- "One may not bother to identify an insect before crushing it. After all, it's size is telling enough for rapid recognition."
---
Kael arrived home long after sunset, the orange sodium glow of the streetlamps leaking through the uneven rows of cracked blinds in his bedroom window. The train ride back had been the usual blur of silence and grit — bodies pressed together, voices droning in meaningless chatter, the oily smell of fried food clinging to the carriage. He stood for the whole journey, refusing to let his skin touch the warm plastic of the seats. When the train screeched into his stop, the platform was damp, almost glistening, as though the ground itself sweated filth.
His neighborhood greeted him with the familiar chorus: glass crunching underfoot, arguments bleeding out of broken windows, a dog barking like it was being strangled. The streets were narrow, suffocated with trash cans spilling their contents, puddles catching the reflections of neon shop signs flickering in dying colors.
Kael wasn't afraid here. Not in the slightest. This was where he belonged in the eyes of others — another faceless boy from a wasted place, expected to be swallowed by it. But unlike them, he didn't rot. He walked through the mess with a measured stride, head tilted just enough to scan every shadow, every alley. He knew the rhythms. He knew the places where the addicts crouched like pale, folded spiders. He knew which groups of boys carried blades, which ones carried broken bottles, which ones carried nothing but an animal hunger to humiliate.
His house was wedged between two abandoned shells of buildings, their windows blacked with soot, their walls tattooed with graffiti. The front door was warped and never fully shut; the lock was long broken. Inside, the stairwell smelled of rust and stagnant water. A lightbulb buzzed and twitched above, sometimes flickering out entirely.
Up the narrow staircase to the second floor: his room.
Kael's room wasn't like Lucian's. Lucian's had books arranged with ritualistic precision, scientific equipment hidden in drawers, the faint chemical odor of experiments clinging to the walls. Kael's, by contrast, was stripped back almost to nothing. The wallpaper was peeling in places, exposing plaster the color of bone. The bed was a low mattress without sheets, only a gray blanket folded like an office shirt. There was a desk against the wall, scarred with burns and knife marks, upon which sat a few notebooks filled with diagrams — not of chemistry or strategy, but anatomy sketches, crude maps of veins and pressure points, little notes on movement and control.
On the wall above the desk hung two things:
An old metal pipe, dented from use.
A heavy black jacket, the kind worn by men working late shifts in warehouses.
Kael unhooked the jacket and shrugged into it, his face unreadable.
---
The night was restless outside. He heard them before he saw them: the cluster of boys at the corner, six or seven of them, voices sharp with mockery, bottles clinking against the curb. They weren't much older than him, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but their bodies already sagged with indulgence. They were predators here — of women coming home late, of old men fumbling for their keys, of anyone who crossed wrong into their orbit.
Kael descended the stairs soundlessly. He did not hesitate, not even once.
When the first one noticed him, they laughed. Skinny kid, pale face, empty eyes. One of them threw an empty can at his feet. Another asked if he was looking to get robbed. They circled like dogs, certain they had him pegged.
Kael didn't speak. He never did in moments like this. He stepped forward. The movement was surgical: pipe in hand, the first blow cracked against a jaw with a wet thud. The boy dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Another lunged — Kael sidestepped, swung the pipe low, the shinbone giving way with a snap. Their voices turned from laughter to panic, but by then the pattern had already been written.
There was nothing wild about Kael's violence. No shouting, no wasted breath. Every strike was deliberate, controlled, precise. He didn't look angry. He didn't even look alive. His eyes were glass, his expression the same as when he sat in a classroom or beside Lucian in the lab.
Within minutes they were gone — limping, dragging, spitting blood on the pavement as they scattered. Kael stood in the silence they left behind. His pipe dripped. He set it back against the wall inside the stairwell, wiped his hands on his jacket, and returned to his room as though he had merely stepped outside to take out the trash.
This was his pattern, night after night. The neighborhood was infested, and he was the uninvited exterminator. Nobody thanked him, nobody knew. That was fine. He wasn't looking for thanks. He wasn't even looking for relief. He was fulfilling a role that no one else could — erasing insects, the same way Lucian envisioned it, but in silence, without spectacle.
Nevertheless, in that, perhaps, the two were very alike.
---
Later that night, Kael sat at his desk with the window cracked open. The sound of sirens painted the distance. He wrote in his notebook, his handwriting thin and jagged:
"Decay breeds filth. Filth breeds larvae. Theit numbers do not stop growing until they are crushed."
He paused. Here, his handwriting didn't carry the clinical accuracy of professionallism. Kael's thoughts flickered toward Lucian — the only person who had ever spoken to him without triggering that cold boredom, that urge to break faces simply to feel the silence again. Lucian's eyes had not looked at him like he was just another asset. They had recognized. Birds, circling, finding but reflection.
Kael let the page dry, then closed the notebook.
---
The next morning at school, their plan began to take root. Lucian had outlined it the day before in the lab, when the chemical smell of scorched tissue hung in the air. They would not waste their intelligence on small acts forever. No — this would be sculpted violence, a performance of extermination. The students, the teachers, the masses — they needed a demonstration. A purge, carefully chosen, aimed at those who fed like maggots on weakness.
Kael's role would be simple: to draw in the rot, to isolate it, to make it accessible. He knew the shadows where the worst congregated, both in school and outside it. He had studied them with the same precision he studied anatomy. Lucian would orchestrate the spectacle; Kael would ensure the targets were placed exactly where they needed to be.
On the train that afternoon, they sat side by side, words kept low. Lucian's eyes gleamed with that feverish calculation Kael had grown to recognize. He spoke of rot and cleansing, of the insect masses that crawled unchecked. Kael didn't need to add much. He only gave short nods, short answers. It wasn't that he agreed or disagreed — it was that Lucian's words already matched the silent instinct that Kael acted upon nightly.
By the time Kael returned home again, he could feel it: the plan swelling in the air, crawling toward its first execution.
In his room again, he sat on the mattress, jacket hung back on the wall. He thought of the neighborhood boys, of their broken teeth and shattered bones. He thought of fleas, their jumps scattering them around as they picked which hair to cling onto next.
Kael didn't believe in destiny. But he understood necessity.
And this — this purge they were about to begin — was nothing less than necessary.
---
Lucian Vexis was raised in a house that had no warmth. It was not an accident, nor a tragedy, but a deliberate absence—an architecture of emptiness. Marble floors swallowed footsteps, corridors stretched long and echoing, and the only sound that lived there was the ticking of imported clocks. The building was a monument to wealth but not to life: a place too clean, too polished, where even dust seemed afraid to settle.
His father, Desmond Vexis, was always gone. His presence was less a man and more an expectation. Desmond existed in photographs and in the faint scent of cologne he left behind when rushing out to his job at one of the world's leading biotechnology firms. He was a man devoted not to family, but to progress, to profit, to reputation. He demanded perfection from Lucian in the way one demands precision from a machine—silently, but with the knowledge that failure would snap the mechanism in half.
When Desmond was home, he spoke little, and when he did, his voice was clinical: Grades. Posture. Discipline. Results. Lucian did not remember ever being hugged by him. Instead, he remembered the cold brush of a suit sleeve against his shoulder as his father inspected a test score, flipping the paper as though it were one more business report. A "good job" was rare, said without inflection, and always followed by "but you must maintain it."
His mother was the opposite, though not in any way that mattered. She was loud, colorful, indulgent, living her life in spas and nightclubs, returning home at ungodly hours with smeared lipstick and the smell of liquor soaked into her dress. She spent as fast as Desmond earned—handbags, vacations, champagne—and she played at motherhood the way one plays at roulette.
She loved Lucian only conditionally. If he was top of the class, if he dazzled relatives at gatherings, if he brought home awards she could parade to her friends—then she was affectionate. She would kiss his cheek, buy him new clothes, call him her "perfect little man." But if he faltered—if he scored second, if he made an error—she withdrew as swiftly as she embraced, leaving him in silence, in disdain.
Worse, she leaned on him. When Desmond was gone and the house was too quiet, she would pour wine and tell Lucian about her loneliness, her frustrations, her betrayals. She told him things no child should hear: about affairs, about emptiness, about how she sometimes wished she had never been married. She confessed like a sinner but expected absolution from her son. And Lucian, sitting stiff in the dining room chair with his schoolbooks spread before him, learned early that he was not the child—he was the parent.
It was here the fracture began.
---
Lucian grew up independent because there was no alternative. No one cared if he ate, if he slept, if his mind was a nest of thoughts too heavy for his age. He learned to tie his own ties before his mother was awake, to iron his uniform because the maid didn't always show, to force himself through homework because disappointment from his father was a punishment far heavier than grounding. He became a self-contained world: disciplined, sharp, unyielding.
But within that world brewed something dangerous.
Secondary school sharpened it. Lucian excelled without effort—perfect scores, flawless essays, brilliance that seemed less studied and more instinctual. Teachers praised him, classmates envied him, but Lucian did not bask in approval. He expected it. If others failed, it was because they were too weak, too lazy, too... Unthinking. He looked around at his peers—giggling, fumbling, aimless—and saw only evidence of inferiority. Why did no one else try? Why did no one else rise? They swarmed in mediocrity, crawling over each other for scraps of recognition while he stood above, unchallenged.
That was the seed of his title as "better than them": the intoxicating sense that he was different, superior, more evolved. He did not feel it. He knew it.
By fourteen, Lucian had become a machine of research. He did not stop at assignments; he consumed beyond them. Genetics, neurology, philosophy, entomology—his father's scientific journals became his nightly readings, and he digested them with a hunger that no one noticed, because no one cared. Knowledge became his fuel, his armor, his throne. The more he read, the less he resembled the children around him.
And then came the insects.
It began innocently—if anything about Lucian could be called innocent. A biology unit on ecosystems, the humble ant colony presented as a model of cooperation. Lucian stared at them in their plastic enclosure, crawling in endless circuits, and something inside him snapped with clarity. These creatures lived by order, by hierarchy, by a system that consumed the weak and rewarded the strong. They worked until death with no complaint, no illusion of individuality.
He saw himself in them.
But then, the vision widened. He began to map their structures against his classmates, his teachers, his mother, his father. Humans were ants—mindless, swarming, performing repetitive motions until death. They too were programmed by instinct, by shallow wants. Food. Sex. Entertainment. Status. Strip away the polish, the language, the clothing, and what was left? Insects crawling in human skin.
He filled notebooks with observations. Drawings of ants labeled with human traits. Lists of similarities: They cluster. They fight over crumbs. They follow pheromone trails—humans follow trends. They devour their own dead. They swarm around leaders.
Soon, the differences disappeared. He did not lose the ability to distinguish; he abandoned it. It was inefficient, a waste of energy, to pretend there was a line between insect and human. To Lucian, there was no line. There were only insects.
Except him.
---
The complex bloomed slowly, like rot under wallpaper. Lucian realized he was not part of the swarm. He was above it. He was not a worker, not a drone, not even a queen. He was the boot that crushed the colony. The observer outside the glass enclosure. The god staring down into the nest.
At first, he tested this in small ways. A cruel word whispered to a classmate, watching them crumble. A lie here, a threat there. He catalogued their reactions like an entomologist catalogues species. Fear. Submission. Anger. It was all stimulus and response, nothing more. He grew detached not from malice but from fascination: every human reaction was so predictable, so mechanical, that it disgusted him.
What do you do with an insect infestation? You control it. You eradicate it.
At fifteen, Lucian had begun late-night dissections. Not of humans—yet, he thought—but of beetles, cockroaches, moths he trapped from the garden. He pinned them to boards, sliced them open, examined their organs under the expensive microscope his father bought him for his birthday. It was not cruelty; it was confirmation. The twitching legs of a cockroach mirrored the twitching lips of a crying classmate. The torn wings of a moth mirrored the broken arm of a bully he'd "accidentally" knocked down the stairs. They were the same.
And each night, as the house stood silent and his parents lived in their separate spheres, Lucian felt something inside harden into permanence.
---
By the time he earned the lab internship through his father's connections, Lucian was no longer a boy. He was already a construct, already something alien. His father thought he was shaping him into an heir—disciplined, brilliant, ruthless in business. His mother thought she was raising a son who would validate her vanity, her pride.
They were both wrong.
Lucian had stopped being their child long ago.
In the lab, surrounded by microscopes, centrifuges, tanks of preserved specimens, Lucian felt at home. This was where gods worked—men who bent DNA to their will, who engineered life, who dissected creation itself. Lucian belonged among them. He was not one of the insects scurrying through school corridors. He was something else, he kept repeating. He's sure he is something else.
And as he leaned over petri dishes, studying cell division, he saw not science but scripture. Proof that life was fragile, mechanical, reproducible. Proof that humans were not sacred, but systems. Systems that could be dismantled. Systems that could be replaced.
---
Lucian Vexis was born human. But somewhere between the cold marble of his house, the perfume-soaked ramblings of his mother, the silent demands of his father, and the crawling of ants beneath his gaze, he shed that skin. Though every day he assured himself he was more "human" and more worthy than those below him, he lost sight of his accuracy of the definition.
What was left was something sharpened, remade. Not a boy, not a student.
A deity staring down at an insect colony.
Not anticipating worship, but waiting to crush.