The rain tasted of iron as it plummeted onto the cracked street, running red through the gutters.
Bodies and broken weapons lay twisted in the dark, the storm washing nothing clean.
In the center of it all lay two men, bruised and blood-slick, watching the raindrops fall.
"...Dohyun, you still alive?" Taeyang asked.
Dohyun didn't answer. He slid an arm across his forehead, breath rasping, eyes still locked on the sky.
Taeyang chuckled, flicking a bead of blood from his sleeve. He leaned back, fingers laced behind his head, one leg resting over the other. "This ruin… it is spreading all across the country, huh?"
...
"Tell me," Taeyang's voice was playful but serious. "What do you believe our labor is for?"
"…I don't know." Dohyun shifted, testing a bruised rib. "Is our lord proud?"
"That's all you care about?"
Dohyun's gaze stayed on the storm. "What else matters? In a world like this… only strength keeps one standing. And to be seen wielding it."
The rain fell harder, a low thunder rumbled across the sky.
"Because in the end…"
Lightning flared, carving their shadows across the corpses.
"The Wildlaw rules all."
…
Elsewhere, Days later – Dawn
The cracked, blood-filled streets, the increasing number of deaths, the spreading violence… it wasn't just a rumor. City after city was burning. Darin's fingers hovered over the keyboard, tracing the latest reports as if her scripts could make sense of it all.
Then one story caught her eye: Multiple gang wars erupt nationwide. Factions eliminating their own kind. She clicked on the article, anticipation coiling in her chest. The page loaded…
…
Source Unavailable.
Frowning, she refreshed. Another site. Another article. Gone mid-scroll.
Her heart thudded. Fingers flying, she opened her coding tools: scripts and tracers she'd built in quiet, sleepless nights, and dug into cached pages and system logs.
Her tracer tool slid through the logs effortlessly, as if following pathways it had been built for. Almost like it knew what to look for.
The timing, the structure, the precise order of deletion.
Someone was scrubbing the internet in real time.
Then she saw it: fragments arranged not as text but as a jagged ring of zeroes, pulsing across her screen like an unblinking eye.
Her brows knit. The pattern felt… familiar. Like code she'd seen before, long ago.
Beneath it, a single name appeared:
ZERO.
Something in her chest shifted.
Why did this symbol make her stomach drop? Something about it felt wrong.
Her mind went blank. This isn't a glitch, someone was asserting their presence.
Who are you…?
The screen flickered, stuttered, and then a message window snapped open.
TEMPORARY BEST FRIEND #21:
You said you had to move out of town… It's today, isn't it…?
Darin froze. She glanced at the date in the corner of her screen.
June 1st, a new month.
The sunlight bled through the blinds,too soft for a room with this many discarded lives. She hadn't even noticed it until now.
Her eyes shifted to the corner of the room. A trash bin, overflowing with shredded IDs. Dozens of names, dozens of faces, all hers.
Every new identity felt like leaving another piece of herself behind. Sometimes she wondered if, piece by piece, she was forgetting who she really was.
She whispered "Zero… Have I heard of that name before?" then sighed and typed back: Yeah.
TEMPORARY BEST FRIEND #21:
I'll miss you so much. Promise you'll call when you get there?
Her fingers typed Sure, though she already knew it was a lie. Every move meant a new identity, a new start, and the people she left behind never heard from her again.