___ 21st December 2025, 4:50 am ___
The drumming sounds of the rain crashing against Uche's window had never been a problem until tonight.
Was he nervous or excited?
He couldn't tell for sure.
The room was dark due to a power outage, which is quite common in this part of the world. However, the blinding flash that always came before the rumbling sound of thunder revealed his figure—occasionally.
He has a lean, muscular build, a slim face, and a light brown skin tone, which compliments his cornrows hairstyle and neat side fades.
Uche was dressed in a sleeveless turtleneck black shirt and black cargo pants, which complimented his gloves and running shoes. It wouldn't be far-fetched to assume he was preparing for a midnight robbery but he had greater plans in mind—This was the night he was going to become the world's greatest deviant or die trying.
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Uche was the third of five children in a middle-class family residing in the Southeastern part of Nigeria—Enugu state to be precise.
Growing up, he was a soft-hearted boy who watched anime, glazing over loud and dazzling protagonists while silently admiring the cool, ever-silent, and crafty antagonists.
Sadly, humans were normal, a word he grew up to hate. For a short while, the depression that came with this reality was alleviated by his drawing talent.
"I can't become a dazzling hero or a cool villain but I can make one." He always said to himself.
But reality came swinging... And fast.
Why?
Because Uche was born to typical middle-class Nigerian parents. For these people, you were either a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or a failure.
On a normal day, he would get his ass whooped when found drawing instead of studying, and on good days, he would only get shouted down ruthlessly.
You know… things like this kill dreams and confidence. Watching them rip apart and destroy artworks that meant so much to him broke something.
Beyond the 'safe' hell he called home, Uche was the weird kid who couldn't fit in and occasionally got picked on. His existence would have been completely ignored if it wasn't for his insignificant gift—one he rarely got the opportunity to use and eventually abandoned.
That was why he grew up believing the average Nigerian child had their dreams crushed by their parents before the brutal realities of life got to them.
For a good part of his childhood, he resented them for this. That one thing that made him smile had been taken away—leaving behind an empty shell that just existed.
As a wise man once said; 'You can take a horse to the stream, but you cannot force the horse to drink.'
With shattered confidence and lacking the motivation to follow the mapped-out plan to cooperate with slavery, his academics suffered.
In terms of appearance, he was no different from a goblin—big, round-headed with pointy ears and tiny limbs that gave him an ugly figure. As if the heavens hadn't played enough jokes, he was emaciated, timid, and light-spoken—a bully's favorite Christmas present.
Those days were the most challenging but most educational part of his life.
Uche was the odd man out, relegated to the role of an observer, and watched his peers live cheerful lives filled with love, care, and friendship from a dark corner, wishing he could experience this—even if only for a day.
With the loneliness came resentment for his peers which matured into indifference as time passed. He embraced his place as an observer and enjoyed the perks that came with it.
Body language, mannerisms, deceptive cues, false confidence, and many more.
He could spot them all in one glance. Soon the reality of those friendships which he once envied began to unfold.
Some were backstabbed, and some were abandoned when their friends found 'better' friends. Others split up over disagreements, and a few allowed time to wear on their friendship—sad endings were all he could see.
There were a few who surpassed his expectations, sticking together throughout secondary school but changed nothing in his opinion about his frailty and irrelevance of friendship.
Yes, some exceptions stood the test of time. However, exceptions don't make the rules!
If 99% of all friendships were bound to lead to bitter ends—why bother?
And so, the world taught Uche his first life lesson—Lone wolves die first.
Uche was a lot of things but he wasn't dumb. He knew not everyone was as good-natured as the world tried to portray. In fact, he would argue most people are nasty.
To survive, he assumed the facade of a silent yet kind loner who treated everyone with respect and just enjoyed peace. However, he soon came to learn his second lesson—Peace is not the absence of war but the mutual understanding of the repercussions of war.
Unfortunately, the lesson came a tad too late. His solitary lifestyle made him an easy target, and his kind persona only painted him weak. He was a prey and attracted predators.
Bullying was a constant throughout secondary school.
Uche's love life, you ask?
Non-existent.
Who would love a goblin who always hid his talent from everyone?
He was worthless.
However, there were a few who saw his potential beyond his glaring flaws, but Uche sent them packing. He knew he was crap and couldn't make sense of why they liked him.
To an extent, he was even suspicious of them.
Instead of letting them get close enough to see his flaws up close, he maintained distance and missed out on his opportunity to experience childhood romance.
All these pent-up negative emotions and nasty experiences broke him. He bottled them up and died in silence a thousand times before 18.
Making it into the University was like a breath of fresh air, a new environment where he could undergo rebirth and the first thing he did was work on his body as he had come to understand looking harmless didn't necessarily equate to safety.
One would expect him to go down the route of bodybuilders. But Uche had thought it through—he didn't just want to look dangerous, he wanted to be dangerous. The movement limitations and health challenges that came with the physique were not worth it.
Once he had built what he considered the perfect physique, he quickly shifted his focus to actually learning how to fight.
Now he had the physique, the face, and the knowledge needed to build a successful social life, and as expected he did.
With the mastery over the act of assimilation. He partied hard like he was born into that life but also blended in amongst the introverts. It was as easy as changing a face cap because none of those were the real him.
To be honest, he couldn't even remember what the real him was like.
His love life didn't improve as his traumatic childhood left him with a severe case of reactive attachment disorder(RAD) and emotional detachment.
He could experience, understand, and reciprocate love but never really feel it.
Uche's knowledge of women came from people around him. He judged based on results and not sentiments or words. For him, something either works or it doesn't.
He ignored what women had to say and focused on what they responded to.
While the self-proclaimed 'good-guys' bitched about being ditched for 'bad boys,' Uche was more curious to find out the unique traits these bad boys had that attracted women and it wasn't as superficial as many made it out to be.
'What did these drug dealers and gangsters have that I lack?' he asked himself a couple of times and it wasn't long before he found the answers.
Confidence, charm, decisiveness, control, mystery, fearlessness, and many more.
Time and time again, he reinvented himself. Improving his mannerisms, body language, and mindset. It felt like he was cutting out tiny pieces of clothes from a thousand masks to create that perfect persona.
The process was long and hard. He experienced many failures, but none of them hurt because he was never emotionally invested. To him, it was just a game—a means of improving his craft.
It took some time but after failure came success---many of them. To him, they were all new faces that would be sent away when he got bored.
In his defense, for the short while they spent together, he gave them the most thrilling and passionate love they had ever and probably would ever experience.
This new life he spent over a decade studying and creating did not bring the satisfaction and fulfillment he expected—it bored him.
And then it happened—
The world tree's appearance in early 2020 changed everything for Uche, and Ki-moon's interview made his eyes gleam with life for the first time in over a decade.
He saw this as an opportunity from the heavens to achieve his childhood dreams of becoming the dazzling hero he was destined to be, but Uche understood haste makes waste.
Uche wanted nothing more than to open a door and grab an ability for himself but his observer instincts kicked in.
"There is no harm in waiting and watching before acting…" He repeated to himself a thousand times.
And then the tragedy of 8 October occurred, infamously known as the black assembly. Hundreds of millions of doors opened across the world spitting out the mangled corpses of the reckless enthusiasts who tried to explore the other world.
Even worse, the appearance of a hundred gates scattered across the world on the 11th of October was met with enthusiasm by deviants—a term used to describe humans with unique abilities from the world tree.
They believed the heavens had chosen and blessed them with these gifts specifically for this moment—technically, they weren't wrong.
However with great power comes great responsibilities, and sometimes those responsibilities can be too heavy.
The monsters they met within the gates were vicious, it felt like something out of a movie until it wasn't. The raid ended with heavy casualties—nearly fifty percent of the deviants who participated were killed.
That was half of the global deviant population which was acquired at the expense of over 400 million lives!