If there was one thing Niragi had never been interested in, then it would be flowers. They were made for girls, unnecessary gifts and souvenirs that only brought money to the industry.

He didn't care if the front yards he kept passing day after day were covered in roses and tulips or overgrown with weed. Some yards smelled sweet and charming while others bore the stench of waste and decay – it was all the same to him.

There was just one exception to all of this.

On his way home, whenever school was over and the weather would allow it, Niragi took a route that was neither the fastest nor the most comfortable, because it ran past two of his most favorite buildings in town: the comic shop and the computer store. Taking this path meant that he wouldn't have to cross the downtown, that he would be spared the sight of the cool kids hanging out together.

He was none of those cool kids, and he didn't want to belong to them either. The few people he actually dared to call friends were just like him. They found pleasure in building things from scratch, in getting broken devices to work again, no matter if it was an old radio or a complex computer system.

Whenever Niragi had some money to spare, he'd spend hours burrowing his nose through comics and books about programming and game design, and even if he didn't have any money, he would sometimes enter the store and simply enjoy the smell of books and knowledge.

The building was one of the outermost houses of the city, and on the other side of the street grew a huge sunflower field. This was the exception in his disinterest to flowers, because those sunflowers really had something extraordinary about them.

Every summer, huge yellow blooms would explode out of the ground and grow into the sky within a mere couple of days. Sunflowers didn't have to fear anything; no other flower could compete with them. If anything else tried to grow on their ground, the sunflowers would simply grow higher and steal all the sun for themselves, causing them to look even more impressive while everything else in their shadows was deemed to rot.

Sometimes, Niragi would simply choose the longer path just to check if the field was blooming already, and he'd be amazed again and again how much those flowers managed to grow in a mere day.

This was the kind of strength he looked up to. And when the bullying started, it also became a place of refuge.

He never understood why the cool kids chose him to shove around and throw things at him. He always tried to tell himself that it wasn't his own fault, that it could have been anyone crossing their path in the wrong moment.

The bitter truth was, though, that even if the choice had been random, he turned out to be the victim.

Now the detour was not only a choice anymore, it was the only way he could escape the bullies waiting for him downtown. Whenever Niragi feared another attack of stones and spits and rotten food, he would run past the sunflowers hovering above him protectively and hide in his comic shop until it grew dark outside and his stomach was aching with hunger.

It seemed to be a good way to escape, and Niragi almost dared to hope that those kids would search for someone else to bully. That they'd grow bored of searching him in vain and move on to someone else, maybe even more vulnerable than him.

He became sure of that when he ran out of school a couple of days in a row without someone chasing him. Finally, finally he was free again! Free to continue his life searching for knowledge and spending his time with doing what he really loved to.

The wide smile on his face vanished immediately when he spotted the sign on the store, noting that the comic shop had been closed down without further explanation. And that was when the first stone was being thrown out of his precious sunflower field.

They had found him, and they had left him no place to hide, no path to escape. Day after day, Niragi begged them to stop, offered to do their homework or to help them cheat some tests, but they wouldn't give in.

And the sunflowers, once allies that he had looked up to, were now laughing down at him mockingly, not sheltering him from danger anymore but instead hiding his bullies so they could charge at him any time unnoticed.

It was cruel, and it was unfair.

Weeks passed, and the fear slowly turned into hatred. A deep red hate that was fueled by his own pain, and it colored his vision crimson whenever he faced the gang of bullies who just didn't want to stop harassing him.

One of their faces he would never forget. Takagi Mosu – the leader of those who had turned his life into hell within seconds. He would suffer, even more than Niragi had to endure – no matter what had to be done to achieve that.

Takagi Mosu would experience true pain, and Niragi would be the one delivering every single blow.

Whenever he thought about his revenge, he couldn't help but think about the sunflowers as well. Those flowers, greater and stronger than anything around them. Along with their memory came the bitter hatred, the taste of blood in his mouth and the pain shooting through every part of his body.

Niragi could either continue to hate them for being so superior…

Or he could become just as strong as them.