Chapter 7 - First Breath II

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[16 June 2103, alternate BNHA universe]

There was an alternative version of the universe created for human entertainment. This alternate version was similar to the original, with a few changes added to the main universe. The creator of the alternate version had made some changes to the universe for the existence of his chosen character. His chosen character was a man named Ikiru. Ikiru had experienced many things from birth to death. The creator did not specifically choose Ikiru's soul. He had found him after searching for him according to his criteria.

He had already created the alternate universe and was curious to see how someone of the character he believed could change the story of this universe would live. Therefore, he decided to send Ikiru's soul to the reality he had created. Ikiru was already dead in his home world. At the age of 69, he breathed his last breath of old age. His life was full of trauma and pain. But in his life, he was able to achieve the goal he had set for his life. The Creator was one of those responsible for the Earth known to man. He was responsible for the souls that descended to Earth and the souls that reached the end of their life cycle. However, over time, the Creator had accumulated a collection of souls from among them.

Ikiru, whom he created out of boredom and sent to the alternate BNHA universe, was one of these souls. The souls in the creator's collection belonged to people who had faced and overcome the difficulties that life had given them. Among these souls, Ikiru was among those with a darker story. He was born to a couple who had been orphaned. He grew up happily until the age of twelve. He was a cute and handsome boy with blond hair and blue eyes. He had a pure and stubborn character. All this changed when Ikiru lost his parents in a traffic accident at the age of twelve.

After the death of his parents, he was placed by the state in a children's institution. Here he was bullied because of his appearance and behaviour. However, he did not stay in this institution for long. A year later, he was adopted by a newly married couple. In the years to come, Ikiru would come to realise that the life he lived in the orphanage was nothing compared to the hell he would go through. The couple who adopted Ikiru were members of a religious cult. This cult was founded by heretics for their own ambitions. They lured stupid and easy to deceive people into their web, working and using them for themselves. Of course, this was the functioning of the cult when it was founded. In the following years, the cult had grown and attracted more and more deviant people.

Unfortunately, Ikiru had the appearance and background to arouse the interest of these perverts. For the first month of his adoption, everything seemed fine, but things changed rapidly. The cult to which the couple belonged had used their connections with the state's child services agency to prevent regular checks from being carried out. Using the excuse that Ikiru would receive special education at home, the adoptive couple severed Ikiru's connection with the environment and threw Ikiru into the hell he would live in from then on. In the years that followed, Ikiru was regularly abused by certain leaders of the cult.

Ikiru was not the only one in this situation. Dozens of children like him were captured by the cult. Years of abuse had broken many children forever. Among them, mental illness became the norm. There was even a large group of children who believed that what they were going through was their destiny and purpose. The cult's brainwashing of children worked on most of them. The children had already given up because they could see no way out of the situation they were in. Some claimed that if they submitted to what the cult demanded of them, their suffering would turn into happiness and pleasure. Ikiru was trapped in the clutches of this cult until the age of eighteen.

Military service, which the state made compulsory for men, began at the age of eighteen and lasted for two years. Although the cult was able to develop connections and structures in many state organisations over the years, the army was not one of these institutions. The functioning of the army, unlike the rest of the state institutions, was that it was more autonomous. This made possible grouping and infiltration within the army almost impossible. In addition, the size of the budget allocated by the state for the army caused the big fish in the market to want to monopolise the army. For this reason, there was a huge competition over the construction of the army. The cult that had Ikiru in its clutches was medium-sized at best. They had no chance of competing with these big fish. Therefore, when Ikiru was eighteen years old, he was finally able to escape from the clutches of the cult.

Ikiru remained in the army for the next thirteen years. At the age of twenty-six, he was promoted to the special forces. After five years in the special forces, he retired from the army. Normally, in the special forces, five years of mandatory service would be served and then the person would retire after five more years of service. However, since Ikiru entered the special forces section of the army, he had applied to serve in areas categorised as the highest risk. His application was accepted and Ikiru completed all the tasks assigned to him.

The army carried out very detailed health checks on the soldiers. Since the day he joined the army, Ikiru had not been lazy for a day and spent all his time training his mind and body. The reason for the acceptance of his applications to the special forces, and during his time in the special forces, was that Ikiru received the highest scores in all the tests he took. From his mental state to his physical condition, he was examined in detail by the army. Ikiru was a living human being, as stable as a machine.

The army highly valued and utilised people like Ikiru. Ikiru realised this in his first year in the army. He worked as hard as he could and made the most of the opportunities the army offered him. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-one, he completed hundreds of missions in the war zone. His success rate was high, if not unprecedented. This allowed Ikiru to retire at the end of his mandatory term of service.

No one expected Ikiru to be so talented and intelligent. Especially the cult, which had abused him for years. From the beginning of Ikiru's military service, until the end of his service in the army and his retirement, the cult had never heard about him. Or rather, they didn't. The leaders of the cult believed that the children they kidnapped/abused through years of brainwashing would not cause them any trouble, even when they became adults. There were not many who had already escaped from their clutches. They were not worried about the small minority that remained. This belief would spell the end of the cult.

Ikiru, like the other children who had suffered the same fate, had lost his sanity long ago. But unlike the others, Ikiru was smart, very smart. His mind reacted to the situation he was in, using every fibre of his being to keep him alive. As a result, Ikiru had gone from intelligent to genius. Since the day he fell into the hands of the cult, Ikiru had been seeking salvation. The disappearance of men who had reached adulthood for two years, and the failure of some of them to return, had shown him that the salvation he sought was possible. When he reached adulthood, he realised that this salvation was the army. Since the day he joined the army, he had been thinking about what he should do. The education he received from the army gave him a new perspective.

Ikiru remembered well the society he lived in until the age of twelve. With the opportunities given by the army, the path to his salvation opened up for him in his mind. Years of countless training and education had helped him overcome the mental scars of years of abuse. However, Ikiru was completely insane. The reason he was so good at hiding it was not only because he was not insane. He was also a genius. This combination made him one of the most dangerous sociopaths ever seen. Knowing that the Army was his salvation, Ikiru moulded himself to be most useful to the Army.

With his successes, he had achieved the position he wanted in the army. After entering the special forces, he made the decision of his life. He chose a war zone as his duty station. Ikiru had learnt the value of human life years ago. He had seen the fairy tales that society believed in and the reality that those in power showed him. Ikiru would either succeed and survive or fail and die. So for five years in the war zone, he carried out hundreds of missions.

The scenes he'd seen there hadn't affected him for a moment. It was similar to the hell he had been in as a child. For Ikiru, it had become second nature. His broken mind, as it always had, had taken on a form that was best suited to Ikiru's survival. After countless sorrow, pain, suffering and death for which he was responsible, Ikiru returned to his country. Ikiru had always been handsome. However, since the day he entered the army, he had a somewhat intimidating nature. You would expect people as handsome or beautiful as Ikiru to be more sympathetic. However, the atmosphere Ikiru gave off made those around him feel uneasy around him. When he joined the special forces, this atmosphere intensified. When he returned to the country after completing his mission, no one but his superiors could even look Ikiru in the eye.