A Delivery Job from the Blade
It was one of those rare, quiet moments in our cramped but cozy shack, where I got to spend time with the only family that mattered to me. Exhaustion from backbreaking labor mixed with the thrill of unexpected luck, making the seductive pull of sleep even harder to resist tonight. Still, I shook it off. “Sarah, time to study.” “Okay!” I grabbed her thin little hand and we were just about to open the worn-out textbook under the faint glow of the gas lamp when—
Thud. Thud!
The unwelcome knocking at our door late at night made me frown as I stood up. “…Just a second.” A visitor at this hour? It felt more suspicious than a straight-up robbery. In the Hood, there was an unspoken rule about not visiting someone else’s turf after dark. You couldn’t tell friend from foe once the light faded. Besides, I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would come looking for me.
“Coming,” I called out, keeping one hand resting on the metal rod tucked in my waistband—just in case—as I slowly opened the door.
Outside stood a pale-skinned man with a teardrop tattoo under one eye, arms crossed, waiting in silence.
“You Cain?”
I answered with a nod. He gave me a quick once-over and got straight to the point without any small talk.
“The boss has a job she wants to give you.”
Bald head, black leather jacket, fingerless gloves that left the back of his hand exposed—revealing a spade tattoo. That alone marked him as a member of the Blade, one of the two syndicates that basically split the Hood between them. But more importantly, his whole look screamed the exact opposite of what I wanted around Sarah’s education. So instead of inviting him inside, I stood guard at the doorway. He didn’t seem to care about formalities either.
Still… what could the Blade possibly want from me? I didn’t remember doing anything that would catch their eye. And it wasn’t like they’d suddenly decided to scout an outsider like me when their whole gang was made up of orphans.
“What does that woman Edge want with me?” I asked, racking my brain for every possible scenario while I waited for his answer.
“It’s a delivery run.”
The words he dropped so casually made my brain freeze for a second. It was that unexpected. I forced myself to stay calm and asked again.
“Why would you bring in an outsider for something that important?”
In the Hood, delivery work carried serious weight. It was basically the only profession where people born down here could show off an advantage over the folks from uptown. Aside from selling your body, it offered the highest chance of climbing the ladder. Jobs never dried up, the base pay was solid, and you got to move between the Hood and Sentinel, picking up juicy bits of information along the way. But the biggest perk, in my opinion, was the chance to naturally mingle with uptown people and learn their culture and manners. Sure, I’d have to eat a ton of shit and take their attitude, but that was obvious. What most people didn’t understand unless they experienced it was how crucial it was to shake off the dirt-spoon stink that clung to you. In extreme terms, it was the difference between being an animal and becoming a person.
That’s why—even though it was a bit ridiculous to talk about “classes” among gangsters and slum-dwellers—becoming a delivery runner was nearly impossible unless you came from one of the so-called “Hood nobility” families. So for a gang like the Blade to hand over a sweet gig like this to an outsider instead of their own people? It didn’t make any sense.
The man shrugged slightly, as if he understood my suspicion.
“I don’t know the details, but the fancy client apparently doesn’t like dealing with gang members. Funny, right? They don’t realize that any delivery job in the Hood usually ends up going through our hands anyway.”
I was starting to get the picture. I still wondered why they’d picked me specifically, but his next words wiped that question away completely.
“So we’ve been looking for someone with enough balls to help us out. Then a bunch of our guys happened to see you scare the shit out of that crazy bastard Schroed and make him run off with his tail between his legs.”
It was a perfect fit. Pure luck. The same kind of insane luck as finding that lump of silver-iron in the trash mountain. Honestly, I didn’t think some god was looking out for me. If that were true, they wouldn’t have kidnapped me from a decent life and dumped me in a shithole like this. But separate from that, sometimes life just hands you a streak of good fortune where everything you touch turns to gold. My gut told me this was one of those times.
“So, Cain. What’s it gonna be?”
This was an opportunity I had to seize. I didn’t hesitate.
“I’ll do it.”
“Smart choice.”
The next few days felt like a dream.
The following afternoon, I finished work a little earlier than usual while the sun was still up. I carefully carried Sarah on my back as we climbed the cliff.
“Brother, where are we going?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“What? You still think I’m a kid?”
“Well, you’re still too tiny to call you a young lady. You need to grow taller and put on some weight first.”
When I teased her on purpose, Sarah puffed up in annoyance and thumped the metal part of her mask against the back of my head.
“Hey! Is that any way to talk to a girl?”
“You really do need to gain some weight.”
It wasn’t entirely a joke meant to mess with my little sister. For a girl in her late teens, Sarah was far too small in both height and build. Her weak lungs and airways couldn’t be helped, but her tiny appetite made proper growth almost impossible. In this world, plenty of girls her age were already married with children. Yet she was still so frail that she could barely walk on her own and had to be carried on my back whenever we went outside.
Still, I’d seen plenty of guys who grew up dirt poor and malnourished suddenly shoot up in height once they joined the military and started eating properly. Maybe the same could happen for girls if they got proper nutrition later on. The first step, though, was getting her to a place where she could breathe without that mask.
The fact that Sarah’s weight on my back felt lighter than a statue of a goddess was anything but comforting.
“Haa… We’re here.”
Thanks to that, my steps were quick, and I decided to count it as a blessing that we reached our destination faster than expected. I gently shook Sarah awake. She had already dozed off, her head resting on my shoulder.
“Sarah, we’re here.”
“Mmm…”
She lifted her head and looked around. It didn’t take long before a pure, delighted gasp escaped her.
“Whoa…!”
The place where I stood was the very top of the cliff. Because the Hood’s green smog was so dense, it stayed low to the ground. Climb just a little higher and you could see a surprisingly clear sky. The gloomy twilight of the Hood—its tightly packed buildings wrapped in thick fog and swallowed by darkness—lay beneath us. Above it all was the sight of Sentinel draped in a magnificent red sunset like a royal cloak.
The Hood and Sentinel had once been a single city. Back then they shared the same name, and the only difference between them was the honest geographical one of lowlands versus highlands. The problem started when magitech engineering and alchemy really took off. Issues similar to the industrial revolution in my old world began popping up one after another. Human instinct to seek higher ground funneled wealth and prestige upward. The instinct to hide dirty things sent the poor and pollutants downward. It was an obvious, predictable story.
Some listeners might say we could just close our eyes and climb a little higher. But for people of the Hood—for us—that “little higher” you could reach before sunset was an impossibly massive wall.
I had no intention of explaining it any further. There was no reason or leisure to do so.
I set Sarah down and stretched my back.
“Sarah, you can take your mask off for a bit here.”
“Yeah!”
She took it off as if she’d been waiting for permission, stood on her own two feet, and—though her legs trembled slightly—held my hand tightly as she silently gazed up at Sentinel wrapped in sunset light.
She had only removed a single mask, yet Sarah looked healthier and more energetic than ever before. I could feel the pulse of life from her small hand.
“…Thank you, brother.”
“I just wanted to come here myself. It’s nothing.”
“It’s a promise. One day I’ll definitely make sure you live in luxury, brother.”
“Just hearing you say it is enough.”
If things continued to go even a little bit better from now on, maybe—just maybe—we could one day step inside that mirage we could only see by craning our necks.
Three days after accepting the Blade’s offer.
“Nice to meet you. So you’re the Cain I’ve heard about?”
Somehow I’d ended up being summoned to their headquarters, standing face to face with their leader, Edge. Of course, we weren’t alone.
Bark! Bark! Bark!
Mastiffs with thick spiked collars were going absolutely insane, snarling at me. On top of that, several burly men—including the pale bald guy who’d delivered the initial message—stood motionless beside her. The pressure they gave off was no joke.
The leader of the Blade, Edge, was a young woman. At least on the outside. Her white-blonde hair looked almost bleached, and she wore sunglasses. She was dressed boldly in a tube top and black leather leggings. For a woman in this neighborhood to walk around like that without being a prostitute took tremendous confidence. And those things on her back… were those dual swords? I couldn’t even begin to guess how skilled she thought she was.
Edge sat cross-legged on an extravagant chair, looking down at me while puffing on a cigar. She smiled and said,
“So this is the pretty decent bastard who crawled out from between the legs of that flower-garden-headed bitch Ilaina—”
Before she could even finish the sentence—
Click.
I had already drawn the gun from my waistband and was aiming it straight at her head.
“Shut your fucking mouth, you bitch.”
It had been a completely reflexive action.
“What the…! Boss!”
“Is this guy a complete lunatic?!”
The lackeys who had been trying to look tough beside her were visibly shaken. They clearly hadn’t expected me to do something like this.
The tension was thick enough to snap.
“How vulgar,” a girl who looked like she had just turned twenty said in a perfectly calm voice as she stepped into the murderous atmosphere.