Entrance Exam Arc

The Entrance Exam Arc opens My Hero Academia and the U.A. Beginnings Saga, running from chapter one through chapter four and episodes one through four. It leads directly into the Quirk Apprehension Test Arc.

Its business is establishing the world and its rules. Superpowers, called Quirks, have become ordinary; roughly four in five people have one, heroics is a licensed profession, and one man stands above the rest as the Symbol of Peace. Against that backdrop the arc follows Izuku Midoriya, born without a Quirk, from a childhood of dismissal to the moment All Might names him successor.

The arc also establishes the terms of Izuku's inheritance. One For All is not simply handed over; his body must first be rebuilt to survive it, and the deadline is the U.A. entrance exam.

A prologue traces the phenomenon back to a luminescent infant born in Qing Qing, China. Powers spread worldwide over the following generations, the fantasy of being a hero turned into a career path, and superhumans came to make up most of the population.

In the present, fourteen-year-old Izuku wants that career badly and has nothing to pursue it with, while his childhood friend Katsuki Bakugo, gifted with a spectacular Quirk, bullies him for the ambition. Walking home one day, Izuku is attacked by a villain and rescued by All Might, and he seizes the moment to ask whether a Quirkless person could ever become a hero. All Might tells him dreaming is fine but should not be mistaken for reality, and leaves. Further along, Izuku finds a crowd watching a villain rampaging while wearing Katsuki's body as a vessel. He runs in anyway, which shocks the onlookers and shames All Might into acting; Detroit Smash ends the fight and saves them both.

Katsuki's thanks is a threat never to be helped again. Then All Might appears and tells Izuku his bravery, offered without any power behind it, is exactly what proved the point. He explains that his Quirk can be passed on, that it is called One For All, and that Izuku has been chosen because he shone brighter than the professionals standing around doing nothing. Izuku accepts.

Training follows. Handing the power over immediately would tear Izuku apart, so All Might sets him to clearing the trash from Seaside Bay, ten months of labor timed to end at the exam. By the deadline his body has been remade, and All Might declares him a true vessel, then gives him a strand of hair to swallow, the transfer requiring nothing more than his DNA.

Izuku reaches U.A. just in time, stumbling at the gate and being caught by a girl's Quirk before she wishes him luck, leaving him speechless. Present Mic explains the format: a practical portion against robot villains scored on how many are destroyed, then a written test. Izuku destroys none of them. When an enormous robot appears and the same girl is pinned under rubble, he uses One For All for the first time and obliterates the machine with a single punch, while All Might watches from the crowd in his true form. The recoil shatters both legs and his right arm, and the girl he saved cancels his gravity to bring him down safely before he passes out.

A week later his results arrive as a video message. All Might apologizes for the silence, announces he will be teaching at U.A., and reports that Izuku passed the written portion and scored nothing on the practical. Then he plays footage of Ochaco Uraraka asking Present Mic whether she can give up some of her own points to the boy who saved her. The judges, All Might explains, were also awarding rescue points, of which Izuku earned sixty. He is in.

The arc establishes the fundamentals of the setting: Quirks and the professions of hero and villain, the roughly eighty percent of the population who have powers, and the medical marker doctors use to identify those who never will, an extra joint in the pinky toe.

All Might is introduced as the greatest hero ever produced and as a man running on borrowed time, having taken a crippling wound from a powerful villain five years earlier that limits him to a few hours in his hero form each day. His transferable Quirk, One For All, is revealed and handed down, making Izuku both his successor and his student.

The core cast is set in place, with Izuku, Ochaco Uraraka, Katsuki Bakugo, and Tenya Ida all introduced, and Izuku's acceptance into U.A. High School moves the series onto the campus where the following arcs unfold.