Chapter Text
The transformation occurred at approximately 6:23 pm, Japan standard time.
It was a Tuesday. At a glance, it was no different from any other, provided one did not count the end of the entire world as a notable deviation. A nasty snowstorm had buried Musutafu beneath a hazy, gray blanket of snow. Most sensible people were sheltered inside, basking in the warmth of modern heating and staying off the roads.
Later, Izuku would wonder if the storm was the only reason he survived at all. If not for the snow, there would not have been a pileup on Yamada Street just outside the Dagobah ward. If there had not been a crash right at the end of his shift, the precinct chief would not have ordered him to stay late and help with the cleanup.
If his probationary status had not made him the easiest body to throw at inconvenient work, he might have been inside the cruiser instead of standing outside, shivering in his reflective police jacket while the wind stabbed at every bit of exposed skin. He might have been under a roof. He might have been anywhere else.
But he was not.
Izuku Midoriya was twenty years old, Quirkless, and six months into his first year as a police officer, which meant he was exactly qualified enough to be handed the jobs nobody else wanted, and exactly powerless enough that nobody felt guilty about it. He had gone into law enforcement as a stand-in for his true dreams, after All Might told him he couldn’t be a hero.
You cannot be a hero without a Quirk. The words had been cruel to the fourteen-year-old that needed to hear anything else but condemnation. There had been no sneer in his voice, no mockery, no dismissive laughter. Just exhausted honesty, delivered in a practically kind way that shut every door Izuku had the delusion to believe was open to begin with.
He’d still gone home that day with a sore throat and sludge in his hair. He had still turned on the news to follow hero activity, as was his habit, and saw the shaky phone-captured footage of All Might tearing through the slime villain when saving Katsuki Bakugo. He had watched Katsuki glare at the cameras, then watched him go to U.A.
Izuku watched a lot of people go to U.A. over the next few years. Katsuki, who went on to become Dynamight. Shoto Todoroki, Creati, Uravity. Names that started small, then shot onto the hero leaderboards. Years and years of interviews, internships, agency debuts, public speculation, and fan cams all over social media. People his age, stepping into the path he had spent his life mapping out in dozens of now-abandoned notebooks.
Meanwhile, Izuku finished high school in general education, graduated with unremarkable marks, and spent two years applying to academy programs that found ways to say no with varying degrees of respect. Too much liability, not enough experience, not outstanding enough exam scores.
Eventually, the police academy that accepted him was all the way across the city, giving him an almost unbearable commute that he grit his teeth and made anyway. He’d been introduced to his peers as an acceptance based on recruitment initiatives, placing a flag on his head that he didn’t truly belong, only accepted because the precinct wanted to look good.
“Don’t forget to check under the guardrail, Deku!”
Officer Yamaguchi’s voice cut through the wind from the passenger side of the cruiser. He rolled the window halfway down, letting warm air spill uselessly into the storm while he gestured toward the slushy road shoulder.
Izuku straightened from where he’d been crouched near a twisted bumper fragment. His gloves were soaked through, meltwater having worked its way into the seams sometime in the last ten minutes. His fingers were beginning to grow numb and ache.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Yamaguchi grinned, the smile contorted into something mean. “Wouldn’t want your incompetence damaging someone else’s car.”
The officer in the driver’s seat chuckled. Izuku looked back at the road before he could consider doing anything unprofessional that would get him fired.
Deku. He thought he’d escaped that name when Katsuki left for U.A. For a while, he almost had. In high school, people found other things to call him: Quirkless, try-hard, fanboy. Those were more stomachable.
Then, just a couple of days into his new position, the great hero Dynamight visited the precinct during a public safety tour. Katsuki didn’t even speak to him. They’d locked eyes across the bullpen, Izuku half-risen from his desk with a fresh incident report still in his hand, and Katsuki’s face twisted like he’d smelled something rotten. Then, he’d simply leaned forward, muttered something to the chief, and by the end of the week, everyone knew the nickname.
Izuku picked up the bumper fragment and carried it over to the growing pile beside the cruiser. Plastic, fiberglass, glass, a strip of rubber weather seal. The pieces told a story, with the headlight cover from the sedan, the front-left quarter panel from the blue kei truck, and the child’s insulated lunch bag, empty and thrown from the back seat during impact. There’s no blood on that one, thankfully. The paramedics had left half an hour earlier, all three from the sedan alive. Concussed, potentially more, but not in critical condition.
That much mattered, even if Yamaguchi was laughing at him. Even if they watched him work from the cruiser in the pleasant heat, even if their help would help them expand the lane back to three-wide and clear the traffic along the road that passed them by.
“You missed one!” the driver inside the cruiser called. “It’s - “
Slam!
The cruiser vanished.
One moment, it was there, idling beneath the falling snow with the red and blue lights flashing garishly through the storm. The next, it was as if Mt. Lady crushed it underfoot like a tin can, smashing it flat against the asphalt.
There was no explosion, no warning flash, no villain shouting a name for any potential camera. Just a grating, metallic shriek as the roof punched through seats and the windows blew outwards in glittering fragmented blankets. The cruiser compressed into a paper-thin wafer faster than Izuku could blink confusion from his eyes.
Yamaguchi’s arm, which had been hanging out the passenger window, dropped into the snow, landing with a wet splatch. For half a second, Izuku’s mind refused to understand what he was looking at. The severed end at the elbow was so clean it took a second to begin leaking and staining the snow red. His lungs refused to pull air in.
Then, his training took hold, and Izuku moved.
“Officer Yamaguchi!” Izuku shouted, stumbling forward. Then, he stopped so hard his boots skidded in the slush, because there was no one to help. The cruiser was not damaged. It did not exist anymore.
Assess first, Izuku told himself, suppressing a surge of nausea. Identify the threat.
“Dispatch, this is officer badge number 6623, Izuku Midoriya reporting in. We have a villain attack on Yamada street near the border to Dagobah ward. At least two officers down, requesting immediate backup,” he said into his radio at his shoulder. Static hissed back at him
“Dispatch, report,” he repeated. Again, a dozen heartbeats with no response. Have they jammed radio signals?
Izuku’s right hand drifted to the holster at his belt, where his standard-issue sidearm sat. He did not draw it yet - a prematurely drawn gun only typically served to unnecessarily escalate situations. It also wasn’t particularly useful against most villain Quirks.
He forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose. A villain attack was the obvious culprit here. Some kind of compression Quirk, or spacial distortion or gravity manipulation or telekinetic strike from outside of visual range.
Izuku backed away from the remains, scanning through the blizzard. Visibility was poor, maybe twenty meters in open air, less where the snow was thick. His pulse hammered so hard in his ears that it nearly drowned out the wind’s howl.
“Police!” he shouted into the storm. “Identify yourself!”
The storm swallowed his words, and there was no answer. He searched for silhouettes or figures in the distance, movement between buildings, the shape of a support item or a camera drone, or any sign of other life. Instead, there was only open space.
Izuku blinked. That’s wrong.
Yamada street ran through a dense stretch near the Dagobah ward, boxed in by apartment complexes, towering office high-rises, storefronts, convenience stories, and other large buildings. There should be large structure framing the road, visible even in this dense storm
They were completely gone. Izuku spun around, and noticed that every single car that had been backed up on the roadway was also gone. Where the buildings should have stood, the storm drifted over empty lots and naked foundations instead. Yet, the road remained, traffic lights swung over intersections and lamp-posts stood tall on the edges of the road.
Anything with a roof had been smashed flat, from tall structures to even the roadside onigiri stand that only had a canvas awning. Izuku’s mind started to dive deeper. This was an area-of-effect attack, at a massive scale if whatever building housed dispatch was any indication. How many people were indoors because of the storm? The population density in this ward at 18:23 on a weekday was…
Izuku staggered, one hand flying to his mouth in horror. People had been in those buildings. People had been in those passing cars. People had been eating dinner, sleeping, working late, lounging at home, hiding from the snow. Thousands in the surrounding blocks alone, more if this stretched as far as he feared. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.
His stomach heaved and Izuku bent forward, swallowing hard until acid burned the back of his throat. He could not throw up. Not now. If there were survivors, if there was anything he could do, he wouldn’t waste time in panic.
“Is anyone there?” he screamed. “Can anyone hear me?”
Only the howling of wind and empty air greeted him back. Fear started to creep in on his subconscious mind.
“Anyone on this channel, respond,” he said into his radio again, trying the local police channel. Static. “Please.”
The radio popped once, loud enough to make him flinch, then went dead. At the same time, every lamp post along the highway flickered. Izuku looked up as the lights died in a sting, amber illumination winking out and casting the road into darkness. For a moment, there was only the storm.
Then, a voice spoke inside his head.
It was androgynous, almost robotic, and he could almost feel the words more than hear them. It was not Japanese or English or Spanish or any of the languages he had tried to teach himself in middle school because foreign rescue heroes needed to be multilingual. For the first half second, the sound was completely meaningless gibberish.
Then, something itched in the back of his mind, the syllables bent, and Izuku began to understand.
Surviving humans take note:
A holographic, semi-transparent box appeared in front of him. He swatted at it on instinct, but his hand passed straight through. The panel fuzzed around his forearm in a burst of static and light, then snapped back into focus the moment he pulled away.
It was not projected onto the air or distorted with the snow, and it didn’t cast light on his glove. It shifted with him when he turned his head, locked in the same place in his field of view, perfectly centered no matter where he looked.
The characters on screen were not Japanese, nor any alphabet he recognized. They had too many angles and too many marks stacked inside other marks, foreign in a way he’d never experienced before. And, for some reason, he could understand them.
Not exactly a translation, but like someone had reached into the part of his brain that understood language and forced a new door open. Izuku’s hand tightened around the grip of his handgun.
“Show yourself!” he calls to the empty storm. “Heroes are on their way!”’
Pursuant to Syndicate regulations, subsection 543 of the Precious Elemental Reserves Code, and following your planet’s failure to file a valid appeal for mineral and elemental rights within fifty solars of first contact, your world has been lawfully seized and is presently undergoing extraction of all requested elemental deposits by the assigned planetary regent.
Izuku stared at the words. First contact?
All interiors of your world have been siphoned of raw materials, organic and inorganic, and those materials are currently being processed and refined for requested elements.
Under the Mined Material Reclamation Act and subsection 35 of the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, surviving humans, as the dominant indigenous sapient species of this planet, will be granted an opportunity to reclaim their lost matter. The Skull Empire, having been assigned regency over this solar system, is permitted to determine the method of this reclamation opportunity.
The Skull Empire has selected the eighteen-level World Dungeon. The Skull Empire retains all broadcast, commercial, operational, and exploitative rights associated with the World Dungeon, and shall remain in control so long as all Syndicate regulations regarding world resource reclamation are observed.
Izuku’s eyes skimmed over and listened to the words, reading all of them, but not quite absorbing any of it. This was a notice. Not written like a villain's ransom announcement, but like a legal document in contract law. This was a bureaucratic notice for the end of the world.
Upon successful completion of the eighteenth level of the World Dungeon, planetary regency shall revert to the winning party. A Syndicate-neutral observer AI—myself—has been created and dispatched to this planet to supervise dungeon formation and ensure all applicable rules and regulations are followed.
Please pay close attention to the following information. This announcement will not be repeated.
In accordance with the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, all remaining materials not extracted for resource processing are being repurposed for construction of the subterranean World Dungeon. First-level dungeon entrances will open approximately one minute after the conclusion of this announcement. These entrances will remain open for exactly one human hour. Once the entrances close, no additional entry will be permitted. Upon entry, participants may not leave until they have either completed all eighteen levels of the World Dungeon or satisfied other approved exit requirements.
If you choose not to enter the World Dungeon, you must sustain yourself upon the surface of your planet. This will be the final communication you receive from the Syndicate during your natural lifetime. All previously processed matter and elements are now property of the Syndicate. Surviving humans remain free to mine, gather, and utilize any remaining naturally occurring resources for survival. The Skull Empire wishes you good luck and thanks you for this opportunity.
Izuku almost laughed, looking around himself. Every piece of human infrastructure and resource has been stripped away. Would survival in these conditions even be possible?
For those who wish to exercise their right of resource reclamation through the World Dungeon, take note:
One hundred fifty thousand level-one entrances will be distributed across the world. These entrances will be marked and readily visible. Upon entering the first level of the dungeon, participants will have five rotations of your planet to locate and descend to the next level. There will be seventy-five thousand entrances to level two, thirty-seven thousand five hundred entrances to level three, and each subsequent level will contain half the number of descending entrances, rounded upward, until the single final entrance to the eighteenth level.
Those who enter the World Dungeon must locate a staircase and descend before the allotted time for each level expires. Once that time has passed, the level will be reclaimed, and all remaining matter within that level, including living participants, will be forfeit.
Each lower level will have a longer reclamation period. Additional rules apply upon descent to the tenth floor. Those rules will be explained if and when you arrive at that point.
If you choose to enter the World Dungeon, it is strongly recommended that you locate and utilize a tutorial guild as soon as possible. Multiple tutorial guilds will be seeded throughout levels one through three.
Any additional questions, disputes, or appeals must be submitted in writing directly to the nearest Syndicate office. Thank you for being part of the Syndicate. Have a great day.
The box vanished. The sudden absence left Izuku staring empty at falling snow. For several seconds, he did not move. His thoughts wouldn’t form into words, arriving instead as fragments that did not quite fit together.
Syndicate. Skull Empire. World Dungeon. Eighteen levels. Organic material. Broadcast rights. Matter reclamation.
His grip on his handgun had gone slack. He’s not sure when he drew it, but the weapon now hung at his side, muzzle pointed at the ground. It suddenly felt devastatingly useless against whatever entity had destroyed his planet and spoke into his head. His fingers had thoroughly numbed by now, and he couldn’t even feel the textured grip anymore.
Izuku turned in a slow circle. There were no buildings, no cruisers, no convenience stores with fluorescent lighting to shelter in. The city had been reduced to empty roads and foundations. Soon, hypothermia would set in and he would die. How many others would end up the same, caught out in the storm like this?
Instead of giving up, Izuku clumsily holstered his handgun, and whispered to himself, “Think.”
A villain attack remained a possibility, but it was feeling more and more distant by the moment. Nobody with a quirk powerful enough to instantly level buildings for what had to be dozens of square blocks at once had existed since, well…ever. Then, a reality-warping or hallucination quirk would need to be layered on top to explain that announcement.
He could be dreaming, but he felt that his fingers hurt too much for that. This all felt way too real to be some nightmare conjured by his subconscious.
Aliens, then. Just like the announcement said.
Izuku squeezed his eyes shut. It sounded ridiculous and like something posted to an obscure message board and subsequently ridiculed. Then again, the entire concept of Quirks had sounded ridiculous, when that shining baby was first born in Qing Qing City. Heroes had sounded ridiculous until society rebuilt itself around them.
World Dungeon.
The phrase dragged up old memories of graphs and maps and encounter tables and boss mechanics and resource management. Days spent serving as both dungeon master and player for an entire party at once, because he’d had nobody else to play with as a child. Yet, a dungeon had rules. A dungeon could be learned and exploited.
A dungeon could also kill anyone unprepared.
A brass-instrument horn blasted through the world. Izuku flinched, shoulders hitching toward his ears as the sound rolled over the flattened city. He turned towards the source and saw a beam of light punch straight through the blizzard. It stretched from the ground roughly a soccer field’s length away, near where a high-rise had stood just a couple minutes ago.
Another beam ignited farther away, then another, then a dozen more across the ruined city, scattered in seemingly random distances. These were entrances to the World Dungeon.
Izuku felt his feet start to carry him towards the nearest one before he even quite understood what he was doing. The gates irradiated warmth, drawing him towards it through promises of respite from the cold. If he stayed on the surface, he’d have to survive a blizzard with no shelter or supplies.
That was not the only reason he drew forward, however. The reason he kept stepping forward was because people would go down there. Not just trained officers and heroes, but ordinary people. Injured people, children, elderly, people half-dressed in just boxers and barefoot because their homes had vanished around them. People in shock, grieving, freezing, or desperate enough to follow the first light that would get them out of the storm.
Across the world, people were going to enter those stairwells without understanding the true implications of what it meant.
And those people would need help.
What’s more, the announcement had said something about reclaiming lost matter. It had said that completing the eighteenth level could return planetary regency to the victor. It had used legal language so deliberate that Izuku wasn’t sure if it could be trusted at face value, but the promise was so alluring he felt he had to try. There was a small chance, however thin, that he could recover what had been taken.
His mother had been indoors. The realization almost made his knees buckle, but he kept trudging forward. His mother certainly would have been home. The storm was too bad for errands, and she worked from home most days. She’d have been home in the apartment, crushed with the rest.
Hopefully it had been quick.
He finally arrived at the food of the staircase after what felt like an eternity of walking through the snow.
“I’m not sure what someone like me can do,” he said, more to himself than anything else. “But I have to try.”
The warmth grew stronger as he stepped down into the entrance. Snow on his shoulders belted away and ran in cold lines down his back. The spotlight hummed faintly overhead, though there was no visible machine producing it. The stairwell itself was wide enough for a crowd of twenty to walk side-by-side, and dove straight into the earth like a subway station entrance.
Torches brimming with orange flames lined both sides, buried in iron brackets along the descending walls. They seem untouched by the wind, flickering only with their own heat. At the bottom of the stairs sat a light so bright it drew Izuku’s attention straight inward.
Izuku paused at the first step and looked over his shoulder one last time. His home was gone. There were no sirens or heroes or echoes coming to help. Izuku turned back and descended.
The first few steps were damp concrete, but as he descended the storm faded away behind him with alarming speed. By the tenth step, it was completely gone, and by the twentieth, all of the meltwater and dampness had evaporated from his clothes. He flexed his fingers, feeling returning to them quickly as he descended.
Still, the stairwell kept going. It was as if for every step he took down, the exit got that much further away. The entrance behind him was still visible, but distant, just a rectangle of storm-gray light at the top of the staircase.
The concrete surroundings also changed as he descended.
At first, it was subtle enough he thought his mind had been playing tricks on him. The smooth-poured grey walls roughened shifted to brown with irregular joints. By the time he stopped to look properly, the walls had become cobblestone, each rock rounded and damp-looking, mortared together with dark lines of green moss. Vibrant vines crept along the stones, tiny leaves trembling in the warm draft.
Izuku reached out to touch one, and it seemed to shy away from his hand, as if alive and sensing his presence.
The air changed as he descended, too. The smell of snow and wet asphalt faded to be replaced by the humid, damp scent of soil, smoke, and old stone. It reminded him of botanical gardens and old shrines, or places human industry hadn’t touched for decades.
Eventually, he emerged into a stone antechamber. The ceiling arched high overhead, and torches rimmed the walls, lightcatching on moisture in the mossy mortar and turning the surfaces glossy. The room was too large for the stairwell that led into it, and the room itself seemed to hum with anticipation.
At the far end was an enormous doorframe. Not just tall enough for one person, or even for someone like All Might in his prime. The frame rose at least three stories, built from dark wood carved with leaves, skulls, geometric knots, open mouths, and curling tusks. Two figures dominated the center panels.
They were humanoid, but not quite human. Their bodies had the rough proportions of men, with thick arms and heavy torsos. Muscles corded across their skin, but fat gathered around their stomach, neck, and shoulders in a way that made them more like boars than men. The faces were swine-like, with narrow snouts and long jaws. It looked as if someone had taken the visage of a pig and stretched it across a human skull, then tossed on ivory dusks jutting upward from the lower jaw.
Skull Empire? He wondered. The announcement had said the Skull Empire held regency over Earth for the duration of the dungeon. Were these meant to be them? A species, maybe? Izuku suddenly hated that his brain couldn’t parse the question, because he didn’t know enough to even begin to consider.
Izuku reached out to touch the door, but froze halfway in transit. He looked down at himself.
A haggard, hand-me-down police uniform, a handgun with one spare magazine, a radio, a phone, handcuffs, a notebook, and a utility knife were all he had to his name. No armor, no food, no medical kit.
No Quirk.
He had imagined entrances like this before, in games. The threshold before the first dungeon began, the moment the adventurer stepped out of their natural world and into the story. He had never imagined being here himself.
I need to help them.
He reached out and placed his palm against the door. It was warm.
Then, it vanished. Izuku blinked, and the antechamber was gone. He stood in a corridor wide enough to be a city street. The hallway stretched away in both directions, broad as a double-lane highway. The ceiling hung far above, supported by irregular stone arches glowing orange from torch and lanternlight. The cobblestone walls continued here, thick with vines and patches of moss.
Izuku spun around, but the chamber extended behind him, too. The door was gone. It was truly too late to turn back now.
“Okay,” he whispered. His heart hammered against his ribs. “Okay. One-way entrance. It said you can’t leave after entry.”
Then, the holographic box appeared in front of him again. This time, he did not swat at it. He still jumped, but only a little, which counted as an improvement in his mind, given the circumstances. The interface hovered in the center of his vision, half-translucent in the warm gloom of the corridor.
The voice that accompanied the text was different from the first one that gave the first announcement. That one had been flat, legal, and inhuman, like a machine reading the terms of a contract.
This one was chipper and personable. It sounded almost excited, in a chilling, sadistic sort of way, when it read the words in the box.
Welcome to the Dungeon, Crawler.