Dawn. The first sliver of light was an impertinence—an insult, really. An intrusion into the sovereign territory of my sleep.
I surfaced slowly from the depths of that same dream—a world suspended by invisible threads, every motion and thought answering to my will. Even as it faded, I could still feel the hum of it, the control, the rightness of it all. And then came the memory of my smile. That sheepish, unguarded, idiotic smile.
It irritated me.
Sentiment was a design flaw. I scrubbed it from my mind with the same ruthlessness I'd use on a disobedient subordinate.
The bath was a scalding baptism. Steam coiled around me like the ghosts of my own strings, tracing lines over skin that was beginning to stretch and strengthen. I studied my reflection in the mirrored glass—a boy, yes, but a boy with a man's eyes. Calculating. Cold. And beneath the surface, a blueprint was taking shape. The chassis was being forged; the engine was being built.
At eight years old, I was no longer a fragile child. I was a prototype—still incomplete, but with every passing day, I could feel the potential tightening, coiling, waiting.
I dressed in silence, fastening the buttons of a uniform that felt more like a costume. At least it was tailored—expensive fabric that draped properly. Appearances mattered.
The breakfast table awaited. It always did.
Mother—Seraphina Donquixote—looked like an advertisement for serenity and luxury. Her smile was too bright, her posture too perfect. Father—Homing—sat opposite her, immersed in the financial section of a holographic display, muttering curses at numbers that refused to obey him.
A picture of familial harmony, painted in high definition.
"Doffy, my love!" Mother's voice chimed, sweet and sharp. "You look so handsome this morning."
"It's the same uniform as yesterday, Mother," I said, sliding into my seat. "The only variable is my patience with it."
She laughed, a sound so well-rehearsed it could have been recorded.
Father didn't look up. "The Commission's at it again," he muttered. "New tariffs on imported tungsten-carbide alloys. They're calling it a 'national security measure.' What a joke. It's just another handout to domestic suppliers."
I poured myself coffee. They'd stopped arguing about that years ago. "So bypass them," I said, stirring lazily. "Buy a proxy firm in the Philippines, reroute the shipments through Singapore, and register the imports under industrial development exemptions. Or bribe the oversight officer. Cheaper, faster, and you'll get bonus points for efficiency."
Father glanced up, frowning, though pride flickered in his eyes. "You have a terrifying mind for this sort of thing."
I met his gaze evenly. "Efficiency is morality, Father. Inefficiency is sin. Someone always pays for it—and I prefer it not be me."
Mother tutted softly. "You sound so much like your grandfather when you say things like that."
"Then I pity the old man." I reached for the toast. "His reputation for wisdom must be exaggerated."
Her laughter faltered, just a touch. I noticed. I always noticed.
It wasn't that I disliked them. They were… useful. Familiar. Predictable. But they saw me as something fragile, something that needed protecting from the world. They didn't understand I was the world that others needed protecting from.
The ride to school was silent. Kato, ever the loyal shadow, navigated the sky-lanes with military precision. The city glided past beneath us—endless tiers of steel and light, arteries of traffic pulsing with human futility. Power and weakness, both visible in every structure.
I pressed a palm to the window, tracing the skyline with a fingertip. "One day," I murmured, "you'll all dance when I pull the strings."
Kato, wisely, pretended not to hear.
The classroom was already a battlefield by the time I arrived.
Noise, color, chaos. Children compared trading cards, argued about Pro Heroes, and practiced harmless bursts of their quirks under the teacher's weary supervision.
And in the back corner, like the eye of the storm, sat Yaoyorozu Momo.
"Fashionably late again," she said without looking up, her voice perfectly level as she turned a page in her thick chemistry text.
"Royalty does not answer to the bell," I replied, sliding into my chair.
Her eyes flicked up briefly. "Royalty still gets detention, last I checked."
"Then they'll have to detain me in style."
A sigh. The classic 'Doffy-is-being-insufferable-again' sigh. I'd begun to count how often she made it.
"We have a practical exam today," she said. "Support-type quirk applications."
"How invigorating," I drawled. "Shall I demonstrate how effectively I can tie the teacher's shoes together without moving?"
"Maybe try not to get expelled before lunch."
"I'll consider it."
Ms. Anzai began her lecture—an endless drone about quirk ethics, safety, and responsibility. I tuned her out. Instead, I let my attention slip to the invisible filaments at my fingertips. A single thread unspooled, thinner than hair, gliding across the floor to the desk ahead. I looped it around a boy's pencil, lifted it an inch into the air, and set it back down again. He blinked, confused.
Control. Precision. Grace.
Momo's voice cut through my focus. "He's calling on you."
I looked up. Every pair of eyes was on me.
"Donquixote-kun," Ms. Anzai said, clearly regretting her life choices. "Can you explain the relationship between mass-energy conversion and creation-type quirks?"
I didn't move from my seat. "The question itself is incorrect."
Her brows furrowed. "I—pardon?"
"It's not conversion," I said, leaning back. "It's manifestation. Creation quirks don't 'convert' energy into matter; they reshape what's already there. Atomic data pulled from a sub-dimensional source, reorganized by the quirk factor. The problem, of course, is that no one's ever accounted for the entropy debt. Where does the surplus energy go? What does it cost the user in thermodynamic terms?"
Silence.
"So," I concluded, "your textbooks are wrong, and your curriculum is an embarrassment."
The class stared. Ms. Anzai's smile twitched like a dying lightbulb.
"T-thank you, Donquixote-kun. A very… advanced perspective."
Momo covered her face with one hand. "You didn't have to destroy her."
"I didn't have to," I said lightly. "I chose to. It keeps the world honest."
"You're impossible."
"And yet," I said, "you keep talking to me."
The rest of the day followed the same pattern. Questions answered too precisely, teachers flustered, classmates bewildered. I performed small acts of invisible mischief—a string looped around a bully's shoelaces, a hovering eraser returned to its owner. None of it detectable. None of it traceable.
When the final bell rang, I was already halfway out the door.
"See you tomorrow," Momo called.
"Try not to die of idealism without me," I replied over my shoulder.
Home. The sanctuary.
I bypassed the staff and the pleasantries, heading straight to my private chamber. It was no longer a "room." It was a laboratory. Blueprints, prototypes, fragments of weaponized brilliance littered the space. The centerpiece was my testing area—a reinforced cube lined with carbon-fiber walls, my own personal warzone.
First came the body. The harness snapped around my shoulders, polymer cords tightening to simulate gravitational drag. I strained against them—arms, legs, back, lungs screaming in protest. Every repetition, every tremor, was an offering to the god of progress.
Pain was not the enemy. Stagnation was.
Then came the quirk.
I summoned threads—hundreds, thousands—stretching them across the chamber in a shimmering lattice of control. Precision first. A snowflake, perfect down to the molecular symmetry. A spiral pattern mimicking a helix. Then power.
A cube of ballistic gel waited in the center.
I inhaled. The world sharpened. My focus narrowed.
A hundred threads shot forth, piercing the gel, burrowing deep, spreading in microscopic branches. I clenched my fists.
Expand.
The sound was exquisite. CRACK. The cube erupted, shattering from within. Not sliced—ruined.
A low chuckle slipped from my lips. "Progress."
The satisfaction was pure, chemical. A dose of achievement straight to the bloodstream. I wanted more. I would always want more.
Hours passed. I trained until the world dimmed at the edges and my body trembled from exertion. Finally, drenched in sweat, I collapsed into bed, the city's distant hum whispering through the window.
No dreams came tonight. No visions of empires or smiles I didn't mean. Only the soft, pulsing silence of exhaustion.
The world outside still belonged to others—for now. But beneath the surface, I could feel the threads tightening. Invisible. Patient. Waiting.
Soon, the puppets would learn to look up.
And they would find that the strings had always been there.