.
.
.
The Purge
.
.
.
Ask anyone: birthdays are important.
Even to him, they meant something. That was one thing about Rokudo Mukuro that was a normal, average thing: he loved his birthdays.
They represented something. To him, a child experimented upon, poked at and prodded everyday, they were a small symbol of hope in what seemed like a wide plain of despair.
It was a sign that he had survived so far. They were the time markers, the only thing that they could look forward to.
We had survived another year, the children would think, tears blurring their vision, and they'd pray that they'd get another year to live.
June 9th happened to be Rokudo Mukuro's special day, and his tenth birthday was a special day indeed. It was the double digits, the decade, and he was still breathing. He had experienced hell six times, dying over and over, but managed to push through the adversity, coming back to this godforsaken world.
And he wasn't going to experience it again, he told himself, as the scientists marched him into the room with the experimentation table. Never again.
That day, the scientists were testing what effects the Six Paths of Reincarnation had on his physical abilities. Fools. They were all fools. Mukuro had the support of ten years keeping him standing and hard-earned strength surging through him, pulsing through each muscle and cell, building a force that would not be defeated.
He'd kick their asses and that was a promise.
One of them, a man wearing the same long white coat as everyone else with thick glasses bordered by a wide frame, handed Mukuro a trident. Two men, each one bearing the equivalent mass of your everyday gorilla, stood guard, guns in holsters and knives strapped to arms.
The glasses man walked out of the room, standing on the other side of a glass window. He cleared his throat, speaking into a microphone, creating a record. Mukuro smirked, interally. A record that would never be forgotten.
"Today, Unit 69 will be completing a basic training course," the scientist drawled, finger pressing the red recording button twice. Everything from this point on would be permanently etched into the computer's memory. "where he will use the Fourth Realm of his 'Six Paths of Reincarnation' to destroy previously established training dummies. Unit 69, activate your Fourth Realm."
Mukuro obediently did so, his right eye activating with the strange indigo fire. Feeling power surge through his body, his fingers trembling with power, he faced the training dummies. It wouldn't be the dummies he defeated, Mukuro chuckled quietly, but the only true dummies in the room.
Maybe even the whole building if he was feeling particularly ambitious.
"Unit 69-" Mukuro hated that title. He had given himself a name, far better than anything those fools could dream up. 'Rokudo Mukuro'. Six times a corpse. The cleverness of his own thoughts astonished even himself. "-may begin."
And begin he did.
The first one to go down was the gorilla guard on the right (who was mentally deemed King). Whipping around, Mukuro simply plunged the trident into King's chest with such ease it was sickening. King had no time to react, as Mukuro kicked his opponent's chest, sending his body slamming against the glass window and sliding down, a trail of red following him.
The gorilla guard on the left (Mukuro decided that he would be Kong) didn't react to his partner's death, yanking the knives from their straps on his arms. Their weapons clashed, Kong gritting his teeth. Mukuro didn't even flinch, roughly shoving his trident forward into Kong, knocking the man off balance. Gleefully, Mukuro stabbed the unsuspecting man in the eyes, killing him instantly.
Withdrawing his blood-stained weapon, Mukuro knelt beside Kong, digging around his pockets for keys. He pulled them out from his pocket, walking towards the door. The scientist inside - the glasses man - was bug-eyed. Glasses man was used to killing experiments, not having his own comrades and allies killed.
He scrambled backwards, speaking quickly into the microphone. He would continue doing his job until the very end. "U-Unit 69 has killed Alonzo and-" the man was cut off as Mukuro, his strength multiplied by the power of the Fourth Realm, thrust his hand through the man's back, his last words being interrupted, violently.
Red dripped from his flexing fingers, but he paid it no heed. Revenge was his. And there would be no ending his wrath and fury.
Brutally destroying anyone that got in his way, Mukuro stalked through the halls of the facility. He kicked open doors, freeing trembling children and teenagers, all of them deformed or transformed in some way.
Some people thanked him, tears mixing with blood stains, crying as they fled the building. Others sobbed to themselves, hiding in the corners of their cells, unwilling to leave in fear of the unknown.
That, he supposed, was just what the Estraneo - he hated to even think of that disgusting name - had done to mankind. They had pushed it to the edges of sanity, breaking away at the barriers of their minds. There was simply nothing left for those sorts of people. He cleanly killed them, deciding that they would prefer it to be ended, rather than living in a hell where there was nothing but suspicion and fear for the rest of their lives. A final act of compassion, he preferred to think of it as, for those lost souls who would never find their way back to where they had once been. End it quickly. Spare them.
Red and blue eyes trailed over the fine, polished wood of the final door. It was sickening, he almost snarled, that the leaders of Estraneo were living like kings and queens off of the blood of the innocent, while the innocent were dying and screaming, gruesomely changed.
They would pay. Pay the costs of their finery.
He used his trident to pry open the door, forcing his way inside. They couldn't hide from him. From the angel of death that was so generously offering judgement.
Inside the room, there were three women and three men, all of them staring at him in uneasy fear and horror. The same fear and horror that had plagued him and his people for so long.
"W-What are you doing here?" one man, either very brave or very stupid, asked, trying very hard to ignored the blood that was dripping from Mukuro's fists onto the rugs that were lavishly distributed throughout the room. "Go back to your cell!" he shouted in Mukuro's face, inches away.
Spit flew, splattering against Mukuro's face. Instantly, he flipped his trident, guiding it with ease into the abdomen of the Estraneo leader. The man's eyes widened and he clawed, uselessly, at the weapon, to no avail.
Mukuro tilted the weapon, allowing the body to slide off of his weapon. His eyes raked over the remainder of horrified, terrified people. "Who will be next?"
For his tenth birthday, Mukuro eradicated the Estraneo from the world. He had done humanity a favor, removing the plague of child experiments from that portion of the world.
However, he was branded with the title 'mass murderer', in exchange. He was 'graciously' taken into the Generoso mafia family, whose name literally meant generous, along with two fellow experiments. He had given the two boys names, naming one 'Joshima Ken' and the other 'Kakimoto Chikusa'. They immediately decided that he was the most magnificent person to exist, their savior, the deliverer of the purge. The Generoso Family meant nothing to them, just a location with people to take advantage of.
On Mukuro's eleventh birthday, he became aware of the Generoso's similarities to the Estraneo. Years of being locked away inside a cell had given Mukuro a very important gift: the gift of observation.
The Estraneo had been a mafia family, just like the Generoso. Both families worked in the field of science and experimentation. While the Estraneo had experimented upon human beings, the Generoso experimented upon animals, like snakes and dogs. Despite the Generoso being much kinder than the Estraneo, traitors were treated as criminals, shot on the spot. After witnessing such an act, Mukuro formed a single common truth about the mafia: they needed to be cleaned, destroyed and removed from the world.
Manipulating Lancia, the strongest man in northern Italy, by using the Sixth Realm, the Realm of the Heavens, he killed all of the Generoso just as he had done to the Estraneo.
Birthdays were everything. For Mukuro, they were the dates of his purges for mankind and his people, his fellow experiments who had suffered the pain and destruction of the mafia.
Happy birthday, Rokudo Mukuro.