The rain fell in thin, trembling threads not gentle, but nervous, as though the sky itself feared what it was forced to witness. Night had no stars that evening, only the glint of bayonets and the echo of marching boots dissolving into mud. In the heart of a dying town, the house of the Nuts family stood silent a lonely skeleton of wood and dust, trembling under the hum of artillery.
Johnny was sixteen when the world ended.
He remembered the clock ticking each second a blade scraping against bone when the soldiers came. Their faces were blank, their eyes glassy and cruel, reflecting firelight like shards of broken mirrors. The first scream belonged to his mother; it was short, almost swallowed by thunder. The next came from his brother strangled, cut off mid-breath. Johnny's father reached for his rifle but never made it the muzzle flash carved a red blossom into the air, brief and obscene.
Blood spread across the wooden floorboards like spilled ink, winding through the cracks as if trying to escape. Johnny hid beneath the table, trembling, his fingers pressed over his lips. The smell was thick gunpowder, sweat, iron, and the sick sweetness of death. He wanted to move, to breathe, to scream, but his voice had already drowned inside him.
Then he saw him the man in the officer's coat. A familiar face twisted by uniform and duty. It was Thomas. His father's old friend. His godfather.
Thomas stepped into the lamplight, boots slick with blood. He lit a cigarette, unbothered by the bodies on the floor. Smoke curled lazily from his lips, like a spirit leaving a corpse. He turned, his gaze cutting into the dark, and Johnny saw the faint curve of recognition a small, knowing smirk.
"Mercy is for the living," Thomas said softly, and ordered the men to burn the house.
When the fire caught, it didn't roar; it sang. The wood cracked like bones snapping under weight, flames swallowing the photographs, the curtains, the family piano all of it reduced to memory and smoke. Johnny crawled out through the back window, his arm torn by splinters, his lungs filled with ash. Behind him, his world melted into an orange inferno.
That night, something inside him broke not like glass, but like a door slamming shut forever.
Years passed like ghosts.
War bled across continents, and Johnny followed its trail a shadow in uniform, a whisper among the dead. He wore other men's faces, spoke in lies, and learned to kill without trembling. Torture was no longer horror; it was arithmetic the quick calculation of fear, pressure, silence. Each death was another step toward Thomas, toward balance.
He became what the world had made him a machine carved from loss and rage. The boy who once prayed in the ruins had become something unholy, a man whose pulse beat in rhythm with violence. His heart, once fragile and human, now ticked with the cold precision of vengeance.
In the mirror of every battlefield, he saw his reflection fading eyes pale, expression void, soul replaced by a hunger that never slept.
Johnny's Nuts died that night in the fire.
What remained was only the echo a hollow creature walking through smoke, chasing the scent of blood.
And somewhere, beneath the roar of war and the silence between breaths, he could still hear his mother's voice faint, distant asking him to stop.
But vengeance had already answered.