Riko Vale never expected much out of life. Not peace. Not glory. And not redemption. He was born in a crumbling apartment tower on the edge of a forgotten district—one of those places where the streetlights flickered even on good nights, and the smell of rust, piss, and old cigarette ash was as familiar as your mother's voice if she was still around.
He wasn't.
She overdosed when he was seven. Fentanyl, they said. Or maybe heroin. No one bothered to check. It didn't matter. Her body slumped on a stained couch, her eyes wide but empty, stayed with him longer than her name ever did. After that, Riko bounced from one crumbling doorstep to the next. Relatives who took him in out of guilt rather than love. Foster homes that traded children like loose change. Shelters that reeked of unwashed dreams and disappointment. He learned young that kindness was either currency or bait, and neither was free.
By the time he was thirteen, he'd stopped hoping for rescue. Fairy tales were dead. Heroes didn't exist. There was no magic, no divine judgment, no mercy. There was only what you could take and what you could keep. So he took. First candy bars. Then wallets. Then knives. Eventually, blood.
School became optional. Then a memory. He stopped showing up, and no one called to ask why. He joined a street crew for protection, then took over a smaller one when their leader got locked up. His rise was not glamorous—it was cold, ruthless, and calculated. He didn't win fights because he was stronger. He won because he hit first, and when he hit, he didn't stop.
The gang called themselves the Crows. No one took them seriously at first. They were bottom-feeders. Riko turned them into something else. He didn't have ambition. He had hunger. And that hunger needed to be fed on fear, on turf, on leverage. He ran extortion, protection, and small-time drug moves. Enough to keep the lights on and the cops away.
He didn't trust easily, but he kept a tight circle. Jia was one of them. Smart, fast, and mean in all the right ways. She could boost a car in thirty seconds or stab a traitor in ten. She made him laugh, once. Made him believe there was something worth building. Something worth holding onto.
But belief was poison.
Because the second you started thinking it could last, it didn't.
Paranoia grew in him like mold in damp corners. He started checking over his shoulder more. Sleeping with one eye open. Drawing lines where none existed. Jia left before things got ugly. She said he was turning into a ghost long before he died. Maybe she was right.
And then came the job. The one that was supposed to change everything. The one that would finally get him out. A rival boss, mid-transfer, was barely guarded. Too easy. Way too easy.
But greed and desperation are blinding.
He climbed into that van thinking it was the beginning of a new game.
It was the end of the old one.
The explosion didn't feel like heat. It felt like nothing. One second, he was leaning forward, checking his piece. The next, fire kissed his skin, metal tore through bone, and time just… stopped. The last thing he saw was a flash of orange, and behind it, Jia's face in the corner of his mind, turning away.
There was no pain.
Just weightlessness.
And then, silence.
He didn't wake.
Not in the way people think waking means. There was nobody to stretch. No breath to take. No eyes to blink. He existed in something deeper than sleep, heavier than death.
There was no sky above him. No earth below. No sound, no texture, no up or down. It wasn't darkness in the way night is dark. It was an absence. The raw void of not being stretched infinitely in every direction.
Riko drifted.
At first, he tried to move. Instinct demanded it. But there was nothing to move. No limbs. No lungs. Just awareness floating in a cold, quiet eternity.
Time bled into itself. Minutes? Hours? Days? He couldn't tell. He wondered if this was what hell was—not fire and brimstone, but isolation. Not punishment, but forgotten existence.
But something within him refused to fade.
Some part of Riko Vale—the boy who starved, the teen who stabbed, the man who ruled a trash kingdom—held on. That part was stubborn. Spiteful. The universe had taken everything from him. He'd be damned if he gave it his last piece.
So he floated. Remembered. Clung to the tatters of his life like a drowning man hugging concrete.
He remembered his mother's cracked voice singing off-key lullabies while already half-numb from pills. He remembered the sting of fists when he lost his first street fight and the grin on his face when he won the second. He remembered hunger. The kind that lived in your bones. The kind that made you bite.
He remembered building something from nothing. A gang. A name. A sliver of fear in the eyes of those who once looked down on him. He remembered Jia's arms around his neck the night they thought they'd take the city, and how cold those arms became when they pulled away.
He remembered that moment before the explosion, when he'd actually felt hope.
That was the cruelest part.
Then—something changed.
Not sound. Not light.
But a shift.
The nothing around him rippled. As if it had boundaries after all, and something on the outside had reached out and touched it.
A pulse.
Faint.
Then again. Stronger.
Not a heartbeat. But something like one.
The void contracted. Pressure built around his awareness, like the air before a storm. And then, at the edge of existence, something spoke.
Not in words. In code. In meaning. In essence.
A soundless, emotionless whisper carved from logic itself:
[SYSTEM LOADING…]