“What are you doing in an alleyway, scavenging for lunch?” the blond youth said with a massive grin on his face, accompanied by the laughter of the 4 people behind him.

Inwardly rolling his eyes, Theo stood there, letting fate take its course.

‘Well, it doesn’t really matter, I’ll just let them do their thing.’ Though Theo. Although he long ago realized that not doing anything and letting the joke that is his life play out on its own is the best choice to make, that really bothered him today for some reason. It might be because of the itching and the irritation he was experiencing today, but looking at the blond bastard's face annoyed him way more than it should have.

If he was a protagonist, the guy standing right before him would play a role of a cliche villain from a rich family that bullied the protagonist in his childhood and later become his steppingstone. But a protagonist he is not. That just makes the blond dude one of the many ways the world uses to torment him.

“You know, we can’t let you bring trash to our prestigious school, can we? So, we will take it upon ourselves to educate you, just so you don’t make a laughingstock out of yourself later. Right boys?” The blonde boy, who has not been named because of the sheer irrelevancy beyond this chapter, continued with the same shit-eating grin on his face.

“Yea, will educate him real good.”

“We’ll follow you, boss!”

Theo just kept looking at them with a blank look in his eyes. Although the location is new, he heard the same kind of insults so many times that just listening to them became boring. Now he just hoped his uniform won’t get too dirty.

It seemed as though Theo’s apathetic look annoyed the blonde guy even more than the blonde guy annoyed Theo. He charged at Theo, bent his upper torso to the right, and hit him with a right hook straight in the jaw. That punch alone showed that he either had some fighting experience or trained in some kind of martial arts.

Theo didn’t resist the force of the blow, letting his body collapse and fall towards the ground. Although inwardly, he was a little surprised, since the guy usually avoids the face and goes for the parts of the body hidden by clothing.

“Thud”

“Bam!” Right after the expected sound of the body hitting the ground, another, not so expected, yet still unsurprising sound of a foot hitting the chest of a collapsed body was heard.

“Bam!” Then another.

“Bam!” And another.

“Thump!” And another yet again, just this time, it was a stomp on the chest rather than a kick, followed by even more kicks of the other 4 fellows who joined the fun.

Now Theo was really surprised. This was not according to the norm. Sure, they would rough him up, but they were never this brutal. First the strange inching and irritation, then the unlikely encounter, and now the uncharacteristic beatdown, nothing made sense. To others, something like this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but to Theo, who lived life on a constant rewind button, just one change was surprising, let alone 3.

“Bam! Thud! Bash!”

“Crack!” The beating continued and along with the sound of the cracked rib, Theo really started to get annoyed. Not because of the pain, a kick was nothing compared to the pain of the curse, and on the lucky side, just as the effect of the curse strengthens if in contact with people he is attracted to, the effect is also significantly reduced if he hates their guts.

The itchiness only got worse as the beating increased and so did the irritation, at some point, the ground started to rumble and shake. The tremors started as subtle vibrations, gradually increasing, but the guys beating Theo didn’t seem to notice, almost as if caught in a trance.

The tremors grew, the kicking intensified, the itching increased, and the irritation grew to an all-new level. At this point Theo didn’t care anymore, he didn’t want to play along this farse, he knew what would happen if he rested, but he didn’t care. Who cares about authorities, he will just start another cycle, it's not like it never happened before.

“Rumble” The itching and rumbling only increased.

Theo’s eyes grow bloodshot, his pupils contracted, and his irises flashed with a red light, not because of some otherworldly energy, but more akin to materializing his pure emotion, his pure rage. Since he already decided on it, he didn’t hold back, letting all the bottled-up feelings out. If he was true to himself, he enjoyed this kind of cycle the most, the liberation he felt when he stopped suppressing himself was exhilarating.

Despite the supposed pain, he should have felt from having multiple of his ribs broken or fractured and the left arm that seemed to gain another joint, it didn’t bother him that much. If one experienced the curse he had to deal with all his life… well lives, they would probably understand. Even now, he suspected that the pain he felt was the meager effect of the curse lingering from the contact of the kicks, overshadowing the pain that his nerves were sending to his brain. And even that was nothing compared to the ever-growing itchiness.

Grabbing the leg that was about to stomp his face, he twisted it, prompting an agonizing yell to escape the owner of the appendage.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

This feat was not accomplished by monstrous strength, but just a result of an excellent understanding of the human body and usage of pure technique.

Taking advantage of the surprise the yell brought, Theo stood up still holding the leg of the bully, and brought it over his shoulder. Using a weird angle and incredible understanding of momentum, he threw the guy to another one of his friends, with his shoulder executing a bonus nut buster move in the process, preventing the poor guy from ever spreading his genes across the world.

Now that Theo’s “friends” seemed to break out of their trance, they finally noticed the ever-increasing rumbling, that could by now probably be considered an earthquake. Excluding the guy whose possibility of having a little bully junior in the future got taken away, of course.

Theo didn’t care though, although an earthquake was strange, a lot of strange things already happened today.

He grabbed the hair of the guy nearest to him and used the momentum of his descending face along with the momentum of his own ascending knee, to deliver a blow deserving of an instant knockout.

“Crunch.” The blow was accompanied by the sickening crunch of the bully’s nose and thud of the collapsed body.

The attention was all back on Theo now. The blond guy along with one of his friends already about to charge at him, another one of the bullies just getting back up from being knocked over by his eunuch friend, and the last one holding onto his now broken family jewels.

But, Theo’s next actions stopped them in their tracks.

“Crunch!” Another crunch was heard, yet this one a lot louder and a lot more sickening than the last. The sound of the unconscious bully’s neck being shattered by the blow of Theo’s foot.

Three expressions of horror. One expression of pain. And, one expression of satisfaction, an expression that shouldn’t belong to a teenager that just committed murder.

“Shatter!” Another sound of shattering was heard, but this time it wasn’t bone, it wasn’t glass, hell it wasn’t even anything of the material plain.

The space itself… was shattering.