The square stank of wet straw, horse piss, and the copper tang of yesterday’s fear.

Two tax-thugs had the little girl (same ragamuffin who’d handed Jax the handkerchief) shoved face-first against a baker’s stall.

One held her wrist twisted so high her toes barely scraped the mud.

The other tapped her skull with a cudgel like he was tenderising meat.

Valerian stepped forward, voice honey over broken glass.

“Do release her, good neighbours.”

The head thug didn’t even look up.

“Keep walking, summoned. This rat stole the king’s bread.”

Tap.

Tap.

The girl whimpered.

Jax took a long, slow drag, let the smoke burn his throat raw, then crushed the butt under his heel like he was putting out a small life.

He flicked his wrist.

A senbon sprouted from the cudgel-man’s wrist with a soft thunk.

The club clattered into the muck.

“How dare you!” the guard roared, clutching the new hole in his arm.

Valerian’s smile never moved, but the temperature dropped ten degrees.

“No,” he said, soft as a confession. “How dare you starve a child while your lord wipes his arse with silk.”

He flicked two fingers.

Six golden blades shot out like pissed-off hornets, punched through mail and meat and bone.

The guards came apart in wet red ribbons.

One helmet rolled past Jax’s boots still wearing half a face.

The girl bolted, bare feet slapping through the gore.

Jax lit another smoke off the dying ember of the last, didn’t bother looking at the bodies.

“Real subtle, Golden Boy.

Next time just send ’em a fruit basket with a severed head in it.”

Valerian wiped a stripe of someone’s lung off his vambrace.

“I’d like to think so. The others are on this plate. Elara torched the east gate, Kragthar’s probably eating the garrison. We link up, pool what we know, cut the head off this pigsty kingdom.”

Jax started walking.

“Yeah, you go do that.

I’ll be over here doing the thing you heroes keep forgetting: actually helping the people you’re posing for.”

Valerian’s blades spun tighter, humming like a hornet trapped in a jar.

“You’d turn your back on destiny?”

Jax didn’t stop.

“Destiny’s just another word rich assholes use to make poor kids die smiling.

I’m allergic.”

He flicked ash onto a still-twitching corpse.

“Tell your fan club I said hi. And try not to get any more blood on the peasants. They’ve already paid enough in red.”

Jax Harlan never knew his parents’ names.

He learned hunger before he learned words.

Left in a rain-soaked cardboard box behind a South-Side whorehouse, he was six when “Mister Velvet” (a pimp with a gold tooth and a switchblade smile) dragged him out of the gutter and taught him the first rule of survival: everything has a price.

By ten he was moving dime bags through alleys that reeked of piss and cordite.

By twelve he could break a man’s fingers with a phone book and still keep count of the cash.

At fifteen Velvet handed him a stainless steel bowie knife, a blue suit two sizes too big, and a name.

“Time to stop being dead weight, baby boy.”

First job: a junkie who’d skimmed two grand.

Jax put three stab wounds in the guy’s chest while the man pissed himself and begged.

Velvet ruffled his hair like a proud father, slipped him his first pack of unfiltered Luckies and a bottle of rotgut rye.

“Welcome to the family.”

He never left it.

He broke legs for late payments, burned rival stash-houses to the ground, pimped girls who called him “sir” with eyes like busted neon.

He drank until the screams in his head sounded like a scratched jazz record.

He fucked anything warm because feeling something (even if it was just skin on skin) beat the alternative.

Cops snatched him eight times.

Every time he smiled for the cameras, took the fall, did county time in six-month bites.

Never flipped.

Never cried.

Just smoked his way through the yard, knuckles raw, eyes flat.

Inside, they called him “Suit” because that same blue jacket (dry-clean only) hung in his cell like a middle finger to the system.

Outside, the streets called him “Fall Guy Jax.”

Because he’d eat a charge to keep the bosses clean.

Because he’d laugh while the judge read the sentence.

Because when the cage door slammed he’d light another cigarette and whisper to the dark:

“See you on the other side, motherfuckers.”

He was twenty-nine, halfway through a bottle and a blonde who didn’t speak English, when the Chaos Weaver ripped him out of that world and dropped him into a cathedral of screaming meat.

Still wearing the same blue suit.

Still tasting rye and gun-smoke.

Still carrying the bowie older than most countries.

Poverty taught him hunger.

The streets taught him pain.

Mister Velvet taught him how to smile while he carved your heart out and sold it back to you by the gram.

Everything else?

Just window dressing.

Jax flexed his fingers, felt nothing but bone and cheap cotton.

The god-strength that had let him surf a goddess’s exploding uterus was gone, bled out somewhere between the meat cathedral and this piss-soaked street.

Back to factory settings: zero mana, zero stats, just a suit that used to be blue and a knife that had tasted more hearts than most people have birthdays.

He chuckled anyway, low and ugly.

“Round two, motherfuckers.”

The palace squatted on the hill like a fat toad wearing a crown.

Every window glowed with torchlight; every torch was paid for by a child who hadn’t eaten in three days.

Lord Verrick held court in the banquet hall that used to be a cathedral (stained glass replaced with iron bars, altar swapped for a long table that groaned under whole roasted oxen, wheels of cheese big enough to choke a horse, rivers of black wine).

Verrick himself was a mountain of sweating suet.

Silk robes strained at buttons made from children’s teeth.

His jowls trembled every time he laughed, which was often, because someone was always screaming somewhere in the building.

A gaunt steward (ribs showing through his livery) crawled forward on hands and knees, dragging a silver tray that held nothing but grease stains.

“My lord,” he croaked, “the Summoned tear the city apart. Eastern Garrison is ash. We need orders.”

Verrick didn’t look up from the beef leg he was gnawing like a dog with a divorce lawyer.

Grease ran down his chins, pooled in the folds of his neck, dripped onto a naked slave girl kneeling beside his chair.

She didn’t flinch; she’d stopped flinching months ago.

“Send the Red Mage to Fargone,” Verrick mumbled around a mouthful of gristle.

“Send the Red Knight to whatever’s left of the east gate.”

He tore a fist-sized chunk of meat free and flicked it at the steward’s face.

The man caught it with both hands and shoved it into his mouth like a starving animal, chewing so fast his gums bled.

Around the table, two dozen “guests” sat in chains.

Former nobles, merchants, a baker who’d shorted the flour tax by three ounces.

Their plates were empty.

Their eyes were worse.

Verrick belched, loud enough to rattle the chandeliers made of human finger bones.

“More wine,” he barked.

A boy no older than ten shuffled forward with a crystal flagon, hands shaking so bad the wine sloshed over the rim and onto Verrick’s lap.

The lord backhanded the kid across the room.

The flagon shattered; the boy didn’t get up.

Verrick wiped his hands on a slave’s hair and grinned at the room.

“See? Generosity. I feed half the city.”

He laughed again, spraying flecks of meat across the table.

Somewhere below, in the oubliette carved beneath the wine cellar, something with too many teeth smiled back.

The hill was a staircase of broken backs and unpaid taxes.

Jax climbed it one squelch at a time, cigarette glowing like a tiny middle finger to the palace above.

“Why’s every despot gotta look like he swallowed a smaller despot?” he muttered, flicking ash onto the still-smouldering tax ledger.

“Never seen one who could outrun his own shadow unless it was carrying a fork.”

The iron portcullis yawned open like a drunk’s mouth.

Ten guards in half-plate spilled out, shamshirs flashing torchlight.

“HALT! Name and purpose!”

Jax exhaled smoke through his nose.

“In there.”

He jerked a thumb at the palace.

The captain stepped forward, blade half-drawn.

“And why would we let gutter-scum—”

“Please,” Jax finished for him, shrugging like a man who’d already accepted the joke was on him.

Red light flared behind the guards.

A figure in a scarlet cloak dropped out of the night sky, landing cat-quiet on the battlements above.

Hood up, face hidden, one palm already glowing like a forge.

“—was gonna say please,” Jax sighed.

The Red Mage didn’t wait.

He tracked Jax’s heartbeat, palm snapped down, and a fireball the size of a city bus roared straight at Jax’s face.

Jax moved first.

He dove forward, straight into the guards’ ranks, shoulder-checking the captain like a bowling pin.

The fireball followed, hungry.

It swallowed the entire squad instead.

Ten men became ten torches.

Mail melted into skin.

Skin sloughed off in wet sheets.

One guard kept running three steps before his legs realised they were soup and folded.

The stench hit like a slap: pork, copper, and burnt hair.

The Red Mage landed in the smoking crater, cloak untouched.

“Impulsive,” he sneered, voice smooth as poisoned honey.

“Lord Verrick wants the golden prince.

You? You’re not even a footnote.”

Jax rose from the pile of charred corpses, brushing ash off his sleeves.

He rolled his wrist; the bowie knife spun once, settled.

“I might surprise you.”

The mage’s eyes flickered—some invisible HUD only he could see.

Name: Jax Harlan

Level: ?

Mana: 0

Threat: Negligible

He laughed, a soft, pitying sound.

“Step aside, dog.

Or I’ll turn you into a pile of nothing.”

Jax smiled with too many teeth.

Between two fingers, a senbon glinted—thin as a lie, sharp as regret.

He flicked it.

The needle punched through the mage’s glove, through flesh, through bone, and stuck in the meat between metacarpals.

The mage hissed, more surprised than hurt.

Then the aura hit.

A cold, black-white river surged up the senbon and into Jax’s veins like liquid lightning.

His knees buckled for half a heartbeat, then locked solid

STR: 11 → 47 AGI: 19 → 83 END: 14 → 61

The mage stared at his bleeding hand like it belonged to someone else.

Jax rolled his neck, cracked it once.

“Turns out stabbing works just fine.”

He took one lazy drag off his cigarette, exhaled toward the palace.

“Your move, Red.”