The rain in the city always smelled like rust and cheap exhaust.
Leo walked with his head down, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a coat that was too thin for the biting November wind.
The neon signs of convenience stores and dive bars flickered over the wet pavement, casting warped, colorful reflections in the puddles.
To anyone else, it might have looked cinematic.
To him, it just looked like another Tuesday in a life that was going absolutely nowhere.
He was twenty-two, though the heavy bags under his eyes made him look ten years older.
He worked a soul-crushing data entry job, living paycheck to paycheck in a cramped studio apartment where the heater only worked when it felt like it.
He wasn’t a genius.
He wasn’t a star athlete.
He was the definition of ordinary—a background character in a world of eight billion people.
His only escape was fiction.
After grueling nine-hour shifts of mind-numbing spreadsheets, Leo would bury himself in manga, anime, and watching movies.
He didn’t idolize the righteous heroes with their unwavering morals and self-sacrificing complexes; he found them exhausting.
He liked those who wanted freedom.
Freedom from the rules, from the crushing weight of society, from being a fragile, helpless human forced to play by the whims of those with more money and more power.
Leo kicked a crushed soda can down the sidewalk, the metallic clatter briefly drowning out the hum of the distant highway.
His route home took him past an old, condemned subway station a shortcut that cut ten minutes off his walk, though it was notoriously unlit.
Tonight, the darkness felt heavier than usual.
The damp air clung to his skin, and the silence was absolute, broken only by the steady rhythm of his own boots on the concrete.
Then came the scuffle.
“Give me the fucking bag, man!
Just give it!”
Leo froze.
Up ahead, near the chain-link fence of the station entrance, two silhouettes were violently tangling in the shadows.
One was a tall, heavily built man shoving a smaller figure against the brick wall.
The glint of a switchblade caught the faint ambient light of a distant streetlamp.
Normally, Leo would have turned around.
Keep your head down.
Mind your own business.
That was the rule of the city.
But as the smaller figure let out a panicked, breathless sob, something inside Leo snapped.
It wasn’t a surge of heroic justice; it was a sudden, violent disgust at the world.
The strong preying on the weak.
The endless cycle of helplessness.
He was so incredibly tired of being helpless.
“Hey!” Leo shouted, his voice echoing off the brick walls louder than he intended.
The attacker whipped around, dropping his grip on the victim, who immediately scrambled away into the darkness, leaving Leo standing alone.
“You wanna die, kid?” the man snarled, stepping into the dim light.
He looked desperate, his eyes wild and dilated, the knife gripped tight in a trembling hand.
Leo’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Every instinct screamed at him to run, but his legs felt rooted to the pavement.
For the first time in his life, he didn’t want to back down.
He wanted to fight.
He wanted to prove that he wasn’t just a punching bag for the universe.
He lunged.
It was a clumsy, untrained tackle.
He hit the man’s midsection, driving him back toward the fence.
For a split second, Leo felt a surge of adrenaline, a fleeting delusion of triumph.
Then came the cold.
It wasn’t a sharp pain at first.
It felt like someone had punched him in the stomach with a block of ice.
Leo gasped, all the air rushing out of his lungs.
He stumbled backward, his knees instantly giving out.
He hit the wet concrete hard, the impact jarring his teeth.
The mugger didn’t say a word.
He just stared at the blood on his knife, panicked, and bolted down the alley, vanishing into the night.
Leo lay on his back, the freezing rain mixing with the warm, dark liquid pooling rapidly beneath his coat.
He tried to lift his hand to his stomach, but his limbs felt like lead.
His breathing turned into shallow, wet rasps.
So this is it, he thought, his vision beginning to blur at the edges.
There was no grand orchestral music.
No flashback of a life well-lived.
Just the smell of wet garbage, the biting cold, and the pathetic realization that he was dying in an alleyway for a stranger who had already run away.
Panic and regret clawed at his throat, but beneath it all, an overwhelming, suffocating rage began to boil.
He hated this.
He hated being weak.
He hated that his life amounted to nothing more than a few decades of mundane suffering followed by a meaningless death in the mud.
If there’s a next time…
The thought echoed in his fading consciousness, sharp and venomous.
If I get another chance…
I won’t be the victim.
I won’t be weak.
I’ll tear apart anyone who looks down on me.
The neon lights above him flickered and died out.
The sounds of the city faded into a deep, ringing silence.
The cold completely overtook him, dragging him down into an absolute, suffocating darkness.
Leo closed his eyes for the last time.
[System Initialization…]
[Soul Resonance Detected…]
[Searching for suitable vessel…]