"Mine" was the first word he spoke.

Before "me" and "you"; before "us" and "them". Before everything else. His first word was "mine".

He hissed that word more than he spoke it. A hiss halfway into a growl thrown to a congener he killed in the next second.

He didn't know why he said it back then. This one word simply slinked into his mouth, appropriate, as he leaned over terrorized prey. Then he killed it too. The world rung in his mind, mysterious in meaning and implications. In a flash of lucidity he realized he didn't know what it meant.

When he was alone again, he said it again. He looked at his clawed hands covered in dark red. He said it again. It made sense. But he still didn't understand.

Words begun to slip in his mind from then on.

Words to call things. Rocks. Sky. House. Sand. Laugh. Blood.

Words to describe things. Red. Slimy. Black. Hard. Purple. Soft. Yellow.

Just little things he looked at and the word would sneak onto his tongue. Words to be seen, then felt, tasted in his mouth, heard. He didn't know where they came from. Maybe the memories of all those humans he'd killed were slipping things into him. Maybe Magano itself wanted to give him more ways to hate. He didn't know, nor did he care. He had yet to find them a utility back then.

He did care about this first word, however. Mine. This was nagging him. He didn't like it. His mind was full of unrest, and he wanted it to stop.

He was empty. There was no use to superfluous ripples, was there?

When he was alone, or as alone as he could get in the wasteland populated by his kin, he would murmur the words for himself. He would speak them over and over again, until his tongue was sore and the words became senseless rumble to his ears, and then he would continue to say them in his head until it hurt. He didn't know why. But he was sure they had a meaning together.

Little by little, the words that came became things he couldn't get to know, yet he had a vague, albeit confusing idea of what they were supposed to be. Tree. Flower. Kitchen. Food. Rain. Dew. Milk. Sun.

Time passed with his head filling up with words he didn't completely understand.

Words more complicated slowly began to appear as well, and along them concepts. These words were different from "rocks". He instinctively knew the meaning of most of these words- hate, sadness, I, you, like, why, and many, many more. He started to think about them more. He started to think more. Thinking didn't come as naturally as one may think. It was hard because no one was there to show him how while he rose to the top in strength.

Among all of those words he learned from no one, his favorite were numbers. Simple, yet they held a particular flavor of perfection on his tongue. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero. Simple. Perfect.

He felt closer to understanding what "mine" meant, but even then it escaped him. He thought he should understand, but it constantly slipped away from his grasp. There was something vital missing for him to understand. It frustrated him to no end, and only the thrill of blows made him forget that.

As he changed, fighting was the only constant, and he slipped back into the easy dance of kill-or-be-killed. There was nothing difficult to understand. It was a battle to the death and it was his "normal".

Slowly, he became able to understand his prey's babble. He had seen other impurities speak, of course, he had heard them taunt humanity with words of despair. He hadn't realized it was a tongue that they understood, but it made sense.

He listened. Their voices were not different from his, no more difficult to understand. He mused that strength truly was the only divide.

He still didn't know what "mine" meant, but there was a sense of propriety, of clinginess that he believed he had already internalized. Fundamentally, however, it couldn't make sense to him.

To have something be his, he would need to be someone in the first place.

He was a being with no name. An aggregation of corrupted souls held together by a curse and a desire to fight on. He didn't want to live as much as he wanted to die trying. He was going to die trying to stand at the top. He lost himself to adrenaline, forgetting words in favor of the demented laughs of his youth, drowning the questions of his mind.

Who would know, if the strongest didn't? Who among his kin would own anything if not the most powerful of them all?

Years and years after his mind and body had begun to change, he was asked a question.

"What is your name?"

He did have a "name" by then. A label, more than a name of his own. Only something others used for convenience. He didn't see the point. He didn't see her point, but he said it anyway, like a well-rehearsed singsong although he had only given it to a handful of beings he hesitated to call people.

"Kamui," he said. Her anger was a cool thing, a frosted fang so cold that it burned, and the frigid strength in her sent promising shivers down his spine. "That's what the others call me…"

It was not his name yet. Not until she spoke again. "Kamui," she repeated, she acknowledged, and suddenly, something changed.

When she said it like that, like it mattered, it was his name and no one else's. He still didn't understand, but maybe he was starting to.

She thanked him, like there was someone to thank, and he didn't understand, he crawled back into a defensive shell, cradling his name, pretending nothing was happening.

But from then on, the girl who had given him a body and a name, Benio Adashino, would always be his prey.