Joshua Park was twelve years old and terrified of dying.
Not in the way most kids were scared of it. Not the vague, back-of-the-mind anxiety that crept in during thunderstorms or when you watched the wrong movie. His fear was constant, specific, and loud. It lived in his chest like a second heartbeat, always reminding him how many things in the world were trying to kill him. Car rides turned his knuckles white against the seat. Amusement parks were completely out of the question. The one time his uncle handed him a kitchen knife to cut fruit, his hands shook so bad he nicked his own finger and cried in the bathroom for twenty minutes. A stranger's obituary in the newspaper could send him spiraling for the rest of the day. Didn't matter if it was an old person, didn't matter if they'd lived a full life. Dead was dead, and something about that made his brain refuse to move on.
His parents tried. Therapists tried. One of them called it thanatophobia and handed his mom a pamphlet like a name for it would somehow make it smaller. It didn't.
By the time he hit sixteen, it had softened just a little. Not gone, but quieter. He'd learned to push through the noise. He started walking to school instead of riding the bus, which felt like progress. Four blocks, crosswalks, traffic lights. Small steps. He told himself he was getting better.
* * *
He was crossing the intersection on Hida Street when the car ran the light.
No warning. No horn. One second the walk signal was green and the next there was a wall of blue metal filling his entire field of vision and then there was nothing but impact.
He didn't lose consciousness right away. That was the part nobody told you. The movies always cut to black immediately, like the body was polite enough to just shut off. His didn't. He was on the asphalt, the sky above him a dull gray, and everything hurt in a way that didn't feel like pain yet, more like pressure, like his whole body was being compressed from the outside. He tried to sit up. He couldn't. He tried to call for help. His throat felt wrong, collapsed inward, and the sound that came out wasn't a scream, it was just air, leaking.
People were running toward him. He could see shoes. Someone was on their phone. He watched all of it with the detached clarity of a person who already understood what was happening.
His biggest fear was finally happening, and his last coherent thought was that it was quieter than he'd expected.
Then the gray sky went black.
* * *
The black wasn't empty.
He couldn't see anything but he could hear things. Distant at first, like voices coming through walls, layered over each other in a way that didn't make sense as language but still communicated something. Then one of them separated from the rest, closer, clearer, and it was laughing.
Not a warm laugh. Not a cruel one either. Something in between, like whoever it belonged to found the whole situation genuinely funny but in a way you weren't really invited to understand.
"In this life, boy," the voice said, "do not fear death. You should embrace it. Ahahahaha."
Then silence.
* * *
He woke up in a bedroom.
Small. Tidy. Morning light coming through curtains he didn't recognize. He was lying in a bed that felt just slightly too short, and when he looked at his hands they were small. Not sixteen small. Younger. He sat up and his head swam with information that wasn't his, memories slotting into place like someone was loading files he hadn't asked for. A name. A school. A mom who made rice for breakfast every Sunday. A neighborhood he'd never been to.
His name was Kaito Mura and he was four years old and he had absolutely no idea what was happening.
Before he could work through any of it, a voice came from the hallway.
"Kaito, you awake?"
His mom. That was his mom's voice, which was wrong because his mom was a woman named Gina Park who smelled like lavender and worked night shifts. But the warmth that moved through his chest when he heard it was completely genuine and completely unasked for, and he didn't know what to do with that.
"Yeah," he said. His voice was small. Of course it was. He was four.
He was trying to figure out how to form a sentence about any of this when the HUD appeared.
* * *
It wasn't a screen. It wasn't quite text either, more like information that existed just behind his eyes, dark against the light of the room, impossible to ignore. He blinked. It stayed. He rubbed his face with his small four-year-old hands. Still there.
Hello, Kaito. I am Gloom.
I am your assistant. I am not an AI. I am a soul, bound to you, here to assist and obey. I will be showing you your stats and your powers. These are not XP, not level-ups, not a game system. They are simply things you will gain naturally through training and age. I will answer any question you have.
But first, let me explain what you are.
Kaito stared at this for a long moment.
"Okay," he said slowly, out loud, in the voice of a four-year-old. "Go ahead then."
The HUD shifted.
"What do you think makes a person strong? The soul or the body?"
Kaito thought about it for half a second. "The body. Power is physical. You can train a body. You cannot train a soul."
"You are partially right. Power is physical, yes. The body is the vessel, the physical manifestation of what a person can do. But the amount of power a soul carries into a body? That is determined by the soul itself. Think of it this way: Endeavor. You know who that is now, yes? The memories gave you MHA."
He did. He knew exactly who Endeavor was. He also knew, somewhere quieter, that in his old life he had never watched a single episode of this show. He had watched Avatar: The Last Airbender maybe a hundred times though.
"Say Endeavor was not born here. Say he was born in the world of that show you loved. He would have been a firebender. Powerful, precise, overwhelming. Because his soul burns hot. That is not a moral statement. It does not mean he is evil or good. Morality has nothing to do with the nature of a soul. It simply means that is the shape of his power."
That actually made sense. Kaito sat with it.
"Most souls are reset when they die. The memories go, the shape of the soul resets, and they are born into whatever power the new world allows them. You are different. Your soul did not reset. It carried over. And because of that, you have something no one in this world has naturally."
The HUD paused like it was giving him a moment to prepare.
"You can possess the unliving. Dead bodies. You enter them, you wear them, and while you do, you can use their quirk at a level beyond what they were capable of in life, because your soul is stronger than theirs was. You can also possess living bodies, though you gain no power from that. The person is still in there. You are simply along for the ride. That has its own uses."
Kaito was quiet for a second.
"What the hell," he said. Quietly. In his four-year-old voice. "That is insane."
"It is unusual," Gloom agreed, and he could feel something like dry amusement coming off the presence, though it had no face. "But consider: when you possess a dead body, the soul is already gone. You are not killing anyone. You are not displacing anyone. The body is an empty vessel. You are simply the one choosing to use it."
Kaito looked down at his hands again. Still small. Still four.
"They won't look like corpses?"
"No. They will appear alive. Normal. No one looking at them will see anything wrong."
He processed that.
"And I just walk around in dead people."
"When necessary, yes."
"And my real body just sits there while I do it."
"Correct. Your body will be vulnerable while you are away from it. That is the limitation you will need to manage."
Kaito leaned back against the headboard of his small child bed in his new child bedroom and stared at the ceiling.
"Alright," he said finally. "Cool. Great. So I died, woke up in a cartoon, and my superpower is grave robbing."
"That is one way to put it."
"Is there a better way?"
"Not really, no."
From the hallway, his mom called again. Rice was ready. He was going to be late.
Kaito Mura, formerly Joshua Park, age four, pulled himself out of bed and went to have breakfast. He had a long time before any of the scary parts started. He figured he might as well eat