Sometimes, Riku wondered if he was born wrong.
He thought about it as he walked through the halls of the school, inadvertently dodging the boys who trained their powers in the special skills clubs. One threw fire on the back court, another floated pencils without touching them. Next to him, a girl practised levitation with a rope tied around her waist "just in case".
And he... he was carrying only a broken backpack and a thermos of cold tea that was shaking in his hands from nerves.
-Don't look so much, you'll turn to salt," Itsuki joked, tapping him on the shoulder.
-Salt? -Riku asked, not understanding.
-It doesn't matter. Sounds wise," Mina interjected, hanging onto her backpack like a cape. Still, it's better than looking up to the 'divine' as if they were gods.
The three of them sat on the edge of the abandoned court, where no one was practising anything. That's where they always met. The "normal club", as they called each other.
There were four of them:
- Riku, quiet, soft-spoken, sharp-eyed.
- Mina, talkative, creative, with an outrageous laugh.
- Itsuki, the sarcastic one, with ideas that he never finished executing.
- And Sora, who always brought food and never said how he got it.
None of them had skills. None of them had an initiation licence. None had been called to the special tests.
In a world where 80% of the population had some gift, they were in the remaining 20%. The grey zone. The group of those on the outside looking in.
-My old man says that not having powers will make me stronger," Riku once remarked as they shared cold rice in a park.
-Strong how? In character? -Sora asked, scratching the back of his neck.
-Frustration," laughed Mina. Riku smiled, but looked down.
-He... works himself to death. He makes knives, hammers, things for temples. He says he didn't need powers. That he did it all with his hands. But I... I don't want to spend my life pounding metal.
The others were silent. They understood. Too well.
-I want to fly," Mina said, without irony for once. Not... not in the sky, literally. Just... not feel like I'm stuck here.
-Do you think there's a way? -Itsuki asked. To change who we are.
-There's always a way," Sora replied, pulling a stuffed loaf of bread out of his coat. The question is whether we're willing to pay the price.
No one said it aloud, but that night, everyone went to sleep with the same question swirling in their heads:
What if there was a way? What if all we need is the courage to try?
Days later, Mina was the first to mention it.
-I heard about a guy who met another guy who has an address. They say they "awaken" occult powers there.
-That's a scam," said Riku. But he didn't sound convinced.
-Maybe," Mina admitted. Or maybe... it's our only chance. The others said nothing. But no one laughed.
Mina -Maybe we should go-
The others looked at him strangely, though they all wanted to go except for Riku who was a little bit annoyed at this situation.
-Come on Riku, do you want to remain a nobody," said Itsuki.
Itsuki adds, "We don't have to go back as gods," he said, looking at the sky, "We just have to go back as visible.
Riku ends up accepting and Mina saves the location in her phone.
That night while everyone was asleep, Riku got up quietly. He got dressed slowly. He looked at his room one last time. He wrote a letter and left it on the table.
Riku clutched the note he had written. He didn't know whether to leave it. He didn't know if his father would understand. He didn't know if he would forgive himself later.
But he knew one thing.
He couldn't just stand there, waiting.
And with that thought, she closed the door behind her. The journey was not heroic.
There were no secret maps or tunnels lit by mystical flames. Just an address written on a napkin, damp stairs descending into maintenance tunnels, and the silence of those who knew they might never go up again.
Riku walked behind Mina, his heart pounding like a broken drum. Itsuki joked with the lantern, but his voice trembled. Sora said nothing the whole way up, as if he already knew what they were going to find.
When they arrived, there were no ceremonies. Just an iron door, creaking open. Inside, hooded figures awaited them, smooth masks, a soft, feminine voice inviting them in as if it were a job interview.
-Welcome," she said. You have been seen. They have been chosen. And they, desperate to stop being invisible, entered.
The Awakening
The place looked like an operating theatre out of a nightmare: stained white walls, cold lights, surgical instruments next to altars with candles and incomprehensible symbols. The cult was not lying when it said it united science and faith.
They called them in one by one.
Sora was the first. He volunteered without hesitation, as if he had always planned this.
They strapped him to a gurney. They injected him with a green liquid that seemed to glow from within.
At first, he screamed. Then he convulsed. His veins darkened. His skin broke into stitches as if something was trying to come out from inside.
Riku watched from an observation room, not understanding whether this was a birth or an execution.
Sora did not die. But when he opened his eyes again, they were no longer the same colour. He didn't say anything. He just smiled. A strange, crooked smile. The smile of someone who had paid a price and still didn't know what he had lost.
-A successful one," said a voice. The first.
Chain fall
Mina was the second.
The uproarious laughter faded with the first spasms.
Her body rejected the substance. They tried again. A second dose, deeper, more dangerous. Her fingernails grew longer. His eyes turned completely red for a few seconds. He screamed so loud that everyone in the room covered their ears.
And then... she fell.
Not dead. But not alive either.
-Unstable mutation. Hold and isolate," they ordered.
Riku tried to approach. He was beaten. A guard pressed his neck against the wall.
-Don't interfere. You've already started on the road.
Itsuki's turn
He joked even when they tied him up.
-If I get out of this as a lizard, at least I want to fly.
The injection was quick. His body tensed. Something in his bones started to creak from inside.
And then it happened: a kind of black shadow emerged from his back, floating like solid smoke, like a voice whispering in another language.
-It has awakened a partial resonance," muttered one of the Cult scientists. Not stable, but... usable.
Itsuki couldn't speak. He was bleeding from his nose, from his eyes, but he was still conscious. His body trembled, but the shadow was still there, alive because of him, or in spite of him.
Riku
He didn't offer. He didn't move. He wept. He could barely stand. He knew it wasn't bravery that had brought him there. It was fear. The desire not to be the only useless one among gods.
When they tied him up, he didn't fight. He had no strength. The needle went in and his whole world went up in flames.
He felt his blood boil. His skin wanted to break from the inside. That his lungs shrank, that his heart changed its rhythm, its language.
And in the midst of the scream, she saw something. Not a vision. A memory. His father, teaching him how to hold a hammer.
"All that is forged in pain... remains."
When he came to, the room was destroyed. Two scientists lay unconscious. One of the stretchers was floating half a metre off the floor, spinning uncontrollably.
And Riku, sitting amidst the molten metal, had his eyes open as if he had just been born.
-Hold him," commanded a voice in the shadows. The Awakening... was true.
They were not released.
The Cult would not let them go.
They divided them. Sora was called "Active A". Mina, they locked her up, sedated. Itsuki was assigned a "spirit guide". Riku... was put under constant surveillance.
They were not people. They were materials.
They were proof that the method worked.
They were proof that the world could be remade with pain.
And while the system slept, the four friends - those who only wanted to become visible
- were moulded into something else. They were no longer normal.
But they were not free either.
The next day, Goro wakes up and goes to wake Riku to teach him how to forge weapons, but something was different. Riku's futon was laid out. Folded neatly, as if he wanted to make it clear that he hadn't left in a fit of rapture. As if he had said goodbye without words.
Goro noticed it immediately. The absence was not in the disorder, but in the order. In the silence perfectly placed over every corner of the house.
The cupboard, ajar. The backpack, gone.
The sketchbook, where Riku scribbled scenes that he never said aloud, was no longer on the desk.
And on the low dining table, a note written in that clumsy but firm handwriting that Goro would recognise even with his eyes closed:
"We'll come back stronger, Dad."
The phrase stuck in his chest like a splinter. "We'll be back."
Plural. He hadn't gone alone.
The friends. Mina, Itsuki, Sora. The four kids without powers. Invisible. Silent. Ignored. Now also... absent.
The police arrived later that day.
They took the note, searched the room, asked questions without looking in the eyes.
-Any recent arguments?
-Did the boy have any self-esteem issues?
-Did you notice any... obsessive behaviour on the subject of powers? Goro didn't shout at them.
He answered in monosyllables. His body straight and his jaw clenched.
They wrote in their notebooks, left a leaflet, and left as if they had done enough.
Goro stood at the door, watching them walk away in the drizzle, and then quietly closed it.
Days passed.
He put up posters. He visited hospitals. He walked through neighbourhoods where patrol cars no longer entered. He asked about each of the other three boys. None had been seen.
Riku seemed to have vanished.
But his shadow remained in everything: in the cup he used for tea, still unwashed. In the gloves he had forgotten hanging on the coat rack. In the space his silence occupied during meals.
Goro didn't sleep for more than two hours at a time. He did not eat well. He worked non-stop, pounding metal furiously until his arms went numb. The workshop was no longer his refuge: it was his way of not thinking.
Until, one night, he heard the first rumour.
It was in a makeshift canteen on the fringes of the city. There, amidst cheap smoke and flickering lights, an old man with missing teeth spoke to anyone who would listen.
-They say there's a group... that gives powers to those who have nothing. "The Awakening, I think they call it. It brings them back to life.
Goro approached without saying a word. He grabbed him by his coat and lifted him up with one hand.
-Where?
-I don't know! I don't know! -shrieked the man, fear sticking in his throat. They say they move through old tunnels, abandoned factories... I'm just repeating what I heard!
Goro let him go. He didn't say thank you. He didn't apologise.
He simply walked out, his heart roaring under his chest like a red-hot forge.
The investigation took him to the edges of the city, where concrete crumbled and wires hung like rotten roots.
He followed marks: symbols painted on dirty walls, doors double-bolted shut, tunnels smelling of rust and dried blood. Areas where no one patrolled. Where no one dared enter.
And in one of those places - a forgotten factory, consumed by damp and dust - he found it.
A blue cloth bracelet. Broken.
Goro stood still. He didn't touch it at first. He just looked at it.
It was the same one he had made for Riku himself on his tenth birthday. A small amulet with his name embroidered on it in twisted hiragana. A gesture of love. Of protection.
"So that you will never forget who you are, even if the world wants to erase you."
He picked it up. He clenched it in his fist. The metal under his skin vibrated, as if he knew what that meant too.
Riku had been there. Maybe he still was.
That night, Goro returned to the workshop. He lit the forge.
Not to work.
To prepare.
Because the system wasn't going to look for his son. Because the heroes with ID didn't go down into the sewers.
Because the Cult of Awakening had to understand that not everything could be broken with impunity.
And if his body was steel...
Then he would be the wall between that hell and all the other sons who had not yet been dragged down.
Two nights later.
Goro Takamine had visited twelve neighbourhoods in three days. His knuckles were scarred, his back numb and his heart pounding like a burning forge. But he would not stop. He could not.
He barely slept, ate just enough. He went from speakeasies to dilapidated shelters, from empty alleys to makeshift bases of rumour collectors. His hammer hung on his back.
Riku's blue bracelet, clenched in his fist like an anchor.
On one of those moonless nights, in an old laundry converted into an illegal casino, someone spoke:
-"I hear one of the mutants is on the loose. They say he lives under the city," said a chemical dealer, nervously counting plastic chips. He laughs alone. He attacks rats. And he says things like he's preaching... like a madman.
Goro raised his head.
-Where?
The man hesitated.
Goro put the hammer on the table. He didn't hit it. He just left it there, heavy enough to make the wood creak.
-They said it's in the sewers of the old industrial sector, near the disused underground tunnels. No one's dared to patrol there for weeks.
-Did you see his face?
-No, but... some say he's wearing a school uniform.
Goro put the hammer away. He said no more. He walked out the door without asking permission.
Sewers in the industrial sector
The walls were covered with mould. The pipes creaked. And laughter... laughter floated like steam in the air.
Bulwark - Goro Takamine, now completely encased in steel - moved forward without turning on a light. He didn't need it. He already knew the smell of fear, the sound of madness.
Rounding a tunnel, he saw it.
A human figure, hunched over, surrounded by Cult symbols drawn in chalk and dried blood. On the ground, the remains of animals, shredded rubbish...
Goro approached and saw the figure of Sora, one of his son's friends.
-Sora? -Goro said, his voice filtered through the metallic echo of his body. The figure turned slowly.
-Who's asking? -he crooned. His tone was playful... and profoundly erratic.
Sora. Thinner, paler, with glassy eyes and a crooked smile. His shadows moved without following the laws of light. And his school uniform still hung, dirty, stained with blood and ash. Seeing Goro, he recognises him.
-Ah! The blacksmith. Riku's father," Sora laughed, doing a theatrical turn. You're here to pick up Riku? You're late. He's no longer with the broken ones like me. He's been upgraded. A 'True Awakened One'.
Goro did not answer. His steel feet crunched on the rubble.
-Where is he? -he growled.
-And why would he tell you? -Sora laughed as if her throat tickled. You want to save him? You can't! He left by choice! He chose! Didn't you know that? Your son abandoned us by choice!
Goro charged without replying.
The fight
Sora transformed.
His shadow enveloped him like a parasite. His arms became serpentine, his eyes glowed red. He laughed as he shot out blasts of darkness that echoed like screams in a cavern.
I'll show you what awakened in me! Look at me, you old good-for-nothing! I have power too!
Bulwark stood his ground, covering himself with his steel arms, taking each blow without retreating.
But with each step, he closed the distance. Until he got there.
One punch. Direct. Precise. The metallic echo felt like restrained thunder. Sora fell. His shadow receded like frightened smoke.
A shard of truth
-Goro..." Sora said, spitting blood as he returned to normal and barely conscious. I saw it. I swear. Riku. They took it... them. They said he was unique. That he endured everything without breaking down. That he didn't even scream.
Goro knelt beside him. The steel began to slowly fall away from his face, revealing eyes reddened with insomnia.
-Where?
-I don't know... they took him... higher up... like a glass cage, they said. "Zone 7", or something like that.
-Is he alive?
Sora cried, trembling.
-I don't know. I don't remember anymore. I just know that... he didn't scream. None of us held on. But he... he didn't scream.
But at that moment, Sora fainted.
Escape
Sirens sounded in the distance. Police were coming down the tunnel. Torches. Voices. Goro stood up. Steel covered him again like living armour.
One of the officers shouted:
-Stop! Stop or we will shoot!
But Goro had already disappeared into the smoke and concrete. The officers saw Sora and called for backup and an ambulance. The darkness gave way to dim light.
Goro opened his eyes slowly. His body felt numb, his muscles still loaded with tension. The first thing he noticed was a strange weight on his face.
A magazine.
Crumpled. One of those old ones, with licensed heroes on the cover, smiling like plastic idols. It covered his face like a useless mask.
With a grunt, he pushed it away.
-Did you sleep well, steel wall? -said a familiar voice.
Daiki, leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee in his hand, looked at him with a half-smile.
-Because we have a lot of work to do.
Goro sat up slowly. The smell of metal, sweat and oil hung in the air like a familiar perfume. They were at the base: the old textile factory. The roof was still leaking in the same spot. The noise was the same. But something had changed.
In the distance, in the clear, Shiftie and Ricochet were training. Aoi dodged through shadows, disappearing and reappearing with flashes of her camouflage, while Haruto threw his boomerang with surgical precision. They laughed, corrected themselves, tried again.
They did not have perfect powers.
But they were trying with everything they had.
Goro watched them in silence, saying nothing for a long moment. Then he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else:
-Riku... if you're still out there... I hope you're fighting too.
His voice sounded low, but firm. Like a hammer held back, waiting to strike. And then, he stood up. Because the work was just beginning.