Uproar // Villain Deku // Book 2

Chapter 13: Don't Breathe.

Izumi Yagi's P.O.V

"All those years ago, Nana, your father's predecessor, seemed to be interested in learning more about the quirk's ancestry — I even helped her with a few of the more recent wielders of One For All." Gran Torino explained. "She was working on this ancestry project for weeks, maybe even months — creating wells and pools of knowledge she could site as she learned to make the cultivated power her own — until one day, she called me and asked to meet."

    I stared attentively at Gran Torino as he retold the story that could be linked with my cracked and broken flesh — flipping through the news articles marked in the album occasionally.

"We met on a rooftop, overlooking the city, that day. 'Gran Torino', she spoke out in a worrisome timbre. 'You'll never believe what I've discovered about One For All!'. Her tone of voice caught my attention as she continued. She sounded worried — with hints of concern seeping into her voice. I was scared for my friend." He told me. " As we looked to the city's skyline, she began again. 'I think One For All isn't compatible with ordinary quirk users', she said. I asked her to continue, still not completely sure of what she was saying, and so she did. She went on to telling me of the fourth user's strange cause of death: old age."

"But old age isn't a strange way to die." I interrupted him with a confused expression.

"Ordinarily, no, but you have to understand that the fourth user, Shinomori Hikage, was only forty years old when he died."

"Then how could he have died of old age?"

"Nana looked through the medical reports after learning of his early death, and the autopsy said he died of old age, but you know what she really thought it was?" He asked me, awaiting my nod of curiosity. "Nana believed that One For All had been eating away at his life."

"How is that even possible?" I questioned him. " A quirk couldn't kill a person. Quirks have been around for centuries, yet no one has ever died due to a quirk deteriorating their body. If someone really had been killed due to a quirk eating away at their life, it would have been broadcasted through every channel and spoken about more — no matter the year it had occurred in." I continued.

"One For All is no ordinary quirk. One For All contains multiple different quirks inside it, as well as multiple different vestiges that still linger within the quirk. It wasn't so much that possessing a quirk killed Shinomori, possessing multiple quirks killed him." He told me. "From having the quirk for many years, it ate away at him — it destroyed him. All of the power that lingered inside of him, it was too much for his body to contain. It crushed him — it cracked him."

    As he continued on, retelling the story of the fourth user, I flipped through another page of the album. On this page, there was a photo that left my eyes wide and my mouth dry. It was a photo of the fourth user's corpse — taken during his autopsy — however, the part that stood out the most to me, were the cracks that appeared along his body.

The same cracks that had begun to appear along my chest.

"We weren't certain that One For All had been what killed him, but somehow, Nana could just feel it. In her bones; in her veins; in her blood, she could feel it. She had a link to the quirk and its users — a psychological one as well as a physical one. An ordinary quirk user such as myself would never understand the bond she and the predecessors shared, but you could. You now share the very bond that seemed to connect Nana and the deceased users."

    I could feel it in my soul, the vestiges that lingered inside of me. I had met them in a dream once, and then during training. Getting their quirks wasn't a choice or a test of nobility, the predecessors didn't give me their quirks, One For All had evolved. The predecessors didn't seem to like me. They thought I wasn't worthy of using One For All, they told me, but they had already accepted me as a user, and there was no going back now.