, in the voice of someone who means it.

“The wing?”

“Heals when I change back.” He looked at the three destroyed drones scattered across the desert. Then at Izuku. Then at the geometry of the arrangement — the three angled facets still standing, already beginning to fade as the Diamondhead form’s metabolic energy receded. “You triangulated three simultaneous shots.”

“The spread pattern had a predictable geometry,” Izuku said. “Once I identified the algorithm, the counter-arrangement was straightforward.”

“That was not straightforward.”

“It was logical.”

“Izuku. You redirected three energy blasts into each other using your hands in approximately four seconds.”

Izuku thought about this for a moment. “I had good notes,” he said.

Ben made a sound that was simultaneously a laugh and something more complicated. He changed back — a flash of green, and the insectoid form collapsed into a fourteen-year-old boy standing in the desert in cargo shorts, slightly singed.

Izuku changed back too. Small again. Human-weight. The desert air was cold on his skin.

The Rustbucket had circled back and was pulling up beside them, and Max was already out of the door before it fully stopped, running a scan with a handheld device, looking at the drone wreckage with an expression that mixed relief and something else.

“Three drones,” Max said. “Vilgax’s standard forward scout deployment.” He looked at the sky to the southeast. “No signature on the sensors. But that could mean he pulled back or—”

“Or the sensors are inadequate to his stealth capability,” Izuku finished.

“Yes.”

“We can’t be sure he’s gone.”

“No.”

Izuku looked at the destroyed drones. At the scorched wing-mark on Ben’s shoulder, fading now. At Max scanning the empty sky with an expression that had the specific quality of a person looking at something they’d been dreading for a long time.

“Tell me about him,” Izuku said. “Everything. Not tactical summary — everything. His capabilities, his history, his patterns. I’ve been operating on fragments.” He opened his notebook. “I need the full picture.”

Max lowered the scanner.

“You sure?” he said. Not discouraging. Just asking.

“Yes.”

Max looked at him the way he’d looked at him across the breakfast table — that particular look, the weight-recognition look. Then he nodded, once.

“Get in the vehicle,” he said. “This takes a while.”

It did take a while.

They drove north, then west, then north again in a pattern that Max said made tracking harder, and while they drove he talked. He didn’t simplify. He didn’t soften. He gave Izuku the full account in the flat, precise tone of someone who’d learned to transmit important information without the interference of emotion, and Izuku wrote and listened and asked clarifying questions and wrote more.

Vilgax.

An alien warlord from a world called Vilgaxia. Conqueror. The kind of mind that treated whole civilizations as tactical problems — identify the most powerful defender, eliminate them, and the rest followed. He had spent decades building an empire on that logic, and the logic worked because the logic was correct: eliminate the strongest thing and the rest falls. Every time. On world after world, he’d found the strongest thing and he had eliminated it, and each world had fallen.

He had nearly been stopped, twice, by Max. The first time Max had been younger and Vilgax had been less augmented — still the most physically dangerous organism Max had ever faced, but finite. Containable. The second time, Vilgax had been rebuilt. Enhanced. Technologies from a dozen conquered worlds integrated into his biology, his armor, his infrastructure. He’d become something that was no longer entirely organism and no longer entirely machine, and the combination was, Max said, close to unkillable with the tools they currently had access to.

“Close to,” Izuku noted.

“Close to,” Max confirmed.

“What are his limitations?”

Max was quiet for a moment. “He thinks in one dimension,” he said. “He looks for the strongest thing. He’s never met a situation where the strongest thing wasn’t the relevant thing. It’s been enough, every time.”

Izuku wrote: Vilgax tactical profile: maximized direct combat capability, operational history of success via dominant force application, potential blind spot — has never encountered a situation where dominant force was not the determining variable. Pattern recognition bias toward strength-assessment.

He looked at what he’d written.

Then he looked at the watch.

He thought about Aizawa Shouta — no, he stopped himself, Aizawa Shouta didn’t exist here, and he was doing the thing he did where he cross-referenced his hero notes with new situations — but the concept. The hero concept. A hero whose entire approach was built around neutralizing strength rather than opposing it with greater strength. Taking the power out of the equation.

He wrote: A strength-maximized opponent is, paradoxically, easier to predict than a versatile one. Patterns can be identified and countered. The question is not ‘how do we overpower Vilgax’ but ‘how do we make the engagement one where his power is not the determining factor.’

“You’re thinking about how to beat him,” Ben said.

“I’m thinking about the structure of the problem.” Izuku paused. “It’s too early to think about how to beat him specifically. I don’t have enough data. But the structural analysis is useful regardless of the specific variables.”

“He tore apart three Plumber ships,” Max said. “Simultaneously. With his hands.”

“I know. You told me.” Izuku looked at the notes. “He’s also been defeated twice. Temporarily, but defeated. By you.” He looked at Max’s reflection in the rearview. “What did you do? Both times.”

A long pause.

“The first time,” Max said, “I didn’t beat him. I outlasted him. I changed the terrain — literally, physically moved the engagement to an environment that neutralized his mobility advantages. I used his force projection against a structure rather than absorbing it directly. Took forty minutes.”

“The second time?”

“I didn’t beat him the second time either. I delayed him. Long enough for reinforcements.” He paused. “Reinforcements that aren’t available now.”

Izuku wrote: Engagement principle, both Vilgax defeats: not overpowering him. Redirecting, outlasting, delaying. He wins every straight fight. He loses when the fight isn’t straight.

He underlined it.

“He’s going to come again,” Ben said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Max said.

“Tonight?”

“Unlikely. The drone loss tells him we have active countermeasures and at least one transformation user. He’ll reassess. Recalibrate. He’s not impulsive — that’s one of his worst qualities. He takes his time when time doesn’t cost him anything.”

“How long?”

Max considered. “Days. Maybe less.”

Ben was quiet. He was looking out the window at the dark desert, and Izuku looked at his reflection in the glass and saw what he’d noticed before — the weight. The responsibility he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t put down. Amplified now, with the scale of it made concrete.

Vilgax.

An empire builder. A civilization ender. A thing that had never met the strongest defender of a world and not found a way to destroy them.

Coming for a watch on the wrist of a boy from Japan who wasn’t even supposed to have it, traveling with a boy who was supposed to have it but didn’t, in an RV, in a desert, at four in the morning.

Izuku looked at his notes. He looked at ten alien species profiles and their tactical applications and his theoretical combination chains and his structural analysis of a threat type he’d had less than twenty-four hours to study.

He thought about what Max had said. He looks for the strongest thing. He thought about what the Omnitrix’s selection criteria had been. Not a soldier. Not a conqueror. Someone who would value what the forms were.

He thought about being quirkless. About spending fourteen years in a world designed for people with power, learning to see every problem from the angle of someone who didn’t have the obvious solution available. About how necessity had made him into something that thought around corners rather than through walls.

Vilgax looked for the strongest thing.

Izuku had spent his whole life being, by every conventional measure, not the strongest thing.

He thought about what it meant — really meant, structurally, tactically — to fight someone whose entire strategy was oriented around finding and defeating the strongest thing in the room.

He wrote, slowly and very deliberately: Preliminary strategic hypothesis: the optimal counter to a strength-supremacy approach is consistent unpredictability combined with distributed threat vectors. Vilgax can defeat the strongest opponent in a fight. He cannot simultaneously defeat ten different opponents with ten different capabilities and zero redundancy — if no two threats operate on the same principle, there is no single optimal counter. The Omnitrix, used correctly, is not one opponent. It is ten.

He looked at the sentence.

He thought about it very carefully, checking for the specific kind of wishful thinking he’d been trying to eliminate from his analysis since age nine.

He didn’t find any. The logic held.

He looked at Ben.

“I need to practice,” he said. “Seriously, systematically, and starting as soon as there’s daylight and somewhere I won’t destroy infrastructure. Every form. Transition speed, capability limits, combination approaches.” He paused. “I know we were going to contact Azmuth before—”

“Both,” Ben said, echoing what they’d both said the night before.

“Both,” Izuku agreed.

Ben reached over and, in a gesture that was unconscious and immediate and something Izuku did not know how to catalogue, bumped a fist against Izuku’s shoulder. Not hard. Just there.

Izuku looked at it. Then at Ben. Ben was looking out the window again.

“You have good notes,” Ben said.

“Yes,” Izuku said.

“We’ll be okay.”

Izuku thought about the sensor signature. About the dent in the Rustbucket’s ceiling. About a conqueror with three galaxies worth of technology and experience and physical capability pointed like an arrow at a watch on his wrist.

He thought about ten thousand species sleeping in that watch, waiting.

He thought about the structural logic of a problem that had never been solved by being the strongest thing in the room.

“Yes,” he said again, and meant it differently this time, and wrote three more pages before the sun came up.

The sun came up red, the way desert suns did, throwing long shadows across flat land, and Izuku was already outside with the watch face up and the holographic interface spinning slowly.

Ten silhouettes.

He looked at each one.

He thought about what Max had said — that Azmuth had wanted the wielder to value what the forms were. Not what they could do. What they were. Ten thousand species. Ten thousand ways of being alive in a universe that was, apparently, so much larger and more complicated and more populated than anything his world’s century of hero culture had prepared him to imagine.

He pressed the dial.

Green light came.

He let himself be remade, for the fourth time, into something that was not a boy and not a weapon but a different kind of being, temporarily borrowed — and thought, in the moment between human and not-human where both existed simultaneously, that this was the strangest and most specific kind of privilege he had ever been given.

He spent three hours practicing before Max called them in for breakfast.

He filled six pages.