The King of Heroes: Null/Virtue

Affinity

Izuku was conscious of five other people in the room. He wasn't sure how he could sense them. He didn't have enough muscle strength to look around as a newborn, and his eyesight and hearing were still adjusting, but he knew that he and his mother were not alone.

After an embarrassingly long amount of time, at least for Izuku, his mother managed to quell the crying. The gentle rocking and the heat of the blanket nearly lulled him into slumber, but he forced himself to stay awake.

It was a bad habit, but he had a tendency to sleep only a few hours. His paranoia was not so easily dispelled, giving him quite the insomnia. If only his mother had been in the room, he would have allowed sleep to take him into its embrace.

What seemed like gibberish flowed from the mouths of both his mother and the other five. Izuku couldn't understand it, so he merely did his best to examine his surroundings.

The ceiling above him was like obsidian, jet-black and glossy, but also jagged. It looked like a natural formation rather than a structure. Even still, it felt comfortable and safe. The walls were lined with purple flames. Hovering without a torch or lightbulb, they looked more like Magic than technology. Finally, there was his mother herself.

Of all the experiments Izuku saw in the labs, very few of them resembled humans. Even the successful experiments like #4 or #9 had a sort of uncanny appearance. Izuku, in his past life, had slitted eyes, longer fingers, rough cracked skin that looked like scales, and more. He could just barely pass for a civilian when bundled up in clothing, but it was clear there was something wrong with him, and he was one of the lucky ones. Most test tubes in the lab contained such misshapen forms that they'd never be able to live beyond their capsules. That was part of the reason Izuku would secretly terminate them as a mercy. The scientists expected them to die, so they never caught on to Izuku's small kindness.

But when it came to his mother, Izuku was stunned by the flawless integration of human and reptilian DNA. Her skin was smooth, and the scales on her body served to accentuate her features, rather than appear monstrous. Her hair was thick and lucious. In his previous life, Izuku's hair was falling out in clumps. Not to mention, she apparently had the capacity to reproduce. Most of the experiments in the lab were sterile.

"Whoever created her must be a genius..." Izuku thought to himself, still in somewhat of a stupor from birth. If you stuck his old body next to his mother's, it would be like putting a child's crayon scribblings next to the Mona Lisa.

But as his mind began to clear, Izuku realized that there was more to her than he originally thought. He could see faint bony tips peeking out from behind her, and she was sitting on the bed strangely, as if there was something near her tailbone. Izuku only put it together when everyone stopped talking, and his mother gingerly adjusted him in her arms.

Turning him towards the five other people in the room, Izuku realized that he was not, in fact, in a world of genetic experiments.

All five of the "people" were decorated with scales. Four of the five backs were adorned with leather wings, and tails, some thick, some thin, whipped around behind them. These weren't experiments, they were a species.

Izuku very rarely got the time or freedom to enjoy media in his past life, but his predecessor, a woman codenamed Rampage, was really into manga and comic books. Before she passed away from her mismatched genetics, she would tell Izuku all about the fantasy worlds that writers created. Heroes, villains, demon lords, and the many species in-between.

He hadn't been reborn into a world like his own, that much was clear.

There were three women, and two men, if genders were even the same in this world. As they spoke, their names came through clearly to Izuku, even though the rest of their speech was incomprehensible.