Lucien woke up the same way he always did. He was stiff and he was fueled with constant anger. Lucien always hated people in general.
He even hated the air that smelled of exhaust and the grilled food down the street.
He hated the dirt under his long nails and the pigeons in the park that pecked him everyday like they owned the sidewalks. But what he hated most is that no one ever seemed to notice him.
Being unseen by the whole world felt worse than the physical pain he went through every day.
Worse still was the place that he woke up in. The same broken bench. The wooden slats that dug into Lucien his spine each night. Above him a rusted streetlamp coughed its weak light.
Above him, a rusty streetlamp that coughed up its dim light, but it was just enough to irritate Lucien as he was trying to sleep.
He had slept there six months in a row, tucked away in a corner of a park in central Tokyo nobody remembered.
Every dawn made the anger inside of his heart thicker.
Lucien his parents had disappeared when he was just three years old.
One day they were there feeding him in the morning, and the next day they were gone, like they never even existed in the first place. A nurse found him a day later.
She had pinned a new name to him and left him too. Since then the streets were his home and his lesson.
For example Lucien learned how to stay warm in winter and how to sleep without being robbed by other homeless people.
His days fell into a brutal but simple routine.
He rolled off the bench at around 8 in the morning and went to stand at different kinds of stations all over Tokyo with a torn cardboard sign.
Some people scowled. Others ignored him. Once a gang of kids had beaten him up and taken the small pile of coins he had managed to scrape together that day.
If Lucien had luck on his side someone threw a few coins his way. For them it probably felt like spare change for a thing that was already broken.
Fights were normal for him. On average he would fight three times a week, maybe more if he felt like it. A look that lasted too long in his opinion, or his temper snapping first when he had a bad day. He would barely win. He was stubbor and weak.
Lucien often came back with broken ribs, bruised eyes, a lip that was split open and his knuckles were bleeding almost every day. Lucien his body was a total mess.
When Lucien wanted a meal it meant digging through trash bins behind izakaya and konbini.
When he found something he ate it fast, and after he begged again until the sun sank. When the night came and he lay on that bench again, the same question rattled in his head: This is really it? Is this the life I was made for?
He wanted change since the day his parents left him. He needed it. At night he pictured a hand reaching down to him.
His saviour dragging him out of the nightmare.
When a sudden change came, it was not the change what he had begged for.
The next day arrived and the sky that day hung very low and choked with smog.
Lucien sat with his cardboard sign by a subway exit near the Shibuya District.
His hoodie that he stole from someone had been white once; now it looked eaten by the city. His old Nike sneakers had holes where soles had been. On his lap his cardboard sign read: I need some money for food. Please.
People streamed past. Most of them were students or salarymen. Each lived within their own small orbit.
Some of them turned their heads away from him as if he interrupted the sharp lines of their day. The majority of people flowed around him like water around a rock.
He had only twenty coins in his pocket. It was not even enough for a small bowl, not enough for warmth.
Lucien gave up and leaned his head against the concrete wall and watched the ceiling above the stairs.
"God," he muttered. "If you really exist, you suck." He said it almost every day. Not because he did not believe in a god, but because the words had become a habit.
Then a man walked by in a black and white suit.
He slowed down when he went near him. Lucien's breath stuttered with a small, useless hope. The man adjusted his AirPods and kept walking. Lucien his hope died instantly.
Lucien looked down at his hands. They seemed wrong. They were thin and the skin on his fingers started to peel off.
Then all of the sudden the whole world stopped moving.
Above the tall towers of Tokyo something opened. It looked like a seam in the world he alone could see through the subway station ´ s ceiling.
His vision twitched for a moment and then sharpened. In that tear hung a being like an eye. It looked like glass and starlight folded into a single gaze. It looked at Lucien.
He tried to shout for help, but no sound came out of his throat.
A voice filled him, not in the ears but in the room inside him where memory lived. The voice was ancient and calm.
You have been heard by me, Lucien.
Lucien stood up because his body made him do it. On earth time paused as if waiting. Pain rolled through Lucien, precise and unavoidable.
The second he stood up he fell back to his knees. Something or someone entered his body.
He did not feel any type of strength as a neat swelling. He felt like he was altered, like a tool ground to a new edge.
The first thing that came back was sound. It slammed back, everything rushed in with it. The trains were roaring again and mouths finished the sentences they had been midway through.
No one knew what happened. Only Lucien held the memory of that silent moment.
The same voice but now softer brushed his ear.
You are now the vessel of the God of Vengeance.
Lucien stared at his hands again. They were different. They glowed—not with light that warmed him, but it was a dark luminescence that drank the edges of concrete.
He immediately tried to hide his hands. The bench that he had slept on for six months would wait for him that night, and the rusted streetlamp above him would blink its tired pulse.
Lucien had been chosen to be the next God of Vengeance. He did not know what that meant.
For the first few hours he thought it was some kind of sick joke or that or that he was hallucinating.
But when he heard the same voice for the second and third time. Lucien knew he had changed.