Dark.
A weightless, drowning dark.
Something wet dribbled across Kaito's cheek no, not Kaito, not yet, not anyone just a wrinkled, gasping body on a mound of rusted metal. The cold scraped into his skin like teeth.
He tried to wail. No sound came.
A scream nearby. Sharp, broken, echoing off twisted scaffolding.
A crash: metal barrels collapsing. A bootstep thudded past, kicking up ash and black dust into his raw throat.
Breathe.
He remembered not who, not when but how. A memory not his own floated just beneath the surface: Breathe, idiot. Breathe or die.
And so, the tiny body breathed. Shallow. Wet. Each inhale pulled in soot and cold and the stench of burning plastic.
Above, no stars. Only the orange halo of distant fires and the endless churn of smokestacks.
Fingers rough, calloused, smelling of oil scooped under his armpits. Lifted him.
A man's face: black hair stiff with dirt, eyes sunken deep, lips cracked white. His teeth were missing in front.
He grunted, tucked the newborn under a filthy coat, and turned. His breath rattled.
Footsteps through trash, through slush, past gnawed bones, past twisted dolls and shattered plastic.
The child Kaito drifted, half-senseless, against the man's chest. Somewhere in his mind, flickers: a name. A word. Hunter? Nen?
The man muttered under his breath, words Kaito couldn't yet understand. But he understood the tone: not anger. Not love. Just survival.
A crash behind them. Another scream.
The man flinched but didn't stop.
The newborn's eyes fluttered, crusted with ash. For a heartbeat, they locked on the sky a gap in the smoke and in that narrow, ragged tear, something shone.
A single, pale star.
And then the dark swallowed it whole. The dark swallowed the star, and then years passed like smoke curling through fingers.
The child's world became sharp things.
Rust flakes. Glass shards. Bone splinters.
By three, Kaito learned to crawl over them without a sound. By four, he learned to eat without chewing too loud. By five, he learned how to be smaller than his own breath.
The older kids were wolves: scabbed fists, wired jaws, teeth bared under gray sun. They fought over moldy bread, iron scraps, plastic bottles with dregs of oil.
Kaito watched.
He watched the way they circled, how they postured, how they struck from angles, how they burned through something invisible when they got angry or scared. Nen or the shadow of it, raw and blind.
His body was thin, ribbed, delicate. His mind was a shard of something from another world, humming with words like Ten, Ren, Zetsu. But his body this body was a rat's, not a lion's.
So he waited.
He waited until the night his belly twisted on itself, gnawing at the nothing inside.
Under a collapsed sheet of metal, Kaito saw the rat. Fat, gray, twitching its whiskers at a smear of old grease. It didn't hear him.
Didn't see the small hand with the shard of glass.
Didn't expect the desperate swing.
The glass cut through fur and skin, and the rat squealed once, jerking, its feet drumming hollow plastic. Kaito fell on it, pinning, panting, his own heartbeat screaming in his ears.
Warm.
Warm meat. Warm blood. Warm life.
His mouth trembled. His teeth clamped down.
After, sitting in the dark with the taste still on his tongue, Kaito shivered. Not from cold. Not from shame.
From the clarity of it. The clarity of what survival meant.
The next days, he watched.
Older boys in gangs with scraped metal pipes. Girls slipping between fights to strip bodies of shoes and belts. Men with rotted teeth, flickering eyes, who lashed out when crossed.
Kaito saw how aura leaked from them in sparks invisible to most, flickering to him at the edge of sight.
He understood enough: they bled their strength without knowing it. No focus. No flow. Just anger, survival, bursts of force.
If he could focus it no. When.
Not now. His ribs stuck out like knives. His fingers were splinters. But soon.
Soon.
Under the collapsed shack, he drew in his knees, pressed his hands together.
The words were clumsy in his mouth, his tongue stiff from disuse. But he said it, rasping into the hollow dark.
"Kai…to."
A name. His name.
Not the one given here the one he chose to carry.
His breath hitched. He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead to the dirt.
"This world has rules," he whispered, voice raw, throat dry. "I'll break them all."