Can We Be Heroes?

Chapter 40• Birth of a Vigilante I

Izuku Midoriya loved heroes. Scratch that, he worshiped them. As far back as he could remember, his world only made sense through one lens: heroes were everything. Their courage, their strength, their kindness—they were hope made real.

He watched the same All Might videos every day, mouthing every word, mimicking every pose. In his notebooks, he sketched costume ideas, drew battle moves, and wrote imaginary team-ups between him and his future classmates at U.A.

He was four when he first told his mom:
“I want to be like All Might!”

She had smiled. Hugged him and told him he could do anything he wanted and He believed it. Why wouldn’t he? It was dream after all and dreams came true.

Oh, how wrong he was. Because dreams don’t always wait to be crushed gently.

Izuku was six years old. Small. Fragile. Full of light.
And then came those three words.

“You are quirkless.”

And kust like that, the future he had painted in every crayon color was erased. He remembered his mother’s face that day. She cried first and he didn’t understand why.

He hadn’t cried at first. He had just stared.

Quirkless.

He kept repeating it. It sounded wrong. It tasted wrong. Like a word that shouldn’t be his. The other kids found out quickly. That’s how it always went. And they didn’t hold back.

Bakugo was the first to laugh. “Deku? A hero? You’re a joke.” Then came the pushing. The shoving. The notebooks torn in half. One day it was just words. The next, it was bruises.

And eventually Izuku stopped drawing, stopped talking about heroes but he never stopped watching them.

At night, he’d curl under his blanket, tablet in hand, rewatching old clips. All Might saving civilians from burning buildings. Kamui Woods trapping robbers with his vines. Pro heroes smiling in the face of disaster.

He watched every battle frame by frame, memorizing footwork, timing, habits.

It was when Izuku had reached ten years old that he truly understood that the world didn’t just forget people like him. It rejected them.

By then, his obsession with heroes had gone completely quiet. Almost non existent. He didn’t talk about All Might anymore. Didn’t show anyone his notebooks.

At ten, you’re supposed to be loud, curious and full of hope but Izuku... the poor boy looked so tired. Tired of seeing his mother cry quietly in the kitchen, clutching rejection letters. Tired of hearing whispers behind her back—

“That’s the woman with the quirkless kid.”

“She should’ve given him up.”

“No man would stay with that kind of baggage.”

Even his teachers looked at her with pity.
And at him with something worse—apology.

Inko tried her best. Every single day she smiled, cooked, worked part-time jobs that paid next to nothing, and still tried to say “It’s alright, sweetie” when she was clearly hurting.

She never blamed him, not once. But Izuku wasn’t stupid. He knew he was the reason for all her suffering. He was her chains that held her down.

One day, on the way home from the store, he saw her get cornered as two older kids, probably high schoolers were busy mocking her. Calling her pathetic and saying she should be “grateful” anyone even hired her. One of them even spat the word “quirkless” like it was a disease.

Izuku had dropped his bag and rushed them, small and weak fists swinging with full of fire but he didn’t last thirty seconds. They beat him. Not hard enough to break bones—just hard enough to remind him of his place.

He lay there in the dirt, cheek scraped, lip bleeding, watching as they walked off laughing like nothing had happened.

His mother rushed to him when she saw, crying, holding him, whispering apologies that weren’t hers to give.

And as she cried, something inside him just
snapped. That night, lying on the floor of their small apartment with an ice pack to his jaw, Izuku stared at the ceiling.

The world wasn’t fair. It had never been fair. And he wasn’t going to pretend it would suddenly change because he wished hard enough. He didn’t have power, didn’t have status nor protection.

But he had a brain. He had knowledge. Every hero he had ever studied. Every villain he had ever read about. Every fight. Every quirk. Every weakness.
He knew them better than most adults did.

And in that moment, ten years old and already carrying a lifetime of rejection, Izuku made a choice.

If the world didn’t want him, he wouldn’t beg to be part of it. He’d rather use it. Study it, learn its secrets and weaponize every last bit of knowledge it gave him.

Not to destroy it but to control it. To move in the shadows and make the world better—even if he had to do it alone.

That was the night Hex was born.

Not with a costume but with a truth. He didn’t need a quirk. He needed a plan. He needed data. He needed to become someone that even the world would fear because it couldn’t understand him.

And as the moonlight cast shadows across his room, Izuku turned to his journal.

And wrote. “Knowledge is my weapon. I am not powerless. I am Hex.”

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Word Count [888]