A Golden Opportunity
It was one of those times when I was spending a quiet evening with my precious family in our narrow, uncomfortable, but strangely cozy plank shack. The heavy fatigue from backbreaking labor mixed with the rush of unexpected good fortune, making the pull of sleep even stronger than usual. Still, I fought it off.
“Sara, let’s study.”
“Okay!”
I gripped her thin little hand tightly. We were just about to open the worn-out textbook under the faint glow of the gas lamp when—
Thud. Thud!
The unwelcome sound of someone pounding on the door late at night made me frown. I stood up.
“…Just a second.”
A visitor at this hour? It felt more suspicious than an outright robbery. In the Hood, there was an unspoken rule against visiting someone else’s turf after dark. It was too easy to mistake friend for enemy when you couldn’t see shit. Besides, I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would come looking for me.
“Coming.”
I kept one hand resting on the metal rod tucked in my waistband, ready to draw at any moment, and slowly opened the door. Outside stood a pale-skinned man with a tear-drop tattoo under one eye. He waited with his arms crossed.
“You Kain?”
I answered with a nod. The man gave me a quick once-over and got straight to business without any small talk.
“The boss has a job she wants to give you.”
Bald head, black leather jacket, fingerless gloves that showed off a spade tattoo on the back of his hand. Never mind that he was clearly from Blade—one of the two gangs that split the Hood between them. His whole look screamed bad influence for Sara’s education, so I kept him on the doorstep instead of inviting him inside. He didn’t seem to care about manners anyway.
But what the hell did Blade want with me? I couldn’t remember doing anything that would catch their attention. They weren’t about to scout an orphan like me this late in the game.
“What does that woman Edge want from me?”
I was still turning over every possible scenario in my head when the man dropped his answer like it was nothing.
“Delivery.”
My brain actually stalled for a second. That was the last thing I expected to hear. I forced myself to stay calm and asked, “Why would you bring in an outsider for something that important?”
In the Hood, delivery work carried serious weight. It was basically the only real advantage locals had over people from up top. Aside from selling your body, it was the job with the highest chance of actually getting ahead. Work never dried up, the base pay was solid, and you got to move between the Hood and Sentinel, picking up valuable information along the way. Best of all, in my opinion, was the chance to rub shoulders with Sentinel types and learn their culture and etiquette naturally.
Sure, you’d have to swallow a mountain of pride and eat shit on a daily basis, but that was obvious. What people didn’t understand until they experienced it was how crucial it was to shake off that ingrained dirt-spoon vibe. In the most extreme sense, it was the difference between living like an animal and becoming a person.
So yeah, it was a little ridiculous for gangs to talk about class divisions in the Hood, but unless you came from one of the so-called “Hood noble” families, becoming a delivery runner was nearly impossible. The fact that a gang would hand off such a sweet gig—one they barely had enough of to share among their own—to an outsider made zero logical sense.
The man seemed to understand my suspicion. He gave a small shrug.
“I don’t know the full story, but apparently the fancy client doesn’t like dealing with gang members. Funny, right? They don’t even realize that any delivery job in the Hood usually goes 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.
“We were looking for someone with enough balls to help us out. Then a few 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 alignment. Pure luck. The same kind of absurd fortune as finding that lump of silver iron in the trash mountain. I didn’t think some god was looking out for me—if that were true, I wouldn’t have been kidnapped from a decent life and dumped in this shithole in the first place. But separate from that, sometimes luck just cracks open and everything starts going your way.
My gut told me this was one of those moments.
“So, Kain. You in or what?”
This was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss. I didn’t hesitate.
“I’ll do it.”
The last few days had been a string of events that felt like a dream.
The next day, I finished work a little earlier than usual while the sun was still hanging in the sky. I carried Sara on my back and carefully climbed the cliff.
“Brother, where are we going?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“What? You still think I’m a little kid?”
“Well, you’re still too small to call a young lady. You need to get taller and put on some weight first.”
I teased her on purpose. Sara responded by tapping the metal part of her mask against my head in annoyance.
“Hey, is that any way to talk to a girl?”
“You really do need to gain weight.”
It wasn’t entirely a joke meant to mess with my little sister. For a girl in her late teens, Sara 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 she could barely walk on her own and had to be carried on my back whenever we went outside.
Still, I’d seen boys who grew up dirt poor and malnourished suddenly shoot up in height once they joined the military and started eating properly. Maybe if girls got the right nutrition later on, their bodies would catch up too. The first step was getting her to a place where she could breathe without the mask.
The fact that Sara’s weight on my back felt lighter than that goddess statue was anything but comforting.
“Haa. We’re here.”
At least my steps were quick. I decided to count it as a blessing that we’d reached the spot faster than expected. Sara had already dozed off with her head on my shoulder. I gently shook her awake.
“Sara, we’re here.”
“Mmm…”
She lifted her head and looked around. Soon, a pure sound of wonder slipped from her lips.
“Whoa…!”
We stood at the very top of the cliff. The Hood’s green smog stayed low because of its density, so even climbing a short way into higher ground let you see a surprisingly clear sky. The gloomy dusk of the Hood stretched below us—clusters of ramshackle buildings wrapped in thick fog, vanishing into darkness. Above it all, Sentinel glowed, wrapped elegantly in the red sunset like a magnificent cloak.
The Hood and Sentinel had once been a single city. Back then they shared the same name, and the only difference was the honest geographical split between lowlands and highlands. The trouble started when magic engineering and alchemy really took off. Problems similar to the industrial revolution in my old world began popping up one after another. People’s natural preference for higher ground funneled wealth and prestige upward. The instinct to hide anything dirty sent the poor and the pollutants down below. It was a painfully obvious story.
Outsiders 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 huge wall.
I had no intention of explaining it any further. There was no reason or leisure to do so.
I set Sara down and stretched my back.
“Sara, you can take the mask off for a bit here.”
“Yeah!”
She pulled it off immediately and stood on her own two feet. Her legs trembled slightly, but she held my hand tightly and silently gazed up at Sentinel wrapped in sunset light. Just removing one mask made her look healthier and more alive than I’d ever seen her. I could feel vitality flowing from her small hand.
“…Thank you, brother.”
“I just wanted to come here. No need to thank me.”
“It’s a promise. One day I’ll make sure you live comfortably, brother. I swear.”
“Thanks, even if it’s just words.”
If things continued to go well—just a little more, just a tiny bit—I might actually be able to step inside that mirage I could only barely see by craning my neck right now.
Three days after I accepted Blade’s proposal.
“Nice to meet you. So you’re that Kain?”
Somehow I’d been summoned all the way to their headquarters and now stood face to face with their boss, Edge. Of course it wasn’t a private meeting.
Woof! Woof woof!
Massive dogs wearing thick spiked collars barked at me like they’d lost their minds. On top of that, the pale bald guy who’d delivered the original message and several other burly thugs stood motionless at her side. The pressure was no joke.
Blade’s leader, Edge, was a young woman. At least on the surface. Her white-blonde hair and sunglasses paired with a tube top and black leather leggings made for an extremely bold outfit. For a woman who wasn’t a prostitute to walk around the neighborhood dressed like that showed insane confidence. And those things strapped to her back—were those dual swords? I couldn’t even guess how skilled she thought she was.
Edge sat cross-legged on an ornate chair, looking down at me while smoking a cigar. She smiled.
“Ilaina—that crazy bitch with flowers growing out of her head—somehow managed to squeeze out a pretty useful bastard from between her legs…”
Before she could finish the sentence—
Click.
I had drawn the gun from my waistband and aimed it straight at her head.
“Shut your fucking mouth, you bitch.”
It was pure reflex. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.
“What the…! Boss!”
“Is this guy a complete psycho?!”
The lackeys trying to look tough beside her were visibly shaken. They clearly hadn’t expected me to pull something like this.
The situation was a single spark away from exploding.
“How vulgar,” a young girl who looked like she had just turned twenty said, stepping casually into the killing intent that filled the room.