Shigeo woke to the creak of pipes and the smell of mildew. His bed was nothing more than a thin futon rolled out beneath the staircase, pressed between boxes of cleaning supplies and stacks of old newspapers. The space was so small he had to curl his legs just to fit, his forehead nearly brushing the low ceiling when he sat up.
For a moment, he stayed there in the dark, staring at the jagged shadows cast through the cracks of the stairwell. His stomach growled. His body ached. But worse than hunger or soreness was the silence above him, the silence that meant his parents were awake.
"Brat!" his father's voice thundered from the kitchen. "Get up! You think breakfast makes itself?"
Shigeo flinched. He never liked that name brat because it was like a faceless extra in the background of life. But it stuck, because his parents never called him Shigeo unless it was to scold him.
"Yes, Father," he whispered, though he knew they couldn't hear him. He pushed himself to his feet, careful not to knock his head on the slanted ceiling, and slid open the narrow door that led into the hall.
The kitchen was cold, the fluorescent light buzzing overhead. His mother sat at the table, arms crossed, eyes sharp with disapproval. His father loomed by the stove, pointing to the empty pans.
"Move," his father barked. "Do your job."
Shigeo shuffled forward, his bare feet silent on the tile. He took eggs from the fridge, hands trembling as he cracked them into a bowl. His fingers worked quickly, whisking, pouring, setting the pan to heat. Cooking was muscle memory by now. He'd done it every morning since he was old enough to reach the stove.
But his hands shook more than usual today. He was tired. He was always tired.
The eggs burned. Just a little but enough for his father to notice.
A heavy hand struck the back of his head, sending his face dangerously close to the sizzling pan.
"Useless boy!" his father snarled. "You can't even cook properly? You're nothing but a mistake."
His mother didn't flinch. She didn't speak. She simply sipped her tea, eyes cold and unblinking, as though watching a chore being corrected.
Shigeo said nothing. He only nodded, bowing his head as he moved the pan away from the heat, trying to blink back the sting in his eyes. Words caught in his throat, emotions piling inside his chest like stones in a jar, filling, pressing, suffocating.
He swallowed hard and whispered, "I'm sorry."
Shigeo placed a single slice of bread into the old toaster, the coils glowing faintly as they heated. The smell of eggs still clung to the air, his father's curses echoing faintly in his mind, but no one paid him any attention now. His parents were already seated at the table, bickering over bills.
When the toast popped up, Shigeo quietly slid it onto a plate. No butter, no jam. Just dry toast. It was all he was allowed to take for himself. He ate in silence, careful not to make a sound, then rinsed the plate in the sink and slipped away to the small bathroom.
The shower was quick and cold. He let the water run over him, washing away the sting of the earlier blow, though nothing could rinse away the weight pressing inside his chest. He dressed in his academy's plain uniform and checked himself in the mirror. His hair fell neatly over his forehead, his expression blank. No matter what he felt inside, it was safer not to show it.
When he opened the front door to leave, a hand seized his arm.
"You better remember to get us some cigarettes," his mother said, her nails biting into his skin. Her voice was low, sharp, a command disguised as a reminder.
Shigeo froze, eyes dropping to the floor. "Yes, Mother."
She released him without another word, and he stepped out into the gray Tokyo morning. The city buzzed with its usual noise, but to Shigeo, it felt distant. He walked with his head down, backpack hanging loosely from one shoulder, each step carrying him closer to the one place that hurt just as much as home.
School.
Inside the crowded hallway, the air was filled with chatter, laughter, and the slam of lockers. Shigeo moved carefully through the stream of students, trying to make himself smaller, invisible. He reached his locker, already thinking of the books he needed, when a sudden foot hooked around his ankle.
His body pitched forward. The floor rushed up.
His face smacked against the tiles, pain shooting through his nose and forehead. Laughter exploded around him, sharp and cruel, filling his ears like static.
"Did you see that? He fell like a sack of trash!"
Shigeo pushed against the floor, trying to rise, but a heavy kick slammed into his stomach. The breath tore out of his lungs, and he collapsed again, coughing, his vision swimming.
One of the boys who always seemed to find him and he was broad-shouldered and he was smirking as he was standing over him.
"Pathetic," the bully sneered. "You should thank me. At least I noticed you exist."
The others joined in, their voices a chorus of mockery.
"Look at his face!"
"Bet he's gonna cry!"
"What a loser."
Shigeo didn't respond. He curled slightly, protecting himself, his expression blank as ever. But inside, the stones kept piling up. Anger. Shame. Pain. All of it locked away, filling the jar a little more.
When Shigeo pushed himself up from the tile and stumbled toward class, the hallway followed him with a tide of laughter. People pointed, tossed paper balls and half-eaten snacks that slapped against his back and slid to the floor. Someone called out, "Hey, Mob, try not to ruin the tile this time!" The sound of hundreds of voices made his ears ring. He kept his head down, shoulders rounded, making himself smaller though he already stood no taller than five-three. Being small didn't help; if anything it made him easier to kick.
In homeroom, a crumpled textbook sailed past his ear and smacked into the teacher's desk. The teacher only chuckled and tossed a comment into the air like a thing to be shared. "Get a grip, Kageyama. If you can't hack it, then maybe…you won't be missed." The class howled, and a couple of kids slapped their desks as if it were a punchline.
Throughout the day the same cruelty repeated itself in different small ways: pencils shoved into his backpack, insults muttered as he walked by, someone pushing his shoulder too hard in the corridor until his books scattered. "Why don't you just die?" someone whispered loud enough for a dozen others to add their own barbs. Teachers who were supposed to keep order turned away, rolled eyes, or helped craft the jokes. Their indifference hardened the room like cold plaster; he learned how to slide through it without breaking on the outside.
By the final bell the school felt like a throat narrowing around him. He moved through the courtyard and into the front of the building where a cluster of students always gathered after practice. Today that cluster included the football team, faces flushed with triumph and testosterone. They made a circle and pushed him into the middle.
"Mob! Perfect timing," the biggest one said. He was all shoulders and sneer. "You want to be useful for once? Prove you're not a loser. If you want us to stop, do everyone a favor and take a swan dive off the roof."
The words landed with a different weight. The kind you can't shrug off. Someone laughed, someone else whistled. A phone lifted, recording. The crowd pulsed with expectation, eager for the show.
Shigeo's knees went weak. He tasted copper, like the memory of blood, like the sting from the morning's slap. The stones inside his chest shifted. He had been collecting feelings in that hollow all his life: shame, humiliation, fear, anger, the sharp, cold hunger of not belonging. They weren't separate anymore; they had piled and compacted until there was no room left.
For a breath he tried to nod. The safer thing was to obey, to give them the spectacle they wanted. To disappear. But the voices in his head was the ones that had always told him to be smaller were suddenly drowned out by a sound that was his own: something raw, rising.
He remembered his father's hand, his mother's silence. He remembered the teacher's laugh, the punch that had knocked the air from his lungs in the corridor. He remembered every thrown paper ball, every whispered wish that he'd never existed. The memories were not neat; they came as heat and pressure and a single, terrible decision not to swallow them any longer.
He stopped moving.
Then the first change was small and awful: a prickle under the skin, like static climbing along his arms. His hair lifted, not with wind but as if the air itself had become aware of him. The color left his face in a rush that made the bullies' laughter falter. A faint white light smeared the edges of his vision, then brightened until it was blinding.
The light poured out of him like breath. His eyes went pale with no pupils, only white and his whole body began to hum in a tone that settled into the bones of everyone around him. Things shivered: the plastic bottles in backpacks, the loose gravel at their feet, the flutter of a girl's skirt. A pressure wave rolled from him and knocked the nearest students to their knees; papers flew like dead leaves.
No one yelled. No one moved fast enough. For a heartbeat the courtyard was silent but for the low sound that came from Shigeo. Then the world answered.
The psychic force that had been caged inside him released in a single, violent exhale. It hit the building first with windows trembling; concrete dusting out of seams like chalk. Then it pushed outward, a shock that ripped through lockers, tore roofs from classrooms, and turned the neatly tended courtyard into a windstorm of desks, lockers, and school bags. A column of force punched the air, and the school the brick structure that had been a backdrop to a thousand cruelties was folded inward with a sound like a living thing being crushed
The school was gone and there was nothing but jagged ruins and smoke rising from broken earth. A wide crater spread where the courtyard had been, cracked asphalt and torn steel marking the blast zone. And at its heart, one small boy lay curled on his side, hair floating weightlessly, his eyes dimming back to black.
Around him, the consequences were undeniable.
Students who had been closest were strewn across the ground, some crushed beneath debris, others lying twisted in unnatural stillness. A few groaned, crawling weakly, their faces bloodied and ash-covered. Dozens more were scattered at the crater's edge, injured and broken, their screams filling the silence that had hung only seconds before. Phones, backpacks, shoes and all the casual artifacts of a school day were mixed among the bodies like evidence of an ordinary life ripped apart.
And in the very center, untouched by dust or rubble, Shigeo breathed shallowly, unconscious. The boy everyone had laughed at, beaten, mocked had become the very disaster they feared, even if they hadn't known it yet.
New York, Xavier Mansion
The Xavier Institute stood quiet under the early evening sky, its sprawling grounds bathed in warm orange light. Inside the mansion's heart, in an office lined with old books and framed photographs, three figures stood together: a man with red sunglasses, a bald man in a wheelchair, and a woman with long red hair and green eyes.
Scott Summers stood stiffly, arms crossed, his voice edged with frustration. "Charles, Logan disregarded orders again. He went off on his own, cut through the objective without even waiting for backup. One day his recklessness is going to…."
He stopped mid-sentence when Jean Grey suddenly gasped, clutching her head. At the same moment, Charles Xavier's hand shot to his temple, his face tightening with agony.
"Jean?!" Scott's hands were on her shoulders instantly, panic breaking through his composed mask. "What's wrong? Talk to me!"
But she couldn't. Neither could Charles. The psychic scream rolling through their minds drowned out everything words, thought, even breath. Their bodies shook as if struck by invisible lightning, and Scott could only watch, helpless, as the two most powerful telepaths he knew writhed in pain.
Minutes dragged like hours. Finally, the wave receded. Both Jean and Charles sagged back into themselves, pale and trembling. Scott kept his hands on Jean, eyes darting between the two of them.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded, fear bleeding into his voice.
Charles drew in a slow breath. His voice was calm, but beneath it carried a gravity Scott rarely heard. "Assemble the X-Men."
Scott straightened, tension sharpening his frame.
"There is a new omega-level mutant," Xavier continued, locking eyes with him, "and it may be one of the most powerful we have ever felt."
Scott gave a single nod and turned on his heel, already moving to sound the call.
Jean, still shaken, caught her breath and whispered, "Charles…did you feel it? The pain. The anger."
Xavier's gaze darkened. "Yes. It was unbearable." He paused, his tone softening to something more human than professor or leader. "And it came from a child."
Jean's eyes widened, her voice low but certain. "We need to reach him before anyone else does."
Charles nodded once, heavily. "Before he does."
Jean rose, regaining her composure, and followed after Scott. Xavier remained, staring out the window toward the horizon, where somewhere across the ocean, a broken boy had just rewritten the world with his grief.