Volume 4 Prologue: The Old Dog’s Dream

I remember those petty years back when my hair’s still black, skin too smooth and voice ain’t rugged like goddamned gravel.

Life on the streets ain't no damn storybook. It's a freakin’ battleground.

You fight, you bleed.

You win, you eat.

Lose, and you rot in some alley, forgotten like yesterday’s trash.

No blood, no money.

No money, no food.

No food, and my old ailing ma…well, she wouldn’t have lasted a week.

I didn’t have a choice.

Every damn day was a war. You square up with punks trying to take your territory, idiots desperate enough to stab you for a bag of coins, or worse, bored thugs who kill just to pass the time.

And me?

I fought like hell.

I piled up bodies behind me—not dead, no. Just broken enough to never crawl back into my life again.

Thugs called me a soldier.

Some, warmonger.

Others—the wolf.

And like flies to shit, the bigger fishes started circling.

Mobs. Gangs. Syndicates, name it.

They wanted a piece of me. Some wanted me dead. Others wanted me to wear their colors.

I just started dropping them off like dominoes. Beat enough punks to fill a damn calendar. 31 days? Shit, I beat that many in a good week.

But the more I fought...the emptier it got.

“What was I fighting for, huh?”

For a corner of a dirty city that didn't even know my damn name? Some bullshit respect from cowards too scared to swing first?

Oh, and thinking about that, I got older.

And one night, sitting under a broken streetlight with my fists bleeding and my stomach growling, I thought—What the hell am I doing?

When I was a kid, I had dreams too. Not this blood and knuckles bullshit. I wanted a home. A kitchen. 

A family.

Something warm and something real.

So one day, I just left without a warning.

I ignored the crooks trying to pull me back. I’m completely out of the battleground within a week.

I never looked back.

I found a job cooking in some rickety old restaurant. Turns out all those years scrapping on the streets taught me how to move fast, stay sharp—and yeah, how to cook good enough to keep people coming back.

Salary wasn’t much. Nothing compared to the dirty money I used to pull in. But it was enough.

Enough to keep me, and ma, alive.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Until that night.

Overtime ran long. I dragged my ass back home, tired but kinda happy—thinking about the dinner I was gonna make for her.

The house was dark.

Quiet.

I flipped the lights on and—

Flash.

Blood.

So much blood.

My mother.

Face down on the floor.

Shot.

My heart stopped.

I didn’t scream.

Didn’t cry.

Didn’t even breathe for a second.

My body just told me what to do.

I picked up the old gun stashed in the drawer and went hunting.

It didn’t take too long until I found the bastards, every last one of them.

And I made them pay.

My fingers clutched on the trigger like I was playing the damn piano. I sent my notes, and in each loud crack of gunpowder, like tempuras they folded and fell.

Each bullet, each swing, every broken bone—they weren’t enough, I didn’t dare stop.

But they had numbers.

And I was just one man.

Cornered in some godforsaken alley, half dead already, I thought, this is it. I’ll die right here like all the other rats before me.

Then a hand grabbed me.

Yanked me into the shadows.

Pulled me through the maze of Osaka like I was nothing more than a sack of meat.

It was a kid. A college kid, soft-looking, too clean for these parts.

Ishida Kenji, Haru’s father. He saved my worthless ass that night.

Gave me a new purpose.

Gave me a brother and a friend I never had.

Kenji didn't just patch me up—he rescued me.

Helped me disappear from the criminal world and start fresh.

Even paid for my little diner out in Tokyo, gave me a shot at something real again.

After that, no contact for years.

But it’s okay. For a while, life was good and quiet.

The diner was booming. And me, I know I am a changed meat.

Then one day, I heard Kenji and his wife got killed.

Car crash. Heard it was a Sentinel at the wheels. Only rich asses could afford that metal shit that time.

And when I found Haruki at the orphanage…

That kid had the same darkness in his eyes that I used to see in the mirror.

He was the reflection of my own.

Angry at the world.

Hell, raising him was like trying to tame a damn typhoon. He wasn’t built for the streets.

He was built to rule them.

Every problem he had? His fists solved it.

In every memory? Every pain? Violence was his first and only language to erase it.

High maintenance brat, with too much fire and too little leash.

But you know what?

I didn’t give up.

Because deep down, that old dream was still burning.

After all those damn years, I still wanted a family.

Someone to protect.

Someone to call mine.

I pushed through every ignorance, every fistfight, every busted lip and broken rule.

I didn’t raise Haru perfectly.

Hell, some days I didn’t even like him.

But I loved the kid.

And today—watching him cry, laugh, struggle, feel—watching him carry the weight of a broken world on his shoulders—I'm proud.

Before, there was a silent, cold and deadly kid at my crib.

He was finally out of the shell.

Yeah, I’m a tough bastard, and yeah, I’ll never say it out loud—

But when that punk calls me "father," even as a joke…

…I say shit and shut him up, but deep inside, it means something.

It means everything.

Kenji’s not here anymore.

But through Haruki…

Through all his scars, his stubbornness, his heart…Kenji’s still alive.

And damn…

Maybe I'm not just some old street dog anymore.

Perhaps, somehow, I became what I always wanted to be.

A real father.

Even if I gotta give up being an asshole to pull it off.