Slagjaw
SLAGJAW: WHAT GOD LEFT BEHIND (Releasing Winter 2025)
A new serialized thriller from Infinite Pulp
Malachi Takeda wasn’t trained to win fights—he was trained to end them before they started.
Before the military ever got its hands on him, before he became the name they muttered in briefing rooms and ghost files—Slagjaw—he was a boy in a concrete basement, standing barefoot on old tatami mats, learning a style of combat no one was supposed to teach anymore. His grandfather had brought it with him from across the sea, broken and buried, a forbidden martial discipline called Kagetsu-Ryu. It was never meant for tournaments or honor. It was meant for survival. For vanishing. For war.
Malachi learned early that silence was a kind of weapon, and he got very good at using it.
Years later, after too many missions and too few answers, he walked away from it all. Changed his name. Moved to the Midwest. Found a little town no one cared about and tried to raise his daughter, Lola, like none of it had ever happened. For a while, it worked. Until the night she disappeared.
She was taken during the chaos of the Iowa State Fair. One minute she was there. The next, she wasn’t. The search began and ended in the same breath. The cops gave him platitudes. The witnesses forgot how to speak. And Malachi—who had spent most of his life trying to forget who he was—had no choice but to become it again.
The deeper he digs, the more he sees the shape of what’s been hiding in plain sight. There’s a network. A global machine powered by wealth, protected by masks, and fueled by something far worse than money. These men don’t wear animal faces to hide who they are—they wear them to become what they believe they’ve always been. Their ideology is built on hunger. Their rituals are older than the paper trails. And their currency is children.
Malachi knows the type. He’s killed the type. But this time, they made it personal.
So he builds a mask of his own—not to join them, but to mock them. He carves the face of Hobbo the Bear, the soft, dopey cartoon hero from Let’s Go, Hobbo!, a show Lola loved when she was small. It's the last thing they'd ever expect. He wears it so she'll know it's him. He wears it so they'll underestimate what he’s become. And maybe—if there’s anything left of God in this world—he wears it so the next child who sees that mask doesn’t have to be afraid.
This isn’t a cape-and-cowl fantasy. There’s no origin story. No symbol of hope.
Slagjaw: What God Left Behind is a brutal, mythic reinvention of the superhero genre—told from the inside out. It’s about masks and monsters, the violence we inherit, and the man who refuses to let it pass on any further.
He’s not wearing the mask to protect himself.
He’s wearing it because the reckoning needs a face.
To clean up the messes God could no longer bear to face...
He is what God left behind.
Subscribe to Infinite Pulp to read Slagjaw later this year. As always, season one is free to read.