Prologue: And if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones

Jun had been about five or six when he figured out that his brothers hated him. He’d always known they didn’t care about him on some level but it wasn’t until then that reality sunk in. Ever since then he had tried so hard to measure up, to be enough to earn his brothers’ respect. Every time he got anything other than a 100 on a test he felt a little piece of his self-esteem chip away. All it had gotten him was loneliness and crippling self-hatred, covered up in false confidence.

But for as much as he knew they hated him, he never would have thought that they would be so willing to kill him.

He’d been 19, hadn’t graduated from Duel Academy too long ago, when his brothers had taken him on a trip. He’d thought that maybe they would try to patch things up since he was doing well in tournaments lately, but instead, they had driven on long empty roads, till they reached the top of a cliff towering over the sea. It was a cloudy day, with rain hanging heavy in the clouds, and no one was around for miles.

That was when they pulled guns on him, equipped with silencers. They hadn’t said a word to him as most bullets missed, and the three bullets that hit had him bleeding on the ground. Only Chousaku seemed to have any sort of hesitation, unable to meet Jun’s eye as he shot him, missing all shots but one. While he lay there, shocked to the point of the pain not yet registering in his brain, they stripped him of his ID, phone, cards, wallet and deck. They got rid of anything that could identify him. Jun could hear the Ojama Trio scream in horror for him as Shoji pushed him over the edge of the cliff.

It was nothing short of a miracle that he had survived, lucky that they had chosen too low a cliff for the water below to kill him on impact, and that both his older brothers were such terrible shots. One had hit his shoulder, one his thigh, the third in his abdomen. The third had undoubtedly been the worst, but it had missed his organs by millimeters. He had been crying the entire time he was forced to extract the bullets out of his own body, washed up on the shore and hiding inside a public bathroom. He knew that his brothers had gotten into bed with the yakuza, or some other sort of bad crowd, but he didn’t think him knowing about it would make them want to get rid of him. Apparently he’d been wrong, and it had cost him his entire identity. He knew that if they ever found out that he was still alive, the likelihood of them coming to finish the job was extremely high. He couldn’t take that risk.

So, in a public bathroom with a cracked mirror and flickering lights he’d cut off his hair until it was no more than a few centimeters short, stripping him of the last of his past life. The dull scissors sawed through his thick black hair, strands falling all over his shirt, his face, the floor and the sink with its leaking faucet. He instantly hated it.

For a while he’d been homeless, and he’d picked up on how to make himself look less homeless fairly quickly. He knew he had to get a job if he wanted to survive on his own, and no one would hire him if he was dirty and unshaven. So he’d managed to gather enough money to get a gym membership, saving money by learning how to not get caught shoplifting to get food to eat. He’d kept to a shady gym that didn’t require any sort of identification to sign up; a place where he could pay cash. Eventually he managed to find a job in a convenience store that was open 24/7, yet again making sure that he didn’t need any ID or bank account.

The final piece of the puzzle fit into place when he found an apartment. It was small and needed a huge amount of work done, but after almost two years of living on the streets it was a godsend. It was warm and dry, he had running water and could make his own food. Finally he felt like he could get himself back on his feet. The first few nights there he slept on the floor under a bunch of blankets, curled into a ball.

It was a harsh slap in the face to go from his former lifestyle to not knowing when his next meal would be, but he’d always been stubborn. And if there was one thing he knew, it was that he would not die.

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