The rain in Oakhaven is not a cleanser; it is a weight. It falls in thick, oily ribbons that taste of industrial rust and the copper tang of blood, clinging to the neon-lit skyscrapers that pierce the heavy, leaden sky like jagged glass shards. I stood in the deep, freezing shadows of a derelict alleyway, my back pressed against the weeping brickwork, watching the mist rise from the wet pavement. Here, in the District of Ash, the air feels as though it has been inhaled and exhaled by a thousand dying lungs before it ever reaches yours.
Across the street, huddled under the flickering buzz of a failing streetlamp, a man was bartering with the void. I recognized the type—a low-tier enforcer for the Vane Syndicate, a man whose soul had been eroded by the grind of the city until nothing but the jagged edges of survival remained. His breath came in ragged, visible plumes, sharp and vinegar-sour with the scent of unadulterated terror. He wasn't alone. Hovering inches above the grime-slicked asphalt was a Collector, a lesser Shinigami draped in the tattered remains of frozen smoke. Its face was a featureless mask of obsidian, punctuated only by two vertical slits that pulsed with a rhythmic, sickly violet glow.
I watched the "Price" manifest between them—an ethereal, glowing script that hovered in the rain, refusing to be washed away. This was the Decree, the fundamental law of our twisted existence. The man wanted strength; he wanted to survive the hit squad he knew was waiting for him three blocks over. In exchange, the script demanded ten years of his remaining life and every memory of his mother's face. It was a standard trade, a cruel equilibrium that the Shinigami enforced with the cold precision of a clockmaker. They don't care for gold or flesh; they feast on the intangible weight of human history, the very things that anchor a soul to the world.
"Do it," the man hissed, his voice cracking like dry wood. "Take the years. Just let me kill them. Let me be the one who stands."
The Shinigami tilted its head, a motion so fluid and silent it felt like a glitch in reality. It reached out a long, skeletal finger, the tip glowing with the dark ink of the contract. This was the moment of the bind, the point where the human ceases to be entirely human and becomes a debtor to the shadows. Most people look at this and see a bargain. I look at it and see a theft. The world is a reservoir of potential, and these entities are merely the leeches that have convinced us they are the owners of the stream.
I stepped out of the darkness. My boots made no sound on the wet pavement, not because I was stealthy, but because the world itself seemed to pull away from my presence. I felt the friction of the Decree rubbing against my skin—a constant, low-level irritation, like a wool sweater worn in the height of summer.
"The exchange is skewed," I said. My voice was flat, carrying the profound exhaustion of someone who has watched the same tragedy unfold in a thousand different rooms.
The man spun around, a snub-nosed revolver trembling in his hand. He couldn't see me clearly through the distortion of the downpour, but the Collector saw me. The violet slits in its mask widened, the rhythmic pulsing stilled, and the entity did something I have only ever seen in my reflections: it flinched. It sensed the anomaly. I am the hole in the world where the rules don't apply.
"Get lost, kid!" the man screamed, his eyes bloodshot and wide with the mania of the desperate. "This is my deal! My life! I'm finally getting what's mine!"
"It was your life," I corrected him, moving closer until I was within arm's reach of the Collector. "But the ink hasn't touched the page yet. There is no decree written here, only a suggestion."
The Shinigami let out a sound like grinding glass, a psychic shriek that vibrated in the marrow of my teeth. It tried to withdraw its hand, to retreat back into the veil between worlds, but I was faster. I didn't reach for the man. I reached for the entity. My hand clamped around its wispy, smoke-like wrist, and the world suddenly went silent.
This is the secret they keep buried under layers of myth and fear. They say the Shinigami are masters of the Decree. They say humans are the cattle. But when I touch them, I don't feel a god. I feel a reservoir. I feel a vast, unearned abundance of energy that has been siphoned from us over millennia. My ability—Dominion Authority—began to hum in my bones, a cold, predatory hunger that bypassed the rules of trade entirely. I didn't offer a price. I didn't offer my memories or my future. I simply took.
The Collector shrieked, a sound that didn't travel through the air but directly through my nervous system. The violet light in its eyes began to bleed into my skin, crawling up my veins like liquid mercury. It was a coldness so absolute it felt like fire, a searing frost that turned my blood into shards of ice. Every time I do this, something inside me cracks. I can feel the empathy I once had for people like this man drifting further away, replaced by a vast, hollow silence that grows larger with every stolen spark.
The enforcer watched in paralyzed horror as his god began to dissolve. The glowing script of the Price shattered like glass, the shards evaporating before they hit the ground. The power the Shinigami had been distilling—the raw physical reinforcement intended for the man—flowed into me instead. I felt my muscles tighten, my senses sharpening to a razor's edge. I could hear the rhythmic dripping of water three floors up; I could smell the gun oil in the man's holster and the faint, metallic scent of his fear.
The Shinigami vanished, leaving behind nothing but a lingering scent of ozone and a few flecks of grey ash that the rain quickly hammered into the mud.
The man fell to his knees, his revolver clattering to the ground. He looked at his hands, then at me, his face a mask of confusion and loss. "What… what did you do? Where is it? I needed that! I'm dead without it!"
"Go home," I said, my voice vibrating with the unnatural resonance of the stolen energy. "You still have your ten years. You still remember your mother's face. Use that time to run, because the men waiting for you aren't going to wait for you to find another god. You were willing to die to win a fight. Try living to win the war."
I didn't stay to watch him cry. Compassion is a luxury for those who don't have to carry the weight of what I just absorbed. Every time I dominate a Shinigami, I distort the local fabric of reality. I become a beacon for things much worse than a simple Collector. I walked back toward the main thoroughfare, my long coat heavy with the rain. My reflection in a shop window caught my eye—a pale, haunted man with eyes that glowed a fraction too bright, the look of someone who is becoming a ghost while his heart is still beating. I am Vailor Cain, and in a city governed by contracts, I am the only one who refuses to sign.
As I reached the corner, a figure was waiting for me under a flickering neon sign that advertised a brand of synthetic coffee that had been out of business for a decade. It was Daren Holt. He was leaning against a soot-stained brick wall, his arms crossed, his face a study in practiced indifference. Daren was a contractor too, but his price was a unique kind of hell. He had traded his entire ability to feel physical pain for the power to dampen the senses of those around him. He was a man who could walk through a fire and feel nothing, but he could also stand in a crowd and feel entirely alone.
"You're late," Daren said, his voice a low rumble. He didn't move. "And you smell like a graveyard. Did you pick a fight with a Collector again, or was it a stray shadow?"
"It wasn't a fight," I replied, stopping a few feet away. I could feel his 'dampening' aura trying to settle over me, a heavy, muffling blanket that sought to quiet the world. My stolen energy pushed back against it instinctively, a ripple of violet light shimmering at the edges of my vision. "It was a harvest. The Vane Syndicate is getting desperate. They're starting to contract for basic survival now."
Daren sighed, a puff of white vapor in the damp air. "One of these days, Vailor, you're going to swallow something that doesn't want to stay down. The higher-ups in the Ministry of Silence are talking. The 'Ashen Warden' hasn't been seen in weeks, and the balance is tipping. People are noticing the missing Shinigami. It's not just a glitch anymore; it's a pattern."
"Let them notice," I said, looking up at the oppressive sky. The clouds were so thick they felt like a ceiling. "The system is a lie, Daren. We pay and pay, and the city only gets darker, the towers get taller, and the prices get steeper. If I have to become the monster that breaks the scales, then so be it. At least I'll be a monster of my own making."
"You talk like a man who hasn't slept in a century," Daren muttered, finally pushing off the wall. "Come on. We have a meeting in the Underbelly. A client needs a 'negotiator' for a contract gone wrong. Some mid-level councilman tried to trade his soul for a seat on the High Council and realized too late that a soul is a very difficult thing to live without in a city this cold."
I followed him into the depths of the city, my mind already drifting back to the cold violet light of the Shinigami. The stolen power was already beginning to fade, leaving behind a hollow, gnawing ache in my chest. That was the hidden cost of my authority—not a price paid upfront, but a slow, agonizing erosion of my own self. I was an empty vessel, filling myself with the essence of death just to feel a flicker of life for an hour. It was a cycle of addiction I couldn't break, because the alternative was to be as powerless as the man in the alleyway.
The Underbelly was a subterranean maze of old subway tunnels, repurposed bunkers, and forgotten drainage systems, lit by stolen electricity and the dim, pulsating glow of bioluminescent moss that grew on the damp walls. This was the true heart of Oakhaven. Above, the city pretended to follow the laws of the government; down here, the Decree was the only law that mattered. Here, the air was thick with the scent of ozone, grease, and the metallic tang of old blood.
As we descended the rusted iron stairs of a long-abandoned station, I felt a sudden shiver crawl up my spine. It wasn't the cold of the damp tunnels. It was a pressure—a heavy, silent weight that seemed to flatten the very air in my lungs. I stopped, my hand gripping the cold, rusted railing.
"What is it?" Daren asked, his hand instinctively moving toward the heavy knife at his belt. He couldn't feel the pressure, but he knew my reactions.
I didn't answer. I looked toward the end of the tunnel, where the shadows seemed to be thickening, becoming more solid, more intentional. From the darkness, a presence emerged. It didn't make a sound, yet it commanded the entire space. It was a silence so profound it felt like deafness.
A figure stepped into the dim, flickering light of a buzzing halogen bulb. It wasn't a spindly Collector. This entity stood seven feet tall, clad in armor that looked like it had been forged from the black glass of a volcanic eruption and the calcified bones of a thousand fallen civilizations. Its head was bare—a pale, porcelain-smooth skull with no eyes, only a single, perfectly horizontal line etched across the forehead. It didn't float; it walked, and with every step, the concrete beneath its feet cracked as if the world itself was buckling under the weight of its existence.
"Azrat El-Noqt," I whispered. The الصمت الأول—The First Silence. An Arch-Shinigami. These were the architects of the Decree, the ones who didn't just collect prices, but wrote the very laws we were forced to live by.
Daren took a step back, his face turning the color of ash. His power—the ability to negate pain—was a mockery in the face of such a being. Azrat didn't cause pain; he caused *conclusions*. He was the period at the end of every human sentence.
The Arch-Shinigami stopped ten paces away. The air between us began to vibrate with a discordant frequency that made my vision blur. My Dominion Authority flared up instinctively, surging through my veins like liquid fire, but for the first time, it didn't feel like I was reaching for a reservoir. It felt like I was standing at the edge of an abyss, trying to hold back the ocean with a cup.
"You have been eating my servants, little glitch," Azrat said. The voice wasn't a sound; it was a realization that formed directly in my consciousness, heavy and absolute.
"I do not make contracts," he continued, the porcelain skull tilting slightly. "I am the conclusion of all contracts. I am the silence that follows the scream. You are an error in the script, Vailor Cain. A smudge of ink that refuses to dry, a line that refuses to end."
"Then try to wipe me out," I said, though my heart was hammering against my ribs with a violence that threatened to crack them. I raised my hand, the silver veins in my arm glowing with the remnants of the energy I had taken from the Collector. I channeled everything I had into that moment, trying to find a grip on the vastness of his presence.
Azrat didn't move. He simply *was*. The sheer presence of him began to bleed the color out of the world. The yellow of the halogen light turned to a dull, dead grey; the red of the rust on the stairs faded into nothingness. Everything was being pulled toward the void of his existence. It wasn't an attack; it was simply the reality of being in his proximity.
"Not yet," Azrat said, and the pressure suddenly vanished, leaving me gasping for air as if I had just been pulled from the bottom of the sea. "A world without a glitch is a world that is finished. A perfect script has no need for a reader. I am curious to see how much of this city you can consume before you realize that you are only feeding your own funeral. You are not the writer, Vailor. You are the ink that is running out."
With a flick of his wrist, the shadows swallowed him whole. The tunnel returned to its normal state—damp, dark, and smelling of decay—but the silence he left behind was different. It was the silence of a predator that had decided to watch its prey run for a little while longer, knowing that every path leads eventually to the same trap.
Daren slumped against the wall, sliding down until he was sitting on the dirty concrete. He was shaking, a rare sight for a man who couldn't feel his own body. "We... we should leave. We should leave the city tonight, Vailor. That was a Pillar. You can't dominate a Pillar. You're trying to drink the ocean through a straw."
I looked at my hand. It was still trembling, but not from fear. It was from the realization of what I had just felt. Azrat El-Noqt wasn't just powerful; he was the source. He held the key to the entire mechanism of the Decree. And if I could find a way to take even a fraction of what he held, I wouldn't just be a glitch in the system. I would be the one who redefined what it meant to be human.
"No," I said, my voice steadying as the stolen power finally drained away, leaving me cold and empty once more. "We're staying. The client is waiting, and I need to know why the Arch-Shinigami are finally showing their faces in the dirt. If they're worried about me, it means the Decree isn't as absolute as they want us to believe."
I started walking again, deeper into the dark, toward the iron door that marked the entrance to the Underbelly's main hub. Behind it lay the corruption, the greed, and the broken souls of Oakhaven, all waiting to be bartered, sold, or stolen. I felt the cold rain from the surface dripping through the rusted vents far above, mixing with the sweat on my brow.
I am Vailor Cain. I don't pay the price, and I don't follow the script. The city is a machine built on the suffering of those who have nothing left to give, and I am the wrench in the gears. The Decree was written in blood and shadow long before I was born, but it hasn't seen my ink yet. I placed my hand on the cold metal of the door, feeling the hum of the city's desperate heart beneath my palm.
"Let's see what a soul is worth when the gods are watching," I muttered, and I pushed the door open.
The light from inside was blinding, a chaotic swirl of neon, smoke, and voices, but the darkness in my mind remained perfectly clear. The journey of sixteen hundred steps had just begun, and the first one was already stained with the ash of a god. I stepped through the threshold, leaving the silence of the tunnel behind, but carrying the storm of the Arch-Shinigami deep within my chest. I was ready to play my part, not as a character in their story, but as the one who would eventually tear the pages out of the book.
Oakhaven thought it knew the cost of living. It was about to learn the cost of me.
As the door groaned shut, the sound echoed like a tombstone being set in place. There was no turning back. The rain continued to fall outside, a never-ending grey shroud over a city that had forgotten the sun, but here in the dark, the fire was just beginning to catch. And I was the one holding the match.
I walked into the center of the room, and the crowd of contractors and thieves parted like a receding tide. I wasn't looking for a savior. I was looking for the next thing to take. Because in a world where everyone has a price, the only way to be free is to be the one who owns the debt.
The first chapter was written. The ink was wet. And the Decree was finally about to change.
I am Vailor Cain. And I am taking it all back.
The hunt had begun.