I can't remember when the Malum Family first infiltrated my village. Possibly because it was years before my own birth. Our village, while small, is also right on top of a large silver deposit making it the perfect target for the world renowned crime syndicate. Despite their insidious hold on the village, the Mayor had done nothing to stop the Malum Family, though to be fair there was not a lot to do. The last Elder Fist user in the village had died 40 years ago. To save himself, the Mayor struck a bargain. Every month he would offer up a group of men to work in the mines and in exchange he would receive five percent of all profits. Yet as I watched from the Mayor's Estate as my father offered another five men to the Malum Lieutenant, I could feel my anger rising, my fists clenching and ready to fight! Only to sit back down and relax my hands. After all what could I do? I am the Mayor's 'Runt', Tac Taggart because I am as small and harmless as a thumb tack, for what could a tack do in a world run by power where the strong thrive and the weak shrivel and die? Nothing. That's what I had told myself for years as I watched family's be torn apart and mass graves dug on my father's orders. While I wallowed in my own patheticness and cowered from my father. Yet after 15 years of pusillanimity, today I would stand up to him. Well... at least that was the plan.

I marched towards my father, fists bared and faced with a grimace.

"What are you doing here Tac? I'm conducting business at the moment, whatever it is that you need can wait boy." His rotund face, fattened by the riches procured of others dooms, sneered at me while we were both under the gaze of the Lieutenant.

"Ho? So this is the spineless son I hear so much about?" The man dressed in the Malum Uniform, black leather suit and encrusted with silver like serpent design to show his position as a Lieutenant and a matching shoulder cape and cap, looked on in amusement.

"Perhaps the runt grew a spine? You're eyes are shining with heroism, hehehe many many like that have died at my feet boy." The Lieutenant began to giggle.

"SHUT UP! You-You're scum, no you're worse! You and your allies all prey on us like parasit-" Before I could realise it I was on the ground. a leather boot pushing my face into the dirt.

"Huh? What was that you little bastard? You want to die? I am an Elder Fist user boy, you are nothing but an ant to me! Squirm in the dirt under my boot like the insect you are!" From the edge of my field of view I could see his fist sparked alight into an aura of mauve. 

"Or better yet maybe you would like to take these men's place in the mine instead?" I don't know why I expected my father to even attempt to help me, for if I truly am the spineless coward they call me then he was even more so than I.  Yet it still didn't null the pain I felt both in my body and in my heart.  Despite the agony that burned through my being I still wished for the strength that had eluded my all my life, power to invoke in hopes of change and the guts to get up and fight! 

"No, as if a bug like you could even swing a pickaxe. Very well, I'll just kill you now! Demon Fist: Crushing of the Damned!" Raising his now flaming fist, the Lieutenant swung with all his might. The dull mauve aura flared into the face of three eyed devil with a single horn crowning it's visage as it flew to crush my skull. Then the world turned crimson.

Once the world had drained of the foreign color, I opened my eyes to see a facing staring back at me along the ground, the Lieutenant's pale face and glazed eyes seemingly stared through me. Getting up from the dirt now that the weight had been lifted, my eyes had never left the body. Gaping in his torso, or at least what was left of it, was a smoking hole. Standing above the body was a young man, most likely only a few years  my senior, yet his presence gave off the feeling of an insurmountable titan born of centuries of training. The young man stood about six feet tall, with skin browned by the harsh rays of the sun. His messy ebony hair tamed by a single wrap of cloth leading it into a bushy ponytail reaching the small of his back. His hazel eyes stared down to his left fist that glowed with the same crimson that had blinded me, before looking up to gaze at me. As we studied each other I was able to see more detail on this mysterious man's visage, a five lined scar reached from the right side of his brow to the left of his chin, stretching across his nose and lips. 

"H-he's dead!" The hysterical screams of my father rung aloud in the background, yet the world seemed to mute itself as our eyes stayed connected. Then it it all came rushing back, the world that had dulled and muted itself came roaring back into my senses as the fifty Malum grunts ran straight towards the stranger.  The stranger had seemed to seen them as well because with a slow turn of his head he stared the rushing mob down. That was the moment I felt like dying, felt like my lungs would rather collapse then stay in tact, like every cell in my body would rather rip itself to shred if it meant an end to this feeling, it was that feeling that caused the mob to drop dead from the single star of a teenage boy. That same stranger then turned his head to face the vomiting figure of my father.

"Oi!" The retching retched man reached his gaze up into the the now searing red eyes of the boy- no this young man.

"Run." Once again the compulsive need to obey swam through the area until his father did as he was told and dashed away out of sight. Once again the stranger reestablished eye contact with me, his presence and actions invoking my survival instincts, a sharp pain in my skull screaming for me to run away.

"Wanna blow this place?" Then it was gone, and standing in front of me was just a regular teenage boy.

"Umm... what?"