If you've been following my work, you know that I've set up a couple other stories in a multiverse of sorts, shared with Shadow Monarch Hero: Viridian and The King of Heroes: NULL/Virtue. The Soulous Hero, The Synthetic Hero, War for Individuality, A World Without Heroes (This fic), and the Heroes of Alexandria are all part of this multiverse and these initial chapters for each of them are sort of like pilot episodes. I'll have more coming out soon! I won't immediately dive into writing them as I have a lot of other projects, but I wanted to get them out of my head and onto "paper." Please enjoy! If it's not obvious, this fic is heavily inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans. And as usual any art used in this fic is A.I. generated unless otherwise stated.

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Izuku Midoriya never had a pillow. He would sleep on his mother's lap as she leaned against the wall of their dilapidated shack and told him stories about days long past. Titanous Heroes who were snuffed out by the Virtrian Empire. He always vowed to one day let his mother rest on his lap, so that he would be the one getting a bad night of sleep before their hellish work quota the next morning. He couldn't convince her to do so before she died. His father and sister soon followed suit.

Mining deaths were standard on Mars. Companies refused to transport the necessary safety equipment. It was easier and cheaper to throw more bodies at the task.

The Midoriya family shared what little they had. Their passing was a blessing for their son and brother. Their meager shared safety equipment was now his. It kept him alive to his 18th birthday.

Of course, he didn't keep track of those things. The underground heat, the dust in the air, the aching of his bones. It all stole what little energy he possessed. It left no room for such pitiful things like dates. There was nothing to look forward to, aside from death, so why keep track of what day it was?

He didn't get to bury his family. The companies didn't want their "employees" to waste any time standing in front of a grave. They indiscriminately burned the bodies in a mass processing facility and let the ash blow away. Armed guards stood at the edge of the facility to make sure none of the "employees" attempted to watch the last of their family disappear into the Martian wind.

Izuku didn't even bother trying to give his family a proper send off. He didn't have the energy to eat some days , much less resist. This was the only life he had known. The only life his father had known. It was a foregone conclusion.

So he dug, and he dug, and he dug. He couldn't sleep anymore. Not on that hard floor that bruised his bones. Not in the same place his family had once been. He'd rather work away in the mines until he dropped dead.

He thought about revolting, as all slaves did. But the actual citizens of the United Virtrian Empire were in possession of all the weapons they wanted. For a small fee they were allowed to shoot whatever slave they cared to. If anything, violence was encouraged by the government and religion.

If any slaves were found praying to any God for help or salvation, they were liable to be shot, at no cost. They weren't worthy of prayer.

Izuku didn't believe in a God. He didn't see how anyone could. But he still prayed in secret. Prayed that one day, he'd be able to put his pickaxe through his "employer's" skull, only after lopping off every other body part the man had.

Izuku didn't want clean air, good food, or solid sleep. He didn't want to bathe, or read books and watch movies. He didn't want to play games or sports. He just wanted to see others in pain. There was nothing left in his bones but loathing.

It was the only thing that kept him upright. He wanted to die, but he couldn't bear the thought of leaving this world without any sort of justice. Rage was the only thing that drove his arms back and forth, back and forth.

He swung with such passion that other slaves thought he was eager to work. It was that passion that ignored the structural cracks in the cave, the warning signs that had taken many other lives. It was his hollowness that drowned out the cries of other slaves as they fled for safety.

All Izuku could think of as the cave collapsed around him was that he'd finally be free. One way or another. And then, the rocks at his feet crumbled, turning into a fine gravely avalanche.

It sent him tumbling head over heels. He didn't even try to break his fall, or even himself out. He just went limp, hoping for the end to be a sharp crack to his skull. But fate was cruel.

The rocks broke one of his legs, it punctured one of his lungs, and it stabbed through one of his eyes. And landing on his right arm splintered it into a dozen pieces. None of the injuries were deep enough to kill him quickly. They were just enough to let him slowly die.

Izuku Midoriya was so completely destroyed that he didn't even feel the pain. His mind had been reformatted by years of suffering. All he could feel was the rage.

That was why he didn't let himself fade into unconsciousness. Pain meant nothing unless it led to pleasure. He had experienced a lifetime of pain in just 18 years. It had to lead to something... anything.

Coming to a stop at the cavern floor, he clawed at the ground with his still functioning arm. The world above him had been sealed off. The only way was forward. Blood seeped into his only remaining eye, so he moved on nothing but his sense of touch.

Time faded into an abstract concept as his fingers began to peel and bleed, all the way down to the bone. It was repetitive work, but he knew that sort of thing well.

Then he came to a wall. He knew he had only crawled a few feet from where he landed. He knew this was not a cavern, but a tiny pocket of air, deep below a surface of stifling agony. There was nowhere to go, nothing to be done. There was only the drawn out wait for death.

Izuku sighed, allowing his hand to fall from the wall and rest on the floor until he passed.

But instead of arm falling upon a dusty outcropping of rock, his wrist felt the cool touch of metal.

FWOOOOM!

The small cavernous pocket began to tremble, Izuku's body shaking and rocking along the floor. Being tossed back and forth, his injuries flared up, finally working past his emotions.

His leg bent the wrong way, and the side his lung was on slammed into a rocky wall.

"GAH!" He growled in agony, clutching at his side. His breath was labored and his consciousness was beginning to dull. If it weren't for his high pain tolerance, he would've passed out from the shock alone. Unfortunately, blood was still pooling beneath him, and he wasn't getting enough air.

The walls began to crack and fall away, like that of an eggshell breaking away from the yolk, but Izuku felt nothing hit him.

He reached up to try and wipe the blood from his remaining eye. All he could manage was to smear it, giving him red-tinted vision. Everything was blurry, but shockingly, he could see, even in the pitch darkness. There was a powerful crimson glow lighting up his surroundings. Four circular parts of the wall were emitting intense heat and light. Not only that, but Izuku heard something familiar.

It was a crackling, like static electricity. All the slaves knew it well, because it was the sound their masters used to intimidate them. It was the power of a miniaturized fusion core, the same ones that were embedded in the mechanized Armors that Izuku's enforcers piloted.

"Biology compatible..."

"Emotional state... nonoptimal..."

"Medical status... rapidly deteriorating..."

"Accessing vestigial permissions..."

"Permission granted..."

The voice shook the room. It was feminine, but deep and powerful, like an Amazonian warrior who had seen their fair share of war. But it was all just noise to Izuku. His consciousness was fading.

"Izuku Midoriya, you have been chosen as the inheritor. Do you accept?"

"Accept? Accept what? Is that Death? Maybe this is it... my final moments. Do I accept death?" Izuku let out a pained sigh. "Yes... yes... I accept..."

"Confirmed."

"Beginning integration..."

"One For All."

"All For One."

"BZZZT..."

"One For NULL."

"Mom... dad... Izumi... I'm sorry..." As he passed out, he could've sworn he felt his slave collar being taken from his neck.

*******

Shadows danced throughout Izuku's mind. Ghosts of the past, and visages of the future. Their suffering, their anger. It all compounded within himself. It burned red-hot.

He saw a woman with black hair holding a child, smiling down at her grandson, while she floated above the ground.

"How do I know this is her grandson?"

A man picked through the rubble of a destroyed building with shadow-y tendrils coming from his hands, pulling out anyone who was still alive. Another let out a massive smokescreen, covering the retreat of the innocents. A man with white hair in a stylish suit hiding in the shadows. And still more flashed through his head. He saw hundreds of years in the blink of an eye.

All eight had one thing in common, a monstrosity of dark metal stood at their beck and call, watching over them and their families. It was a towering demon, with a heart full of love and compassion.

Now, that demon was alone, its family was dead. All it craved... was justice. In that, the demon was more human than most. Metal, flesh. Human, machine. It didn't matter. They were all one and the same. Creatures hiding beneath the crust of a planet, hoping and praying for the day that they would once again find the power to stand and fight.

*******

Ochako Uraraka was exhausted. Her bones ached, her mind begged for rest, but she knew that if she stopped, the masters watching over the mining pit would punish her. Her tattered clothes did nothing to protect her from the harsh elements of Mars. Even when terraformed, the planet was borderline inhospitable.

One of the tunnels had just collapsed moments ago, and yet they were still working on the dangerous and uneven terrain. If a slave took too long clambering over the rocks, they were liable to get their nerves attacked by the collar around their necks, if not outright shot. With a solar system full of humans, one body amongst the pile was nothing. Hell, a hundred bodies was nothing.

Shambling along, she couldn't keep her balance and fell to the ground. She could just barely break her fall with her hands, but her shin hit a sharp rock.

Fire raced up to her brain, searing her nerves and making her cry out in pain. The slaves next to her saw it and one held a finger up to his lips. He was walking with a limp, his own leg scarred by an old wound. He knew better than anyone that if you became useless, you'd be disposed of.

She tried to stand, but the pain made her collapse all over again. She wasn't sure if it was broken, but it felt like it.

"#000129455-MM, stand up!" The guards, sitting in their magnificent white mechs, yelled down at her, angels that punished the innocent, the Virtue Armors. Uraraka tried again, to no avail.

"Pleas-"

She spasmed as her collar sent pulses to her brain, telling it to fire pain signals. "Stand, or be discarded."

Uraraka just laid there, in a puddle of her own tears as one of the 50-foot tall mechs jumped into the pit, landing next to her and scattering dust at the nearby slaves. "WORK!" His voice bellowed at the others as he took his time approaching her.

She knew what was coming. The collars couldn't kill, not anymore. They used to be able to kill the wearers with a single button push, but the Virtrian Empire found that too many of their pilots and slave masters pressed the button at the slightest delay. Making them bloody their own hands decreased the slave labor loss to a sustainable amount, and it provided the men and women with a chance to "exercise" their mechs.

"I wonder... if I just squeeze a little bit... will you pop?" The monster got closer and closer, his massive mechanical hands reaching out to her.

"Please... someone..."

But no one could help, the other dozen mechs standing by certainly weren't going to do anything, and a slave only invited pain or death by resisting.

"Or maybe I could take a cute one like you home... huh...?" He paused, his mech's head swiveling to look around. His readouts were detecting a local seismic event. The ground at his feet was shaking. This area never got earthquakes.

The lecherous voice returned as the surprise of the quake wore off, "Well, why don't I bring you up here, just to keep you safe f-" In a single impossibly fast instant, the rumbling grew intense. And like a bullet from the barrel of a rifle, a 60-foot tall mech of onyx metal and red energy clawed its way out of the ground.

The pilot in front of Uraraka didn't even have time to turn his mech before the demonic Armor tore open his midsection with his razor sharp talons.

Ripped in half, the Virtue Armor collapsed. All at once, the coolant and the blood rushed out, pooling beneath its fallen body.

Before the perimeter could open fire, or even realize what had happened, the Armor began smoking, filling the area with the blackest haze Uraraka had ever seen. It didn't seem harmful to breathe in, but it completely enveloped the mining pit, obscuring their view.

"Rogue Armor! Stand down or we will open fire on the entire-" The Virtue Armor went flying back, its chest piece concave and unmoving. The lower half of the dead Armor had been flung at him, propelled like a rocket through the smoke.

"Open f-" The second half of the Virtue Armor decapitated another, cutting off their communications and sight. All of the mech's mechanics took up so much space in the body that the head was the central unit for a lot of electronics. Without it, the pilot was essentially blind and deaf, forced to open ports in the chest cavity, where they were seated, to see.

"One For All... plus Overclock..."

The haunting mechanical voice spilled into the pilots' very souls.

Upon opening slits in the metal to see his compatriots, the pilot of the decapitated mech was able to see a black blur fly out of the smoke, but that was all it was. By the time he caught up with the movement, two of his squadmates were laying on the ground, dead.

No matter where he turned, he couldn't catch sight of the demon. He could only witness the aftermath.

One-by-one, the mechanical pillars of power were falling around him, and the dread began to set in. A grunt of the Virtrian Empire, he'd barely even passed basic training. He'd never seen combat. He never expected to be confronted by anything. He was in control of these people, right?

Finally, when he was the only one standing, the blur stopped. Its form hadn't changed, and yet, instead of seeing a mech of black metal and red energy, he saw a cloaked figure, holding a scythe in its hand. It had no face, just a skull.

His entire body went cold as a vision flashed through his mind. The scythe would bisect him right at the chest, cutting his head from his body, even as he attempted to flee.

"No... nononononononono..." He turned his Armor around, and his vision flipped. The last thing he saw was the open sky. His head was resting at his own feet, the top half of his mech had been sheared completely off, along with his own head. Everything happened... just as he foresaw it.

With all the Virtue Armors - as well as their pilots - dead, the black haze began to clear from the mining pit. The slaves saw nothing while they cowered on the ground, hoping to not be stepped on or shot at. Looking up, instead of seeing the carnage and blood of the Virtue Armors and their remains, they saw a boy.

Standing atop the exit hatch of his Armor, the green-haired boy was cloaked in dark robes, looking down at the miners with just a single eye. The other had been replaced by a glowing red mechanical one. Both his right arm and left leg were also made of the same technology. Their thick metal didn't match his frail body, but he had no trouble moving around.

Raising his right hand, its claw-like fingers stretching out to the slaves, it shot out dozens of black tendrils. Each tendril that left his finger split off like branches on a tree, and one of those branches would then branch out, and so on. It went on until each and every one of the several hundred slaves had one by their throat.

The energy constructs worked their way into the collars, weaving through the mechanisms, and disengaging them one-by-one.

At the exact same time, every last collar clicked open, and fell to the ground with a heavy thud. No one said a thing. The entire area was dead silent, quite literally in relation to the guards. No one moved. It was all for a very simple reason... they were still screwed.

"Whaddya reckon, Ecto?" A man with dark hair and one eye asked the man with the injured leg, who had gestured to Uraraka earlier. "How long?"

"Maybe... 15-20 minutes. He killed them fast enough that I doubt they even broadcasted a warning. But once HQ tries to check in with them, they'll realize the issue and send reinforcements from Juras."

"Wha-What's going on?!" Uraraka still had tears in her eyes. She wasn't going to be taken by one of the guards, but she still very likely had a broken bone in her leg.

That shout helped shake some of the adults from their stupor, and grabbing whatever they could find, splinted her leg.

"It's a NULL Armor," The man with black hair said.

"NULL? I thought only Virtue existed?" Another young girl asked, looking up at the onyx mech.

"Well, I think most of us did," The man called Ecto responded.

"There exists a dimension beyond our own, where creatures, called NULLs, live as pure energy. When they crossed that barrier between dimensions, they found humans. Instead of attacking us, or possessing us, they bonded with us, creating NULL Armors as a way of physically inhabiting the world. And once bonded with a human, both the Armor and the pilot awaken a Quirk, a superpower." The man gestured at two other slaves. "When the Virtrian Empire took over, they eradicated the NULL and their pilots. Ever since, NULLs stopped coming over to this dimension."

"How do you know all this?" The other young girl, Kinoko, asked.

"Because resistance never truly dies out." The two new adults rushed over, holding a map in hand.