.....
The first day of summer holidays flew by quickly, like droplets of condensation running down the outside of a cold glass on a warm day. The outside air was hot and muggy, and there was an air of purposelessness hanging over everything. The roads vibrated with a hum of wild students, their shouts and laughter echoing and rebounding off the road in all directions, but Fatiba was immune to it. She took pains to keep her face and voice blank—showing nothing on her face and nothing in her voice—but she knew she didn't have many fans or supporters here. Her real friends, the people who actually knew the idiosyncrasies of her personality and the silences that so often preceded her thoughts, were all back in the UK, far from her. Japan, on the other hand, felt irresistibly polite, politely reserved, immaculately clean… but ultimately very isolating for her.
So when Amaya Wagakure, who was unapologetically goth in looks, very mouthy in attitude, and completely ridiculous in actions, sat right across from her at the table, Fatiba didn't cut her down. I mean, one takes what one can get, even when said one had bright red, bold pitch-black lipstick and spoke in a way that indicated her ideas had been heavily impacted by a great deal of Tumblr posts from 2012.
However, beyond the initial environment, the discussions really fell into place. Somewhere lost in the clouds of steam billowing from the sticky melted cheese and the crinkled greasy paper plates that contained their snacks, they quite spontaneously fell upon a mutual passion and common ground: Warhammer 40K. This complex world represents the grimdark future of humanity, where eternal war is waged on under the rule of god-emperors with chain swords and riddled with heresy. In that instant, both of their eyes lit up with enthusiasm, like addicts finding another soul who understood the exhilarating high that they both hungered for.
"Alright, but I really need you to listen to me," Amaya commanded, her fingers tracing the crust as if it were an ancient relic of enormous significance. "Magnus is not to blame for what he did here. If you were brought up as a psychic god-geek nurtured by actual wolves who howl at the planets and stars, you would have most certainly reached your breaking point as well."
Fatiba did laugh—a real one, this time, at least. "You must be mad. That man has utterly destroyed all we once had. All of it! The Council of Nicaea was a warning to all of us, and he read it as if it was an agenda of things to be done."
"And yet," smiled Amaya, ripping the pizza in half, "he's still the most fabulous Primarch." "The others are simply war crimes with abs."
Fatiba took a pull of her soda to hide the grin spreading across her cheek.
Whatever Amaya was—loud, dramatic, intrusive—she was here. She was alive. And for now, she was enough.
Laughter caught in mid-gasp. Amaya's black-manicured hands froze above her glass of soda. Her eyes didn't move at first, but her stance shifted—something feral, something wounded.
Please, don't turn yet," she said to him, her tone falling an octave in pitch, emitting a cold and serene presence that sliced through the balmy summer air with an edge.
Fatiba's eyes blinked. "Why?
"Just—don't. They're out there."
Fatiba remained stationary, but turned the other way.
Across the street, a little to the left of the window, which was smeared with a wealth of fingerprints and filled with the drifting and enticing aroma of oregano, stood a group of boys—although it should be noted that we should be more precise, that they were at the age just past childhood—huddled together tightly, appearing to be a group of leeches gathered around a strong telephone pole. One of the boys waved vigorously a brightly colored poster, holding something that immediately caught the eye and demanded attention. Another boy rolled glue carefully with a dead-eyed skill, a look that appeared as if he had done this task time and time again before, and with a certain amount of practiced facility. Amidst all this activity and commotion, Fatiba was able to catch a passing view of the image that was displayed on the poster being waved aloft.
Shotaro.
His face on the poster had been butchered into obscurity—his silver hair scribbled out in layers of permanent marker, his once-crimson eyes violently overwritten with thick red Xs that screamed annihilation. Not censorship. Execution. And beneath the desecrated image, scrawled in jagged, trembling letters like a curse carved into stone:
WILL DIE.
Beside it, the flag of the Red-Eyed Ronins hung like a wounded beast—torn, graffitied, and urinated on in ink. Gang markings. Territory markers. A message wrapped in teenage rage and something else, something old. This was not a rebellion. It was recruitment.
"Rival set," Amaya muttered furiously under her breath, rising with a strength that reminded her of a crashing wave. The chair she occupied creaked ominously as it shifted back, and her shadow dramatically sliced across the floor in a movement that reminded her of the sudden drop of a guillotine. Although her eyes were still fixed on the poster in front of her, the tone of her voice had already shifted radically—no longer carefree or full of humor, but serious and heavy. "That's not merely an act of defiance. That is, without a doubt, a carefully laid trap."
Fatiba, who sat, looked at the typed words in front of her. Her voice was delivered softly with an undertone of puzzlement as she remarked, "What would make them want something for a teenager something like this?"
"Because this is how this place is," Amaya said, moving closer to the window. Her image distorted and twisted in the glass, a spectral figure with black lips glaring out at the devastated terrain. "This island is decaying and tainted from the inside out. There is an underground—I'm not using metaphor here, literal tunnels and rooms. There is a whole city underneath the city we're standing on top of. And the thing that's creepy is that nobody has any clue where the doors or entrances are."
She talked rapidly now, words spilling over one another as if every elapsed second was a second lost that let the rot eat deeper. "The police cannot in fact cut down on the crime issue because they are not dealing with the cause of the problem, not the disease itself. They are dealing with the symptoms that it produces. The underworld is not merely replete with crime; it is parasitic in character. We have our old money that keeps this system going, our corrupt officials who turn a blind eye, our child traffickers who brazenly distribute business cards, and our ganglords who exchange courteous handshakes with mayors."
She tapped the glass. Her voice dropped.
"Those kids? They are not merely exhibiting a lack of intelligence. They are deliberately throwing out a line. If they prod and annoy Shotaro with sufficient intensity, it is quite possible that someone of greater stature will take notice. Someone who possesses more experience. A lieutenant. Perhaps even a recruiter. And then, that's when the real trouble begins." She pivoted her gaze towards Fatiba. "If a gang manages to capture the attention of an individual from the Underground, they get drawn in. And once you find yourself in that world…"
She did not finish her work.
Because some truths did not require the entire sentence. Implication was sufficient.
Outside on the busy street, the boys burst out laughing as one of them nonchalantly lit up a cigarette, congregating under the defaced poster that dangled precariously. One of the boys, excited to immortalize the moment, thought of taking a selfie with his face spread wide into a smile. Another boy, meanwhile, walked playfully to the bottom of the flagpole and kicked it with excitement, imitating a dog claiming a tree with confidence.
Fatiba could feel it deep within her belly. The enormous weight that was carried behind the ink on paper. This particular war was not fought with the traditional weapons of bombs or by the casting of votes, but rather it was a war that was fought in symbols and the emotional scars that they left. It was a war that you were often completely unaware that you were a part of until that moment when someone would suddenly knock on your door and roughly twisted your kneecaps off, leaving you in shock.
Also, there was another individual who provided you with his business card.
.....
The tape tore with a sharp, harsh tear that resonated off the concrete surface, sounding a bit like the report of a starter pistol firing. The boys, half-punk attitude and half-poser posturing, pasted the defaced poster on the public bulletin board with boisterous glee as though they were advertising their kill for everyone to see. The face of Shotaro, brutally marred in black ink, scowled out with empty, hollow eyes through two serrated, threatening red Xs that marred his picture. Below this gruesome representation, in heavy, thick letters resembling blood, the threatening message read: WILL DIE.
It was actually a cleverly contrived lure, and astonishingly, it functioned well as planned.
The poster had not just stuck to the wall—it had wedged itself in the city's lungs. In seconds, strangers slowed. Then stopped. Then gathered. Puzzled murmurs drifted like the fog. Commuters. Students. Vendors. Janitors. A woman with a baby. A man in a delivery jacket. The whole gamut of daily life had come to a stop, drawn into the widening circle of tension like moths circling a fire that might spread to a riot.
"Is this real?"
"Who would do such a thing?"
"Are they serious here?"
The crowd bloomed in size and heat. Some neutral. Some are blinking at the message, unsure of its meaning. And some—some—stood still with a different kind of silence. A heavier kind. The kind that came from memory. From bruises that were once bandaged by strangers with crimson eyes.
"Hey," a man grumbled to himself, pointing to the defaced Ronin flag that had been placed alongside the poster. "That sure isn't right at all…"
Another person joined the conversation with a worthwhile observation. "You see, that Shotaro boy… He's actually the very reason why my daughter can now ride the train home alone safely."
"My niece too," another one cried, fists clenching. "He arrested the jerk who was harassing her. Cops didn't do anything. But he did."
One of the boys in the gang let out a loud and boisterous laugh, being particularly brazen at the time, as he was energized by the commotion that surrounded them. "Oh really? Is that so? It appears that your daughters are alive thanks to a delinquent who has a strong savior complex. I can only imagine how pleasant that must be."
That was the spark.
"You little shits," a grey-haired woman spat, her groceries trembling in her hands as she spat out the words. "You have no conception of the trouble that boy has landed himself in. He is not some meaningless punk. He is the reason that we are able to sleep soundly at night without having to double-lock the door!"
The energy shifted. This was not a crowd anymore. This was a storm front. The temperature dropped, but the air vibrated. Shotaro Mugyiwara was no politician. No celebrity. No deity. But to the average Joes of this city—he mattered. He was fists when justice was silent. Fear where law was quiet. A walking 'last resort' who never needed applause to show up.
Increasingly, voices began to add themselves to the rising tide of sentiment and feeling which surrounded them. In this charged atmosphere, a schoolgirl in a rumpled uniform nervously but resolutely stepped forward—her demeanor was craven, but she was far from frightened—and carefully removed the defaced poster from the wall with hands which did not so much as quiver by a fraction. In the heat of this confrontation, one of the boys lunged forward suddenly, full of bluster but lacking in any substance or profundity by which to back it up. His hand reached toward her shoulder—
Only to be suddenly slammed back, knocked off-balance, by the shopkeeper whose face still bore the faint but unmistakable trace of a fire that had long since been lit outside his door.
"He stopped my place from burning down," the man said, voice gravel and heat. "I owe him a lot more than a slap."
A second voice—hoarser, older—interrupted. "My Wife is a nurse and now she no longer have to be afraid when running to the hospital for late night shifts."
A third: "He chased a bastard out of the bathroom who tried to corner my kid."
Every single voice became a biting strike. Not a strike of physical fists crashing, but a severe impact of memory. This was the kind of memory that made spines stand on end and jaws clench in reaction. It was the kind of memory that you didn't write down or document on any pages, but carried silently, much like the scars that rest just below the skin.
The boys' gang moved restlessly. Their strut snapped like dried paint. One stepped back. Another attempted to look into the eyes of the crowd—and couldn't. They weren't being yelled at. They were being remembered at. By a hundred hushed anecdotes of potential tragedy.
Then--snap.
A thick, muscular arm, like steel that had been swaddled with gentle care in soft cloth, encircled the neck of one of the boys in a carefree but unmistakably unbreakable hold. The pressure wasn't yet applied. Not yet. But it was easy to see that it didn't need to be.
"Hello there, poster man," a voice spoke softly in direct proximity to his ear, its tone as warm and hospitable as a summer wind, but containing a latent threat that was no less lethal.
The crowd turned as a whole.
".....Mazino Hiroki!!"
The color just faded from the face of everyone who was there. Even the people who were pro the act had to take a step back involuntarily, as if responding to an invisible force. This is because whenever that specific name was mentioned, it meant more than a moment of identification—it was a foreboding warning to everyone within earshot.
"In the flesh," Hiroki announced, his face cracking into a huge, toothy grin that cut his face in half like a smile, sunlight cutting through the air and glinting off his golden hair as if it too was aware that it was on someone who was most certainly a quicker man. He pushed his hair back off his forehead in a lazy, effortless motion, one that indicated the fact that he'd done this a thousand times before—his muscles rippling beneath the white plain tee, creating the impression that he wasn't so much carrying groceries as dragging a heavy threat of violence wrapped up in the paper bags.
"I went out here to just purchase some eggs," he muttered to himself, swinging the bag back and forth like a pendulum. "You know, for some fried rice?"
Then his gaze finally fell on a particular spot.
The vandalized poster fluttered in the breeze—Shotaro's face desecrated, his crimson eyes buried under X's thick and hateful. Mocking. Threatening. Hiroki stopped. The playfulness drained from his face like color from a corpse.
The shopping bag tore and fell with a loud thud onto the pavement.
"Well… well… well."
The words that were said were not even loud. They did not need to be loud in order to be effective. Each one dropped softly, but it landed with the impact of a countdown bomb ticking its way down to its inevitable detonation.
The people behind him were quiet. But not motionless. They leaned forward, breath bated, as if gravity itself warped toward this moment. They did not need to be rallied. Hiroki was the rally.
Observe, Shotaro Mugyiwara remained completely unaffected when others preferred to insult and slander him. He strode past the different posters plastered on the walls with his hands loosely bunched up in his pockets and his mind lost in a daydream world. He merely shrugged off the insults thrown at him like they were just pesky flies fluttering in the air. He allowed the world to spit its venom out as freely as it could—he had much larger demons to battle and wrestle with. There were mighty gods to confront and defy, as well as personal fears that he had to hold and reconcile with. He did not opt to battle back or engage in a fight against words.
But Hiroki?
Hiroki looked after them.
Because Hiroki remembered.
He recalled clearly the moment when he had the feeling of being constructed the same way as a refrigerator, filled to the brim with the crushing weight of shame. He recalled that he used to sweat grease, not from grueling training sessions, but from having no control over constant eating. He could still hear the boys' laughter, whose names have remained chiseled in his mind and whose teeth he knocked out years after in a rage. What actually remained in his mind, however, was not merely the bullying that he had undergone—but the firm and affectionate hand that extended through all that decay and despair to lift him up and offer him hope.
Shotaro.
Not with sympathy. Not with speeches. With fists.
Shotaro pounded the weakness out of him, bone by bone, until there was only strength left. Made him vomit excuses like bile and breathe discipline like air. Taught him mantra not as a mystic monk, but as an exhausted god who grew weary of expecting miracles and opted for violence instead. Shotaro did not see a fat, broken shambles—he saw a sword stuck in muck. And he dug.
So Hiroki did not care about what a bunch of punks marked on a wall. Because Shotaro was not only the hero of the streets. He was his resurrection.
And no one gets to spit on the name of the man who pulled you from the grave and handed you a spine.
Hiroki cracked his neck. The shopping bag dangled at his hip like a pendulum of divine judgment.
"How many times," he groaned, "ughh, how many times do I have to say this to you dipshits?"
He dragged the child violently by the shirt collar with a firm grasp. The boy struggled and wiggled about in wild abandon, as a fish might struggle to free itself from its inescapable doom.
Go. HOME," snarled Hiroki. "Open. A book.".
He spun on his heel, throwing up his arms over his head in the style of a caricature of an educator earnestly sermonizing to the wide space above.
"Work diligently at your studies. Achieve excellent marks. Complete your schooling and graduate successfully. Give your service to your nation! buy your mom an airfryer!"
Then—SLAP.
A clean one. Wrist loose, palm stiff, the kind that slaps ego instead of skin.
"But noooo," Hiroki growled.
SLAP.
"We wanna be gang."
SLAP.
"We want to be Al Pacino."
SLAP.
"We are seeking and yearning for attention."
SLAP.
"We are Sopranos."
SLAP.
"We discover that we cannot keep bottled up the wiggling worms that are our own thoughts, so we try to declare war on a person just for another person to adopt us". The last slap rung out down the block like the final words of a sermon. The boy remained motionless now. Not in pain. But in shame. Hiroki stepped in closer, his voice low and genuine.