Chapter Text
Nezu sipped his cup of tea, a smile of his furry face. He’d just come from his lecture for the third year classes, Ethical Quirk Usage Under Both Legal and Moral Constraints, a subject that always put him in a good mood. Sure, the students always left looking vaguely drained from hearing a small furry animal with an IQ several times their collective mental sum spout off facts and statistics from years of philosophical and legal debates, but it was all worth it to enrich young minds.
So sue him if he enjoyed emotionally crushing them with the occasional three hour lecture. They’d never be able to prove it for certain. A small giggle slipped past Nezu’s lips. He already had plans in mind for next week’s lecture. Perhaps an intersection of Confucianism and 1900’s Spanish laws to begin with before spiraling into his own personal hybrid ethics system. That could be a good first twenty-six minutes.
The smile froze on his face as he turned the corner and saw the door to his office standing open. He definitely hadn’t left it open, especially because it was the fully human-sized door rather than the smaller one he used.
He lifted a paw to his mouth and pressed a button on his watch. “Office, prime security measures for contingency 283-KJ.”
With that settled, he reinvigorated his smile, took another sip of tea, and marched towards his office. He didn’t know who he’d find inside, but he’d make sure they learned a valuable lesson about breaking into UA.
He took one step into his office and stopped dead. He may not have known what he would find inside, but his intellect allowed him to calculate a number of potential scenarios in excess of quadruple digits. A Nomu assassin waiting in ambush. Yet another nosey journalist trying to swipe confidential files. Aizawa waiting to talk to him about a cute cat picture he saw. A scenario he’d never imagined was the one actually in front of him.
His office looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Filing cabinets had their drawers pulled out and hurled across the room, some embedded in walls. His computer had been rigged to project onto the ceiling and seemed to be displaying a Droste image of itself. Papers were scattered across the room and pinned to the walls, all marked up in scrawled handwriting that trailed off the pages and onto the wall to connect to others, creating a maddened spiral of tet that enveloped the room. And in the middle of the chaos stood Tenya Iida, franticly flipping through a thick sheaf of papers Nezu was certain he’d left locked in a strongbox under 7.3 feet of topsoil in his zen garden.
This wasn’t an oversight Nezu could blame on his short time to think of who he’d find. Iida would have remained at the bottom of his list of suspects even if he’d been able to think until the heat death of the universe. Nezu suspected Iida would spontaneously combust if he tried to jaywalk, and yet here he was breaking into the principal’s office and vandalizing the place.
“Mr. Iida?” Nezu asked warily.
Iida’s gaze snapped up from the papers so fast, Nezu didn’t even see him move. There was something in his piercing stare that Nezu couldn’t quite place. “Ah, Principal Nezu, sir! You’re just in time!”
Nezu quietly closed the door behind himself and walked towards his desk. It was an odd feeling to be on the other side of it like this. “In time for what?”
Iida’s face split into a wide grin. “My ascension.”
That expression, that wide smile that showed joy but no humor… Nezu recognized what he saw in Iida’s cold blue eyes now. It was madness.
Nezu’s paw crept closer to the button that would activate his office’s security systems, but didn’t press it yet. “Ascension?” He asked, masking his nervousness with a jovial tone. “And what could you mean by that?”
Iida’s ear-to-ear grin somehow widened. “The UA University code of conduct handbook, fifth publishing edition, words nine, twenty-four, one hundred six, forty-three, and one on pages X-iii, four, seven, ninety-eight, and the back cover, respectively.”
Nezu’s heart sank like a rock. Perhaps an intellect like his occasionally got bored. And perhaps he occasionally occupied his time by setting up complex puzzles and hunts. And perhaps, just perhaps, one of those would grant whoever solved it total control over UA and all within it. But it had taken him years to set that up, hiding the pieces in everything he had a hand in! It would be a logistical nightmare to solve, sorting through cryptic and incomplete clues found in everything from regional zoning codes for power line installation to city ordinances regarding Quirked animals to the UA teacher’s handbook. To solve it, someone would have needed an astronomical level of intelligence and several months of investigative work!
Or, it only now occurred to him, a complete encyclopedic knowledge of every legal and regulatory code for the entire prefecture.
And looking at the room indicated that Iida had the latter. The spirals of text were in perfect accordance with the instructions he’d buried piece by piece in the manufacturing standards for different types of street lights and road signs, their wording exactly laying out the cyphered phrases built into the school’s blueprints. Iida wasn’t exaggerating, from what Nezu could see he was only a few short steps away from gaining complete control over UA.
He almost pressed the button then, but stopped himself. He had to know what led to this first, or else this whole thing could start again.
“Well, alright then!” Nezzu said cheerily. “It certainly seems like you’re well on you way to having everything in order. May I ask, what brought this on?”
Iida’s eye twitched violently before he spoke in a voice with the most fake calm Nezu had ever heard. “Video games.”
Nezu blinked in confusion. “Pardon?”
“Video games!” Iida shouted, voice bordering on hysteria. “You see, Hero Brawl: Adamant came out this weekend, and everyone was playing it! This was all well and good, but on Sunday! Oh, on Sunday.”
Iida was terrifyingly still save for the near imperceptible trembled of rage running through his whole body. “They! Kept! Playing! It was a school night, and oh, how I tried to help them, to make them see the error of their ways! But. They. Refused. All through the night they played, all crammed into Kaminari’s room, and all night I sat awake as the sound effect and the conversation served as the soundtrack of my failure. And on Monday, of course! They were tired, they couldn’t focus. I thought that would be enough, that they would learn their lesson from that after Aizawa made them run laps for falling asleep in class. But that night, last night, do you know what happened?”
Iida stared at Nezu. Nezu stared at Iida. As the silence dragged on, Nezu realized Iida actually wanted an answer.
“No, I-”
“They played again!” Iida shouted, interrupting Nezu and nearly making him jump out of his fur. “A second night of failure, of sleeplessness, of contemplating my mistakes. The didn’t respect the rules, didn’t respect me. It tormented me. It haunted me. It gnawed at me like a hound at a bone, crushing me in my own weakness. A hero? Ha! How could I enforce the law when I fail to even enforce the rules of the dorm?”
Iida let out a high-pitched laugh, and Nezu would have sworn Shigaraki himself couldn’t have sounded more deranged. “I fell into despair. And then I fell, yes, I fell into, into madness. But then! But then. I found the answer! I found the solution. Your puzzle! I knew of it, and I knew I could solve it. I could have done so ages ago! But I did not, because then I was blind, because I had not yet contemplated and seen the true way of things.”
Nezu had his answers, but he still didn’t press the button. He was horrifically fascinated with what was happening before him and he wanted to see how it would end. “And what, pray tell, is the way of things?”
Iida took a shuddering breath and hunched forward over the desk, looking down at Nezu. “That you are weak. You allow such disobedience, such vile and disrespectful behavior! To willingly turn a blind eye to such depravity is horrendous, and if you allow it simply because you do not know of it, then that is simply incompetence. In either case, you are a wretch, a worm undeserving of your station, and thus I saw the necessary path I was to tread. I must tear you from your position and instill myself as the new ruler on this academy.”
“I would call this my holy mission, or claim divine mandate, such is the true power of my enlightenment, but I am above such things. Divinity pales before the force of my conviction as surely as a pebble cannot compare to the unadulterated might of the sun! And if God Himself attempted to bar my way on my mission, I would leave Him shattered and broken in my wake.”
“Make no mistake, I will accomplish my task. I will become the ruler of this institution, and I will remake it into perfection. It will be a bastion of law, of order! No more will chaos be allowed to reign!”
“Come now,” Nezu started, “Surely things can’t be that bad. Aizawa-”
“Aizawa?!” Iida shrieked, his voice as frayed as his sanity. “He will be the first to go! He does this wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…”
Iida trailed off, repeating the maddened mantra until it was only a whisper. Nezu opened his mouth to speak again when Iida lunged forward, reaching entirely over the desk gripping the edge with such force that the wood cracked, staring down at Nezu with maddened eyes. “Wrong! Do you know what he said to us on the first day of class?! He said lies~.” Iida said the last word sing-song, trailing off into a hiss.
“How can we trust him? His threats? His pro-mis-es? His words are vipers on his tongue, vermin between his teeth.” Iida’s voice quieted, lowering to a rapid, maniac pitch just above a whisper. “He says he will expel us but no no no he said that already and it was lies and does he mean it this time he does not he is a spineless wretch who cannot keep the class in line for they know well his lies and untruths and his threats are toothless in the face of knowledge.”
“But he has expelled students before. It can’t all be lies.” Nezu said, trying vainly to reason with him. It was clear Iida was beyond that, but he couldn’t help but poke the wasp’s nest to see what would happen.
Iida threw himself backwards from the desk though his feet didn’t move from the spot, back arching until he was practically looking behind him as he laughed. Then he snapped back to his previous position in the blink of an eye, laughter cutting off abruptly. “Expulsion.” He hissed the word slowly, as if tasting every syllable. “It is a coward’s crutch. To expel a student is not to fix the problem, it is merely to wash one’s hands of it. It is weak, and Aizawa is weak for using it. That detestable cur sees the mountain and decides it would be too hard to climb, and so leaves it for another. But I am not like him. I do not lack conviction!”
Iida jumped from a whisper to a scream on the last word, his arm slashing sideways in a violent chop that slammed into Nezu’s computer and hurtled it from the desk. The projection on the ceiling turned to a garbled mess of static and colors, casting the room in a chaotic and spastic light. Iida didn’t seem to notice.
“I will not avoid the mountain! I will grind it level beneath my heel! Problems shall be corrected, and this school shall be a shining example to the world!”
“Aoyama! French? Illegal! French?! A crime! Frrreeeennnnnch?!?!?! Unnnnnnacceptablllllle!!!!”
“Ashido! She prefers to live a life of indolence, to have fun instead of studying! No more! She will learn to learn, until she can recite more mathematical principles than me-mes!”
“Asui! Is a tongue for handing things to people? I think not! Unsanitary! If she will not use her hands, then clearly she has something against them! The solution is clear: make her use big dinosaur-head grabber claws!”
“Uraraka! She defies gravity, and in doing so defies the core tenants of our universal laws! The audacity! There is only one way to teach her true respect for the laws of reality! Advanced. Physics. Classes.”
“Ojiro! Is an icon of what we should aspire to be! I! Have! No complaints about him!”
“Kaminari! No more bideo games for him! He’ll learn to play reasonable games that end at normal times! Like D&D!”
“Kirishima! He obsesses over manliness! What is a man?! A miserable pile of secrets! A featherless biped! He must be broken of his idolization!”
“Koda! He keeps the company of beasts, and yet refuses to keep them in check! Worse, he encourages their primitive instincts against those who irk him! He shall be placed below even the beasts of the wild, condemned to live among the vermin as they crawl and writhe and feed in the dirt, until such a time as he deserves to live as a man once more!”
“Sato! He punches? Very fast? But does not reference the JoJo? This is a crime most crusty and it cannot continue!”
“Shoji! He is very tall! But also in the front of the class! Very rude! Sit on the ground, you goblin!”
“Jiro! She plays music but neglects crucial genres! I will teach her true music! Gregorian chants! Folktronica! Kawaii core! Electro country! Simpsonwave.”
“Sero! His diet is criminally undervaried! I will make him eat a vegetable even if it kills both of us and everyone else within five hundred meters!”
“Tokoyami! Once tried to dye his entire uniform black! As atonement, he will be given a new wardrobe, one filled with nothing but bright pastel colors!”
“Todoroki! Angsty backstories are a burden upon the mind! I will snap his father like a glowstick over my knee and make him go to therapy!”
“Hagakure! She chews with her mouth open, and yet I cannot prove this because I cannot see it! As if my hearing is faulty, like some sort of octogenarian. No more! She shall eat nothing but soups! Nothing but stews! Nothing. But. Broths!”
“Bakugo! His speech is profane! Orphans weep at his voice! His mouth will be scrubbed out with soap until it’s clean enough to eat off of!”
“Midoriya! Every bone he breaks is an insult to the order of the establishment! There is only one logical solution to make him orderly! Only one way to keep the peace! I must make him BONELESS!”
“Mineta! His revolting perversions will be culled! I will surely break him, for I know of no other way to correct him. But when I reforge the shattered remains of his psyche it will be into an icon of chastity and abstinence that the greatest of monks will envy for his purity!”
“Yaoyorozu! Her life of opulence and indolence weakens her character! A monk’s life for her! A monk’s life for one thousand years!”
“All these and more, I shall correct! The aspiring hero student, Hitoshi Shinso! The maniac of the support department, Mei Hatsume! My rulings shall rain down upon all within this school like burning brands upon the penitent until they are scoured clean of their aberrant behaviors! And then, my bastion established, I shall expand my rule! Not to the world, for such a goal is petty and small. I shall seize the reins of the universe and wrest it to true order! A single infinity line, unwavering in its sole yet all encompassing law! A true singularity! T̶̜̖͍̓̔̈́͠ͅḩ̷́̄͒i̵̙͇̦͉̙͔̳̦̙̫͛͜ͅs̷͖̼̮̮̱͍̟͎̥̭̯̒̓̃̒̏̏̉̆̋̃̈́̄̚ ̸̩̗̭̓͊͌͛͆̈́͛̒̂̀͠î̶̺̲̪̲̂s̶̛̟̱͖͙̣̬̘̙̻̪̝̓̆͘͜ ̷̞̮͍̱̬̬̻͇̹̼̽͑͒̌̚͜ͅm̷͉͙̬͍̖̏̈́̆̃͑̀̿̌̄̿ÿ̵̡̮͖̝̦̝̈̓̀̈́̑̎͠͝ ̵̡͇̟̦̻̠̯͓̣̓̊̈́̎̒̎̓̀͂̊́̕w̸͍̖͚̩͔͈͇̦͎̬͊̂̋̽͘i̴̢̱͇̗̠̟̯̱̘̟̍̉͜ͅͅl̷̟̰̪͔̳̎͐̆̊͆̉̕l̶̨͔͙̮̰̭̥̳̲̭̇̄͗̕͠!̴̢͙͓̠̺̻̠͚͓̈́”
Nezu nodded slowly. Iida wasn’t just unhinged, he’d taken the entire door out of the frame and knocked down the surrounding wall. And all this was from a few sleepless nights? Sure, he hadn’t blinked once since Nezu had come in, but there wasn’t even a hint of bags under his eyes.
“Alright then.” Nezu said before pressing the button.
Immediately the walls sprung open and stun webs deployed from hidden panels. Everything in the room above the eighty-six centimeter mark was swept with their energy. Sitting comfortably at eighty-five centimeters, Nezu stood calmly as Iida got caught in them and immediately collapsed unconscious.
Equally calmly, he called the school robots to come drag Iida back to his dorm. Nazu couldn’t imagine how Iida had managed to sneak away from Aizawa in the middle of class, but it was probably better to have him sleep it off than send him right bck to class. First things first, he needed to redo the puzzle. More complexity, more rigorous challenges to complete. He couldn’t have a repeat of this. Second, he really had to have a chat with Aizawa about his students copying their teacher’s sleeping habits.