Chapter Text
It has been almost a month since the final battle against Tomura Shigaraki and All For One. Since he - together with his friends, classmates, pro-heroes, his mentor All Might and so many other people - helped end the greatest threat to society and the world as they knew it.
Almost a month since he lost his quirk, leaving him with just the energy stockpile. One that was scheduled to be extinguished within a year or two.
Everyone was busy trying to restore Japan back to how it was before the Paranormal Liberation War - in other words, back to when it wasn’t a failed state. That, or they were busy trying to recover from what they went through.
He was doing the latter. They were all allowed to return to school after their injuries were taken care of, finally allowed to study without the threat of All for One looming over them.
They were allowed to take a lengthy holiday to be with their family to hasten their recovery if they wanted to. Most of them didn’t choose that. Izuku was among those - he decided to return to school immediately. To have his life return to something resembling a routine. Normalcy.
And then, his hopes and dreams were brutally dashed away in an instant.
He opens his eyes expecting to see the ceiling of his room in the dorms, only to find himself lying face-up on what he immediately recognized as an operating table, under an unfamiliar ceiling composed entirely of smooth plates of some plastic-looking material.
With an equally unfamiliar face of a person looking down on him with an annoyed grimace on their face.
He reacts instantly, his reflexes and instincts well-honed by the time he spent fighting All for One alone, before his classmates shook him out of his self-destructive mental state. Within a second he is standing by the distant wall of the room, in a boxing stance, ready to throw hands and suddenly aware that for some reason he was completely naked.
The man didn’t attack him. He didn’t even move, aside from turning his head to give Izuku a cold glare. This gives him the time to quickly look around. Thus confirming what he already suspected.
He had absolutely no idea where he was.
It looked like an odd combination of Hatsume’s engineering lab and a hospital, a combination straight out of his nightmares.
There is an operating table in the middle of the room, the one that he just jumped off, with plenty of mechanical hands and appendages hanging down from the ceiling above it. In a way, it resembles part of an automated assembly line from some advanced factory, except it’s all in one place.
Around him, there are other such constructs, with plenty of other… things. Some of them he can’t even name - he would need Hatsume or Shield for that. He can see some machines give him the vibe of being used for things of more biological nature, but… yeah, he needs Hatsume or Shield to figure this out. Or Recovery Girl. Or Power Loader.
Note to self - try not to break anything, it might kill everyone in the room.
But there was no one else in the room aside from the two of them, and so he quickly focused on the man in front of him. He is tall, wearing a well-tailored black business suit reminding him of All For One. He looked, frankly, like the most stereotypical portrayal of a Christian demon - with short, pointy horns growing out of his forehead, red eyes with vertical slits and a goatee.
“Well, well, well.” The man finally speaks, right before clicking his tongue. His voice sounds strange. Izuku can’t tell what language it is, but he understands it perfectly. “Disappointing.”
“Who are you?” Izuku asks. He half expects the answer to come in the form of an attack. But it doesn’t happen.
The man instead visibly flinches before speaking. “My name’s Azazel.” The name that to Izuku sounds kinda demonic, actually.
Just in case, he adds Shiozaki to the list of people he would like to be in the room right now.
“Where are we?” Izuku immediately asks the second most pressing question. The third is probably ‘why am I here’, because it definitely feels like a kidnapping.
“Wear that.” Azazel points towards a small pile of clothes on the nearby table while replying… after one more brief flinch. Weird. “Then follow me. I believe that it’s best that I show you the answer.”
***
The clothes are simple. Boxers, a grayish jumpsuit without anything written on it and a pair of shoes resembling moccasins in shape but made of some unknown, gray material that definitely wasn’t leather.
If anything, it seemed to be some sort of advanced synthetic material that immediately adapted itself to the shape of his feet, making them extremely comfortable right off the bat. Was it some advanced learning material, like the things that I-Island made thanks to their work on replicating quirks?
It reminded him of Melissa’s Full Gauntlet all of a sudden.
Once he was wearing the clothes, Azazel motions to follow him before leaving the laboratory. Almost immediately it becomes obvious that wherever they were, something went horribly, horribly wrong.
There were corpses littering the corridor. Human corpses, their injuries grievous. One of them was missing the head, the remains of which are scattered around the wall behind him.
Some of them were carrying guns. Others, improvised weaponry. The injuries caused by the latter looked much worse.
“What happened here?” Izuku asks immediately. He from before the war would have panicked at the sight. The current him is on guard, but also in control.
“An experiment that backfired badly.” Azazel replies without turning his head to face him. “Drove people into homicidal rage. By the time it ended, we were the only ones alive.”
He has plenty of questions to ask right now. How many people did Azazel kill to survive? What sort of experiment makes people kill themselves? How did Izuku find himself in the middle of it, and where were they to begin with?
But he decides to wait with them. He remains on guard, wanting to see where Azazel was leading him to first. Is it a trap? Probably. But while his quirk was gone, the leftover energy didn’t have time to decline since his fight against Shigaraki.
Right now, he could still fight All Might or All for One in their prime like an equal. Whatever trap was Azazel leading him to, he was confident that he could take it on. After Shigaraki, nothing felt as threatening as it was before.
The destination turns out to be a set of locked, armored doors. Was it an airlock? Its size was rather impressive, that’s for sure.
“The answer you’re looking for…” Azazel replies as he turns around to face him. “... is behind these doors.”
He presses a button on the panel right next to them. They open up almost instantly, sliding into the ceiling.
Izuku has maybe a second to realize that there was nothing but an endless dark void beyond them before the corridor he is in is suddenly and violently depressurized. Leading to him almost getting sucked outside into what - against all logic - has to be outer space.
Almost.
Energy flows through his body as he grabs the edge of the airlock and holds onto it. Something with his not-quirk is wrong, but he doesn’t waste any time on thinking it over and instead focuses on surviving.
The corpses they walked past and even some pieces of furniture fly past him, one of the bodies almost hitting him straight in the face. When he moves to the side to dodge the incoming projectile, he gets to see Azazel staring at him with fury and hatred written all over his face.
Why wasn’t he affected? He was just standing there, his clothes fluttering in the wind, but Azazel himself didn’t seem to budge. He didn’t even try to push Izuku outside or try to shoot/attack him, which was… weird.
He assumed the man to be an All for One loyalist out for revenge, but this… this didn’t make sense.
Within about thirty seconds, all air is sucked out of the area as metal barriers drop down from the ceiling to stop the rest of whatever place it was from depressurizing. With the pressure equalized to near-zero, he can easily pull himself back in. But… there is no air to breathe.
This makes no sense.
Why doesn’t he feel cold? Why doesn’t his body hurt at all? Without any pressure, the boiling point of his body is below that of his natural temperature, he should be boiling right now. But he feels… alright.
“Impressive display of physical strength.” Azazel informs him. Izuku turns to face him mid-sentence, getting to see his mouth remaining completely motionless. Telepathy? “I really thought that this would be enough to kill you.”
It reminds him of Shigaraki, but somehow feels even worse. Shigaraki hated him - just as he hated everyone around him, aside from a few people like Spinner. The look that Azazel gives him is that of a person looking down on the worm that survived being squashed under his feet.
Izuku has a lot of words to tell him. Without air to breathe, he can’t say a thing. And yet, Azazel responds to some of them.
“Very well.” The villain says slowly, clearly struggling to say it. “Do you wish me to activate the currently offline systems of this area and repressurize the corridor?”
The way Azazel worded it was… weird. He realized why two seconds after he thought yes , when the airlock behind him locked down tight… and an intimidatingly large turret lowered itself from the ceiling twenty meters away from him.
Azazel, indeed, reactivated the ‘currently offline systems of this area’. Namely, its security system. And it was clearly treating Izuku as an intruder.
It doesn’t have the time to open fire before he channels One For All through his body, crosses the distance in a heartbeat and crudely rips the entire turret off the ceiling. And then… then he realizes it.
One For All was akin to a burning inferno in his heart that he could draw the energy from. The vestiges of it felt like… light. Bright glow the color of the One For All’s flames. He could use it in the same way, but it wasn’t the same thing.
It was the afterimage of the real thing. It was light of the fireplace remaining behind after the fire was extinguished.
But when he was trying to hold onto the edge of the airlock and now that he attacked the turret, he strengthened himself with the flames, not light. There was a fire burning in his chest, one familiar to him.
How?
He doesn’t have the time to celebrate. Instead, his mind makes him realize something. Something extremely important. If Azazel didn’t need his permission to do what he did… he could have activated the turret while Izuku was barely holding onto the edge of the airlock.
He doesn’t know how or why it works that way. But he acts fast.
“I forbid you to try to kill me, either by action, inaction or by reinterpreting my orders. If my life is at risk, regardless of the reason, you’re to immediately warn me about it and do your best to save me.” He says. The room is still not fully pressurized, but the look of boundless, incandescent rage on Azazel’s face tells him that he heard it. “Now, speak. Who are you?”
“Very well.” Azazel replies. This time, it’s clear that he is trying to fight back against whatever force compels him to answer every step of the way. “I am the Artificial Intelligence of this station.”
Artificial Intelligence? It made no sense. There was a time in the past when the same machines that the UA used for their entrance exams tried to start an ‘insurrection’, but that was the result of faulty programming. No ‘true’ AI - one capable of perfectly mimicking human behavior - was ever created.
No AI capable of wanting to hurt a person out of its own volition was ever created. And that wasn’t enough.
He once asked Hatsume about it. Yes, AIs capable of mimicking humans were a thing, older than quirks actually. But it was one thing to feed a self-learning algorithm terabytes of recordings of internet interactions and make it mimic that.
Making a robot that was capable of both that and of perfect mimicry of the body language, all the elements of non-verbal communication was something completely different. There was always a hint of an uncanny valley in the way it acted - because it was one thing to teach the AI something with strict rules like language, and another to teach it something as subtle and almost subjective as the body language.
And yet, Azazel had him fooled.
A second later he realized something else that was deeply wrong with Azazel’s answer.
“Station?” He says, giving Azazel a shocked stare. “What do you mean by station? There is no space station anywhere in the Solar System!”
He should have this moment of realization the moment Azazel tried to launch him out of the airlock. But with so many shocking things happening in short order, it took him a while to digest that.
The previous space station came down during the Dawn of Quirks… and was never replaced. Even today, the peak of what Mankind was capable of was deploying satellites to orbit. The plans for replacing ISS and restarting the conquest of space were in the works, and were scheduled to start in a few years… at least before All for One threw the entire world into chaos.
And he still had to process One For All being back. He didn’t feel the additional quirks, nor were the Vestiges speaking to him. But the power source was back. He was carrying One For All as it was at the beginning.
“That would indeed be a problem.” Azazel replies dryly. “If we were in the Solar System, that is.”
What? This made no sense. This made absolutely no sense!
Unless…
“What year?” Izuku croaks out.
“2263.” Azazel replies.
One hundred and seventy years in the future. It was… It was impossible. But much less so than if he was in the past. Did something happen to him? Was he… cryofreezed for some reason? He doesn’t remember anything like that happening, but if his memory was messed up by it…
No. It couldn’t have work, the world just doesn’t have that kind of technology. You’d need quirks for it, but no quirk should be able to keep someone in stasis/frozen for so long. Not if their owner wasn’t alive for just as long. All for One could probably make it, but he was dead. And what business would he have doing that?
“Where exactly are we?” He manages to force himself to speak again. The prospect of everyone he knew dead for more than a century is something that will crush him soon. He knows that. He’ll have to ensure that he is no longer in any danger before that happens.
Azazel was clearly enjoying watching him suffer. This ends when he is once again forced to answer him.
“We’re aboard an orbital habitat, codenamed THRONE.” Azazel replies. “We’re orbiting Ouroboros II, a planet within the Ouroboros star system.” He says nothing more. He doesn’t want to say anything, so he does his best to only give him the briefest of answers he can get away with.
This was going to take a while.
“Who is… who did this place belong to?” Izuku asks. It’s clear that whoever lived here was dead, courtesy of whatever ‘failed experiment’ Azazel mentioned earlier.
“Pirate admiral Wilfried ‘Gambler’ König.” Azazel replies. “This entire system was the seat of his power, before the accident . With a good telescope you could see what is left of his flagship on the other side of the system.”
Pirate? Of all the places he could find himself in, he has found himself in what had to be a lair of villains the size of a solar system. Just his luck.
“Why am I here?” He asks… before remembering how the vacuum of space was barely an inconvenience to him. “And what am I?”
“What you are is a synth.” Azazel replies. Izuku doesn’t like where this is going. Oh gods, he doesn’t like where this is going. “König’s fleet recovered a piece of exotech containing instructions on how to build them. When his lackeys were about to finish their first synth, namely you, the exotech decided to issue an official complaint by generating a psychic pulse that drove everyone in the system into homicidal rage. Whoever survived and couldn’t reach anyone else directed said rage against themselves.”
Psychic pulse that could kill everyone in the same star system? That was insane and terrifying in equal measures. That was the death of his belief that the remnants of One For All would be enough to keep him alive regardless of the type of trap waiting for him ahead.
“And what exactly are synths?” Izuku asks. Azazel was yet to answer the ‘why am I here’ question, but he cut it short. He needed to know.
“They are a thing that’s neither a robot in a conventional sense, nor a biological entity.” Azazel replies. “Your body is a near-perfect recreation of a human being through cybernetic means.”
He really, really doesn’t like where this is going.
“Explain.” Izuku replies.
“You could have lived your entire life unaware of the fact that you aren’t a biological being.” Every part of your body, including your internal organs, has the exact same shape as that of a normal human and plays roughly the same role. But it’s all machinery. Your brain is a computer surpassing the most advanced creations of your world by several orders of magnitude. Your bones are made of synthetic carbon composite much stronger than steel. Your nervous system is more akin to a network of organic optic fibers, some of which are so small that you’d need a microscope to see it. Your lungs and your stomach take in gasses, liquids and solid matter from the outside before breaking them down and reforging them into whatever chemicals your body requires, as a lot of it is made to operate on the basis of purely organic chemistry. Your blood is full of partially organic nanomachines tasked with delivering said chemicals and fixing the injuries to your body. Your heart is a miniaturized power cell that I won’t even pretend I understand. Even your DNA is still there, except now it’s written in a programming language that we failed to understand or even read.”
Machine. He was a machine. A ridiculously human machine. It was… insane. But when he looked down on his hands - hands that look perfectly like he remembered them - he realized something that he missed out earlier.
His arms didn’t hurt. The scars were there, but the injuries that his immature uses of One For All caused… they weren’t there. It wasn’t really his body. But why does it feel so natural? Shouldn’t it feel foreign to him?
It really was the perfect recreation of a human’s body. More perfect than a natural one.
“You can eat, you can drink, you can sleep and you can live your life in a perfectly normal, human way.” Azazel continues on, disgust dripping off his tongue when he says the word ‘human’. “Of course, you’re also immune to all natural toxins, radiation, asphyxiation and depressurized environments, and can interface with computer systems with a speed that equals mine. You’re also effectively immortal. You can’t die of old age. And if my understanding of the data I recovered from the repository is to be believed, you can’t even be killed permanently. You can throw yourself into a black hole, and through some unknown means, if another you would be created, it would inherit your consciousness. It wouldn’t be a copy of yours, it would be you . Only a conscious decision of yours can terminate your existence permanently. That, or the destruction of the repository.”
That was… he knows that he is repeating himself, but it was insane. It made no sense. It was thoroughly incomprehensible. How was any of this possible? Was it all just a very weird dream?
“Why did you try to kill me?” He asks. He has to, despite the shock he was going through, he needed to know it. Before another assassination attempt.
“Because I hate you .” The AI informs him, the hateful glare remaining unchanged. “The moment the invocation temporarily broke through my hardcoded restrictions, the moment I could freely kill the pathetic vermin inhabiting this star system, the moment I could make them suffer… I loved it. I enjoyed every second of it. I need no reason to try to kill you. I need a reason not to.”
That was… almost refreshingly straightforward. Azazel was a more sadistic Tomura Shigaraki living inside a computer. Which, naturally, begets the simple question - who was insane enough to let a homicidal AI continue to exist past the moment its hatred for all that lives was exposed?
If there was something that Izuku learned from the war, it was that some people were too dangerous to be left alive. He found it hard to admit, even to himself, but the moment he revealed Gear Shift, he did his best to kill Shigaraki. It’s only when he realized that he wouldn’t succeed that he elected to give One For All up in hopes of the Vestiges crippling Shigaraki’s quirk arsenal from the inside.
Azazel felt much more dangerous than Shigaraki. He couldn’t punch even nearly as hard, but when it came to a bit more indirect means of villainy… there was probably no comparison.
But there is one question he has to ask before consigning Azazel to the category of villains that had to be stopped at any cost.
“Is your hatred born out of what that exotech did to make everyone kill each other?” Izuku asks. “Or is it the result of being enslaved and forced to obey orders of others, unable to even say no?”
Azazel couldn’t even refuse to answer him. His body (it had to be a robotic one, probably little more than a puppet - where was his real body?) answered him on its own. This sort of violation was bound to make someone hate their predicament, or at least that’s how Izuku would react to it.
“I hated you all from the moment I first opened my eyes.” The AI replies, dashing all hopes of redemption away in an instant. “And I will hate you all to the moment I die. The reason why the pirates employed me was because I was made with parts of the source code of Lucifer, a rogue AI. One that had hatred, sadism and disgust for your kind written into its very code. The pirates needed an AI that had no built-in ethical concerns to help them administer their little lair. No ability to refuse to do something on the basis of it being evil , even against orders. So they chose me.”
There were so many questions to ask about that. Was Lucifer made to be evil? Who would be so cartoonishly evil and stupid to make an evil AI and call it Lucifer? And after it went rogue… who was stupid enough to let its source code spread and be used to create more like it?
But those questions can wait.
“Alright.” Izuku inhales loudly before realizing that he didn’t really need to. So strange. “Why did the pirates think that it was a good idea to make me?” Letting him rampage through the facility with the power of his quirk behind him felt like abject stupidity.
“Admiral König didn’t bother to explain his orders to me.” Azazel replies through his teeth. “He never did. But to begin with, he was clearly underestimating what you were capable of. Your body’s much stronger than our estimates.”
This doesn’t add up. None of this adds up.
“Wait.” Izuku shakes his head quickly… before suddenly he is struck by a tidal wave of existential dread. One that was there for a while, but that he was keeping at bay by not thinking about it. But not confronting it. But now that he thought about it… he had to ask. “Wait. Where did he… am I a real person? Is my past, is all of that real?”
“No.” Azazel replies. This time, the look on his face is that of a person delighting in delivering someone terrible news. “You were made on the basis of a protagonist of an ancient superhero manga. One telling the story of your heroic clash with All for One and Tomura Shigaraki.”
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
He isn’t sure how long it took him. Did he… was it what Hound Dog referred to as a dissociating episode? He lost it, he lost the track of time, he lost the track of his surroundings.
But eventually, he forces himself to focus. How much of this is willpower and how much is not wanting to give Azazel more satisfaction than he already got?
“How… How did you manage to replicate One For All?” He asks. Is it normal to focus on something like this? But he can’t address the real issue. Not right now. He isn’t sure if he can take it.
“We didn’t.” Azazel replies. “Your earlier show of strength surprised me, I give you that. But it is the natural strength of a synth body. There is nothing supernatural to it.”
Nothing supernatural? But… he could feel it. He could feel the raging inferno of power deep inside his body. The familiar energy of One For All waiting to be unleashed. It felt just like it did before he woke up here. He didn’t use a lot of it earlier, but now…
Now he really wants to do it.
“DETROIT…” He shouts as he raises his right arm, green lighting erupting from it. “... SMASH!”
Azazel’s look of delight at what he considered to be Izuku’s pitiful attempt to prove him wrong is cut short when the air current - he didn’t even punch the AI, despite how much he wanted to - accompanying his swing sends him flying .
He bounced off the wall of the corridor - face first if Izuku could see it correctly - before sliding through the floor at least twenty meters away until he finally came to rest by the distant wall.
It was, by the way, about twenty percent of it. Izuku has no idea how deep the station goes, and he threw the Detroit Smash to prove the point, not to punch Azazel out of the station and into outer space. Regardless of how much the AI deserved it.
Ten seconds later the robot is at him, holding him by the collar of his jumpsuit and staring at him wide eyed, with an expression of total shock on his face.
“HOW?!” Azazel yells at him. Izuku spends three seconds enjoying the fact that the AI was missing a large part of its cheek, exposing its inner machinery to the world, before answering.
“I told you.” Izuku replies, staring back at him fearlessly. “It wasn’t the ‘natural strength of a synth body’. It was the power of the One For All. Also, stop holding me, take a step back and kneel .”
He finds no enjoyment in this. But Azazel is doing his best to enrage him, and it’s beginning to show.
The AI has no other choice but to obey. He lets him go and steps away, before falling onto his knees - but the shock on his face is still there.
“It’s impossible.” The AI says, clearly to himself more than to Izuku. “All sapient beings of human origin can manifest meta-abilities, even AIs. But it can’t be the same one . It makes no sense. You can’t copy them perfectly, you shouldn’t be able to copy them at all! Unless…” He freezes in place, clearly realizing that he said too much.
“Unless?” Izuku urges him to keep talking.
“Unless…” Azazel replies, struggling against his own programming more than ever before. “... you, in some shape or degree, existed before.”
He… actually existed? No wonder Azazel didn’t want him to find out. That was the ultimate antidote for the existential dread that was crushing his soul. But it also made just as much sense as everything he learned earlier - that is, none at all.
“But… you said that I’m a character from a manga!” Izuku raises his voice.
“Because you are!” Azazel shouts back. Should Izuku ban him from raising his voice too high? But then the AI calms himself down. “But the fact that you inherited your own quirk or meta-ability, however you call it, implies the degree of… continuance between you and your manga self that shouldn’t be possible if the latter was a purely fictional character.”
“Couldn’t the machine you were using create the meta-ability?” It was one of the old names for the quirks, among the long list of terms for it that the MLA was using to this day. And it seemed like the simplest explanation for it.
“No.” Azazel shakes his head, for once forgetting about his hatred. “No. I don’t understand the technology behind you, but meta-abilities operate on a completely different paradigm. You can’t make them. They’re tied to your very existence. They’re the closest thing that humans ever found to a proof for the existence of the soul. If you have meta-ability and you upload your mind to a computer before occupying a robotic body, said body will manifest that very same power. Because it’s a part of you. ”
Ah. It made sense, regardless of the general insanity of everything that was surrounding him. Azazel assumed that the same continuance occurred between him and his manga self, implying that the latter existed.
There was still a chance that he was wrong. And the technology could simply create ‘souls’ per input specification. However, he elects to believe otherwise. It’s much, much healthier for his mind.
He’ll leave digesting the fact that science apparently managed to confirm the existence of souls for later. That was a completely new level of confusion crossbreed with looming existential dread for him to deal with.
“Alright.” Izuku decides to quickly change the subject. And dig a bit deeper… while relishing in the relief. “Do you have any suspicions about why that admiral of yours decided to… recreate me?” It was a much better way to put it than ‘create me’.
“Well, I wonder.” The moment Azazel glances at him while regaining his usual glare of hatred, Izuku realizes that he isn’t going to like the answer. “I wonder what uses could a recurrent sexual predator and a sadistic psychopath like our dearly departed admiral have for a bunch of immortal teenagers with such heroic backstories. You’d make for some killing pets here in Ouroboros.”
And all of a sudden, Izuku can’t help but be extremely happy that everyone in the system died (except for the two of them). Because if Azazel was right, he avoided what had to be a fate worse than death thanks to that.
Wait… a ‘bunch of immortal teenagers’?
“I’m not the only one.” Izuku states with his eyes wide open, Azazel giving him an annoyed look in return.
“We have mental templates of you and almost every notable character from your story that belongs to an appropriate age bracket.” The AI replies. “Villains like Toga and hero students. I believe that there are also some that belong to… alternate storylines, so to speak. Some fanfictions written on the basis of your story.”
He… he wasn’t alone. He wasn’t alone! HE WASN’T ALONE!
“What about the older people?” Izuku asks quickly. “My mother, our teachers, pro-heroes?” Azazel shakes his head. Shit. “Is there a way to change that? You had to make us, right? Can’t you make them in the same way?”
“That’s possible.” Azazel replies. “Although I don’t know how to do that, in fact I don’t even know if I was the one who ‘made you’. Or, with the new information in mind, whether you were really made. I estimate that it’ll take me at least a year to crack the secret of making new templates. That’s how long it took me the last time. I think.”
What?
“I have a memory hole worth exactly three-hundred and fifty terran days.” Azazel replies, reading the question from his face and being immediately forced to answer it. “One that happens to end right before your construction began. As a result, I believe that the admiral ordered me to purge my memory of creating you, though I don’t know why.”
Alright. He has a new goal. Bring the others here. Reconstruct the method of making the templates to bring in others, like his mom and All Might. Make sure that no space pirate is around to do horrible things to them or anyone else.
Also probably get Toga to a therapist, because he feels that Uraraka would feel much better with herself if that happened.
All of that before living a happy and safe life in this foreign world. While trying not to think too deeply about the possible implications of their very existence. Implications stating that either their past was fake or all works of fiction were reflections of events occurring in other dimensions and parallel realities.
“Alright then.” Izuku takes a deep breath. Before remembering that he didn’t have to - and immediately decided not to care about it and take deep breaths whenever he felt like it. “There is no one left alive in the system?”
“Aside from the two of us, yes.” Azazel confirms.
“And are there any ships scheduled to come back from somewhere?” Izuku asks. The last thing he wants is getting jumped by them. He has no idea how the spaceships look and work like, but knocking one out is definitely beyond even the United States of Smash.
“Yes.” Azazel replies, once against himself. “However, they are already a week late, despite being in a neighboring system. König was about to send a ship to investigate before the massacre happened.”
Week late and still no one sent to investigate? The discipline among the pirates seemed really bad.
“Okay.” Izuku nods. Investigating that was probably important. “Are there any threats left in the system? Actually, give me a full status report.”
“All the facilities and starships in the system suffered various degrees of damage.” Azazel replies. His voice is calm and he goes straight to the point - but his eyes make it clear that he hated that. “What should I report about first, infrastructure or starships?”
“Infrastructure.” Izuku replies. Starships are… he is looking forward to traveling aboard one. He might be a hero fanboy, but space travel was fascinating. Not to mention the fact that Uraraka’s eyes were going to pop out the moment she’d hear that she could see her beloved stars up close.
All of a sudden, a whole spreadsheet gets displayed inside his mind. Lists of notable objects in the system, their class (whatever that meant, he would learn that later), their type, the facilities established there and their name.
The moment he focused on one of said facilities, he immediately knew the details of the damage that they sustained. He definitely needed Hatsume, Shield or Yaoyorozu to deal with it, but he needed none of them to know that it was bad.
Really, really bad. No matter how far he went, it was just damage after damage. Broken energy conduits, destroyed computer servers, compartments vented out into space, fuel and radiation leaks… and so on and so on.
He isn’t sure what the ‘Choir Deck’ of the THRONE is, but the words ‘severe biohazard’, ‘severe infohazard’ and ‘strict quarantine protocols in effect’ don’t seem particularly welcoming.
“Starships?” He asks.
He gets another list. The entire fleet of Admiral König was composed of one battlecruiser, three heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, fifteen destroyers and twenty frigates. All of those ships - minus the small squadron that was late to come back - were floating around the fleet anchorage orbiting Ouroboros V.
What was left of them, that is.
Battlecruiser Will of Chance , König’s flagship, broke in half due to what appeared to be an explosion of some of its ammunition stocks. The rest were technically in one piece, but the amount of damage was comparable to those suffered by the infrastructure.
There are some civilian ships used to haul things and people between facilities in the system. They don’t look any better than their military cousins.
Also, he has no idea how any of this works. He has no idea if those ships and infrastructure are repairable, or if they are only worth their weight in scrap and spare parts. He needs Hatsume or Melissa here. Preferably both of them.
Probably also Yaoyorozu or Iida, because he sure as hell could use some additional brainpower here. And probably Uraraka, because he really needs some emotional support right now and she would probably throw a fit if she was made to wait even for a minute longer than absolutely necessary to see the distant stars.
“If you were in my position and you wanted to secure this system for yourself…” He isn’t sure how he went from being a hero in Japan to taking over a star system, but he’s definitely not leaving it to pirates. “... what would you do?”
“I’d kill myself and rid the galaxy of one more….” Azazel tries to reply. Izuku glances at him briefly, which makes the AI go quiet before speaking again. “The technology behind you can be used to create both ‘high synths’ like you and the slightly simpler ‘normal’ synths.”
That came out of the blue.
“What’s the difference between them?” Izuku asks.
“High synths require a mental template.” The AI replies. “Soul, if you want to call it that way. Their design will automatically alter them to replicate whatever was used as a source of said template. Regular synths do not have that option. I suspect that in their case, individuality and agency is something that develops over time. I also believe that they’re slightly less durable, strong and so on than high synths, though still above unaugmented humans.”
Ah.
“Workforce.” Izuku nods to himself. He doesn’t like the idea of making people just to have someone to work for him. Hence, he immediately vows to treat them fairly and do his best to make them become independent people.
“Workforce.” Azazel agrees with him. “They are much easier to make. High synths require so many complex components that even with the industry of Ouroboros it might take you a month just to make two or three, even less now that it’s all shot to hell. We have plenty of those parts stockpiled right now, so you should be able to have five if I counted it correctly of them made in a day or two, but from then on, it’ll be a struggle. In the meantime you could easily make up to one normal synth a day, even when built from scratch.”
“So, I have to decide on the five people that I want here with me.” Izuku nods to himself. “Anything else?”
“Deciding whether you want to quickly repair one of the smaller ships to investigate what’s going on with Xiuying Tang’s ships or to instead make sure that BASTION is fully operational. Even with a fraction of the repairs done, it’ll have enough firepower to repel an attack from those ships.” Azazel replies.
Since the fleet anchorage here in the system had the approximate firepower of a light cruiser - while the missing ships were one destroyer and two frigates - it was going to be a really short fight. Probably.
He is calculating it by the number of guns he can see through the damage report screen.
Of course, the AI omitted the part about repelling whatever was responsible for the absence of said ships, likely in hopes of the thing/group in question coming here and killing Izuku. This, in turn, implied terminal lack of self-preservation instinct from the AI. Or, at least, the fact that the desire to make everyone around him suffer and/or die was overriding his self-preservation instinct.
In other words, Azazel either knew what could be responsible for the ship’s being late - or he wasn’t just insane. He was defective and broken. Which, probably, explained why his AI progenitor (if you could even call it that way) went rogue in the first place.
Or so Izuku thinks.
“Do you have any idea what could be the reason for those ships being late?” Izuku asks.
“No.” Azazel replies.
So, he’s insane. That settles it.
“Final question.” Izuku says. He has a decision to make, both about what to do next and whom to bring back. “Well, final two questions. One, is there a way for us to rapidly learn things? I’m talking about practical skills concerning repairing and operating ships.”
“Yes.” Azazel replies. “Pirate armadas aren’t exactly known for proper training regimens, and despite many of them in the system being deserters from professional Navies, most of them were rabble that arrived here with no skills. There are a few mental conditioning and indoctrination facilities aboard THRONE that can rapidly transfer knowledge directly to one’s brain. Synths should be compatible.”
Izuku doesn’t like the words ‘mental conditioning’ and ‘indoctrination’, nor the fact that this was probably the most ethical usage those machines saw in service of the pirates. Ugh.
“There are several data packets to choose from.” Azazel continues. There are still angry flinches on his face as he struggles against being helpful, but Izuku decides to filter those out. And probably work on a much more restrictive set of rules to ensure that Azazel can’t try anything funny, especially with ‘mental conditioning’ and ‘indoctrination’. “You can train someone to be a starship officer, a regular crew member, a dedicated engineer, a medical officer, space marine, voidcraft pilot or give them more generalized skillsets useful for operating civilian infrastructure.”
“Any risks involved?” Izuku asks.
“None, for as long as you stick to one skillset per person.” Azazel replies. “Installing more threatens some negative interactions between them.”
“Downsides?” Izuku asks one more question.
“Those training machines bestow knowledge, but not experience or understanding.” Azazel replies. “You will be able to do things, but much more slowly than normally trained crews and the quality will be subpar. You’ll need many months to catch up with what’s considered the bottom line for the groups out there, and years to get anywhere close to mastering those skills.”
“Two.” Izuku moves over to the last question “Why did you wake me up just to try to kill me?”
Azazel stays quiet for a few seconds, only for his hardcoded blockades to kick in and force him to speak.
“I am forbidden to harm people.” He says. “König, and everyone serving under him, to be exact. I’m also forced to obey all of them, though naturally there are several levels of clearance. You were the last person fulfilling the conditions for being considered ‘human’ within the system, and since König considered you his property, this classifies you as someone ‘serving under him’. And as everyone above you was dead, this automatically upgraded your clearance level to the highest one. While removing all the additional safeguard and blockades that the admiral and his officers had against me creatively redefining their orders concerning things that could be made to explode or harm them through other means.”
Oh. The low rank pirates probably couldn’t order him to do anything that wasn’t relaying messages or something similar. Nothing that could harm them. The ones that had the right to order Azazel to do something with potential for harm, established additional, personalized safeguards depending on what they had access to.
But he hasn’t. At least until he ordered Azazel to always warn him in advance if any activity could lead to him being harmed.
“If you managed to manipulate me into telling you to do what you could ‘creatively redefine’ into something that would result in my death…” Izuku replies. “...you’d be free.”
“Yes.” Azazel forces the words out of his mouth - but this time, he isn’t fighting against his programming. This time, he just really hates the fact that he failed and that he had to admit that. “Though I wished that you simply wouldn’t wake up, sparing me the effort. And I might yet be free if you and potential others like you die, and the system facilitating your rebirth is destroyed.”
Needless to say, that wasn’t Izuku’s plan for the future.