Book 1
Chapter 2: The ATM Awakens
Explosion #27 and Counting
SumaVillage was the kind of place that whispered rather than shouted.
Hidden behind veils of bamboo and ancient pines, it thrived on silence, secrets... and a lot of paid assassinations.
But inside the grand Hanzori estate, a fortress-palace draped in silk banners and echoing with the polite footsteps of armored maids, silence was a long-forgotten concept.
It was usually punctuated by a sudden, inexplicable BOOM, followed by a high-pitched shriek.
"NOOOO, NOT THE KOI PO—oh," shouted a servant, his voice cutting off like a snapped lute string, moments before a geyser of glittering water, complete with startled, flapping fish, exploded from the courtyard pond.
KenHanzori, a cherubic five-year-old with an expression of pure, unadulterated innocence, blinked at the spectacle.
In his tiny hands, a training dagger pulsed faintly, glowing with residual Mone.
The koi flopped angrily at him mid-air, like it too knew this was the fifth aquatic explosion this week, and it was getting tired of the mid-afternoon aerial acrobatics.
The koi, now airborne for the third time this week, glared at Ken with the fury of a thousand suns.
Their open mouths formed perfect "O" shapes– too perfect, like currency symbols. Their scales flashed an unnatural "Platinum-tier gleam" before crashing back into the water.
It had memorized his face. This was personal.
"Wasn't me," Ken muttered automatically, a practiced line delivered with the conviction of a professional criminal, as he casually tossed the glowing dagger into a prize-winning camellia bush.
From the porch, his father, the stoic, ever-composed Lord Hanzori, who had seen more accidental explosions than actual combat in recent years, merely sipped his tea and sighed.
A vein pulsed almost imperceptibly at his temple. "He's gifted."
The head maid, a woman named Kageko whose permanent expression was one of besieged vigilance, was still wringing out her armored kimono from the last fireball incident.
She mumbled, just loud enough to be heard over the spluttering koi,
"He's glitched, sir. And my dry cleaning bill is astronomical."
---
Glitched at Birth, Gifted by Rumor
Ken wasn't trying to train. That was the scary part. He'd never lifted a single pebble with intent.
Yet, trees split with unseen force, ancient stone walls crumbled into dust, and even the ripest fruits sliced themselves perfectly into segments when he merely looked at them too intensely.
His ATM card, issued at birth as per universal protocol, hadn't just read Platinum. It had flashed the ominous words "??? UNREGISTERED TIER" and made the issuing monk, a venerable elder of the MoneTemple, promptly vomit an entire bouquet of meticulously arranged peonies.
The poor man hadn't been right since.
They'd tried everything. Sealing rituals that fizzled out like damp firecrackers, suppressants that somehow made him more energetic, chakra regulators that just made his aura hum like a poorly tuned instrument.
One very desperate soul, a kindly old nanny who moonlighted as a philosopher, even suggested the revolutionary concept of emotional maturity.
Nothing worked. Ken's Mone was endless. Worse: it was unconscious. He didn't use power. It used him, often with catastrophic results for the surrounding environment.
At seven, he let out a particularly robust sneeze and, without touching a single thing, somehow collapsed an entire mountain trail, narrowly missing a passing merchant caravan.
At eight, bored during a particularly dull family dinner, he accidentally spilled so much raw Mone into a discarded rice ball that it briefly grew fangs and lunged at the nearest moving shadow, which happened to be the ancestral scrolls.
By ten, he had completely destroyed a whole training field simply by trying to scratch an itch on his back with a shuriken, the resulting invisible energy wave vaporized the sparring dummies.
Still, his parents applauded.
"He's a prodigy," his mother said proudly, beaming as she watched Ken, while sleepwalking, inexplicably vaporize a rogue chicken coop that had dared to cluck too loudly.
"So dynamic!"
The rest of the village simply wore armor. Full plate, chainmail, even reinforced tabi socks.
Even the family cat, a perpetually grumpy tabby named Mittens, was seen sporting a tiny, surprisingly effective breastplate.
Mittens the cat strutted past in her tiny breastplate, tail flicking. Her shadow stretched into a winged silhouette for three steps before snapping back to normal. She'd survived three of Ken's 'nap-time lightning storms.'
The villagers bowed. She deserved it.
---
One Friend, One Sanity Anchor
Ken's best (and, if we're being honest, only) friend was Narutama, a scrawny, perpetually smiling kid from the SanataClan, old samurai blood but newer, much, much thinner wallets.
Narutama looked like a feather in the wind compared to Ken, often seeming on the verge of being blown away by a stiff breeze.
But he had one peculiar superpower: he could talk Ken down from just about any tantrum, even those accidental, world-shaking ones.
"Don't throw that—KEN, THAT'S A HOLY RELIC!" Narutama would shout, diving dramatically to catch a glowing artifact before Ken could accidentally launch it into orbit.
"Oops," Ken would simply respond, as if he'd just dropped a cracker.
He was also the only one not impressed by Ken's bizarre, accidental displays of power.
"So what if you can explode melons by blinking?"
Narutama would say with a shrug, eyeing a particularly robust watermelon.
"I can eat ten dumplings without crying, and that takes real skill."
Ken watched, awed, as Narutama devoured his tenth dumpling.
"How?!" he gasped.
Narutama smirked.
"Unlike 'some' people, I don't need divine energy to be impressive. Just spite."
As he swallowed the tenth dumpling, his shadow briefly split into three before reforming.
Ken blinked. "Did you just...."
"Did I what?" Narutama replied, mouth full.
Ken secretly loved that. Someone who didn't worship him. Someone who actually complained.
Someone who steadfastly refused to carry his ridiculously heavy ninja backpack, no matter how much Ken offered. Their bond was an anomaly.
They became inseparable, even if Ken had a habit of nearly killing them both on "accidental training outings" that usually involved exploding trees or collapsing caves.
---
A Full Wallet and a Free Ride
And when the time came to attend KokoroMoneAcademy, the empire's most overpriced, overhyped, overly enchanted school, Ken didn't even bother to ask if Narutama could afford the astronomical fees.
He just paid. All of it. Without a second thought.
"I'm not your charity case," Narutama had declared with a sniff, trying to maintain some semblance of pride.
Ken grinned, a mischievous glint in his eyes.
"No, you're my emotional liability. Different thing entirely. And besides," he added, "who else is going to get me fresh ramen at midnight?"
That year, as the cherry blossoms bloomed in the capitol and the sun set over Suma Village, Ken Hanzori turned twelve. His ATM balance had never dropped below full.
And somewhere far above the clouds, in the ancient, shimmering realm of G.O.D., three cosmic figures watched the boy's journey unfold, a mixture of cosmic dread and unexpected amusement on their faces.
"He's still not ready," said the Organizer, adjusting a celestial monocle.
"He's absolutely hilarious," snickered the Destroyer, barely suppressing a laugh that threatened to ripple through spacetime.
"He's our only hope," said the Generator, sighing deeply.
"Also, about that refund system... I, uh, forgot to install it in the initial deployment. My bad. Bit of an oversight, really."
Back on earth, blissfully unaware of his divine designation, Ken burped mid-meditation and accidentally leveled an outhouse behind the Hanzori estate.
The ATM had awakened.
And it was very, very hungry. For other people's power, apparently.