They gave him a number before they gave him a name.
Unit 9-74.
A clean designation. No past. No pain. No family. Just cold breath in colder halls, marching through metal corridors under flickering lights that never went out.
The Abyss didn't need rest. It didn't need comfort.
It only needed results.
And Berou — 9-74 — was exceptional.
They trained him in silence. Hand-to-hand. Swordwork. Execution drills. Tactics. How to kill with a glance and vanish like a shadow slipping through the seams of reality.
He never asked why.
He never asked what for.
His bones still remembered the orphanage. His skin still remembered the hands in the dark. If pain was the only language this world spoke, then he would speak it fluently — with blade, bone, and the fury that burned like ice inside him.
But there was something different in him.
The instructors noticed.
He didn't just fight to survive — he fought like he wanted the world to bleed. Like he wanted to erase it all, tear it down, scream through steel and godlight and leave nothing untouched.
They whispered that he might be unstable. That the four-winged mistake was ticking too loudly.
So they gave him harder missions. Black ops. No witnesses. No survivors. The kind of work that left a stain on the soul, if there was one left to stain.
And Berou excelled.
Until one mission.
One moment.
One crack.
He was ordered to kill a target.
A deserter.
A young girl. Wings clipped. Hands bound.
She had once been like him. A recruit. A tool. A number.
Now she was crying.
Not begging. Not fighting.
Just… crying.
He stood in front of her, sword raised. The same way he always did. No hesitation. No humanity.
But something in her voice stopped him.
"You still remember what it felt like, don't you?" she whispered.
His hands trembled.
He hadn't felt them tremble in years.
For a moment, the walls of the Abyss cracked. Not in stone, but in the space inside his chest. In the place where the boy still lived — small, scarred, quiet.
The sword dropped.
The girl's eyes widened in shock. In hope.
And that's when the other Abyss agents stepped out of the shadows.
Three. Maybe four. All with blades drawn. They had never expected him to hesitate. He was 9-74. A perfect machine.
But he wasn't perfect anymore.
He was flawed.
He was slow.
He was human — if only for one moment too long.
They killed the girl.
And they tried to kill him too.
The next morning, the training hall was red.
Seven bodies.
All torn apart.
Berou stood in the center, bleeding, panting, his wings outstretched like a beast unchained.
He didn't remember it all.
Just flashes.
Steel.
Screaming.
The sound of his own heart breaking open.
They tried to sedate him.
They failed.
And when the higher ranks arrived — the leaders cloaked in authority, faces hidden behind veils of divine disgrace — they looked at him not with pity…
…but fear.
He wasn't a number anymore.
He was a threat.
And by nightfall, they made their decision.
They cast him out.
Thrown to the wastelands between the Abyss and Heaven, stripped of command, hunted by those who once shaped him — Berou fell for the second time in his life.
Not from the skies.
But from the illusion that he could still belong to anything.
He had no home.
No allies.
No purpose.
But something inside him — something deeper than obedience, deeper than rage — had survived.
And it whispered to him now.
Let them fear you.
Let them regret what they made.
You were born with four wings for a reason.
Now show them why.