A month later

Izuku couldn’t believe it! Things had gone from bad to worse.

It was hard on him to have his dream crushed. He spent a month looking for a job, just to be turned down for his quirklessness at every turn. He’d go to sleep each night crying, and wake up each morning wishing he could lay in bed all day. And his mom was having to support both of them on her own. At least...until...

He sniffed again. It had been a normal Tuesday, but apparently Inko Midoriya had gotten caught in some gang fighting. She hadn’t come home that day. And she’s never come home again.

A couple days after the news, Izuku had resolved himself. There WAS no work available for him outside of hero work. These criminals had to be brought to justice. But he couldn’t be a hero without a quirk. And so-**** and out of options, Izuku begin to hunt the dark web for anyways for a quirkless person to gain a quirk.

It didn’t take long for him to find a lead. Supposedly, during the cataclysms and wars that followed the advent of quirks, such things came into existence. Quirks, after all, first began due to humanity’s exposure to radiation. And so, during the wars, humanity had the idea to use radiation to transform soldiers into weapons. They used stones that were imbedded with specific radioactive isotopes and compounds of differing but calculated quantities to try to forcibly inject powerful combat quirks into human DNA.

Most of these have been destroyed or locked away by governments, both due to the lack of morality behind them, and due to the fact that many just failed. Those that weren’t we’re **** to be sealed away by treaties at the end of the wars. But rumors still existed of where they could be found.

Of course, obtaining these would be near impossible. They were amongst the most heavily guarded things in the world. There was no way Izuku could sneak in without billions of yen spent on special gear, and a whole lot of luck. And there was no way he could **** his way in without an entire army at his back. But...

After a couple days of fervent searching, Izuku found a rumor worth checking out. One facility dedicated to creating these had been hit be a nuclear bomb from another nation’s testing on what they thought had been an uninhabited island. This island’s existence wasn’t entirely confirmed, but had been heavily speculated.

In spite of its uncertain location, there were precisely 35 documents of people who had went into the area. 32 had been killed by the radiation. But 3 gained powerful quirks.

One of these 3 had been documented by a friend. This individual was transformed into a giant leviathan-esque person. There powerful quirk enhanced their size and strength more than 30fold, and give them the ability to breathe water. They were supposedly a kind person, but the transformation changed them. They lived in the ocean wrecking boats that come to near to its home to this day. Further documents dug up from some of the world’s governments and certain boat companies confirm this individual’s existence, lending credence to the story.

The second account was of a quirkless girl who had been on a cruise ship that was destroyed by the individual documented in the first account. This girl had floated for what she estimated to be 6 days on some wreckage-surviving off of water and food that had been gathered in a storage box on her wreckage-luckily, almost large enough to be a small boat on its own. Then she entered the site.

She documented the transformation as painful, and thought she would die several times. She didn’t know how long it took, but after calculating based on the time she spent traveling after she saw the date when she reached land again, she estimated the transformation took 4 days.

Nowadays, she possessed an ice manipulation quirk and lived in Siberia so she wouldn’t bother anybody. She mentioned both that the quirk was hard to control, and that her personality changed due to the whole experience, although whether it was from the transformation or the traumatic event, she couldn’t say.

The third individual left the most credence to this place’s existence. A couple of documents, when put together, told the story of some lab rat floated into the area by a Chinese research team. The rat was placed in a habitat with food and water and lots of equipment to document what happened-but the equipment almost immediately got destroyed by the radiation, leaving the experiment inconclusive. However, early autobiographies and blogs indicated that the rat had transformed into some odd being, and gained nearly unparalleled intelligence. All signs led to this rat being currently known as Nezu-principle of U.I.

Having such hard data of these events gave Izuku confidence to seek this place out, despite the risk to his own life, and it’s unclear location.

Quickly, he came up with a plan. Using the money left from his mom’s life insurance and the family’s saving accounts, he’d go on 4 cruises scheduled to go somewhat near the speculated locations of the islands, and sneak on gear such as Geiger counters to track radiation in the air and find the most likely location for the island. The remaining money would buy him a sailboat and enough supplies to make a trip to the location he suspected it to be.

Of course, he didn’t know how to use a boat, but then again-he could research, and learn the rest on the job. After all, if there was one thing Izuku was confident in, it was his intelligence and ability to learn.