///This is a repost to change it into another volume///
[WARNING: MAY INCLUDE BLOOD AND VIOLENCE]
"Get up, useless! I only kicked you ten times. You are supposed to defend yourself! Get up and have the intention to kill the attacker!" The man kicked the little child again on the floor.
"Ye-yes, father..." The child slowly rose up from the floor. His head was hurting, moreover, he couldn't see straight because earlier, the man directly hit the child's eyes with the kali stick he used for 'teaching'.
The child was no more than three, yet he was always 'training' brutally with his so-called father, who didn't even see him as a son.
"Now block my kali with yours." Before the boy could even stand up straight, another blow landed on his head, making him fall to the hard ground. When he was falling, the stick got stuck in the hole in the ground and made it stand. The boy's stomach landed straight there, almost piercing the soft belly full of bruises.
The man panted and spat on the boy's head after seeing him on the ground, "Weak. In this world, everything is about power. You are a slave if you are weak. Nothing is greater than power. Remember that, boy." He left the room afterwards. The man didn't want to dirty himself by helping that useless human shifter.
The boy coughed a mouth full of blood that was stuck in his throat for a long time. He knew no one was going to help him here. It was just the way life worked.
Cold air blew in from the window up above. This room was like a dungeon. No one was allowed to come in here except him and his father. Nothing was there apart from the square window at the east wall used for air venting. Thank God it wasn't snowing, or the boy would have frozen to death.
The boy exhaled from his mouth and made a blood bubble for a few seconds before it popped. He wanted to cry, but who was he going to cry for? Nobody cared. Everyone here was all full of themselves that they didn't have time to care about others. Mind your own business was the unspoken agreement.
"Mummy..." That was the only word he could utter before he fell unconscious, just like every day in this room.
-----
"Mummy, where is my daddy?" A boy on a woman's lap asked. He had a storybook in his hand about a princess getting a prince as a husband and having a baby.
"Your daddy is very busy." A woman had a soft voice. She was thin as a stick and had a collar on her neck and the left ankle. The collar on the ankle was connected to a thick silver chain and was all over the tiny house they lived in.
"But I want to meet him! Is he like this prince here?" The child was innocent as always. He was curious. His grandmother always told him his father was great, but he didn't how great.
"Yes. Your father is the king of all of us and soon, he will be the king of everything and everyone." The woman didn't look so proud when saying that. She even looked sad.
"I'm going to be a prince?!" The boy squealed and flapped the book closed. His mother's hand was resting across the round child's tummy. Her skin was so pale that people could see the blood vessels without even trying to.
"You are but, I don't want you to." The mother put more strength into hugging that boy, but it didn't change as much.
The boy turned around on her lap, now sitting face-to-face, "Why?"
"Because I don't want you to become your like your daddy."
"But isn't daddy great?"
"Your daddy is a bad person. That is why we live here." She eyed at their surroundings. The house was shabby. The walls had holes and even mice living in them. Rainwater would often seep through the spaces in the roof. And the clothes they wore were nothing but rugged pieces of fabric that were given a long time ago. "I want you to experience the outside world. There is so much there that you won't get enough of it."
"But I have mummy." The boy touched the neck collar of his mother. The silver collar had some writings, but he couldn't read them.
The mother didn't want to let her child see her tears, so she brought his face to her shoulder and patted his back in a steady rhythm.
"Mummy, what's wrong?" He was still touching her collar. Tracing the words like he usually did.
"Nothing, darling." Even though she said that she didn't stop what she was doing.
"Okay." The boy didn't struggle out of her hug and decided to take a nap there. His mother smelled of mud and flowers. Sweet and calming.
"I'm sorry. I love you." He barely heard her tell him before he was sent into a dreamland.
-----
The first time the boy shifted, he went on a rampage. He attacked everyone around him until he passed out due to exhaustion or at least that was what his friends told him. He didn't have any memory of it. His memory stopped when he felt pain surging through him, and the next thing he knew, he was in his room tied up with bedsheets. So it was natural for him to not consider this as his first.
The second time he shifted, he had all the control. He remembered everything. How it felt to be another person. How to feel things as a different person. It was truly magical and life-changing. Although there were after-effects like fainting and removing the blood that didn't belong to him from his body, he still enjoyed it.
He didn't tell his father he succeeded in shifting. His father didn't even care to meet him anymore, so why should he go and meet the man?
After his first shift, he began to shift often into other people, not to pry into their lives but to get the hang of shifting so that it would come naturally. Of course, he did this in his room, a hundred per cent privacy.
During the day, he, along with his friends, practised combat, and at night, he studied how to be smoother and have fewer effects in shifting. Nobody noticed the boy doing this. The boy was pretty secretive and didn't let people into his life that easily. Plus, it wasn't like people cared.
The boy often thought of his mother when he was alone. He still remembered how people came and forcefully separated them. Her screams were still fresh in his memory.
It was just like any other day when that happened. Four bulky men in black banged into the shabby house without a warning. The boy woke up to that noise and found two men staring at him from above. They didn't look like a human. The way they looked at him had no emotions. Their eyes were just like glass balls.
One of them grabbed the frozen boy by his arm and carried him away from the house. The boy was too scared and couldn't do anything. He couldn't even feel the pain being carried by the arm.
When the boy was out of the house, he heard his mother screaming for him. As if a string that was connected to his sanity snapped, the boy screamed back and tried to get free from the man.
The mother was being held back by the rest of the men. When the four men checked that the boy was in their hands, they left the wailing mother there and walked over to the boy. The mum ran to the boy but fell down mercilessly on the ground because of the chain that was connected to the house.
When the boy saw his mother fall, he cried louder, but the men didn't care no matter how much the boy screamed into their ears.
The mother never gave up on her child. She called out her son's name again and again. She tried pulling out the chain, but that didn't work. The chain was connected to the only pillar in the house that was steady. The skin on her hands pilled and removed blood, but she didn't stop.
She stopped pulling the chain when she realised that she just needed to escape her ankle from the collar. So she tried to dislocate her whole foot with all her might. The pain of dislocating the bone was nothing compared to losing her beloved son. The only person in her family who didn't judge her and loved her.
After some long struggle, she succeeded, but the cuff wasn't coming off of her. She screamed in frustration, but when she saw how the four men were calmly taking the crying child, her blood boiled again. She knew that if they took him away, there was no way she was going to meet that child again.
The only thing that was stopping her was her stupid left foot. She thought to herself quietly. Did she need this foot? She barely walked around the house. Was the foot important or her son? Did she need to compare her foot and her son?
With that thought in mind, she looked for the biggest rock nearby because there was no single knife or axe in the house. Luckily, she found a rock that was about the size of her forearm nearby. She dragged herself there and carried the rock in her frail hands. The adrenaline made it possible for her to carry the heavy rock.
'I'm coming'. She smiled at her son for reassurance and spoke in her mind before she dropped the edge of the rock to her cuffed leg.
Blood splattered everywhere including her eyes and mouth. Just one strike wasn't able to severe her leg and the ankle, so she brought the rock up just to bring it down with more force. She didn't scream in pain or anything. The only thing on her mind was cutting off her ankle.
The boy was brought in the front so that it would be easier for them to carry him. He was still screaming and punching the men, but they didn't flinch and continued walking.
"GIVE ME BACK MY SON!!" They only halted and looked back when they heard that. None of them seemed to be surprised that the woman cut off her ankle and was running to them with all she got.
One of the men seemed to be tired of the sh*t he was dealing with and walked straight to her. The mother managed to scratch the man with her uncut nails but the man kept staring at her without doing anything. She then tried to push him away from her but instead got punched right in her sunken cheek and was thrown a few metres away.
She didn't stop there. She stood up from the ground while the blood streamed down her head like a shower. The man didn't hold back either. He remorselessly hit the woman to the ground again as the rest of the group resumed walking.
The boy never ceased to cry. He bit the one carrying him and made every attempt to injure him, but nothing seemed to work. It was like they didn't know pain. They were like dolls.
Until the very end, the mother screamed for her child while getting beaten. The boy saw a glimpse of what was happening behind his back and climbed up the man's shoulder just to see a man punching her like a broken manic.
The man didn't stop punching the mother until she was unable to move. No matter how much he tried to knock her out or kicked her stomach, she never lost consciousness, so he left her that way.
The mother kept on muttering the boy's name while she looked at him with sadness and anger. She gathered all her strength to stand up but was only able to twitch a finger.
The man who punched the mother caught up with the group and directly hit the boy's cheek. The boy got dazed, but it was only for a second. He screamed in return to only be cut off with another punch which accomplished to knocked the boy out.
The woman on the ground shouted when she could no longer hear her son, but none of them turned to look at her. Tears welled up in her eyes. Those bastards were going to hell. She will even become a zombie to accomplish that. She will curse them. She will bring hell to those who harmed her little boy.
"Zev... Zev... Z" Before she could say the last two letters, her vision became black. Her fingers were no longer twitching.