"Those who touch death too soon often mistake stillness for peace and life for punishment."
---
Moscow, Russia — Years Ago
The first thing Nika remembered was the silence after the bells.
Funeral bells — dull, distant, eternal.
She stood beside her grandfather's body, her small hands clenched around the hem of her black dress. The scent of damp earth hung thick in the air.
Her family wept — mother, father, older sister but Nika only stared at the body.
Something called to her.
A faint whisper beneath the veil of quiet.
Her grandfather had been a strange man — wise, terrifying and always smiling like he knew how the world ended.
He once told her, "Every death has a memory, little one. It's only waiting for someone brave enough to listen."
That whisper grew louder.
Her fingers moved before she could think.
She touched his hand.
And the world shattered.
The Vision
She fell. Into oceans of screaming memories.
Each drop a life.
Each wave a death.
Her grandfather's final breath burned through her veins — she saw his youth, his battles, the assassinations, the deals— his hands, drenched in blood and grace alike.
She gasped, and when her eyes opened, she was no longer just Nika.
She was his heir.
Knowledge she never earned flooded her — how to kill, how to mend, how to extract a soul's last truth.
And something inside her whispered with cold clarity:
"You have inherited the hunger."
The Funeral — Minutes Later
The priest's chant trembled. His eyes turned feral as he reached for the guns beneath his coat.
The air thickened with dread.
Nika's parents didn't even notice — until the priest said, " AMEN!!!"
Then, instinct took over.
Nika moved — impossibly fast, without thought, guided by her grandfather's experience now seared into her own.
Her hand touched the priest's throat and his body went limp before hitting the ground.
The light in his eyes flickered and went out.
When the silence returned, it was absolute.
Her mother screamed. Her father pulled her sister close.
And then they stepped back.
Their faces twisted not in grief but fear.
Fear of her.
The Transformation
Her reflection in the spilled water showed a stranger.
Her once-dark hair had turned the color of bone white, her lips and nails black as ink, her eyes glowing with a soft red hue that pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat from another world.
Her hands trembled. "I… I didn't mean to—"
Her mother whispered, "Monster…"
Nika blinked. The word stung, but she hid it behind a crooked smile.
"Well," she said softly, almost joking, "we never really got along anyway."
She turned and walked out into the snow, leaving white footprints that were buried almost instantly.
" Do svidaniya." She muttered while tears streaked down her pale cheeks.
Years Later — Tokyo's Underbelly
The neon night was alive with sinners, killers and saints disguised as both.
That's where she found him — Lord Death Man.
He watched her like a cat studying a mouse that had decided to roar.
"You smell of Death." He said, voice smooth and skeletal. "But not of despair. You still wish to live."
Nika shrugged, twirling a knife between her fingers. "Is that a problem?"
He grinned, teeth like tombstones. "No, my dear. That's potential."
And so began her education. Not in kindness but in mastery.
Death became her dialect, pain her punctuation.
She learned to read souls, to extract echoes, to become the whisper between breaths.
Yet every time she closed her eyes, she saw the same image — a little girl standing before her parents fear.
No amount of training could erase that.
The Televised Revelation
Years later, sitting in the corner of a Tokyo dive bar, she saw him on the flickering TV screen — King.
The man whose strength wasn't in how he fought but why.
He was smiling while helping rebuild Metropolis, not as a hero, not as a god but as a man who understood both.
Something inside her cracked.
Her chest hurt. Not the kind of pain that kills — the kind that reminds you you're still alive.
She pressed a finger against her own pulse and whispered to herself,
"Why does someone like that exist… while I can barely breathe without breaking something?"
For the first time, she realized she wasn't fascinated by death anymore.
She was yearning for life.
But fear held her fast — the fear that if she reached for it, it would slip through her bloodstained hands.
So she smiled again. Soft, bitter, practiced.
"Guess normal's not in my resume."
The rain outside whispered against the glass — like a soft applause for a tragedy no one else would ever hear.
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