Crack.
Crack crack crack
Crack crack crack crack�
Noises.
Noises of joints and muscles cracking.�
Distasteful sounds and severe pain eating at his body.
The boy simply endured this eternal hell.�
Because he knew it was nothing other than the materialization of his own anger.�
Heiwajima Shizuo came to know that he was abnormal when he was a third grader.�
Shizuo, who got into a trivial quarrel with his brother and lost his temper, tried to throw the dining room refrigerator - which was way taller than he was - at his brother.�
Of course, it proved impossible for him at that age. The boy ended up suffering multiple dislocations and extensive muscle damage.
More incidents followed.
During a fight at school, another boy threw a pair of compasses at him. That was scary enough in itself - yet Shizuo's response was even scarier, blowing away the very boundaries of necessity defense.�
With the tender arms of a nine-year-old, he lifted a school desk full of books, swung it around, and threw it at that boy.
- Who was lucky to have survived.�
The desk flew past him leaving mere scratches on his wrist. The next second, something crashed into the wall right behind him.
He turned to look with weak knees and saw a school desk framed in a hole in the wall, none of its feet touching the floor.�
There is something called the "adrenaline power-up" - which occurs often when one is trapped in emergency situations like fires.
Even if you think you're giving something your 100 percent, you usually are not.
Because your muscles place natural limiters on themselves, which makes you think you're giving it your 100 percent when you're really just giving it a fraction of that.
But once you need to get away from a fire, the brain removes such limiters and allows you to be much more powerful than you usually are. That's why people have been able to lift impossible weights, jump impossible heights and thereby save others from the fire in seemingly hopeless situations.�
But Heiwajima Shizuo is "different".
He is able to give it his true 100 percent even when he's not in a crisis situation.
You would probably think that's a highly desirable gift - actually, it's the exact contrary.��
There's a reason that our brains place limiters on our muscles and joints: to protect them. The limiters are just what they literally suggest - they mark the natural limit above which our muscles and joints will have to suffer damage.�
He was endowed with this gift in exchange of his ability to control his own power.
As long as he needs them to, his muscles will give it their 100 percent even if that destroys them.�
And his overwhelming power turned him into Anger itself.
That power - that untamable power of his muscles would manifest itself any time with his fury.�
His brain, dominated by his overwhelming power, would command his body to use it.�
Lift the greatest weight he could land his hands on. Destroy everything. Destroy people. Kill people.
And Shizuo decided to succumb to this natural impulse.�
Destruction.
Since the goal was absolute destruction, it usually commences with the destruction of his own body.�
The vulnerability of his body and the relentlessness of his own power.
The boy's heart was slowly falling into disrepair in-between.�
He had given up trying to contain his own anger since he forgot when.�
There was no "trying" to speak of; since he would end up destroying himself either way, the much easier choice was to break the limiters on his heart as well.�
The boy gave up self-restraint.
He removed the limiters on his everything, ready to let his entire life go to waste.
And he continued to cause damage.
Endless damage.
To his own body.
Every day was filled with damage.
His own damaged body made him angry; so he rages - and damages it some more.�
Repetition of the same fruitless vicious cycle.
There was nothing to gain, except for the evidence of his rampages, which continued to accumulate.�
His muscles injure themselves over and over again - damaged anew before they had a chance to evolve into something more resilient.
The boy kept falling towards the bottom of the hell that was himself.
Struggling, wrestling, but unable to break apart from himself -�
And time elapses -�