An Extremely Overpowered God Of War

Chapter 9

The driver nodded once and didn't ask anything else. He simply drove.

And Raymond sat in the back of that taxi and tried to hold himself together.

The hunger in his stomach had been there for hours and he was aware of it distantly. What he was actually feeling what was moving through him in waves that he was keeping carefully below the surface was a rage so deep and so personal it had stopped feeling like anger and started feeling like grief. 

He couldn't believe it.

 Even now, sitting here with the signed papers behind him and the city moving past the window, he genuinely could not make himself fully believe that Victoria and her family had done this. Had looked him in the eye before he left, made him a promise, taken his trust like it was something they were honored to be given and then done this.

His mother.

His mother, who had fought and scraped and sacrificed through every hard year of their lives to make sure that Raymond and his sister had something to stand on, had been in that house in the house of the family her son had married into and they had let her leave. 

Had let her walk out to wherever she ended up, sick and not strong, and had not lifted a single hand to stop it or follow up or even send word.

If he had known. If he had even suspected for one moment that this was the direction things were heading, he would have made other arrangements. 

He would have found someone else, paid someone directly, done anything other than leave the two most important people in his life in the hands of people who had never actually valued anything except what they could gain.

He had trusted the wrong person entirely.

And now his mother was somewhere on Z Street.

He knew of Z Street.

But never had reason to visit it had existed at the edge of the city's map in his memory as an undeveloped stretch, a part of the capital that hadn't caught up with the rest of it yet. That was five years ago. He didn't know what it was now.

 But the image his mind kept returning to, the one he couldn't fully push away no matter how he tried, was his mother in some poor settlement at the lowest end of the city, surviving on whatever was available, far from anyone who should have been looking after her.

Not long after the driver slowed and stopped.

“We're here,” the driver said, looking straight ahead through the windscreen rather than into the mirror. His voice had gone slightly quieter than it had been. 

“This is it. Z Street.”

Raymond looked up from his thoughts and through the glass.

His jaw locked.

Every muscle in his face went tight at once, the tightness spreading down through his neck and into his shoulders, and for a long moment he simply sat there and looked at what was in front of him without saying a word.

It wasn't a settlement, It wasn't a row of struggling houses or cramped buildings or any of the things his mind had been preparing him for on the drive over.

“This is Z Street?” Raymond's voice came out barely above a murmur.

The driver nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said quietly. 

“That's Z Street.”

Raymond stared through the windscreen at the iron gates, the low stone walls, the rows of markers stretching back in silence as far as the eye could follow.

"A cemetery," Raymond said.

The driver nodded slowly. 

“Yes,” he said. 

“That is exactly what it is. And not even a proper cemetery not for the wealthy or the well-connected or anyone like that.” He paused for a moment. 

“It is a makeshift ground. Something the city put together for the extremely poor. For people with nothing, people with no family, no one to claim them. That is who ends up here.” He shook his head slightly. 

“And the government doesn't maintain it. Doesn't look after it at all. There is even talk I have heard it more than once that they are planning to sell the land soon. Use it for something else entirely.”

Raymond didn't respond, he was already reaching for the door handle.

He paid without counting what he handed over and stepped out of the taxi onto the uneven ground in front of the gates, and the moment the outside air hit him he felt the full weight, his mother.

His mother was not living in a struggling neighborhood at the edge of the city. His mother was not in a small room somewhere, getting by on little, waiting for someone to come find her.

His mother was stay here, he couldn't believe Victoria would do this to him.

At that moment, not wanting to waste any time he started walking, he must get it his mother immediately.

Through the gate and along the uneven path that ran between the rows, the ground poorly kept, the markers inconsistent some proper, most not, many nothing more than sticks driven into the earth with whatever identification could be attached to them. The smell reached him before he had gone very far. Rubbish. Neglect. The particular smell of a place that no one with any power had looked at in a very long time.

He moved along the numbers hoping he would see a little house soon.

His eyes tracked them as he walked, 

At that that moment he found number thirty-two.

Immediately he stopped, then his eyes went cold immediately because it wasn't a small house, or a Shelter, that was in front of him, It was a stick, a simple wooden stick pushed into the ground at an angle, with a crosspiece tied to it, and hanging from the crosspiece was a small name tag, weathered and dirty, the edges of it soft with exposure to rain and sun. 

The ground around it was cluttered with rubbish. A dustbin had been left covering the grave, the smell rising from it was so thick, but Raymond wasn't allowing that to discourage him to check the name tag.

Then he read the name on it.

Immediately his eyes widen when he saw it was his mother's name.

The strength went out of his legs all at once not gradually, not with warning, but completely and immediately. the way a structure fails when the pillars holding it up is suddenly gone. 

His knees hit the ground and he stayed there, both hands coming forward instinctively, and he stared at that dirty, crooked marker with the name tag hanging from it and the rubbish piled around it and the smell of waste rising from every inch of the place.

His voice came out broken and barely above a whisper.

“Don't.... tell me my mother is dead!!”