ACT 1
It was a rainy day.
The streets were empty. Nothing to be seen or heard except the heavy rain falling from the sky.
However, even in that weather, the yelling of a few kids could be heard.
***
Akira glanced over his shoulder. The three guys chasing him didn't seem to slow down, and his breath was already becoming sharp and shallow. However, that didn't bother him that much. After all, he had been in that situation more times than he could count.
As usual, Akira made the "hunters," as he used to call the guys chasing him, follow him to the outskirts of the town he lived in, a place where the houses were built randomly, without any sort of pattern, forming a kind of huge maze that would guarantee a normal person getting lost unless they knew the area by heart, which was Akira's case.
There, he would bait the hunters to chase him until they were finally deep and lost in the maze and couldn't make their way out.
The reason why the boy managed to pull it off every time was because of magic.
As he planned, the hunters followed him through a narrow space between two old buildings. Akira could barely hold his laugh, thinking that the poor guys were now deep within an inescapable labyrinth. Eventually, they reached a dead end.
"You finally can't run away, you bastard!"
yelled one of the hunters as they slowly got closer to Akira. The boy smirked. It was true that he couldn't run anywhere now, a fact that he was tired, and that the other guys knew that. After looking at their angry faces, he used most of the strength he had left to jump super high using magic, high enough to reach the top of a smaller building.
Akira started laughing with tears, barely able to stand anymore, at the guys who were staring at him in disbelief. Laughing so hard and his soaked clothes made him really cold and were draining his remaining energy really fast.
"That is not fair, you little fuck!" one of the guys yelled.
They desperately tried to shout, hit the walls, and even climb, but to no avail. They were too tired and slowly starting to panic, which didn't help them.
After spending some more time laughing and making fun of the poor guys that were struggling to find their way out, Akira finally left them alone. That was his favorite activity. He would usually target smaller groups of older guys, sneak near them, and steal something. And just like that, they became the new hunters.
It's not like they ever did something to him, he just found it funny and entertaining.
Since he was really small, Akira lived with his mother, father, grandfather, and little sister. However, his grandfather had died not too long before the boy turned 13. Akira was 15 years old. Despite living with his grandfather for so long, he always refused to tell Akira about his past. He only told him that he liked to explore the world when he was young, before all the "madness" began.
The madness was the name of a phenomenon that took place around the time Akira was born. According to his grandpa, humans suddenly started developing magical powers. And despite not everyone being able to use them, it was proven that most people possessed some power.
After that, for an unknown reason, the world was divided into four: the North, South, West, and East. The East, where Akira was born, was considered to be the poorest of the four.
Akira always believed that was the reason why almost nobody knew how to use magic, at least in his town. His parents always told him that it was for the better if he couldn't use it. However, Akira never really cared about what his parents or anyone said to him. It's not like he tried very hard to awaken his magical powers, but he was simply able to use them, although barely, but enough to keep him entertained.
As he was wandering around, Akira noticed that the rain had stopped and the clouds were going away, revealing a yellow sun that was starting to set. While getting closer to the center of the town, he started to wonder if he should go home to have dinner or skip it, steal something using his magic, eat it, and then come back home late.
He eventually chose to go home, as he most likely wasn't able to use any more magic that day.
Still, he had some time left, so he decided to do something he had been thinking of for a while.
There was an old bookstore that no one was visiting anymore in that town. The boy wasn't a fan of reading, but lately, he had started to feel the need to know more about magic. He wanted to know how to use it better and more efficiently. It was like a desire, slowly eating away at him.
His master plan was to become the "ruler of the streets" and to make other kids fear him. "Pretty simple," as he thought.
Luckily for him, that bookstore didn't have anyone to watch over it. As he sneaked in, he had really hoped that there would still be books left, but to his disappointment, that was not the case. The whole place looked like it had survived an entire war. All the bookshelves were either broken or barely standing, and the whole room was covered in dust, which made Akira wonder what had actually happened there since nobody was looking after it. Then he remembered that a few years ago, the person in charge of the east, someone known as Vail, ordered a thorough search through every single bookstore and library in the whole east. That must have been why everything went missing.
After not finding anything, he eventually gave up, clenched his teeth and punched the wall, frustrated. He needed to get more powerful, and the fact that he couldn't find his answers there only made him more obsessed with it.
Then a light sparked inside his head. Maybe some of the books had something in them about the truth behind what was happening. Maybe that was why they were disposed of.
But why wouldn't this Vail person want people to know? What happened that no one was talking about it?
In that moment, he decided that he would ask his parents about it when he had the chance. He had tried a few times, but they just refused to tell him. Maybe this time they would, assuming he might have figured something out.
He knew they could use magic, but they refused to talk to him about it just like his grandpa.
At some point, he decided to stop thinking about it as he almost got lost on his way, having taken several wrong turns already.
By the time Akira got home, it was completely dark outside. Not even a light, nothing. The sky was filled with beautiful stars, and if the boy hadn't been hungry, he would have stayed on a roof just watching them. It was his other favorite activity.
When he was smaller, he used to spend whole nights just watching the stars. It was the perfect thing to do to calm him down after arguing with his parents, or just if he wanted to clear his head.
He quietly opened the door of the house.