"Be strong and live"

Those were the last words my father said to me, smiling to the very end. He was lying in a pool of blood after fighting an enemy who had laid waste to all the cites around us. All that remained were two small cities including ours.

We heard his foootsteps calmly approaching, his body reeked of death yet there was not a single drop of blood on his face. It was clear that there was no struggle, he probably used magic to wipe out entire cities leaving no trace. He walked through the city and with each step he put fear into the hearts of my people. He reached the city council building and then he spoke.

The tone of his voice almost made us forget the fact that he had just killed thousands,he sounded like an educated scholar and spoke slowly. We were frozen with fear as we awaited his every word. He said he was looking for a particular stone and from his description we knew exactly what it was.

It was the power source bestowed upon us, the amaterasu fragment that prevents the demons outside from attacking us by forming a protective barrier around the city.

" Give me the stone and you shall live"

He sounded almost comical saying those words that made absolutely no sense. He knew and we knew that without the stone, we had no hope of survival.

The city council asked for some time and were granted five minutes to deliberate on the fate of the city.

They came to the conclusion that without the stone,the city's destruction will be slow but inevitable. They refused to give the intruder the stone and prepared for the worst and then my father, the city's top warrior picked up his sword and confronted the man.

My father had fought many demons before but that was the first time I ever saw him unsheath his sword at the beginning of a fight. He had always fought bare-handed first to gauge his opponent's strength. The intruder held a scythe that had an aura more sinister than the intruder himself.

My father was a strong man but he knew his limitations more than anyone else there was no need to guage his opponent's strength. He knew that if that scythe grazed him in the slightest, he would certainly die.

He drew his sword with the hopes and dreams of the entire city resting on his shoulders but if there was one man who could carry such a weight, it was my father.

It was a long fight, half the city was blown away later forming the wastelands but there were no casualties well apart from my father. He was lying on the floor with the life fading from his eyes as the assailant acknowledging his strength as he had dealt a nearly fatal blow to him granted my father his name .

He said he was the reaper, the soul reaper, a name I would come to hate when I was old enough to understand the concept of names then he disappeared. My father was the victor, the city was saved but he won at the cost of his life.

I intepreted the final words he said to me as a message telling me to prepare for the soul reaper's return. I knew the soul reaper and I were fated to meet each other again and once again one of us would die, the hero or the villian.

They say the hero always wins because he fights for justice but that's wrong. The strongest always wins,justice was just the will that made heroes stronger but there are some villians that justice can't defeat. I knew that better than most.

The hero lost this time because he wasn't strong enough. The city made him weak, I made him weak but I did not plan on being a hero.

I would take whatever measures necessary to become strong enough to kill the soul reaper even if that meant becoming a villian. I knew the journey ahead would be tough but how else is a champion born.