Weakness has a smell.
Mio learned that before he learned long division, before he understood what rent meant, before he realized adults lie when they say everything will be fine.
Weakness smells like antiseptic and overheated hospital rooms. Like metal railings that have been wiped too clean. Like rain drying on worn-out shoes because you couldn't afford another pair.
It smells like your father trying not to cough so you don't worry.
Mio was not born dramatic. He was born small.
Small lungs. Small wrists. A body that trembled when the seasons changed too fast. Other boys grew into their limbs like they were meant to be there. Mio felt like he had been issued the wrong frame. Teachers described him as quiet. Doctors described him as fragile. Neighbors described him as unfortunate.
He hated that word most.
Unfortunate meant powerless in polite language.
He noticed things early. The way men in dark coats never stayed long in their building. The way his mother's shoulders stiffened whenever certain cars parked outside. The way his father's hands shook at night when he thought no one was looking.
Mio always looked.
At twelve, he understood something the other kids didn't: people respect what frightens them. They move for it. They lower their voices around it. They make space.
No one made space for Mio.
At school, boys pushed him aside without thinking. Not cruelly at first. Just instinctively. Like moving a chair that's in the way. When he tried to stand firm, his legs betrayed him. When he tried to shout, his voice thinned out halfway through.
He went home smelling like hallway dust and swallowed anger.
His mother would press a cool cloth to his forehead, even when he wasn't sick. She did it like she was checking for something else. Like she expected a fever to bloom under his skin at any moment.
"You're stronger than you think," she would say.
He never believed her.
Strength, to him, was visible. It was loud laughter that filled rooms. It was men who didn't flinch. It was fists that landed and didn't shake afterward.
Strength did not live in small bodies.
The night everything shifted, the air tasted metallic.
His father had not come home. The clock ticked past midnight. His mother stood near the window too long. Mio watched her from the hallway, unseen, the way he always was.
Headlights cut across the wall. A car he didn't recognize.
His mother's breath changed.
There are moments when the world tilts, just slightly, and only certain people feel it. Mio felt it then. A pressure behind his ribs, like the air had thickened.
Three men stepped out of the car. Dark coats. No umbrellas, though it was raining. They moved like they owned the ground.
Mio saw it before he understood it: faint markings glowing at the base of one man's throat. Not tattoos. Not reflections. Something pulsing under the skin, red and deliberate.
Ledger Marks.
He did not know the term yet. But he knew it was power.
His mother turned from the window and saw him watching.
For the first time in his life, she looked afraid of him.
"Go to your room," she said softly.
He didn't move.
The knock came heavy and slow. Not urgent. Confident.
His mother opened the door before the second knock.
The men did not raise their voices. They did not need to. The apartment seemed to shrink around them. Mio could hear every word, though they spoke almost gently.
"Your debt remains unpaid."
"My husband has nothing to do with this."
"Blood settles accounts."
The metallic taste sharpened.
Mio stepped forward without meaning to. One of the men looked at him, really looked at him, and his eyes flickered downward, to Mio's collarbone.
A faint warmth sparked there, sudden and bright.
The man's expression shifted.
"Interesting," he murmured.
His mother moved in front of Mio so quickly it startled him. "He's not part of this."
"He is precisely part of this."
The glow beneath the man's skin intensified. Mio felt something answering it inside his own chest. Not fear. Recognition.
The room darkened, though the lights were still on.
For a heartbeat, Mio saw something else layered over reality. A thin crack in the air itself. Beyond it, a city not made of concrete but of shadow and neon veins. Towers pulsing red. Currency symbols drifting like ash.
And in the reflection of the window behind the men, he saw it.
A wolf.
Large. White. Standing still as snowfall. Its fur glowed faint silver, and one violent streak of orange cut from its eye down across its ribs like lightning frozen mid-strike.
It was looking at him.
Not at the men. Not at his mother.
At him.
The vision vanished when one of the men raised his hand. The air snapped back into place. His mother staggered.
There was no explosion. No screaming. Just a sound like breath being pulled out of a room all at once.
When it was over, the men were gone.
His mother was on the floor.
Mio knelt beside her. Her eyes were open but unfocused. The warmth in his collarbone burned, then cooled.
He waited for grief to arrive like it does in stories. Loud and overwhelming.
It did not come.
What came instead was clarity.
He understood something in that silence.
Those men were not stronger because they were bigger.
They were stronger because something answered them.
Because the world bent slightly around their presence.
Mio looked at his shaking hands and felt a new emotion bloom, sharp and steady.
Not sorrow.
Not even rage.
Resolve.
If power was a language, he would learn to speak it.
If the world respected only what it feared, he would become something it could not step over.
Outside, rain struck the pavement in steady rhythm.
In the glass of the darkened window, just for a second, the white wolf stood behind him again.
Waiting.