Greetings, readers:
Thank you for reading this fan-made work...
I hope you enjoyed the chapter. I, Wissumi Wizaki, wish you a happy reading.
The Wandering Souls
Nobody is born a legend. Some simply die. There are those who die only so that the echo of what they did refuses to fade.
Luciano Gravina came into the world in an Italy nobody romanticizes. Crime there carried none of the romantic sheen found in contemporary stories.
Modern crime lacked the golden patina of ancient chronicles — there were no asphalt knights, no villains with a code of honor etched into their chests. What existed was something else entirely: a silent disease, a rot that crawled low and without nobility, a dishonor that fed on the weakest, stealing the smile from towns and the joy from their alleyways.
A cancer that announced itself not with elegance, but with the barbarism of dirty hands — a sandpaper hope that scraped away at livelihoods, while families paid tribute disguised as "taxes." That bad breed of criminality taught children, before anything else, that fear was the only currency that never lost its value.
Those who lurked in the alleyways devoured everything. Without knowing it — or perhaps knowing it, but lacking the strength to resist — poor towns became the organ that fed the beasts. It was a cursed symbiosis: the government washed its hands of it and leaders stayed silent, for the law did not reach where criminals had already imposed their own malevolent order.
Within those alleyways, a boy grew up alongside a legend — a great mafioso with virtues, yet a criminal by the law of the powerful. This man, by the surname Gravina, was feared before his retirement. He had changed an era of crime; one whose wars were not waged against the poor, but fought among those with power.
His name was Chipiatre Silenziatore de Cecilia — now grandfather to young Luciano Gravina, who spent his afternoons watching Doraemon and eating snacks after school.
Chipiatre trained the boy Luciano in everything he knew — martial arts, and every kind of hard-won experience from his days as a warrior. Luciano, gifted beyond his years, absorbed it all like a sponge.
In time, Chipiatre forbade his grandson from watching anime altogether — until a DVD vendor recommended a pirated disc of the anime Katekyo Hitman Reborn. The old man found it agreeable; it reminded him of his time as a gangster.
And Luciano became consumed by it. It was the one anime he was allowed to watch, and the one that, by some strange alignment, spoke the language of his grandfather's values and world.
Yet running through Luciano's veins was that same gangster poison — dormant still, not yet awoken.
He descended from the most feared families, those who had tattooed their name into the history of organized crime in Italy. The boy had inherited it the way one inherits a surname, or a curse — something that was supposed to end with his grandfather Chipiatre. Without the weight of obligation or return, that ancient legacy had reached him intact: like an ember that survives beneath the ash.
All it needed was a single spark to ignite.
Years passed, and the streets grew more dangerous. Once, night had been the hour of wickedness and ugly crime — but now these dishonorable acts were committed in broad daylight, before the innocence of children.
Drug dealing. Human trafficking. The indiscriminate slaughter of entire families who had nothing to do with the mistakes of a single one of their own.
Chipiatre had tried to defend what little dignity the neighborhood had left — and he died in the most humiliating way imaginable. When Luciano came home from school one afternoon, he found his grandfather dead, in conditions no man deserved and no boy should ever witness.
And from that day, what ran through his veins finally awoke. That inherited gangster poison — passed down from his grandfather — ignited with a silent fury.
Three years after Luciano graduated from higher education, he celebrated with fire.
Across the country, the major pillars of organized crime were struck simultaneously — coordinated attacks of explosions and gunfire. These organizations never saw it coming, because their known enemies were the police or rival criminal cartels operating in the same underworld.
But this assault came mostly from within — launched by a new organization, rising from the ashes to redraw the map of power in a broken Italy.
Luciano was the architect of it all. He had been planning for three years — from the night of his grandfather's death — building toward his revenge, and toward the cleansing of the country from the filth that corroded its society.
Days passed. Weeks. Months. And the great organizations still had no idea who had declared war on them. Some believed it was the government. Others suspected a rival cartel had struck itself to deflect suspicion. The spies they had planted were dying in the attacks, leaving them blind to their enemy's next move.
Meanwhile, Luciano walked across a university stage with high honors.
From that moment, time ran out for all of them.
In a single week, Luciano and his operation dismantled every remaining organization simultaneously. When it was over, only he and his circle remained standing in the Italian underworld.
And with a speed the government itself could not match, Luciano seized the money and the leverage — the compromising material these organizations had held over corrupt officials to keep them in line.
He kept some. The rest he passed anonymously to the country's most principled prosecutors and politicians, and to the enemies of those who had long been in the criminals' pocket.
Piece by piece, Luciano brought order to the underworld, becoming its hidden godfather — returning crime to something older in spirit, yet less corrosive to the society living above it.
He had inherited the effectiveness of the most feared mafia families in history. In the alleyways, they called him Il Silenziatore — The Silencer.
Intelligent. Calculated. Possessed of a charm that could touch the soul of a beautiful woman and, in the same breath, leave the most capable man bleeding. He ruled from the shadows.
Yet behind those ice-cold eyes, he hid an unlikely obsession: he still watched the anime Katekyo Hitman Reborn. For anyone else, it would have been a pastime. For him, it was inspiration — fuel for his vision, the quiet engine beneath his ambition.
It was something very few knew. Something that might have drawn laughter or sent chills down the spine, depending on who discovered it. Not even his closest disciples or lovers knew. The only one who had was dead — his grandfather.
As a boy, Luciano had loved the story for what it represented: the lost glory of the mafia, its codes, its mutual protection, the Omertà, honor, and a man's word.
It had been his guide. His inspiration. And, driven by that stubborn passion, Luciano had set about rebuilding the impossible. He transformed lost gangs, dusted off old codes of honor and dressed them in ambition. It was not long before Italy trembled again. His name echoed through its streets, and the sound of gunfire traced hymns of a past that many mourned to see return.
One early morning, standing before a fogged mirror — his own breath caught in the pale light creeping through the window — Luciano stared at himself in silence. Only the sick reflection of someone else's fantasy stared back, shadowed by doubt. And that reflection watched him with the grimace of a monster.
Overwhelmed by guilt — by the weight of so many deaths, so many corpses, decision by decision — until the burden became impossible to carry standing upright.
There came a moment when he had faked his own death to erase his legacy.
Then, suddenly, a shadow joined his reflection.
In a fraction of a fraction of a second, his pupils reacted — a beat slower than they once would have been, but just enough that the wire never fully found his neck.
Luciano does not negotiate with age, nor with years of stillness. The body remembered before the mind finished processing. He turned, yielded, slipped free of the garrote with the unnatural fluidity of a man who has danced with death his entire life without ever being caught.
But the reflexes burned into him on the alleyways of Cilicia do not rust — and for the other man, that moment came too late.
When it was over, the assassin was no longer a problem.
Luciano had defended himself masterfully, drawing on the experience that began in his grandfather's training room. And when he finished with his would-be killer, he realized he was surrounded — ten people, weapons raised, all aimed at him.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Applause.
The group of gangsters parted like the waters of the Jordan, making way for the arrival of death.
— "Boss... it's incredible, the show you put on at fifty. Still moves well," Bobi murmured, his voice carrying something caught between admiration and venom.
— "A shame I wasn't able to appreciate such useful lessons from you back then." A pause, thick with the memory of old frustration.
Luciano rose in stillness — half-dressed, unhurried — and straightened himself with the composure of a stoic, showing no fear and no shame before the black-suited men pointing their weapons at him.
He looked at the one holding the garrote — no style to him at all — and recognized him immediately. One of his own disciples.
— "Bobi." His tone was the kind a man uses to order coffee.
— "You were always the laziest in training. You never had Jonny's discipline — not even the raw energy of that idiot Kazuya. But still... you were the second sharpest among my pupils."
A bitter expression crossed Bobi's face.
— "The second?" His jaw tightened.
— "Even now, with ten guns pointed at you, you discredit me? In front of my own men, you dare say I'm second? Tell me, great Pacino — when exactly will you acknowledge what I've built?!"
A pause. And inside that pause, entire years lived and died.
— "You never looked at me. Not once. You were supposed to be the father I never had. I tried everything to please you. But Vicolo was always your favorite... I've hated you for it. And yet here I am, Luciano — still here, still hoping you'll say something worth the wait."
The old man, standing in nothing but his underwear, exhaled — long and deep, the way you empty an old barrel that's been full too long.
— "Bobi. Bobi... what did I tell you about feelings." A beat. "Yes, I carry guilt in this worn-out heart of mine. But this tantrum — this is a disappointment. Especially with your men watching."
"I thought you were more than this." He cut himself short. Then continued:
— "But tell me — Che vuoi?"
He punctuated it with a hand a borsa — the Neapolitan gesture, fingers pinched upward, the universal expression of: what do you want from me?
He let his eyes drift across the room.
— "Look at your men." He spat to the side.
— "Those suits are not just bad — they're an embarrassment. You can see the cheap fabric from here. I told you. I told you more than once, when you were a boy: when the day came that you had men under you, you would take every last one of them to see Signora Boris. She cuts and designs the finest suit in the city. But you — deaf as a wall, same as always — never listened to a word."
A pause.
— "Useless."
The bluntness of it struck Bobi like a blow to the chest. Something in him cracked — the old fracture, the one shaped like a father's approval that had never fully healed.
— "Speak up." Luciano's voice sharpened. "I did not raise a coward."
But it was too late. Luciano's serene cruelty — that coldness that had no need to raise its voice to wound — made it clear that even face to face with death, the old man would grant him nothing. No dignity. No approval. No fear.
There was nothing there.
It was the sudden breaking of someone who had held on too long, and the body decides before the mind can intervene. The rebuke shattered Bobi. He grabbed his weapon and fired — five shots into Luciano.
The room fell into absolute stillness, as if the entire world had held its breath.
Luciano — stoic still, as a man who has long since made peace with his moment — drew his hand across the wounds and lifted it, red and full. He studied the color for a few seconds with the distant curiosity of someone examining something interesting, but not urgent.
He walked. Blood spilled across the white marble floor. Each footprint heavier than the last — a map of his final steps drawn in red across the immaculate surface. Bobi stood frozen, eyes locked on this old man advancing toward him as though five bullets were a minor inconvenience at most.
When Luciano reached him, he stopped.
He gave him a light slap on the cheek — almost tender, the way you do with a son who has finally done something right after years of waiting — and said:
— "Good. Well done. And remember — the fami—"
His knees gave first. Then the rest of him followed.
Luciano Gravina went down slowly. Almost with elegance — as though even the act of dying required a certain dignity — and came to rest in the scarlet pool his own body had been tracing across the floor.
The silence that followed was different from the one before. Heavier. More final.
Bobi didn't trust it. Something in his throat wasn't working right when he finally found the words the old man had left unfinished — the ones Bobi now had to complete himself.
— "The family..."
A pause.
— "And those you love..."
Another pause.
— "...are what matter most."
Red on white marble. Silence. No witnesses worthy of that ending — only men who had feared him, and one who had loved him without ever fully being told that it was seen.
To be continued
Until the next chapter!