Hana-Ai ~ Chapter 1 - The Shadow in the Darkness

The story was tried and true. A classic tale of a kid trying to make it on their own with some good vs evil thrown in. Since it was too short for anything to develop, I can't say much else than that. I did like the name "Nariko," it sounds like a cool cellphone.

The backdrop of what's going on got dumped on the reader like a cold bucket of water. You were much too blatant telling us right off the bat what happened and why Nariko is forced to live the way she does. When you're writing, you want to put them somewhat right into the middle of things and slowly let the reader figure out what's going on. It will develop your character a lot more and make her more realistic. Things flew by much too quickly as well. Nothing got the attention it deserved, needed a lot more describing to give the reader good mental images. Slow it down. This will help with your length.

My suggestion to you is to take another crack at this chapter and looks for ways to lengthen it up with more content for the reader to soak in. They'll care more about the character and more about the story. This article may get shredded, but I'm definitely suggesting a resubmit if it does.

The writing isn't so bad, and except for a sentence fragment, I didn't see any spelling/grammatical errors.

This is extremely short, even for a chapter. Technically, there is no rule for how long a chapter of a story should be, but if you really want each chapter of your story to be this short, you might want to consider putting several chapters in each submission.

The story doesn't really get anywhere in this submission, and although it's clear that you tried to end with a bit of a cliffhanger to make readers want to know more, we don't know enough about your character to be very interested.

Also, I think it's a bit early to say anything about clichés, but as soon as I read the phrase "brave 13 year old" I saw red flags. Maybe I'm just tired of 13-year-old heroes. Anyway, if you continue this story, try to make it something original.

You should definitely try to put more into each submission. It's hard to judge a story when we only have such a small piece of it.