001 - The Undying
A pure white space, empty and unknown.
An indistinct figure stood in silence, gazing at the small sphere resting in its hand.
To the people of this world, Gaia had worn many names: god, creator, truth. It preferred something simpler: the planet's will.
The planet was dying.
Gaia had sensed the sickness long ago. Something like a virus had appeared somewhere deep within the world. Not a single strain, but a cluster of parasite-like things quietly gnawing away at the planet's life force.
Gaia wanted to root them out, but no matter how hard it searched, it could never find them.
Now, all it could do was pin its hopes on the sphere that had appeared at the same moment as those parasites.
At first, the object had seemed ordinary, noteworthy only because it had arrived alongside the sickness eating the world.
The longer Gaia studied it, the clearer it became that the sphere was anything but ordinary.
It could copy any shape. It could imitate all things. Given enough time, it might even become anything in the world.
And so, the planet's will released it into the world below. Perhaps this sphere would become the turning point the dying planet needed.
The moment it let go, the sphere began to fall.
But just as it was about to strike a small stone on the ground, the space around it twisted.
The distortion swallowed the sphere whole.
For the first time, Gaia betrayed an almost human flicker of surprise.
The next instant, it appeared at the place where space had warped.
There was nothing there.
For a long while, the planet's will said nothing.
...
Meteor City.
Its land area was roughly equal to that of the Lapet Republic.
For fifteen hundred years, the city had served as a dumping ground. Official records listed it as uninhabited territory, which meant that even if an infant was abandoned there, no national ID number or biological data had to be registered.
Anything could be thrown away there.
Garbage. Weapons. Corpses. Children.
Everything the world discarded, its people accepted.
A place like that bred dangerous people in unusual numbers. The residents survived by scavenging and recycling the waste others cast aside, while the underworld supplied them with heavy metals and weapons, drawing in those born and raised in violence.
"We reject no one, so take nothing from us."
Bloodshed was never rare there, whether the dead came from inside the city or beyond it.
At that moment, on one of the countless garbage heaps, a fight was already nearing its end.
"You Fanobi bastards! Are you trying to start a war with the Nostrade Family?"
A man in a plain black suit clutched the gunshot wound in his right shoulder and glared at another black-suited man standing across from him with a mocking smile.
"War?" the Fanobi leader said, bursting into laughter. "With an upstart little outfit like yours? What makes you think you get to use that word with us?"
His grin sharpened.
"A little family that only started making a name for itself a year or two ago, sneaking into Meteor City to hire muscle behind our backs. What, were you planning to challenge our place in Gambi Town?"
He raised one hand.
"Kill them."
The men behind him lifted their submachine guns and pulled the triggers without hesitation.
"Damn it!"
The Nostrade men had no chance to resist. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and had walked straight into a prepared ambush.
When the smoke cleared, they were all dead.
Before leaving, the Fanobi leader spat on the pile of bodies.
His family had ruled Gambi Town for sixty years. In that place, their word was law. Every local power had to fall in line.
And yet this upstart family had dared to come to Meteor City in secret and recruit muscle of its own.
If the Fanobi Family had not maintained a relationship with the city's Sixth Elder, and if that elder had not warned them immediately, the Nostrades might actually have brought those recruits back.
The Fanobi leader did not believe they could threaten his family's rule, not even if they succeeded.
But that was not the point.
In the underworld, violence was not the most important thing.
Reputation was.
Violence was only the tool used to protect it.
The gunmen had barely left when the space above the heap of corpses suddenly twisted.
Among the dead was a young man with pure white hair, his body riddled with bullets. A pale, illusory sphere emerged through the distortion and sank into his chest, rippling faintly as it disappeared.
He was one of the recruits the Nostrades had bought from the Third Elder.
Pain crashed through Aren Voss in waves, as if someone had stuffed him into a sack and beaten him until every bone ached.
A stench followed.
It was so foul it felt almost physical, like rotting rats sealed in a vat with sewage and left to ferment.
The smell hit him with unreasonable force.
If he could have pinched his nose shut, Aren would have done it immediately.
But he could not.
Right now, he could not move so much as a finger. He could not even open his eyes.
His mind was terrifyingly clear, yet his body refused to respond, as if he had woken trapped in a nightmare of sleep paralysis.
'What happened?'
'Wasn't I in a hotel?'
'Why do I feel like someone beat me half to death and threw me into a sewer?'
'Had the woman from last night been hiding someone after all?'
Aren had no idea why he was here. His last memory was of a hotel room, a woman he had spent the night with, and the cigarette he had smoked afterward on the balcony.
He had been a psychologist. Between his looks and his ability to read people with unsettling precision, his private life had always been a mess.
'No. She was single. I'm sure of it.'
'Unless one of the men around her found out and lost his mind?'
He had read people for a living. If she had been hiding something that obvious, he should have noticed.
Before he could think any further, a vast flood of memories surged into his mind.
It was too much.
In an instant, Aren's thoughts crashed to a halt, and he lost consciousness again.
As he lay there, something instinctive stirred inside his bloodstained, bullet-riddled body.
His flesh twisted, then began to knit itself back together. One by one, the bullets lodged inside him were forced out.
A moment later, every injury on his body hadvanished.
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