The land was never kind.
Once, Cheri had been a kingdom of gold and scripture — a place where light was worshipped like a god and justice was sung through the mouths of fools. But now it was rot. A carcass of civilization wrapped in smoke and silence. The air itself reeked of spoiled hope. Where towers once stood, only bones of steel remained. Where temples preached salvation, only rats gathered to eat the psalms. The city's name still lingered on parchment, but its soul had long since drowned in sewage.
This was where the forgotten went to die.
Among the slums that festered between the noble districts and the waste pits, lived a child named Gomi Kirā — though even his name was not his own. It was given mockingly by his masters, spat like refuse. Gomi — garbage. Trash. The word fit him in their eyes: something to be used, then thrown away.
He had been five when they took him in — the so-called "benevolent" nobles who smiled for statues and slit throats for supper. They said they were doing a kindness. They said he should be grateful. Every day since, they reminded him of that kindness with their boots and belts.
He worked where even insects refused to crawl: cleaning the slime between the floorboards, gathering the dead rats under the porch, polishing silver with rags soaked in his own blood. They called it training. He called it life.
Outside, the slums were no different. The people there laughed when he passed — laughter sharpened with pity and fear. To them, he was the slave of nobles, the pet of cruelty itself. To his masters, he was filth given shape. To the world, he was nothing.
And so, Gomi stopped speaking. Stopped crying. His silence became armor — thick, unbreakable, heavy. He didn't pray. He didn't dream. He just existed, as though even death couldn't be bothered to collect him.
The city of Cheri never slept; it only starved. Its nights bled into mornings like bruises into flesh. The rich burned incense to hide the stench of the poor; the poor burned bodies to stay warm. Smoke rose like prayer, but no god listened anymore.
Every morning, Gomi left the noble manor to dig through the town's garbage heaps — towers of forgotten things, mountains of rot. Metal scraps, discarded tools, spoiled food, torn clothes, broken dolls. Things that once had meaning. Things that had been loved, then cast aside. He found comfort there. The trash didn't lie. The trash didn't hit him.
Sometimes, he would find a half-eaten fruit and imagine his parents eating the other half. They had once been heroes — rebels of justice, protectors of the downtrodden — until the world turned its blade on them. Accused of murdering a royal daughter, their honor was stripped, their bodies tossed into the Wastes of Cheri, where condemned souls rotted under the open sky. The people cheered as they died.
And Gomi was left behind. To live as proof that justice was a lie.
That evening, the city was drowning in smoke. The slums were quieter than usual. Even the beggars had gone still. Something was wrong — the kind of silence that hums before a storm.
Gomi walked home through the alleyways, hands raw from scavenging, pockets filled with scraps of metal he hoped to sell. His skin ached from the cold. The manor loomed ahead — its tall, rusted gates like a mouth waiting to swallow him again.
But when he entered, the stench hit him first.
Iron. Wet. Fresh.
Blood.
He froze in the doorway. Candlelight flickered weakly against the walls, painting shadows that crawled like worms. The floor was slick. His shoes stuck with every step. And then he saw them.
His adoptive parents — the nobles who had starved him, beaten him, broken him — now lay slumped across the floor. Their eyes were glass. Their throats were opened like letters never meant to be read. Their bodies were arranged — deliberate, ceremonial — as if in twisted worship.
Behind them stood a figure.
Tall. Cloaked in silk soaked black with blood. Their voice cracked the air like the snap of bone.
"They weren't your parents."
Gomi didn't move.
"They were mine," the stranger hissed. "And they betrayed me… for you."
The figure's hand moved — slow, deliberate. The blade gleamed under the dim light, a curved fang of silver slick with crimson. The air between them trembled.
"They gave everything to raise you, filthy moron. While I rotted. While I screamed in the pits. Do you know what it's like to be forgotten because of a mistake that wasn't yours?"
The blade rose.
"Let me teach you."
Gomi's mouth opened, but no sound came. The stranger lunged. Pain — sharp, pure, absolute — bloomed in his stomach. His breath hitched. The world tilted. Blood spilled down his legs, warm against the cold tile. He fell without grace.
The stranger leaned close, whispering into his fading ear.
"Trash belongs in the pit."
Then darkness swallowed him whole.
When Gomi woke, the world was gone.
There was no sound. No sky. Only an endless sea of violet mist and sand that moved like water. His body lay half-buried, pale and trembling. The wound in his gut was gone — not healed, just missing. He felt hollow. Wrong. Alive when he shouldn't be. He was in thrown into the pit that Cheri loomed over.
The air stung his lungs like broken glass. Each breath brought whispers — not voices, but memories. Dying words. Forgotten screams.
He staggered to his feet. Around him, shapes began to form within the fog: faces, bodies, remnants of those discarded by the world. The lost. The murdered. The betrayed. They twisted and groaned, their voices crawling beneath his skin.
"Why are you here…?"
"You don't belong…"
"You survived… when we didn't…"
The mist coiled tighter around him. His heart thrashed. His skin burned. And then — it began.
A pulse, deep inside his skull. Pain rippled through him as bone cracked and flesh warped. A horn tore through his forehead, small and jagged, dripping blood. He screamed — not from agony, but revelation.
Because for the first time, he felt real.
The whispers grew louder.
"You should've died."
"But you didn't."
"You are chosen."
The mist condensed into a shape — a towering silhouette of smoke and shadow, its eyes hollow suns. It spoke with a thousand voices at once.
"Gomi Kirā… You are the Oni King of Yagumi. The Guardian of the Wretched. The Scar of the Forgotten."
He couldn't speak. He didn't believe. But the ground beneath him pulsed, alive with veins of light — memories of the dead fusing into his veins. He saw flashes: wars fought for nothing, children crying for gods that never came, corpses stacked in golden streets. Humanity, dressed in its own decay.
The voices rose to a scream.
"Avenge us."
"Burn it all."
"Make them remember."
And something inside him broke open.
He laughed — low at first, then louder, until the laughter tore into a scream.
"This scar will never heal," he roared into the mist. "AND I WILL NEVER FORGIVE THIS WORLD!"
The mist erupted around him, spiraling into a storm. The dead wailed in joy. His horn glowed with violet fire. He clenched his fists, dripping blood, and looked toward the invisible sky.
"You made me trash," he growled, voice shaking the ground. "Then I'll be trash that tears the heavens apart!"
Lightning cracked across the void. The earth answered with thunder. The sand bled color, turning black, red, and gold all at once. The pit itself seemed to breathe — awakening something ancient beneath its crust.
Gomi stood alone, a storm in human form. The broken son of a forgotten age. The birth of vengeance incarnate.
The voices receded, leaving only echoes — soft, mournful, reverent.
"Filth will rise…"
Hours — or centuries — passed. Time was meaningless here.
Gomi wandered through the mist, following the rhythm of his own heartbeat. The land twisted endlessly: dunes of bone dust, rivers of smoke, shattered idols buried upside down. The wind sang lullabies for the damned.
He didn't know where he was going. He didn't care. Each step was a defiance, each breath an insult to a world that wanted him dead.
But somewhere in the endless fog, he began to hear it — a sound unlike the others.
A heartbeat.
Not his own.
He turned. The mist shifted, parting for a moment to reveal something small, distant, and trembling. A shadow among shadows. Watching. Breathing. Waiting.
Gomi narrowed his eyes.
"…Who's there?"
Silence.
The mist closed again, hiding whatever had been there. The whispers faded to nothing. The world went still.
For now.
And so began the legend whispered in slum gutters and noble halls alike — the story of a child the world named filth, who died once and refused to stay buried. The Oni King who crawled out of hell itself, carrying the screams of the forgotten in his fate.
Cheri had cast him away. Fate had cursed him.
But destiny…Destiny had only just begun to rot...