"It was delicious, Mader," said an energetic young man of about twenty-one.
"Wash the dishes and put them away," replied his mother, who was in her forties.
"Okay!" he said, but as soon as he was out of his mother's sight, he walked to the kitchen, leaving the dishes in the sink.
"Fine, you wash everything for a month, and I'll buy you that game you want so badly." Turning around, he saw a boy of about twelve looking at him with narrowed eyes.
"You're really lazy... But, accept it," the boy sighed, walked to the sink, and began the negotiation.
"You're so lazy, seriously," came the thin voice of a girl entering the kitchen, a young woman who looked only two years older than the young man.
"Shut up, you're not doing it for free anyway," the young man retorted as he left the kitchen, leaving the job to his younger brother.
Leaving the kitchen, I steal a glance into the living room where his mother was watching television. I walk slowly past, trying not to be noticed.
"Are you done yet?" His mother didn't even turn around to see me slip away.
"Uh, yeah, of course, you know I'm fast."
"He's lying, I leave everything to Leo," his older sister's voice came from the kitchen, causing his mother to turn to look at him, but not with a smile.
"Again?"
"Look at him like he's working," his mother could only sigh at his comment.
"Hey, it's not like you have to sigh like that, I'm not a lost cause!" the young man wondered.
"Do you have work tomorrow?"
"Of course, unfortunately I'm still being exploited."
"Then go to sleep already; otherwise you'll be like a zombie."
"Okay!" Until tomorrow... —If I wake up... —As soon as the last sentence came out jokingly, a slipper flew toward him, narrowly dodging it.
—Don't joke about that... Where's the leash? —he said, turning his head around, searching.
—Hey! It's just a joke, don't get so worked up! —Before he could find it, the young man ran off up the stairs.
...
The young man was already fast asleep in his bed, trembling slightly from having gone to sleep without his shirt and having left the window open.
Glug, Glug, Glug
In the silence of the room, a black, viscous mass slowly entered through the window; it paused for a few seconds as if searching for something. Upon finding its target, the mass began to move toward the young man who was fast asleep.
Climbing up the bedpost, the black slime rose until it was on top of the bed. It moved across the young man's body until it reached his wrist, where it began to encircle him as if he were an accessory. Little by little, the mass began to grow.
It stopped encircling only his wrist and began to encircle his entire arm, his torso, his legs, until the young man's entire body was surrounded by the mass. Then, the mass that encircled his entire body began to shrink, as if it were beginning to disintegrate the young man's body until both the young man and the black mass disappeared, leaving the bed empty as the wind blew through the now-empty room.
...
The transition between comfort and hell wasn't marked by blinding lights, benevolent gods, or speeding trucks. It was, simply, a blink of an eye.
For the twenty-one-year-old, the world was an ordinary and predictable place. He remembered the previous night with absolute clarity: the aroma of his mother's homemade stew, the high-pitched voice of his older sister complaining about her own university problems, and the laughter interspersed with the shouts of his younger brother, who had lost yet another game on his console. This was his life. A warm, noisy, and safe ecosystem. He had gone to sleep in his bed, wrapped in blankets, his only concern being to wake up in time for work.
But when he opened his eyes, the white ceiling of his room had vanished.
In its place, a night sky tinged with a strange orange hue by light pollution stared indifferently at him. He felt a sharp pain in his spine; the surface beneath him wasn't his mattress, but the hard, damp wood of a park bench.
The early morning chill seeped through his bare torso, raising goosebumps on his skin. He sat bolt upright, his heart pounding wildly against his ribs. Confusion struck him before panic. He blinked several times, trying to adjust his eyes to the dim light. He was surrounded by cherry trees, streetlights with a yellowish, flickering glow, and a deathly silence broken only by the distant hum of traffic.
"Mom?" His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn't used it in hours.
There was no answer. He stood up, unsteady on his feet, instinctively checking his pockets. Empty. He didn't have his phone, his wallet, or his keys. He was literally wearing only what he had on: worn-out sweatpants.
He started walking, his footsteps echoing heavily on the park's gravel paths. As he stepped onto the main street, reality began to settle in with a terrifying starkness. The signs of closed shops, the traffic signals, the announcements at bus stops… everything was written in kanji and syllabaries that his brain could barely decipher from years of consuming Japanese entertainment.
He was in Japan.
Panic erupted in his chest. How? Why? Was he dreaming? He pinched his arm so hard it left a red mark, but the pain was sharp and real. It wasn't a dream. The icy breeze that cut his face was undeniable. He tried to stop the first person he saw in the early morning: an office worker with a briefcase walking briskly.
"Excuse me! Help, please!" he pleaded in his native language, holding out his hands.
The man stared at him, eyes wide, muttered something quick and incomprehensible in Japanese, clutched his briefcase to his chest, and hurried across the street, fleeing from the disheveled young foreigner.
That was the first rejection. It would be the first of hundreds.
...
The first three days were a blur of despair and denial. The young man wandered aimlessly through clean, orderly streets, trying to find an embassy, a police station where he could communicate, someone who spoke his language. But his mind, clouded by fear and lack of sleep, couldn't form coherent thoughts. Every time he tried to approach a police officer, an irrational fear paralyzed him: he had no identification, he was an undocumented foreigner, what would happen if he were arrested in a country whose legal system he knew nothing about?
Then, hunger appeared.
At first, it was just a dull rumble in his stomach, a discomfort he tried to ignore by drinking water from the public fountains in the parks. But by the fourth day, hunger had transformed into a physical beast that tore at his insides. Weakness gripped his muscles. Walking a couple of blocks felt like climbing a mountain.
He sat in the back alleys of restaurants, closing his eyes as the aroma of ramen, grilled meat, and steaming rice enveloped him. That smell, an invitation to any passerby, was indescribable torture to him. He watched students laughing and sharing snacks in front of convenience stores, spending coins that, to him, meant the difference between life and death.
The humiliation came on the fifth afternoon. His legs trembling, he succumbed to what he had sworn he would never do. He sat on the ground near the entrance of a subway station, lowered his head, and extended a trembling hand toward the tide of pristine shoes passing before him.
He survived thanks to the scraps of other people's compassion. A couple of coins tossed with pity or disdain, enough to buy a meager loaf of discounted bread at the end of the day. He chewed each bite slowly, feeling his dry throat protest, while his eyes filled with tears of helplessness. The young worker, who had once debated his future around a table laden with home-cooked food, now dragged himself through the streets of a foreign city, begging for calories.
...
The nights were worse than the days. When the sun set and the cold took hold of the city, he would take refuge on his park bench, curled up, shivering violently.
It was in the darkness that his mind tormented him mercilessly. Extreme exhaustion plunged him into a half-sleep state plagued by hallucinations. He would close his eyes and swear he heard his older sister scolding him to put on a coat. He felt the weight of his younger brother jumping on his back to wake him up on a Saturday morning. And above all, his mother's voice. Warm, comforting, calling him for dinner.
"Mom... I want to go home. Please, get me out of here..." he sobbed in the solitude of the park, his face buried in his dirty knees. Days passed, and the nights consisted purely of the desperate longing to return to his family. He refused to accept that he had lost them. He convinced his broken mind that if he could hold on for one more day, if he could survive another freezing night, he would wake up in his own bed again.
One rainy afternoon, while seeking shelter under the awning of an old bookstore, his sunken, lifeless eyes fell upon a local tourist map taped to the window.
With his limited knowledge of the characters, he tried to pinpoint where in the vast expanse of Japan he was starving. His dirty, dirt-stained fingers traced the kanji of the region until they reached the name of the main municipality. He managed to read the symbols slowly, whispering the pronunciation under his breath.
Kuoh.
He read the name once. He read it twice. He discovered that the small city consuming him was called Kuoh.
But nothing clicked in his brain. His mind, overwhelmed by the persistent fever, the lack of protein, and the sharp pain of malnutrition, had no room to connect that name with a Japanese anime series he had watched in a past life, but it was simply the damned piece of land where he was slowly dying of starvation and neglect. It was the prison that kept him away from his mother and siblings.
There was no magic in his thoughts, no Sacred Gears, no noble clans on his horizon. There was only the hard asphalt, the rumbling of his own empty stomach, and the distant echo of a family he begged, every night, to come and rescue him.
It was the tenth night. The sky threatened torrential rain. He was under his bridge, trying to arrange his cardboard boxes, when he sensed a presence. It wasn't the police, nor another homeless person.
A middle-aged man, wearing a worn work jacket and smelling of tobacco and coffee, was watching him from a distance. He had been watching him for days. The man said nothing at first; he simply left a bag with a couple of cream buns and a hot coffee on a nearby wall and walked away.
The next day, the man returned. This time, he came closer.
"You have the eyes of someone who doesn't belong on the streets," the man said in his native language, speaking fluently, leaving the young man stunned for a few seconds. He paused, almost as if he knew the young man needed time to process the words.
He looked up, confused. The man pointed to a small shop in the distance, a neighborhood convenience store called "Saturn."
"I need someone who isn't afraid to clean the floor at four in the morning and organize the storeroom. I can't pay much, but I have a back room with a futon and some food that's about to expire but is still good."
The young man was speechless. The offer was so sudden, so human, that he felt his legs give way. He hadn't known he was in a world of demons, angels, and gods. He hadn't known that this small town would be the epicenter of a future apocalypse. At that moment, he saw only an outstretched hand.
He stood up, bowing so deeply that his forehead almost touched the damp ground.
"I accept," he replied with a smile that, despite the grime and exhaustion, shone with a terrifying determination. "I'll work harder than anyone. I swear."
In his mind, a new idea took shape. If he couldn't go home now, he would build a life here. He would succeed. He would become so important, so powerful, or so rich that when he finally found his way back, his family wouldn't see a victim, but a man who had conquered the world that had tried to destroy him.
That night, for the first time in ten days, he didn't sleep under the bridge. He slept on a thin futon in the back of the Saturn Minimarket, surrounded by the aroma of coffee and laundry detergent.
The survival plan was over. The conquest plan had just begun.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Well, it was about time I picked this fanfic back up. As I said before, I thought about abandoning it or deleting it, but seeing that there are still people who have it in their libraries, I started writing it again. Currently, thanks to Gemini, I have the fanfic up to Diodora's attack at least... That's right, I have a complete season and several chapters, making a total of approximately 37 chapters; of course, it's not just copy and paste, I need to change some dialogue and edit, since the AI isn't perfect. With that said, see you in the next chapter.
∧,,,∧ ~ ┏━━━━━━━━━┓
( ̳• · • ̳) ~ ♡ Thanks for reading ♡
/ づ ~ ┗━━━━━━━━━┛