Chapter Two

Izuku walks out of his lab. He shoves the jar into his backpack to prevent dropping it. Hanging up his bag on the hook by the door, Izuku mentally apologizes to Kachan.

I can't enter this workshop and leave without having tinkered with something.

Walking over to a small cubby hidden under his official "desk", he reaches down and pulls out his favorite invention ever.

In the cubie sits a small mechanic dragon. It was about the size of a large house cat, and had sturdy golden plaiting, (It was made of Chromium, Izuku had just bought some paint.) and had 3 talons on the front legs and 4 talons on the back legs.

The head had more stacked up metal plating on the muzzle and little horns that stuck out backward. Its eyes were blank currently because it was turned off, but when activated they glowed a beautiful royal blue, and the glow also showed up between the platings.

The wings were made of a homemade material that Izuku had spent hours for a week weaving strands of Chromium into. They had been dyed the same blue, but Izuku had enhanced the material by (somehow) injecting one of his experiments from the lab into it. The injection was supposed to loosen up the fabric without it losing its sturdiness, but Izuku ended up with a fabric that could catch fire on command and had glowing blue veins weaving across it.

The hardest feat of this project was the heart. Izuku would give anything a heart and have complete control over it. But Izuku wanted the dragon to be able to make its own decisions, to be able to move and think on its own accord.

The first step of that had been programming an unhackable AI that Izuku could put into the dragons - erm - brain, for lack of a better word. It took him nearly a day but Izuku had successfully programmed an AI that had human emotion and could understand words, but he couldn't make it talk.

Turns out making vocal cords wasn't worth the time. The dragon chirped at Izuku. Like a bird.

…

Izuku still didn't know how to feel about that.

The hardest part had been genetically engineering one of Izuku's hearts to give the dragon freedom of its own. Izuku had ended up injecting the heart with little sensors that blocked Izuku's brain waves from connecting to the heart, and in turn, connected it to the AI chip in the dragon's head.

The entire project, from making the blueprints to buying the materials to putting it all together and then the programming and making the injections and testing everything-

The whole process took nearly 2 years.

… Izuku named the Dragon Majesty.

Izuku grabbed the container with the Majesty's heart and shoved both the container and the Majesty into his bag.

. . .

Izuku walked home in the same uncomfortable silence as before. To keep himself occupied, Izuku ran the equation in his head that he'd been working on to put the dragon's AI into his phone.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the very heavy metal cover to the sewer slams open, and suddenly Izuku can't breath.

Slime, gross disgusting sludge was entering his lungs and holding his arms still and he can't grab it because its liquid and he just claws through it harmlessly and Izuku read somewhere that suffocation can lead to brain damage and Izuku was smart enough to get out of this but it was liquid and he couldn't grab it and he can't breath-

Izuku choked and struggled and tried to grab something and faintly he could hear the sludge talking to him but he couldn't hear it because the sludge was everywhere and yet there was nothing there-

Nothing there. There were no organs, no lungs, just sludge. And Izuku can't sense a heartbeat. Which means he can give it one.

Izuku closes his eyes to concentrate. He only has so much longer he can go without air so he has to get out of this and fast.

He dropped his bag sometime during the struggle, which means he doesn't have any access to already formed hearts, but all that means is Izukus going to have to make one from scratch.

When Izuku has time, he normally would focus on bringing his white blood cells in a clump in the center of his hand to form a real beating heart. But right now he doesn't have any time to focus, and he pulls on all the blood cells he can get, red or white. It could harm him later, using real blood cells like that could put him in the same state as someone that was bleeding out.

But frankly, Izuku wasn't going to survive as it was anyways.

In an instant, Izuku can feel the squishy flesh of the heart in his hand, and he immediately lets it go and it gets absorbed by the sludge monster. It takes a second but Izuku can feel the snap of connection between the sludge monster and heart and the cells in Izuku's brain.

The exact moment that the heart connects itself to whatever heartless object (Or in this case person, I guess) is always a strange thing to experience. The heart is suddenly connected to everything that wasn't there before and it attaches itself to the cells in Izuku's brain and can command the heart and what occupies it just like you do to yourself daily so he can-

STOP

The sludge freezes