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The first time Tsukasa kills, he’s thirteen years old and the victim is a monster here to kill him and his sister both.
He doesn’t really think about it. Just feels the need to remove the threat.
It may have been a coincidence that the veil he’d summoned and pushed the monster through lead to a world without atmosphere. It may have been purposeful.
Kadoya Tsukasa, however, is not unknowledgeable of death. He’s seen his parent return from missions covered in other people’s blood. He’s seen his parents’ corpses after they’d died.
It’s different, he thinks as he closes the Veil to stop watching the monster suffocate, to do it himself.
He’s shaking, and he’s scared, and horrified. Regardless of the nature of his world, he is a child. And so, like any other scared child, he goes to somewhere he feels safe.
He wanders into another world.
It’s so strange, he thinks as he walks the busy streets. Most worlds are like this, things other than propaganda on billboards, no monsters intermingling with humans on the street.
It’s easy to find an unlocked bike, an adult willing to help him just because he’s young.
It feels even more separated from Tsukasa’s own reality.
He likes it, somewhat. He likes just as much the anonymity. No one here knows that he’s sitting on the power vacuum his parents had left. No one here knows he’s finally having to deal with threats himself.
No one knows who he is when he wanders into some hidden alcove of a local forest and starts to cry.
No one to watch him summon another Veil and take in the aftermath of his actions.
A bloated corpse on the ground.
He closes the veil as quickly as he opens it, and he stays there until the shaking completely stops.
“Onii-chan? Where did you go?” Sayo asks.
“N-nowhere, Sayo,” Tsukasa says. Best not worry her just yet.
“Why won’t you tell me?” The nine year old girl asks, angrily. “You just left me by myself!”
“I left my camera,” Tsukasa says. “Sorry I can’t just spend all my time with you when you can’t even go anywhere!”
Sayo flinches as if struck. Tsukasa is too tired to respond. It’s true, after all. He has no reason to apologize, regardless.
The next day, he comes to the less than startling realization that Dai-Shocker had been providing them a modicum of protection over the past three years, and that now he’s expected to start participating.
He’s thirteen years old in a world of monsters. No one fears his powers yet.
What he’s not is stupid.
It’s the nature of his world: he’ll be killing again.
He looks at it until it doesn’t make him shudder, nonetheless.
Because he’s from his own world, and this is ugly, but isn’t it just a part of life?
And, he reminds himself, this monster had tried to hurt him and Sayo. This is no more than self defense.
And if he wants to be in power of his own… he has to get used to this.
He’s still thirteen when he kills for the second time, for the third, for the tenth. He kills one of them with a family heirloom sword.
He does, in fact, get used to it.
Eventually he wonders why it was a problem at all. It’s just a natural part of his world. He was just a child.
The thing is, a power like Tsukasa’s? It’s a valuable one. He realizes he’s growing a reputation. He likes it.
What he doesn’t like is that people keep wanting him to work for them. He does what he wants. He’d rather spend more time out there in the Worlds than here.
Which… might be an idea.
Oh.
(Tsukasa is fourteen years old when a Shocker mook named Narutaki Shows up at his door asks if he could use the worlds to give Shocker a way to explains past Earth, and he says yes, but that is a story for another day)