Those with wealth, fame, and power often claim we are all born equal - but this unfair world suggests otherwise. Here you don't even need to go far to see an example simply look at the towering city wall and a little beyond it. The first thing you see will be mountains of trash and the sea of waste, if look even more closely you will see little spots of lights moving around them creating roads for those exiting the city.
Those are the cleaning machines meant to clean the road and fix the wall while collecting usable trash from the mountain. And most people from the inner side of the wall don't even know that inside those machines frail and sickly humans of this land of waste and trash drive it.
Equality.
This word has been spoken by those who are in power for an unknown amount of times. They say words like honey to soothe our thirst for fairness, and delusion us with their twisted ideas of equality. Look around and witness the hard truth etched in the face of humanity.
A child born to privilege and filled with wealth never knew the curse of hunger or the desperate longing for a better life. Their voices are louder than others inferior to them as if they aren't human but mighty giants.
But just one stone thrown away, another child screams, their voices drowned out by the cruel sounds of poverty. You probably won't realize you have hit someone with the stone you have thrown for the sound of poverty is both deafeningly loud and eerily silent.
Do these two lives truly carry the same weight?
Are they valued the same from the first moment they have taken?
Are these two lives really equal?
That would be the biggest joke one could probably tell in this land of forgotten. A frail-looking young man with pale skin and dark circles under his eyes was sitting on a rusty bench, well, what was left of the bench at least. Staring at the grey-colored metal plates of the towering wall he couldn't help but let out a weak sigh.
That's why he decided to give up on the idea of looking for help from the city, even if he told them his situation they wouldn't probably care about it. After all, the death of a hundred children in this place won't come close to the death of a single child from inside the walls.
He looked at the burnt scar on his wrist and remembered how he got it, it was probably his first job, he can't remember clearly but it was at some kind of food store the food they sold there was... not exactly great but it was still considered luxurious by the people out here. He made a mistake and the owner of the place hit him with the first thing he got his hand on, a ladle that had just been pulled out from a boiling soup, still a few drops of hot soup remaining inside it.
The beating was serious, the burnt scar wasn't the only scar he got that day but it was probably the most eye-catching one. He doesn't think any of the kids raised inside the walls would get this kind of scar for the same reason. His eyes wander up staring at the colorless gray sky hidden behind the cloak of industrial steam and dark clouds. He heard these hateful clouds only exist outside the walls in this area, inside the city on the other hand sky is always clear.
He stared into the distance, dozing off, and then slapped himself in the face to wake up.
Sadly even the sky reminded him of the fact that he was born to face hardship rather than a life of luxury and peace, isn't that a little too ridiculous? You can't even daydream while looking at the sky.
Children born here are such unlucky creatures.
They are trapped on the hard road, not by choice but because inequality pushes them there.
This was a path they could not shake, a reality that screamed at them: they were born poor, weak, and frail.
Looking haggard in his cheap clothes and from the lack of sleep, unhealthily thin and pale, probably if he lay down on the ground by the tomorrow morning his body will be thrown into the furnace as a fuel.
Then, a slight grin that didn't look like a grin appeared on his face, nobody knows what emotion he felt behind that smile but in the end, he sat there with a grin on his face.
Slowly counting the possibly last moments of his life, he closed his eyes gently, hoping to feel the gentle touch of the morning breeze sadly the world decided not to do that by gifting him droplets of rainwater. When the small droplet fell on his skin it didn't simply make him cold but brought burning pain to him.
Because all the toxic clouds are forced out from the city the rains have no longer simple water droplets here, they have long lost their cleanliness as their color turned dark grey and it longer simply brings discomfort but pain and disease too, it become toxic as the environment of this land.
Since the world is so cold and cruel perhaps it isn't too bad an idea to let it go and accept the embrace of death slowly.
***
The Gate Syndrome or the Superpower Awakening and many other names are given to certain unknown diseases that bloomed inside humanity during the early 21st century. During that time the tension between nations was intense everyone had already armed themselves to face each other, the World War 3 was only one little spark away.
But all that came to an end when the first ever recorded case of this syndrome, it was a disaster, with a blinding light an old man who was said to have a stage 3 brain tumor turned into a gate to another dimension strangely enough nothing come out from it. The gate lasted a few seconds, less than 10 but that was enough for the creatures behind the gate to notice the small planet we called Earth.
Then all of a sudden people started feeling fatigued or simply fainted, and a global panic descended upon the Earth, the government declared it disease at first trying to calm the public then it happened.
When the infected started bursting into light like a firework while omitting out a bunch of creatures from different dimensions, no one was ready. The creatures come out from the gate starting from simple beasts to complicated futuristic machines quickly overwhelm the weak national militaries of humanities rather easily, plunging the world into complete chaos.
Then with the arrival of the force of evil, the force of good will be born, from among the thousands of infected the first ever humans with supernatural powers were born. We simply call them awakened or the gatekeepers defending the person anyway, with their birth, they helped humanity to stabilize the situation on Earth.
Bringing whatever resembled the old order, but whatever was broken could never be fully restored therefore the society developed to be somewhat different yet parallel to the one before. Of course, over the years many studies have been done on the Gate and its infection but in the end, what we learned wasn't much in the grand scheme of things.
For an average person, being chosen by the Gate was as much of a risk as an opportunity, actually, it's more dangerous than opportunity. Kids learned survival skills and fighting techniques in school, on the off chance of being infected. Well-to-do families hire private tutors to train their children in all sorts of martial arts sometimes they even go through special measures increasing their chances of surviving the gates with supernatural means. Those born from the awakened people will have a greater chance of surviving, from awakening their powers safely to simply having a free pass over the first trials of awakening, truly privileged.
In the end, what's that matter to him? Who had no family to speak of and spent most of his time scrounging for food instead of going to school, being chosen by the Gate presented no opportunity at all. To him, it was basically a death sentence.
***
"Beautiful."
That was the only thing he could whisper as he saw the violent storm made of endless strings of lights and colors, they weren't exactly the strings of light to say rather endless lines made of countless worlds lining together. Inside this violent storm, his small soul gently floats through the raging cosmic wind.
He then looks at where he was heading, one of the strings grows bigger and bigger with each second among those countless worlds lined upon the string a small gate opens sucking his insignificant soul into it.
"So this is my end huh."
"What a crappy life I have lived before."
[Brace yourself you insignificant soul for your trial has begun.]
[Prepare yourself, the one named: Sol.]