The constant hum of the old refrigerators at the Saturn convenience store had become his new lullaby.
Almost six months had passed since that fateful night in the rain when a complete stranger had offered him a helping hand. For the young foreigner, those months had been a brutal but silent metamorphosis. He was no longer the skeletal beggar who trembled in Kuoh's parks. His cheeks had regained their color, his muscles had toned from the physical labor of unloading cases of drinks in the early hours, and his stomach no longer growled for mercy. He survived on bento boxes and onigiri that were about to expire, delicacies that tasted like victory to him.
His routine was a perfect clockwork mechanism, designed with a single purpose: to keep his mind occupied so he wouldn't think. He woke up at three in the morning on his small futon in the back room, surrounded by the smell of damp cardboard and cheap detergent. He cleaned the aisles until the linoleum shone, organized the shelves with almost obsessive precision, and manned the cash register with mechanical politeness.
Yet behind that facade of a diligent employee, his mind had built gigantic psychological barricades. He had developed an irrational and willful phobia of calendars.
When he received the morning papers to put on the display, he would avert his gaze from the upper right corner, where the date was printed. When he turned on the small television on the counter, he would change the channel if the morning news was on. His logic, born of trauma and anxiety, was simple: if he confirmed how much time had passed since he disappeared from his room, if he saw the days, the months, or the year printed on paper, the fragile bubble of hope that it was all just a misunderstanding would burst. The fear of suffering a panic attack and collapsing was so great that his brain simply decided to ignore time. He lived in an eternal and perpetual "today." The year didn't matter; all that mattered was surviving until the end of his shift.
That same selective blindness extended to the world around him. Kuoh City was the epicenter of activities that would chill the blood of anyone with even a modicum of spiritual awareness, but for him, everything had a mundane explanation. If he saw a man in a black trench coat muttering in an alley or a girl with crow's wings leaping across rooftops at night, his exhausted mind simply categorized them as "eccentric cosplayers" or "young people doing parkour." If a customer walked into the store at two in the morning with bloodshot eyes and an unnatural reddish glow, the young man assumed the poor devil was under the influence of some drug or suffering from a monumental hangover. After all, it was Japan; in his mind, eccentricities were part of the culture. He was completely unaware that he was dodging invisible bullets, surviving on a chessboard where fallen angels, demons, and heretical priests crossed paths daily. He was just another civilian, perfectly camouflaged in his own ignorance.
Then came the day that changed the course of his fledgling empire of survival.
It was a Tuesday night, choked by a persistent drizzle that fogged the shop windows. The young man was mopping near the entrance when the doorbell jingled. It was the boss. The middle-aged man who had rescued him from the streets usually stopped by a couple of times a week to check the till and smoke a cigarette in silence, but that night something was radically different.
The boss seemed to have aged twenty years in an instant. His skin, usually sallow, had a sickly, grayish hue. His eyes were sunken in dark, bloodshot sockets, darting around with feverish paranoia, as if he expected the shadows on the shelves to spring to life and drag him to hell. He carried an old, dented suitcase in one hand.
"Young man," the man called, his voice rasping and cracking. "Put that down. Come here."
The young man put down the mop, wiping his hands on his apron. He approached the counter with a hesitant smile.
"Good evening, boss. Is something wrong? The inventory's complete and..."
"I'm leaving," the man interrupted, placing a thick manila envelope on the cash register. "I'm leaving Japan. Tonight. I'm not coming back."
The young man blinked, slowly processing the informaion. "Leaving? Where to? What will happen to the store?"
The man's trembling hands pushed the envelope toward him.
"Everything's here. The transfer papers, the deeds, everything in your name, or rather, the name you put on the records. The Saturn is yours now. You don't owe me anything. Consider it…" The man swallowed, glancing nervously at the rain-streaked window. "Consider it payment for keeping this place afloat."
The young man's heart leapt. The minimarket was his! A wave of euphoria, so intense it made him dizzy, washed over him. This was his first great triumph. Irrefutable proof that his plan of conquest was working. He was no longer an employee; he was an owner. He was so blinded by the sudden, overwhelming happiness, so focused on the financial possibilities of not having to answer to anyone, that he didn't notice the stench of death emanating from the man in front of him. He didn't realize that the "boss" wasn't giving him a gift, but rather casting off an anchor. He was running for his life.
"I… I don't know what to say," the young man stammered, clutching the envelope as if it were the Holy Grail. "Thank you! I swear I'll make this place prosper. Have a wonderful trip!"
The man nodded, though there wasn't a trace of joy on his face. He looked like a condemned man on the gallows. Before turning to leave, he reached into his jacket pocket with a trembling hand and pulled something out. It was a rudimentary pendant: a worn black leather cord from which dangled a dark, opaque, faceted crystal, about the size of a walnut. It looked like a piece of crystallized coal or a chunk of raw obsidian.
"Take this," the man whispered, roughly hanging it around the young man's neck.
Instantly, the boy stifled a shiver. The crystal was ice-cold, as if it had been in a freezer, and at its touch, he felt a strange emptiness in his chest, a cold pressure settling on his sternum.
"What is this?" he asked, puzzled.
"Never take it off," the man ordered, and for the first time, there was a flicker of genuine warning in his lifeless eyes. "Hide… hide the smell. The city stinks, kid. Never take it off, or they'll find you."
The young man frowned. Hide the smell? He quickly assumed the poor old man was rambling from the stress of the journey, or perhaps he meant the stench of garbage in the alleys where gang members used to hang out and cause trouble. A quirk of a superstitious man.
"I'll always wear it, boss. Have a good trip."
The man said nothing more. He turned, pushed open the glass door, and disappeared into the curtain of rain and darkness that shrouded the streets of Kuoh.
The young man was left alone in the shop, the deed in his hands and an icy piece of glass pressed against his chest. He grinned from ear to ear.
He never saw the boss again. He never learned that, less than five blocks away, in a dead-end alley, what remained of the Saturn's former owner was reduced to ashes by a lance of light hurled by a crazed priest, in a silent purge of those who knew too much. The young man owned the store; his predecessor was just another number in the factions' collateral damage.
From that night on, the young man's life took on a new meaning. He worked twice as hard. He maximized profits, negotiated with suppliers using the broken but pragmatic Japanese he had learned, and began to save. Every bill he put in the old safe in the back room was a step on the path back to his real life.
And so his monthly ritual was born.
On the last Friday of every month, as the city lights began to twinkle, the young man sat at the counter of the convenience store with a translation dictionary, an international envelope, and a wad of yen. He filled out the return address illegibly, but his handwriting became impeccable, almost sacred, when he wrote the recipient's address. He wrote his street name, his house number, his country's postal code, and his mother's name.
He took all the money he didn't need for food or to keep the store running, stuffed it into the envelope, and walked the three blocks to Kuoh's main post office. He bought the most expensive international stamps and dropped the envelope into the metal mailbox. Each time he heard the soft thud of the paper hitting the bottom of the box, he felt a part of his soul return to his warm home.
"I'm okay, Mom," he thought as he walked back to the minimarket, his hands in his pockets and the wind ruffling his hair. "I have my own business now. I'm sending you money. I'm not a burden anymore. Just a little longer... just hang in there a little longer and I'll find a way to come back to you."
It was a beautiful routine, built on the foundation of his filial love and unwavering determination. It made him smile even on the coldest mornings.
But it was a routine shrouded in the deepest and most macabre of tragedies.
He didn't look at the dates. He didn't see the year stamp the post office clerk absentmindedly affixed to his letters. He ignored the reddish gazes he sometimes thought he saw from the darkest alleyways, protected by the silent cold of the black glass that rested on his chest, rendering him completely invisible to the entities that ruled the night of Kuoh.
He simply sent his money, blind to the cruel reality of his existence. Oblivious to the fact that those manila envelopes, laden with his sweat, his hopes, and his promises, were being sent to a year that didn't yet exist in that world. They traveled to a country, a house, and a family that, ten years in the past of a different dimension, simply weren't there to receive him. His letters piled up in lost and found offices, lost in the void of an unreal time, while he, in the solitude of his back room, fell asleep dreaming of the face of a mother he might never see again.
...
The rainy season in Japan was relentless. For weeks, the sky over Kuoh transformed into a perpetual gray canvas, suffocating the city under a blanket of water and melancholy. For the young manager of the Saturn convenience store, the rain meant fewer late-night customers and more time alone with the hum of the refrigerators.
It was on one of those torrential nights that fate decided to throw him another piece of a puzzle he didn't yet know he was assembling.
It was fifteen minutes to three in the morning. The young man went out the back door to throw some garbage bags into the alley. The water soaked his hair and clothes almost instantly. Cursing in his native language because of the cold, he threw the bags into the bin. As he turned to go back to the warmth of the store, he heard a faint sound. It wasn't the splashing of water or the meow of a stray cat. It was a sob.
He squinted, trying to pierce the darkness of the alley, barely illuminated by the flickering neon sign of the convenience store. Crouched behind a pile of sodden cardboard boxes was a tiny figure.
The young man approached cautiously. As he moved one of the boxes aside, his heart skipped a beat, remembering his own days on the streets. It was a girl. She couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old. She wore traditional clothing, similar to that of a shrine priestess, but it was torn, covered in mud, and, if the dim light didn't deceive him, stained with dried blood. Her long, straight, dark hair clung to her pale face. She was trembling so violently that her teeth chattered.
"Hey..." he murmured in his rudimentary Japanese, crouching down to her level. "Daijoubu?" (Are you okay?)
The girl looked up. Her eyes, a deep, unusual violet, were bloodshot with pure terror. She cowered, bracing herself for a blow, an attack, or something worse.
"No... no fear," the young man tried to say, struggling with the words. He held out his empty hands to show he wasn't a threat. "I... friend. Bad rain. Come."
The girl hesitated. Her instincts screamed at her to run, but exhaustion was overwhelming. The young man didn't insist; he took off his dry employee's jacket, threw it over the little girl's shoulders, and gestured toward the back door of the Saturn. Overcome by the icy cold, she stood up clumsily and followed him inside.
Once in the back room, the young man turned on a small electric heater and offered her a clean towel and a cup of instant hot chocolate. He sat on a soda crate, a safe distance away, watching her dry her hair. In the light of the room, he noticed that her features seemed vaguely familiar, like the echo of a memory from a past life, but his mind, focused on survival and averse to fantasy, blocked any connection to the world of anime.
"Namae wa? (What's your name?)" he asked gently.
The girl clutched the mug of hot chocolate, staring at the dark liquid. Several seconds of heavy silence passed, broken only by the rain pattering on the roof.
"Akeno..." she whispered, her voice barely audible.
"Akeno," he repeated, nodding. "Pretty name. I'm... a manager."
He couldn't get another word out of her that night. When he asked where her parents were (Chichi? Haha?), Akeno tensed so much that the mug almost slipped from her hands, and silent tears began to roll down her cheeks.The young man, remembering how his own little brother scraped his knees, knew not to insist. He gave him his futon, one of his oversized T-shirts to sleep on, and settled into a folding chair with his arms crossed.
What was meant to be a one-night refuge turned into a strange, weeks-long routine.
The young man couldn't simply throw her out, and his fear of the police—he was still an undocumented immigrant who had taken over the business of a missing man—prevented him from calling the authorities. So Akeno stayed.
The following days were an intensive course in fragmented communication and cohabitation. In the mornings, before opening the shop, they ate breakfast together in the back room. Since the young man didn't know how to cook complex Japanese dishes and they lived off the shop's leftovers, he prepared simple things for her: toast, reheated onigiri, or packaged sausages. Akeno ate with a delicacy and manners that betrayed a strict upbringing, always clasping her hands and whispering "Itadakimasu."
The biggest obstacle was the language. The young man's Japanese was functional for ringing up cash, but terrible for holding an emotional conversation.
One Tuesday afternoon, while the shop was empty, the young man was trying to take inventory.
"Ringo... Ringo juice... three boxes," he muttered, jotting things down in his notebook.
Akeno, who followed him like a silent shadow through the aisles, gently tugged at the hem of his apron. She pointed to a different box.
"Orenji," she corrected him in a very low voice.
The young man blinked, looked at the box, and laughed, rubbing the back of his neck. "Orenji. Yes. Zero in Japanese for me. Thanks, little Akeno."
Soon, Akeno began to help him. Even though he told her she didn't have to work ("I don't work, you little girl"), she seemed to need to feel useful, perhaps to justify her presence. With a broom that was half a meter taller than her, she swept the aisles with absolute concentration. The young man watched her from the register, feeling a strange warmth in his chest. In that lonely, alien world, having someone to care for returned a fragment of the humanity he had lost on the streets. He bought cheap crayons and notebooks from the stationery aisle so she could draw while he worked.
He bought her sweets that were about to expire. Her favorite was a strawberry candy wrapped in pink cellophane. Every time he gave her one, the girl's lifeless eyes would briefly light up, and she would offer him a shy smile that made all the boy's weariness worthwhile.
However, the nights revealed Akeno's invisible scars.
There were times when, during thunderstorms, the thunder would rumble over Kuoh, and Akeno would wake up screaming, covering her ears and huddled in a corner of the back room, muttering incomprehensible things about black feathers and blood. The young man didn't understand the specific words, but he understood the panic. On those nights, he would sit beside her on the cold floor, not touching her so as not to frighten her, and simply speak to her in his native language. He told her stories of his family, of his lazy brother, of his mother's cooking. Akeno didn't understand a word of Spanish, but the young man's deep, calm, and melodic tone acted like a sedative. Little by little, her breathing became regular until she fell asleep, leaning against his arm. He became her shield against nightmares.
It was almost two months of a strange but peaceful domesticity. Two outcasts hiding from the world in a seedy convenience store.
But peace in the DxD universe never lasts.
It happened one Thursday night. The bell above the front door rang aggressively. The young man looked up from the counter. Three men entered. They didn't look like yakuza or regular customers. They wore immaculate black suits, but there was something fundamentally wrong with them. A heaviness hung in the air. They were men of the Himejima Clan, relentless trackers searching for the escaped half-breed "abomination."
The young man felt a chill, but the black crystal he wore under his shirt absorbed any magical aura the men might have detected. To them, the shop and its manager were an absolute supernatural void.
"You," the leader said, approaching the counter with a look of pure disdain. He pulled an old photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket and slammed it against the glass of the register. "Have you seen this brat?"
The young man looked down. It was Akeno. His heart skipped a beat, and his survival instincts kicked in. He knew Akeno was in the back room, probably listening to everything.
"What?" the boy asked, frowning, feigning ignorance.
"Don't play dumb," the man hissed, losing patience. "A child. Black hair." Monster. Did you come through here? Speak, you human trash.
The man's rapid, aggressive Japanese completely overwhelmed the young man's comprehension. He only understood "girl" and "speak." He realized that if he tried to negotiate or showed any weakness, they would search the place. He had to get them out of there. He had to appear unworthy of investigation. Someone dangerous and unpredictable.
A thought clicked in the young man's mind. If he couldn't speak their language, he would overwhelm them with his own.
Suddenly, the young man slammed both fists on the counter, making the cash register jump. His once calm eyes filled with a wild, unhinged fury, the same fury of a cornered animal that had learned to survive on the streets.
"¡¿QUÉ CARAJOS ME ESTÁS DICIENDO, IMBÉCIL?!" the young man roared at the top of his lungs in perfect, aggressive Spanish, leaning across the counter, practically spitting the words in the leader's face. "¡NO ENTIENDO NI UNA MALDITA PALABRA DE SU IDIOMA DE MIERDA! ¡ESTOY HARTO DE QUE ENTREN A MI TIENDA A MOLESTAR!"
The three men instinctively recoiled, taken aback by the sudden outburst.
"¡LÁRGUENSE DE AQUÍ! ¡FUERA! ¡OUT! ¡VÁYANSE A LA MIERDA ANTES DE QUE LES ROMPA LA CABEZA CON UN BATE!" he yelled, waving his arms, his wild eyes reflecting genuine madness, fueled by months of stressful loneliness and fear. "¡LLAMARÉ A LA POLICÍA! ¡A LA YAKUZA! ¡A QUIEN SEA, PERO LÁRGUENSE"
He grabbed a glass bottle from a nearby shelf and smashed it on the floor in front of them, sending shards flying everywhere.
The men in suits exchanged bewildered and disgusted glances. They were trained to fight demons and fallen angels, not to deal with a destitute, mentally unstable foreigner in a convenience store. Besides, their magical senses didn't detect the girl's presence anywhere (Akeno's strict aura suppression, combined with the "nothingness" emanating from the young man, created a perfect blind spot).
"He's just a damn crazy foreigner," one of the men muttered, spitting on the floor. "Let's go. The abomination wouldn't stoop to hiding in a dump like this."
The leader nodded in disgust, put the photo away, and the three of them left the store, disappearing into the night.
"¡Y NO VUELVAN, HIJOS DE PUTA!" the young man yelled one last time toward the door, panting, his fists clenched until his knuckles turned white.
It had worked. She had scared off whatever those men were. Her knees trembled from the adrenaline rush, and she had to lean on the counter to keep from falling.
"Akeno..." she whispered, her throat dry.
She ran to the back room door and flung it open.
"Akeno, they're gone! You're safe—"
The words died in her mouth.
The small room was empty. The electric stove was off. The crayons were neatly stored in their box on the small makeshift table. The futon, which he himself had lent her, was folded neatly into a corner.
"Akeno?" he called, his voice cracking. He checked behind the boxes, under the metal shelves, even opened the door to the tiny bathroom. Nothing. She had vanished like a ghost.
Slowly, with the weight of the world falling on his shoulders, he approached the table. On top of it was a crude drawing done in colored crayons. It was a stick figure of a tall boy holding the hand of a smaller girl, and above them, written in shaky, childlike hiragana script, it said: "Thank you." Next to the perfectly smoothed paper was the empty wrapper of her favorite strawberry candy.
She had heard everything. She had sensed the danger and darkness those men brought to the solitary manager who had cared for her. She knew that if she stayed, those men would return and kill him because of her. So she did the only thing she could do to protect the only person in the world who had ever shown her kindness: she fled into the storm, disappearing from his life.
The young man clutched the drawing with trembling hands. He fell to his knees on the linoleum floor of the back room. The loneliness, which had been eased during those two months, returned with a vengeance, a thousand times heavier and more suffocating. She clutched the paper to her chest, letting the tears she'd been holding back for months finally flow.
The world had taken her family from her, and now, this rotten world had taken the small light she'd found. In the silence of the empty shop, the pain in her eyes slowly mutated. Sadness was replaced by a cold ember, a deep and calculating resentment. She still didn't know what forces ruled the city of Kuoh, but in that instant, on the floor of her back room, she made a promise.
Whoever had frightened that little girl, whoever pulled the strings of that wretched world... they would pay. Everything would begin to burn.
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Let me clarify something: if you're expecting the tone to take a dark turn because of what happens in the following chapters, I'm sorry to say that won't be the case; the MC will redeem himself, but will still have the personality he adopts in the later chapters. With that said, see you in the next chapter.
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( ̳• · • ̳) ~ ♡ Thanks for reading ♡
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