HxH : Threads of Ash (Hunter X Hunter FF)

The alleys of Meteor City weren't built they were scraped open.

Between slag heaps, rusted car skeletons, and tangled chains of wire, Kaito moved like a wraith. Bare feet found the gaps between glass. Fingers brushed aside cans without a sound. Breath shallow, body folded small.

Ahead, voices.

He pressed flat behind a wall of sheet metal, cheek grazing cool rust.

Shiru's gang again. Laughing, swearing, tossing stones at something someone smaller. Kaito listened, head tilted. Every voice, every footstep, every curse slid into his memory like beads on a string.

Tama always laughed on the inhale. Len's shoes scraped when he shifted weight. Kosha's pipe made a hollow tap-tap when he was nervous.

Information.

Kaito waited.

The gang moved on, raucous and triumphant, their victim a thin boy no older than Kaito groaning in the dirt. Kaito stayed still even after the echoes faded, counting thirty heartbeats before slipping past.

The boy on the ground barely twitched. Eyes open, blank, chest heaving shallowly. Kaito paused only a moment, fingers tightening at his sides, then turned away.

Not yet. He was no savior.

Not yet.

That night, he wedged himself under the frame of a toppled truck. Oil stains glistened like black mirrors on the ground. Above, the empty cab loomed, a giant's skull picked clean.

He curled into himself, arms over knees, chin resting on threadbare sleeves. His breath fogged faintly in the cold.

Around him, the night sang.

Clink of bottle glass. Drag of boots. A sharp crack fist on flesh, or stick on bone. Low laughter. A girl's voice. A scream cut short.

Kaito's eyes stayed open. Wide. Clear. Memorizing the music of the dark.

By dawn, his fingers worked.

A strip of wire pulled from a dead radio. A can crushed flat. A broken hinge for weight.

He knelt near a rat hole and built a snare, careful, copying what he'd seen from older scavengers. Not elegant. Not deadly. But his.

When the trap triggered, slapping closed on a tail, Kaito's breath caught. He'd done it. He'd made the world respond.

The rat squealed, thrashing, gnawing at its own limb.

Kaito knelt, hands trembling, and pressed down with a rock.

Later, moving through the narrow lanes between trash towers, Kaito felt it again.

A flicker.

Not in him. Near him.

Ahead, two older boys squared off fists clenched, shoulders tight, a third jeering from the side. As the first boy lunged, Kaito saw it: a shimmer, an almost-heat, coiling around his arm.

Aura.

Raw. Wild. Leaking out without control.

Kaito's mouth went dry. His pulse stuttered. He ducked low, moving wide, circling through the dark, the image burning into his mind: It's real. It's real.

Not theory. Not memory. Not just whispers in his skull from a world he no longer belonged to.

Here.

The beating was quick, brutal, loud. Kaito kept moving.

Near the north stacks, another gang loitered, smashing bottles, daring each other to climb the unstable heaps. Kaito watched from behind a jut of metal, knees bent, weight on the balls of his feet.

One step. Breath. Shift. Slide.

He read their weight, the ripple of tension, the angle of shoulders. When a laugh hit its loudest point, he moved. When a bottle crashed, he slid through the noise.

They never saw him.

By the time he ducked under a broken fence and out into the open lanes, his chest was tight, breath fast but not panicked.

Alive.

Under the pale light of dawn, ash drifting down like gray snow, Kaito touched the corner of his mouth and felt something strange.

A smile.

Small. Crooked. Feral.

Not prey.

Not anymore.