A Monster Is Born

POV - Narrator

December 12th, 1917, America.

The great world war still rages but the fires, despite looking at their brightest, were dimming and dying. Germany was being beat back, with Europe doing the pushing and with America's help, the push was all the more easier.

But on this day of December 12th...something off happened. The war that looked to be stopping soon...suddenly turned up in intensity.

No one could explain it but the generals of the armies, the leaders of all the countries involved...all of them felt a sense of unease that wouldn't go away. No, it'd be better to call it a sense of anxiety that shook them awake at night and made them sweat in both fear and nervousness. But no one could explain the origin.

This phenomenon wouldn't be figured out until many years later and by that point, most of those leaders were already dead or senile.

But those who still had a semblance of sentience all said the same thing. No matter their nationality or their age or their achievements, they all replied in the same way.

"It was like some sort of calamity was on the horizon and my body knew it even if I couldn't identify it."

There was no explanation. No one had one.

Well, except for one family. An oil magnate's wife gave birth to their first child and if you cross reference all the reports of unease from Generals and World Leaders, you will find out that the unease started...on the day this child was born. A child was born and all the influential leaders and generals began to feel unease.

What kind of child could cause this phenomenon? What kind of child could make grown men feel like there was some sort of calamity on the horizon?

A truly demonic child.

Born Alexander Corvin, the child was born with blood red hair and matching eyes. Despite only being born, he was bigger than a normal child and his body was unnaturally hard. One doctors did tests on the child, they found it's muscles and bones were of exceptional quality.

Before any other tests could be completed, the doctors broke down after the child opened it's eyes and made eye contact with them.

Reports say that they first stopped speaking. Shortly after that they began to shake in fear, aggressively sweating. Finally, they collapsed to their knees, tears streaming from their eyes. It was apparently like watching a child get caught by an adult when doing something mischievous and out of fear of punishment, they simply gave up. But to see it happen when a child looked at full-grown men...it was an inexplicable situation. When asked, months later, why they did what they did that day, they simply went quiet. Only one of them replied and when they replied, they said a single sentence, "He was angry at our experiments."

Nothing else. No more words. No explanation of how they all shared some sort of mental problem. Just a simple answer of "He was angry". To most, it was chalked up to the doctors being mentally unstable. But to those who ever met that child...they agreed with what the doctors said.

That child wasn't human.

And how could it be human? That child, that was born on December 12th 1917, was the reason the first world war carried on for another year.

The unease caused by it's birth was misinterpreted by the leaders of the nations involved as anxiety and perception gained over the years of the war, that was telling them that their enemies had began the process of making a weapon of mass destruction. Which all lead to every country involved fighting all the more intensely.

From a history point of view, it's mainly misunderstood that this intensity coming from both sides was from two different camps of reasoning. One side that wanted to end the war by defeating Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies, and the other side which wanted to crush Great Britain, France, Russia, America and their allies for wanting to stop Germany from making an empire that spanned the whole of Europe.

But that's wrong.

This intensity, this drive and sheer willpower to win and triumph over their enemies...It was simply born from paranoia brought on by the birth of a truly demonic child.

A child that could do that...like said before, could it really be called a human? Definitely not. It was something else. Something new. It was the next step of Humanity--but it wasn't a Mutant. Mutant-kind that relied on fantastical powers and abilities was as far removed from this child as this child was removed from the rest of humanity.

No, this child...was in a league of it's own.

And what is this child doing right now? Using his father's resources to gain teachers from all over the world. Martial arts teachers mainly.

You see, this child was a fighter. A true born, natural fighter. Comparing him to the so-called geniuses of the world was like comparing a domesticated dog to a true carnivorous predator like a wolf or a tiger.

He was the real deal.

And despite seeming like he already knew how to fight since the day he came into this world, he still had others teach him. He learnt all he could, perfected their moves and teachings and then discarded them before moving on to the next teacher. He devoured combat knowledge like food and every teacher only made him more and more inhuman.

Right now, he was 13-years-old and he was currently fighting with a practitioner from Japan who majored in Judo and even further in Jujitsu.

The 13-year-old Alexander was taller than any normal 13-year-old and looked more like a young adult than a child who'd barely entered his teenage years. When mentioning how he looked, you didn't even need to mention his height but rather his muscles and build.

He was incredibly muscular. There seemed not to be a shred of useless fat anywhere on his body and each of his muscles was perfectly sized and in the perfect arrangement. His musculature looked like a picture drawn and painted by one of the greatest artists to ever exist, Leonardo da Vinci, if you'd asked him to draw what he thought the perfect warrior looked like. Everything was in perfect balance.

His muscles looked powerful yet agile, hard yet flexible--there was not an ounce of flesh on this boy's body that looked bad, in the wrong place or useless.

It was like his body was of the divine order. The highest grade of body.

His red hair flowed above his head despite their being no wind in the room he was in and his red eyes glinted and shone with destructive glee. He sneered, his lips peeling back and showing his pearly white teeth and the longer and sharper than usual canines he'd had since birth, "I guess this means I'll be saying goodbye to your, 'Sensei'," he mocking said before walking forward with his hands in the pockets of the loose shorts he was wearing.

The man opposite him grit his teeth. If the boy was tall for his age, this man was tall for a human! He was easily above 200cm tall and his body was covered in rock hard muscle. But despite his impressive and intimidating physique, he stood stock still in front of the child in front of him.

His body was subtly shaking and it was covered in sweat.

From the eyes of the man...this child, no, this thing in front of him was too high a wall to climb over. To big and obstacle to knock down or defeat.

He'd crawled to the top of the world as a Judo/Jujitsu martial artist and he'd become the number one throughout the world. The number of fights he'd fought and won was incredibly and the number of fights he'd lost in his early days were also just as many. Those loses taught him lessons he'd never forget and given him instincts that allowed him to know how to fight an opponent and what not to do.

But against this child, those instincts he was so proud of...they vanished! He couldn't feel any weaknesses in front of the child in front of him.

Even with his inhuman brute strength and massive size, he felt--no, he knew! He knew that he wouldn't be able to beat the child in front of him. But that very thought burned him. Had he truly spent his whole life, a whopping 45 years, training and fighting, all to be beat by a child over three decades his junior?

Just as he thought this, Alexander's sneer grew in size until it was a full blown mocking smile, "You must be thinking 'I trained my whole life and yet I'm losing to a child', right?" he said, his disdain practically exuding and flowing off of his body and his words. As he said this, veins popped up all over the man's body. But Alexander ignored that and walked toward the man, his mocking smile becoming nothing but a small smile, "It's okay to feel disillusioned because of the situation. It's okay to despair. It's okay to feel like everything you did up until this point was useless," each sentence shook the big man to the very core and slowly but surely, he did begin to feel disillusioned. He did begin to feel a small wisp of despair. He did begin to feel that his efforts up until this point were useless. Alexander continued smiling, "It's okay. Why? Because you shouldn't compare yourself to me. I'm different to you and everyone else. Decades of training? Secret techniques? Special proteins and diets? I don't need them unlike some people. In front of what I am, that's all useless," Alexander arrived in front of the man who practically dwarfed him, "So, it's okay."

Seeing the smile on Alexander's face...hearing his words...feeling the despair and disillusionment he did...the man felt like it was all over.

He couldn't even beat a child. A 13-year-old child.

But what suddenly spawned inside of him burnt all that away. Flowed over the despair and other feelings and made them go away, for now, and made him numb to everything else. What was this? Anger. Anger at the situation. Anger at a brat being so smug and arrogant. Anger, at what was being said to him.

"Don't think you've beaten me yet, brat!" he shouted in Japanese, his voice deep and booming. He first grabbed Alexander's arm and went to throw him over his shoulder...but as soon as he tried to pull, he couldn't. One image entered his head when he tried this. One memory that was held deep inside his mind.

The memory of some incredibly harsh training he once did in his youth to practice and train his shoulder throw and the strength needed to lift heavy opponents over his shoulder.

He'd tie a rope around a tree and pulled on the other end of the rope until the tree came down. These weren't thick oak trees but rather smaller and thinner trees. Even then it was hard and it took a decent length of time. But after this certain length of time, he was pulling down trees with his carefully cultivated brute force and explosiveness. He even pulled won a few thick Oak Trees. He could be considered superhuman in strength. A real genetic miracle.

If you looked to his genes, you'd be able to see that he was a Beta-Level Mutant with low-levels of strength enhancement coming from the gene.

But that's besides the point.

In this memory, his confidence grew and grew until he found a worthy adversary. A tree so old it had grown to be twice the size of the other tress along with being thicker and harder than them by many times. He tried to pull it down.

And he failed.

That's what trying to pull Alexander over his shoulder was like. It was like he was trying to up and pull a tree that had already beaten him over his shoulder.

He looked back to look at Alexander only to see the boy smiling wide and showing his teeth once again. The site made the man flinch back but as he was holding onto Alexander's arm, he couldn't back away too far.

Alexander had dug his toes through the wooden floorboards below his feet and clung to them when the man tried to throw him over his shoulder. It wasn't hard. Even if the man was a mutant, he was thoroughly dwarfed by Alexander in terms of raw physical strength. Taking his toes from the floorboards, Alexander continued smiling before he spoke up as the man seemed to be frozen in fear, "I've 'devoured' all I need to know about Judo and Jujitsu. You're of no need to me any longer."

As soon as he heard Alexander say that, the man was already in motion. Not of his own volition, however. He was too scared to even move a muscle. No, it was Alexander who turned into a blur and enacted a shoulder throw against the man, throwing the colossal 200+cm man over his shoulder like he was throwing nothing but an empty bag over it.

Despite being thrown, the man could only think one thing.

'This is what a shoulder throw should be.'

Despite being thrown and what that should inspire in him, the man only felt awe and admiration. All of what Alexander had said up until this point was instantly seen as the truth it was.

Decades of training, secret techniques, special proteins and diets--all of it truly was useless to this thing throwing him. Alexander...was truly a new breed of martial artist--no. It would be better to call him a new breed of predator. The new apex. It was if the universe itself had decided it had had enough of watching Humanity fumble along with Martial Arts and instead decided to create a being that could take strides where other people could only shimmy forward.

His life of training truly was a waste. Considering he'd only been teaching this thing for a week and it had already masterfully grasped the essence of both Judo and Jujitsu. It made his own genius look mentally handicapped in comparison.

That was his last thought before he died.

Because the next second, he slammed into the ground and all the bones in his body snapped on impact just like the floorboards he was slammed into. His body, despite being super strong and durable, just couldn't withstand the force being inflicted on it. Then his body went into shock, with the last thing he saw before he died being Alexander raising his foot into the air before it became a blur and crushed his head.

The red-haired boy, left alone in the training room with a dead body, some broken wooden floorboards and a foot covered in blood, bone fragments and brain matter...didn't have a fluctuation in expression.

He simply let out a breath of air before taking in a deep breath.

He then took a step back and kicked his foot out so quickly it was as if he shifted into another bodily position without any actual movement. The stance he was in now was a simple kick but the air still whipped and cracked like a whip as his foot came to a stop from it's apparent movement. The blood and all the other grime flew off his foot without leaving a speck of anything on it. Suddenly it was as clean as it was before he brutally crushed a man's head.

Looking back to the body, he nodded before speaking to either himself or the spirit of the person; it was unclear.

"Hiroki Kurosawa, thanks for the lessons. Your moves and style of fighting will live on through me. I hope that's enough for you to move on," he said before shrugging and turning away. He'd said such an arrogant thing to a person he'd just killed for no reason...and yet if anyone were to hear it, they'd believe in Alexander's sincerity. They'd instinctively know that that was the highest gratitude he could how to the dead Hiroki Kurosawa.

Alexander exited the training room and looked to the left of the hallway he'd entered. There stood a servant who kept a stoic face. Ignoring the slight perspiration on the old man's forehead, Alexander spoke, "There's another one in there. Clean it up."

"Y-yes, young master, right away," the old man bowed with proper etiquette but it was already too late; Alexander was already walking away, not sparing a second glance at the old man.

The boy that exited that training room...exuded both power and arrogance.

So much so that the very air seemed to twist and morph around him. But, right now, he had a rare and genuine smile on his face. Why did such a murderous and bloodthirsty child have such a pure and innocent smile on his face? Because, he was going to visit his mother. He was a filial son, after all.