I’ve never been under any illusions about who I am.
In the real world, “good” and “evil” are luxuries for people who have enough money to choose.
For the rest of us, life is a series of gray compromises.
I was twenty-four, living in a cramped apartment in a city that felt like it was trying to swallow me whole.
I was greedy when I needed to be, selfish because I had to be, and tired—always, perpetually tired.
I spent my nights staring at screens, losing myself in anime and TV shows where the stakes actually mattered.
It was a hell of a lot easier to care about a fictional world than the one outside my window, where my neighbor’s Wi-Fi was the only thing I could reliably count on.
I wasn’t a saint.
If I saw a way to get ahead, I took it.
I lived for myself because, in my experience, nobody else was going to do it for me.
Then came that night.
It was a Tuesday, slick with the kind of freezing rain that turns the streets into a blurred mirror of neon signs and headlights.
I was walking home from a double shift, my coat soaked through, my mind occupied with the depressing math of my bank account.
I saw the car before I heard it, a high-end, silver blur losing its grip on the asphalt.
It was heading straight for a man standing on the corner.
He was older, draped in a coat that probably cost more than my car.
He looked like a man who had never known a day of genuine struggle, the kind of person I usually resented on principle.
He was distracted, looking at his phone, completely oblivious to the two tons of steel screaming toward him.
Logic told me to keep walking.
I had no obligation to him.
He lived a life far better than mine, in a world I wasn’t invited to.
I didn’t have the luxury to care about what happened to a stranger who wouldn’t even look at me twice on a normal day.
And yet…
Before my brain could finish the thought, my legs were already moving.
It wasn’t a conscious choice; it was a glitch in my own programming.
Despite the bitterness, despite the greed, and despite the fact that I knew I had everything to lose and nothing to gain…
I jumped.
I hit him hard, shoulder-first, shoving him out of the path of the silver bullet.
For a split second, as we tumbled toward the sidewalk, I felt a strange, fleeting surge of pride.
Maybe, just once, I wanted to see if the “hero” thing was all it was cracked up to be.
Then the world turned into a cacophony of screeching metal and shattering glass.
There was no cinematic slow-motion.
There was just a sudden, absolute cold.
It felt like the air had been punched out of my lungs, followed by a weight so heavy it didn’t even feel like pain anymore.
It just felt like being…
finished.
I remember the smell of wet pavement and the flickering light of a broken headlight.
I tried to move, to see if the guy was okay, but the connection between my mind and my body had been severed.
That was the moment the realization hit me, colder than the rain.
I had finally played the hero.
And in the real world, that was a one-time performance.
The light faded.
The sounds of the city, the sirens, the rain, the shouting, all bled into a single, low hum that eventually gave way to a silence so deep it felt physical.
I was gone.
I don’t know how long I drifted in that empty, weightless dark.
It felt like an eternity compressed into a heartbeat.
But then, the silence didn’t break—it vibrated.
A heat started to pulse in the center of my chest.
It wasn’t the searing heat of the crash; it was something ancient, dense, and impossibly vast.
It felt like a sun was trying to be born under my ribs.
My eyes snapped open.