Time passed quickly when you were a baby.
That wasn't to say Alex enjoyed the experience—just that everything blurred together in a haze of naps and feeding. Technically, drinking was the more accurate term, given that his entire diet consisted of powdered milk. Not exactly a feast fit for someone reborn with magic eyes, but nutritional adequacy trumped culinary aspirations for now.
And the reason for the powdered milk?
Simple: Alex was an orphan. He was thrown away, at birth, by his biological parents in this life. That was why he was in a basket in front of the orphanage. Quite unoriginal, really. A tad barbaric, even.
The thought didn't bother him much. In fact, it barely registered as a problem. He knew the moment he could stand upright and walk on his own two stubby legs, he'd be self-sufficient. The reason was quite literally staring out from the back of his eyes.
The Sharingan wasn't game-breaking—not yet. A single tomoe wasn't rewriting the laws of reality or bending space-time. But even in its embryonic form, it turned life's more mundane challenges into speed bumps.
For example, language.
By the time he was a month old, Alex could speak fluent Japanese. Not just Japanese, either. Give him a dictionary, and any major human language might as well have been hard-coded into his brain. A few programming languages, too—because yes, this world had computers, and he had checked. Very thoroughly.
Reading wasn't the hard part. That was easy.
Speaking, however… now that had taken some trial and error.
It wasn't as simple as knowing the meaning of words—he had to mimic the orphanage staff first. The shape of their mouths, the way their throats moved, the click of their tongues against their teeth. He couldn't ask for a dictionary when he couldn't even hold up his own damn head. So he'd watched, listened, copied.
And when the first full sentence finally left his lips, clear as day, the room had gone very quiet.
Caretakers blinked. One dropped a spoon.
Of course, nobody paid him much mind after that.
A toddler stringing together complete sentences? Sharp as a tack and eerily observant? Cool Quirk, good for you, lil boy.
Enhanced intelligence, most likely. Nothing world-shattering. Not when the kid down the hall had the head of a raccoon and another literally had a Lego brick for a skull.
Alex's red eyes got a few looks, sure, but they weren't that strange in a world where someone's elbow could shoot cement and All Might went around punching clouds off the sky.
Being smarter than average just meant he got seated near the front of the room and occasionally told to "play nice."
Once he managed to convince the caretakers to get him a phone—three straight days of soul-piercing, nap-shattering crying earned him an hour a day—things shifted gears.
He binge-learned like a man possessed. Webpages, dictionaries, encyclopedias, tutorial videos, textbooks—if it had data, he devoured it. He wasn't just a baby anymore. He was a database with a pulse.
Eidetic memory was a hell of a thing.
The downside? No buff to processing speed.
The memories were all there—everything he saw or read was locked in stone—but unless he took the time to organize them, he still had to dig around mentally like an old man fumbling through file cabinets. Information was only as useful as your ability to find it when needed, and Alex's mind, while sharp, wasn't infinite.
Still, he wasn't complaining. Not really.
After all, how many infants could recite the entire Tokyo subway map from memory while also learning how to modify Python scripts for firmware tampering?
Exactly.
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That evening was just like any other.
Caretakers moved through the nursery, feeding warm bottles of formula to gurgling mouths before tucking them into their cribs. The room was dim, lit by the low orange glow of a nightlight shaped like a cartoon cat. Faint lullabies played on loop from a nearby speaker, trying in vain to lull the more restless ones to sleep.
Cribs lined the walls. The floors were padded, and every corner was rounded for safety.
Alex lay nestled under a light blue blanket, eyes half-lidded like the others.
But unlike them, he remained awake.
He breathed in. Then out.
And with that breath, he called out—not aloud, but inwardly.
Wheel of Fortune.
Just like that, the soft world around him faded. The lullaby went silent. The nightlight blinked out.
Darkness took hold.
Then came the light—a golden, radiant ring, floating in the void. A wheel the size of a building, spinning gently in an unseen breeze. Incomprehensible symbols and shifting runes etched its surface, alive and moving like living ink. All of it unreadable—except for one thing.
A gleaming "1" burned at the top of the wheel, larger than all the others.
Alex's lips curled into a smile.
For 364 days, that number had stubbornly stayed at 0.
But not tonight.
Tonight, it was his birthday.
And he had just gotten his gift.
Of course, back in the real world, he was still nestled quietly in his crib—just another infant in a room full of sleeping toddlers. The wheel was only in his mind. It sounded quite schizophrenic, but so did the whole situation.
All right, let's see what we get.
To say Alex was excited would be an understatement.
In this new life, there were no game-like menus floating in front of his eyes, no stat screens to grind, no skill trees to plan for. There were no quests blinking in the corner of his vision. His body grew no faster than any other baby's. One year in, and he was still weak, wobbly, and prone to drooling in his sleep.
The Wheel was his only anchor—his only promise of growth.
And maybe, just maybe, his only path to survival.
Because while the world around him looked peaceful now, he knew it wasn't going to stay that way. Too much chaos humming beneath the surface of this society built on power. And if the Faceless God's words were any indication, then eventually, Alex would find himself front and center in what was brewing.
Or not. Maybe he'd be lucky. Maybe this was an alternate universe where All Might would slay All For One when they first fought (a few years from now, maybe? He didn't know when exactly he was)
But Alex didn't trust luck, ironically enough.
All I can do is do my best.
Now—spin!
The golden wheel obeyed. It whirred to life without so much as a sound, spinning faster and faster as if pulled by something beyond physics.
The runes blurred. The sigils melted into motion. Blinding lights erupted from the wheel—no, not "lights" in the physical sense. Alex's baby body felt nothing. His closed eyes were no shield.
The brilliance poured directly into him. Not into his mind, but into something deeper.
His soul.
And it burned.
Not painfully, not cruelly—but with an overwhelming flood of color and motion. A million shades he couldn't name. A cascade of sensation that bypassed language entirely. Every layer of his being squinted against it, trying to keep shape amid the flood.
Alex gritted his metaphorical teeth and held on.
He'd asked for the wheel to spin.
Now he would have to endure what came next.
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Alex opened his eyes.
The orphanage nursery was dark, quiet—rows of tiny cribs and baskets lined up like fragile cargo in a gently creaking ship. The faint rustle of a curtain, the distant hum of a streetlamp outside. The rhythmic breathing of toddlers, soft and even.
But something had changed.
His tiny fingers curled around something. Soft. Rubbery. Room-temperature.
He brought it up to his face, slowly, his motor control still limited to the awkward flailing of infancy.
He looked at it—and his brain froze.
"…This is…"
Golden letters flared to life in his mind, seared into the inside of his skull with mocking grandeur.
---
Name: Broken Condom
Class: Equipment
Rarity: F
.
Note: The miracle of life cannot be stopped by mere polymer. You yourself are proof of this, are you not?
.
Tip: rolling 10 times at once guarantees an A+ rank reward!
.
Countdown until next free spin: 363 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 46 seconds
---
Alex stared blankly at condom which was now thrown on the floor.
He was silent for a long, long time.
"..."
And then he sighed.
Or rather, he would have, if baby lungs were capable of long-suffering existential exhalations.
Instead, he just sort of…squeaked.