Worthless Necessity [HitoZuku]

Chapter 16 - I hear it calling me

"I've looked into it." Tsukauchi looked down at his notebook, "There shouldn't be any legal issues if you wish to take Midoriya in. I can easily get the forms and, and with the connections we both have, everything should be completed in a day or two. But if you really do decide to take care of him, it's best to keep the entire matter quiet. You should wait a while, preferably until the hype of the Sports Festival dies down."

"Ah... I understand." Nezu frowned. He knew what Tsukauchi was talking about. In the system, he was considered a responsible adult with a proper job, and no doubt would be able to take care of Midoriya, especially since Midoriya was enrolled in the school he was in charge of.

But to the public, no doubt that it's going to cause an uproar.

After all, it has always been the humans taking care of the animals. Since when was it the case where the animal took care of the human, even if that very animal was considered one of the smartest beings on the planet?

"Your case is a unique one..." Tsukauchi sighed, "There aren't many animals with quirks, and even fewer animals with the mental capacity to be on par with humans. If word of this gets out, nobody knows how it will turn out."

Nezu shook his head. Tsukauchi was right about one thing; no one knows what the consequences of adopting Midoriya would be. Nezu didn't really care about it, but if it would negatively impact Midoriya's life, then this situation would have to be handled even more delicately than before. This was already complicated enough, given Midoriya's current mindset, and whether Midoriya even trusted Nezu enough to take care of him. Nezu didn't want to do anything that would make Midoriya's situation even worse for him. Plus, High Spec granted Nezu a high intelligence quotient, but emotional stuff... was iffy. There was no right answer when it came to emotions.

And Tsukauchi was wrong about the other thing.

Animals with quirks weren't exactly rare. In fact, they were rather common. Animals with empathetic quirks, especially, were commonly used in therapy, and they were specifically bred for that cause. Horses with minor speed quirks were also bred for horse racing, and animals like fish and pigs with quirks that gave them a larger body mass were practically mass bred for consumption. People just assumed that those were natural traits in those animals, and with nothing to compare them against, it was, in a way, a justified assumption.

Humans had relatively nice lifestyles and were generally smart enough to avoid death in a variety of methods, and thus, even people with weak, useless, or even quirks that harmed themselves could survive and live a normal life. But animals had to fight for their own survival, so animals, without that evolutionary edge, or even quirks that were detrimental to their survival, wouldn't make it. Animals have had quirks ever since humans have had them, but the process of natural selection just made it appear that animals didn't. No one would think that a shark swimming in the ocean had a quirk that made it swim faster, or an eagle had a quirk that gave it better eyesight.

It's just that humans considered animals as lesser beings and just assumed that they weren't "good" enough to have quirks. For an animal with a quirk that made it seem abnormal, they were usually abandoned or just killed by humans, or just ignored by its parents and left to die, or were just killed and eaten if it were a wild animal. It severely limited the type of quirk mutations that different types of species could go through.

Nezu wasn't going to say anything about this topic though. He was both lucky and unlucky; he had a quirk that put him on the same stage as humans, but his intelligence had initially backfired on him and caused him to be experimented on. Nezu wasn't going to let any other animals suffer the same fate.

"Just think about it." Tsukuachi finished up, smiling, "I'm nowhere as smart as you are. You can probably come up with an ideal solution that no one else would think of."