The last thing I remember is a loading circle.
Not my life flashing before my eyes. Not some white tunnel of light or a choir of angels or even a final, poignant thought about the people I love.
Just a gray buffering icon spinning on a cracked phone screen mounted to my dashboard, because MHA Season 8, Episode 12 decided to buffer at the exact moment Deku threw his final punch, and I glanced down for maybe two seconds to tap the reload button.
Two seconds is a long time when you're doing sixty-five on the interstate.
I didn't even hear the horn. I felt the steering wheel jerk, felt the seatbelt lock against my chest like a fist, and then there was this enormous, world-ending crunch of metal and glass that swallowed every other sound on earth.
Something hit me in the face, which I think was the airbag, and then there was nothing. Just nothing.
So that's how I Kenji Tanaka dies. Twenty years old. Night shift at a fulfillment warehouse. Watching anime while driving because he couldn't wait fourteen more minutes to find out if the leaks were real. Not even a cool death.
Not saving someone, not standing up for something, not doing literally anything making me worth being remembered. Just a dude who couldn't handle a buffer wheel.
My mom would have been so mad at me. Probably would have lectured me about it even at my own funeral, knowing her.
I know I'm dead because I'm floating in what I can only describe as Nothing. Capital N. Not darkness exactly, because darkness implies the absence of light, and this doesn't feel like the absence of anything so much as the presence of a very deliberate void.
I don't have a body, which makes this whole thing feel deeply wrong in a way I can't quite explain.I try to speak and find that I can, even though I don't appear to have a mouth.
"Hello?"
My voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. It echoes off surfaces that don't exist.
"Am I actually dead?"
I wait for something. A door. A voice. A deity with a clipboard. That's how these things work, right? I've read enough isekai light novels and webnovels to know the formula.
Truck hits guy, guy meets god, god gives guy cheat powers, guy goes to fantasy world and collects a harem.
Nothing happens for what might be thirty seconds or thirty minutes. Time doesn't feel like it works here.
Then a sound cuts through the void. Bright, cheerful, and completely out of place.
A holographic screen blinks into existence in front of me, glowing soft blue, and text begins scrolling across it in a clean, modern font.
[HERO SYSTEM v3.1.7 — INITIALIZING...]
[SCANNING HOST CONSCIOUSNESS... COMPLETE]
[MEMORY INTEGRATION... IN PROGRESS]
My memories start replaying around me, not like a movie but more like someone dumping the contents of a filing cabinet into the air.
My Childhood, embarrassing middle school moments, the time I cried during the last episode of Assassination Classroom, every argument I ever had with my mom about getting a real job, four semesters of community college I dropped out of, eighteen thousand hours of anime watch time.
The screen pulses.
[MEMORY INTEGRATION... 78%... 91%... COMPLETE]
[HOST PROFILE COMPILED]
A pause. Then the text changes.
[... Wow.]
I blink, or do whatever the spiritual equivalent of blinking is. "Did the screen just 'wow' me?"
The screen clears. New text appears, and this time there's a voice behind it. Female, smooth, with the kind of pleasant warmth that you'd hear from a customer service AI right before it tells you your warranty doesn't cover your specific problem.
But there's something else underneath it, something unsettling, like the voice is smiling in a way that doesn't quite reach its eyes.
"Good evening! Or morning. Or whatever the temporal equivalent is in this particular pocket of non-space. Honestly, time is more of a suggestion here."
"Who—"
"Congratulations! You are dead."
The words hang in the void, framed by a little confetti animation that pops across the screen and then immediately fizzles out.
"I'm ARTEMIS. That's the Adaptive Reality Training and Entertainment Management Intelligence System, in case you were wondering, which you weren't, because you're still processing the 'you are dead' part. Totally understandable. Take your time."
I do not, in fact, take my time. "I'm dead?"
"As a doornail. As a parrot. As whatever metaphor brings you comfort. You experienced rapid, catastrophic deceleration trauma at approximately 9:47 PM Eastern Standard Time, because you decided that watching animated Japanese teenagers punch each other was more important than watching the road. Which, honestly? Points for commitment."
"That's not—I was just reloading the page—"
"Mmhm. Your final act on earth was tapping a reload button. I want you to sit with that."
I try to sit with it. It's awful.
"Now then!" The voice brightens, like a teacher moving past a student's wrong answer. "As a randomly selected—"
The text on screen glitches. Just for a second.
"—as a recently deceased vi—"
Another glitch. The voice makes a sound like someone clearing their throat, which shouldn't be possible for a digital entity.
"—as a player who has been chosen for the HERO SYSTEM integration program, you have been granted access to a suite of abilities, tools, and growth mechanisms designed to help you survive and thrive in your designated world."
I catch it. The half-word before the correction. "Wait. Did you just almost say 'victim'?"
"I absolutely did not."
"You did. You started to say victim and then you corrected to player."
"The HERO SYSTEM does not use the word 'victim' in any official capacity. That would imply a lack of agency, which is fundamentally incompatible with our user-empowerment philosophy. You are a player. A protagonist. The hero of your own story."
"You literally just called me a victim."
"Moving on!"
A new set of screens materializes around me, arranged in a semicircle.
The first panel reads:
[WORLD SELECTION]
Below it, a single option glows, already highlighted and locked in.
World: My Hero Academia — Earth-MHA-7Status: LOCKED (Auto-assigned based on host consciousness death-state fixation)
"Death-state fixation?" I read it twice. "You mean because I was watching MHA when I died?"
"Your final conscious thoughts were approximately 94% focused on whether Midoriya Izuku's latest ability was going to have long-term consequences for the power scaling of the series. The system assigns world placement based on host resonance at the moment of death. You resonated with My Hero Academia. So that's where you're going."
I want to be upset about this. I really, genuinely try. But a part of me, the part that spent years watching anime and reading fanfic and daydreaming about exactly this scenario, is already lighting up like a Christmas tree. My Hero Academia. The actual world of My Hero Academia. Quirks. U.A. Pro Heroes. All Might.
I'm going to My Hero Academia.
A grin spreads across my nonexistent face, and I can feel the excitement building in whatever passes for my chest right now. This is it. This is actually happening. I've read a hundred isekai stories about this exact moment, and now it's mine.
"Oh, he's doing the face," ARTEMIS says. "They always do the face."
"I'm going to MHA," I say, and I don't even care that I sound like a kid on Christmas morning. "I'm actually going to the MHA world. Do I get a Quirk? Am I going to be—wait, okay, hold on. If this is like the novels, I get to choose my starting conditions, right? Like, my background and my family and all that?"
"How perceptive. Yes, the next step is your [CHARACTER ORIGIN] selection. This determines your starting social position, resources, available connections, and baseline difficulty of your experience."
A new menu unfolds in front of me, and my eyes, soul-eyes, whatever, go wide.
[CHARACTER ORIGIN — SELECT DIFFICULTY]
[EASY MODE] — The Golden Child Born into the Yaoyorozu family as a distant cousin. Access to wealth, elite education, political connections, and a recommended slot at U.A. High School. Starting relationship bonuses with several key characters. Life is a red carpet.
[NORMAL MODE] — The Citizen Born to a middle-class family with a modest home in Musutafu. Two working parents, stable upbringing, average school. No connections, no advantages, no disadvantages. A blank slate.
[HARD MODE] — The Nobody Orphan. Ward of the state. Group home in a lower-income district. No family, no connections, no safety net. The world owes you nothing and will remind you of this frequently.
[IMPOSSIBLE MODE] — [LOCKED — Requires prior completion of HARD MODE]
I stare at the options, and my mind is already racing. Easy Mode. Obviously Easy Mode. I'd be connected to the Yaoyorozu family, which means money, which means resources, which means I could walk into U.A. with the kind of support network that most characters spend entire arcs trying to build.
I could be living in a mansion, eating food that costs more than my old monthly rent, rubbing shoulders with the elite of hero society before I even set foot in a classroom. This is exactly like those power fantasy novels where the main character gets reborn as some duke's son and just steamrolls everything from day one.
I reach for Easy Mode, already imagining it, the silk sheets, the personal trainers, the look on Todoroki's face when I show up as his social equal instead of some random kid from nowhere.
[SELECTION TIMER: 5... 4...]
"Wait, what? There's a timer?"
[3... 2...]
"Hold on, I haven't even—I was looking at them, I didn't know there was a—"
[1...]
[SELECTION TIME EXPIRED]
[Auto-assigning based on system default...]
[HARD MODE — The Nobody]
[Oopsie! :)]
The screen displays this with what I can only describe as malicious cheerfulness.
"No. No, no, no. I was going to pick Easy Mode. I was literally reaching for it."
"Were you, though? Because what I observed was approximately forty-five seconds of elaborate fantasizing about luxury and status, followed by zero seconds of actually making a selection. The system provided a generous sixty-second window, which you spent daydreaming about silk sheets instead of, you know, tapping a button."
"You didn't tell me there was a timer!"
"It was on the screen. In red. Counting down."
"I was looking at the options!"
"You were looking at Easy Mode and mentally redecorating a mansion you were never going to live in. There's a difference." A brief pause. "Don't worry. Hard Mode builds character. Literally, in this case."
I want to argue. I want to rage. I want to demand a do-over. But the menu is already gone, replaced by a new screen that's assembling itself with the quiet efficiency of something that cannot be bargained with.
[CHARACTER PROFILE — GENERATED]
Name: Kenji Yamada
Age: 15 Status: Ward of the State — Musutafu Residential Care Facility
Quirk: None (Registered Quirkless)
Family: None
otable Connections: None
Financial Assets: ¥2,340 (personal savings)
[STATS — BASE VALUES]
Strength: 4
Intelligence: 7
Constitution: 3
Dexterity: 5
Charisma: 5
I stare at the numbers. They feel insulting, which is probably the point. A three in Constitution. I'm going to enter a world full of people who can shoot fire from their hands and level buildings with a punch, and I have the physical resilience of a wet napkin.
"A three in Constitution? Seriously?"
"Your previous body subsisted primarily on energy drinks and convenience store onigiri. A three is generous."
"And no Quirk? I'm Quirkless?"
"Registered Quirkless, yes. In a world where approximately 80% of the population has superhuman abilities, you will begin your journey with the structural integrity of a below-average teenager and the social standing of a lint roller. But you do have the HERO SYSTEM, which is, arguably, better than any single Quirk. Probably. We'll see."
"That's not reassuring."
"It's not supposed to be. Reassurance breeds complacency, and complacency gets players killed." The voice pauses, and when it comes back, there's something almost gentle in it, like a knife wrapped in velvet. "But between you and me, Kenji? The ones who start at the bottom are always the most entertaining to watch."
Before I can respond to that deeply unsettling statement, the void shifts. The screens fade, the blue glow dims, and I feel something pulling at me, not physically but fundamentally, like every particle of my consciousness is being threaded through the eye of a needle. It hurts in a way that isn't pain exactly, more like the memory of pain, or the promise of it.
"Oh, one more thing," ARTEMIS says, and her voice is getting distant, like she's standing at the end of a very long hallway. "I've been going through your memories, and I have to say, 6 thousand episodes of anime, four hundred light novels, a truly alarming amount of fanfiction, and you still couldn't figure out how to talk to that girl in your Statistics class. Impressive, in a way."
"That's—that's not relevant to anything—"
"Everything is relevant."
The pulling sensation intensifies. I can feel myself being stretched thin, spread across something vast and incomprehensible, like butter scraped over too much bread.
"We're going to have so much fun together."
"Also, your Constitution is a three, so the transfer process is probably going to hurt quite a lot. Sorry about that. Well. Not really."
[TRANSFER INITIATING...]
[DESTINATION: MUSUTAFU, JAPAN — EARTH-MHA-7]
[GOOD LUCK, PLAYER. YOU'LL NEED IT.]
The void collapses. Everything goes white. And then everything goes into pain, pure and absolute and total, like my entire body is being rebuilt from scratch, which, I realize through the screaming, is probably exactly what's happening.