Chapter 1 – The Birth of the Hydra
The first thing Sozo Midoriya remembered was silence—dense and strange, like sound hadn't been invented yet.
Then came breath, the soft weight of a blanket, and the rhythm of a heart that wasn't quite his own.
He didn't cry. He simply knew.
Something in his mind had survived that shouldn't have. Words. Memories. A fractured awareness that whispered, You died, and this isn't the world you knew.
At first, the thought was too large for a toddler's skull. He didn't have the language for it—only the sense that everything around him was familiar and wrong at the same time. The toys were different shapes. The television in the living room played news about people with fire for hair and wings on their backs. The world was tilted toward the impossible.
And Sozo remembered. Heroes. Quirks. A boy named Deku.
He didn't understand why he was here, or how it was possible, but the facts settled slowly, like sediment in water: he'd been reborn in that world. My Hero Academia.
He was two years old when he stopped denying it.
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Days moved like clouds. He learned to walk, to speak, to laugh when prompted. His parents called him bright. Maybe he was. Inside, his mind raced like an adult's trapped in a child's body.
When other children pointed at heroes flying on TV, Sozo stayed quiet. They were too busy dreaming to realize how dangerous dreaming could be.
He noticed, early, a hum beneath his skin—a low vibration that came when he focused too hard on wanting something. It wasn't a quirk test result or a doctor's diagnosis. It was instinct. A current running through him, waiting.
The first time it happened, he was stacking blocks in the living room. His hand twitched, and one of the blocks shimmered. Just a pulse of light, faint blue, like moonlight under water. Then it was gone.
It left him dizzy, but more awake than ever.
That night, he couldn't sleep. The hum returned, like a heartbeat echoing from somewhere deeper than his body. He shut his eyes and pictured a single word from his old life—creation.
A whisper cut through the dark:
> "To know something truly is to give it form."
He froze. The voice wasn't human, nor divine—it sounded like the world itself had leaned in to speak.
He didn't tell anyone. What could a two-year-old possibly say? Mom, I think physics just spoke to me.
Sozo began to test the whisper. He tried to imagine things he knew completely: a spoon, a marble, a leaf. Nothing happened—only a faint warmth in his hands, then silence.
But every failure taught him something. The world was giving him rules. Understanding wasn't the same as recognition. Knowing how something existed mattered more than what it looked like.
The hum had limits. He could feel that too.
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Weeks blurred into months. Sozo learned to read faster than he should have, hoarding knowledge like oxygen. Biology textbooks, material science, anything his parents left lying around. He couldn't grasp all of it, but he tried.
He wanted to see where comprehension met creation.
When he closed his eyes, diagrams flickered behind his eyelids—muscles, organs, scales, sinew. Images stitched together by a child's imagination and an adult's precision.
He didn't realize it yet, but he was preparing to build his first impossible thing.
---
The night it happened, rain whispered against his window. The world smelled like ozone and something older.
Sozo sat on the floor, a notebook open in front of him. Crayon drawings filled every page—beasts, wings, claws. The culmination of his obsession.
A creature with many heads. Regenerative, adaptive, infinite. The hydra.
He didn't know why that myth called to him. Maybe it was the symbolism—kill one head, two more rise. Rebirth through resistance. A body that refused to die.
Something in him resonated with that idea.
He began to sketch its anatomy. Blood channels, nerve fibers, skeletal density. He didn't understand everything, but he knew enough. Enough to see how the body would work, how the cells might divide, how the magic of it could tether to something real.
He whispered the words without knowing they were a spell.
"Embodiment: grant form to thought."
His hands burned. The air thickened. Every color in the room dulled except the blue glow building between his palms.
Light gathered like molten glass. It twisted, condensed, until a shape took form—a crystal, smooth and pulsating faintly, alive with something vast inside it.
Sozo's breath caught. The hum in his chest exploded outward, meeting the glow and sealing it. The crystal pulsed once, twice, then settled, heavy as fate.
Inside it, shadows moved. Serpentine outlines writhed against the surface.
He stared, trembling. The voice returned, softer now:
> "Creation requires cost. Two chances for each form. Fail, and it cannot be remade."
Two chances. That was his limit. He didn't question how he knew—it was carved into his bones the way a quirk's instinct is born.
The crystal dimmed, as if waiting. He reached out and touched it. The surface was cold, but a heartbeat thrummed beneath it—his heartbeat, mirrored back.
The hydra wasn't a beast. It was a vessel. A concept waiting to be completed.
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Days after, Sozo kept the crystal hidden beneath his bed, wrapped in an old towel. He checked on it every night. Sometimes, it glowed faintly, as though dreaming.
His energy felt different too—more centered, like something in him had aligned. He could hear whispers under the noise of the world now, the faint echo of scales scraping stone, wings rustling in distant darkness.
He understood the danger of discovery. To anyone else, this would look like a quirk awakening. To Sozo, it was more sacred. A secret of existence, too powerful to explain.
When he focused on the crystal, he could sense the hydra's outline more clearly—ten heads, coiled around a single core. Each head carried a different pulse, a different potential. One was fire. Another, ice. Others, elements he couldn't name.
It wasn't just a monster. It was an extension of possibility.
And somehow, he knew: one day, it would become his quirk.
But for now, he could only touch its edges. The power slept, like a predator in deep water.
---
By the time he turned three, Sozo had already built rituals around it.
He would sit cross-legged before the hidden crystal each night, eyes closed, breathing in rhythm with its faint light. The hum in his veins would sync with its pulse, the two frequencies blending until he couldn't tell which belonged to him.
Sometimes, the hydra would stir. The crystal's surface rippled, showing faint reflections of moving heads.
It didn't speak in words, but Sozo could feel its thoughts like temperature changes. Hunger. Curiosity. Loyalty.
He whispered to it, as if to an old friend.
"I made you… so don't eat me, alright?"
The crystal flickered, amused somehow.
Even at three, Sozo knew this was insane. But it was his insanity, and it made him feel less alone in this strange reborn life.
The more time he spent in communion with it, the more natural it felt. His mind sharpened, his dreams vivid and vast—flooded with the memory of wings, of endless skies, of scales that could blot out the sun.
The hydra wasn't content to stay imaginary. It wanted to exist.
And Sozo, for all his rational caution, wanted to let it.
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One night, he dreamed of standing in a sea of stars. The hydra coiled behind him, each head a constellation. When it breathed, galaxies rippled.
He turned to it and said, "You're not supposed to be real."
The creature lowered one of its heads, eyes burning like twin moons.
> "Then stop believing in me."
Sozo woke with tears on his cheeks.
The crystal pulsed bright beneath the bed, responding to his heartbeat.
He didn't touch it this time. He only whispered into the dark,
"I can't. You're already part of me."
And for the first time, the hydra purred.
---
Morning came as if nothing had happened. Sunlight through curtains, birdsong, his mother's soft footsteps in the kitchen.
Sozo smiled faintly. To anyone else, he was just a quiet, clever three-year-old.
But inside, he carried the seed of something divine and dangerous.
The Arc of Embodiment had answered him.
It had chosen creation as its language, and Sozo as its speaker.
And somewhere, deep within that crystal heart, ten sleeping heads dreamed of the day they'd wake.
The day the world would look upon him and call it a quirk.
The day the hydra would rise.
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End of Chapter 1