Montana. Akuro hovered high above the city of Billings, staring down at it with contempt. Somewhere down below was his father and mother, of whom he hated with all of his soul. The sky was blindingly bright blue while the clouds drifted lazily along with the wind.
Akuro's body suddenly vanished in a cloud of shadows, and he reappeared on the sidewalk in the middle of the city. He stared forward at the stone stairs that led up to a red door. How fitting that the door was such a shade of blood, as soon the whole city would be flowing with rivers of crimson.
Starting with this house.
He was surprised his parents had moved all the way out here, all the way up from Florida. Not that it really mattered. He was going to wipe not just this whole city but this entire state off of the map, just as they had done with New York and most of the states around it.
As Akuro stood on the sidewalk, he received many strange looks of curiosity and judgement from the people who walked by him. They all likely assumed he was crazy, or that he was a cosplayer. Some seemed frightened by him, especially when they came close. Some mortals have a higher sensitivity to aura and pressure, while most are completely blind to it and cannot sense it at all. A woman froze as she neared him, her body shaking, before she turned and began to swiftly walk away, glancing back now and again.
His armor was undoubtably real while the chains and his horns and appearance was also real. Even so, the mortals could not see that and would, most of the time, simply assume he was just cosplaying. Seemed the news about New York was being covered up by the government to keep people from panicking, otherwise he assumed these people would realize what he was.
Ignoring the looks he got from the mortals, Akuro proceeded to ascend the stairs and raise his hand to the red door.
*KNOCK* came the first knock, *KNOCK* came the second.
A moment passed with not a single sound to come from within the building. But then, behind the door, he could here his father's drunken voice.
"Answer the fuckin door you wench!!" The sound of his father's voice infuriated Akuro immensely. He had the urge to just kill them both without saying a word at all. But he wanted to see the fear in the eyes when they realize who he was..
Then the black door handle twisted down and the door swung open, revealing a dark house with trash littering the floor, torn furniture, moldy and dirt in the crevices of everything, and the ever-present smelled of alcohol and cigarettes.
What stood before Akuro was an unrecognizable woman. It seemed that his father had beaten his once strong willed mother into submission completely. She looked horrible. She had bags under her eyes and her hair was matted and her skin was wrinkled even though she wasn't that old. She should only be in her thirties but she looked like she was fifty.
Akuro suddenly felt sorry for her. Sorry that she had to be tortured by his father, sorry that she had to lose both of her children. But then he remembered the way she had treated him. He cold hand slapping his cheek, the way she'd scream at him, how she had kicked him onto the streets.
"Who are you?" She asked, her voice hoarse. Her eyes were wet with tears and one of them was puffy and blue. At the sound of her indifferent voice, Akuro lost all sense of compassion and sympathy for her.
"Don't tell me," Akuro spoke coldly, "you don't recognize me."
"No. I don't recognize you. Now get out of here. Scram. We aren't looking for sideshow freaks." She said.
"Really? You can't even recognize your own son? I guess the horns and new appearance would make it difficult. And I would just like to inform you.. none of this appearance is fake, mother."
Suddenly her eyes widened. It seemed that, as she stared into his face, she began to see the ghost of her lost child.
"A..Akuro..?"
*THMP*
Akuro's hand shot up to his mother's throat, clasping it and squeezing, crushing her windpipe and bruising her neck.
"Hey, what the fuck is goin on?" Came Akuro's father.
Akuro lifted his mother off of her feet and stepped into the building. Suddenly he gained the attention of the people passing outside, staring in horror.
"It's a demon!" One woman cried in horror as black aura began to coil around Akuro's body is thin trails.
Akuro turned to look into the living room. From the door the house opened up to a straight hall leading to the bathroom and kitchen. To the right was a staircase and to the left was the living room where his father sat on a ripped up couch, bottle in hand, as he watched the news. Upon seeing Akuro, his father stood, throwing the bottle at Akuro's head.
*CRASH*
The bottle shattered against Akuro's horn, alcohol spilling over him. This did nothing but infuriate Akuro.
*CRACK-K*
The sound of his mother's neck being snapped and crushed completely, life leaving her eyes, could be hear through the entire house. Akuro loosened his hand and her body fell limp to the ground.
"How weak and fragile you mortals are." Akuro growled, looking down at his mother's corpse with contempt. Then cold red eyes turned to his father, who shuddered in a sudden wave of fear. Akuro released the smallest possible portion of his pressure, which was all it took to send his father into a state of uncontrollable terror.
"W-who the hell are you? What do you want? Is this about what I owe..? Are you from the gang..? I paid it all off! I swear I did!" His father begged. "Please, please don't-"
A small shockwave shot through the room, shattering the windows and receiving screams from the people outside. His father was sent crashing into the drywall, his fat frame braking it as wood and dust fell down around him.
"Do you not recognize my face?" Akuro asked.
Akuro's father turned fearful eyes up to his son. But there was no sign of recognition. Only fear.
"I-I-no.."
"No? You don't remember the boy you tortured? The boy you beat half to death? The girl you killed right before his eyes? You don't remember your own son?"
His fathers eyes suddenly widened. "Akuro.. how are you alive..?"
"I am not alive. Akuro Zaizen is dead, and the last trace of him dies with you." Akuro spoke.
"I.. I'm sorry." His father said. The man before Akuro seemed so pathetic, so fearful. So wretched and pitiful.
"It is far too late for apologizes." Akuro said coldly, then held his hand out towards his father. The God Slayer suddenly formed him to his hand, the blade cutting cleanly through the man's neck, lodging off his head as blood spilled across the wall and the floor. The shade of red soaked the man's still warm corpse. Akuro, for a long time, simply stood in silence, staring blankly at the decapitated head of his father. He felt no regret, no sorrow. He felt nothing at that moment. He was completely hollowed out.
"Mommy?" Came a child's voice.
Akuro suddenly shivered. Slowly he turned his head and his eyes laid on a small child around the age of six crawling to his mother's corpse.
"Mommy? Wake up mommy. Mommy!" The child begged, but received no response from the lifeless corpse. The blank face of his mother's face, trapped in an eternal expression of horror, stared back with dead eyes at the small boy. For a brief moment Akuro saw a vision of himself as he crawled towards Hope's body, how he had begged so desperately for her to be alive.
A sudden disgust and hatred for himself as he was back then, so pathetic and weak, rose up in him.
*SHWING*
The black blade of his scythe stopped against the child's cheek. The little boy was petrified, his eyes wide as he stared at Akuro in dread, while Akuro stared back in confusion. Why did he stop. Why couldn't he just cut the boy open and spill his blood across the room?
What was this feeling… it was like the pathetic version of himself was staring back at him, as though he were peering into the shattered mirror of his past.
Then Akuro realized his hand was trembling.
Black aura began to swirl around his body then, the God Slayer vanishing as he crumbled, hunching over and clasping his head. His aura began to warp about him chaotically. His mind felt like it was going to shatter as two versions of himself fought for control.
"FUCK!!!" He roared suddenly, and then the roof of the building exploded as he shot upwards through it.
'I… need to wake up..' the real Akuro thought, 'what am I doing..? This isn't right..'
"Hush, dear Akuro. It is okay." Came the voice of Hope, or rather, Void, as she spoke to Akuro in a gentle voice. "It was little more than a bad dream, my love. Relax now, it is alright. I've got you."
Akuro's mind began to settle and the real Akuro stopped fighting, sinking back into the infinite darkness that held him in an eternal dream.
In the sky Akuro's aura returned to a controlled state and he opened his eyes, hateful crimson raining down on the land below him, the city of Billings and the house of his parents far below.
He held out his hand and black aura began to condense into his palm. He was creating a Dark Implosion, but this was much much larger than any he'd ever made before, the orb of condensed aura in his palm bow the size of a massive boulder.
"Disappear." He spoke, "leave my mind. With you, my past will die, so just fucking disappear!!!"
The orb shot downwards, streaking straight down towards his mother and father's house. Down below, the small boy cried over his mother's corpse, a thin trail of blood flowing down his cheek. Then he looked up. His body tensed up and he opened his mouth wide, let out a terrible cry, a scream of utter terror before he was swallowed in darkness.
In that moment the largest recorded explosion in the history of mankind had occurred, a burst of black aura so destructive and massive that it not only swallowed all of Montana but it completely sent the entire North Western side of America, as well as a good portion of Canada, into oblivion, turning all of it into nothing but a massive crater of destruction and death. This would mark the real beginning of a war on a scale larger than any before.
This was the beginning of the new end.