They used to laugh when they said his name.
"Jullius Narva," they would sneer, as if the syllables themselves were a mistake.
In the gutter districts of Virel City, weakness was a scent. It clung to your clothes, seeped from your skin, followed you like a stray dog. And Jullius carried it for most of his childhood.
He was thin where others were broad. Quiet where others roared. Slow to anger. Slower to strike. In a place ruled by fists and blades, mercy looked a lot like cowardice.
The first time he died, he was sixteen.
It was over bread.
Three boys from the Iron Alley crew cornered him near the broken aqueduct. They were older, thicker, already wearing the red thread tattoos that marked gang initiation. Jullius had found a stale loaf behind a market stall and thought he'd eat in peace.
He should have known better.
They shoved him. Took the bread. Mocked his silence.
"Say something, Narva," one of them laughed. "Or is your tongue as useless as your arms?"
He didn't fight back. Not at first.
When he finally did, it was desperate and clumsy. A wild swing that clipped someone's jaw. That was all it took.
The beating was efficient.
A crack to the ribs. A boot to the face. The taste of iron in his mouth. He remembers the sky most clearly—grey and empty above the aqueduct's arch.
He remembers thinking, strangely calm:
So this is how it ends.
Then the knife.
Cold.
Sharp.
Final.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
—
Jullius woke up choking.
Not on blood.
On air.
He convulsed where he lay—same alley, same broken aqueduct, but the sun was lower now. His chest burned like a furnace. His heart pounded as if trying to tear free.
He shot upright.
The wound was gone.
His shirt was still cut. The blood had dried. But his skin beneath it was smooth.
He staggered to his feet, mind unraveling.
I died.
He was sure of it. He had felt the blade slide between his ribs. Felt his heart stutter.
And yet…
His body felt different.
Denser.
Like there was weight beneath his skin. When he clenched his fist, his knuckles tightened with unfamiliar pressure. He could hear things he hadn't before—the scrape of a rat's claws fifty paces away, the distant argument of merchants across the canal.
He was stronger.
Not by much.
But enough to notice.
Panic gave way to a fragile, trembling curiosity.
The second time he died, it wasn't an accident.
He found the Iron Alley boys again two nights later.
They laughed when they saw him.
"You're hard to kill, huh?" one of them joked, not knowing how right he was.
This time Jullius swung first.
He was faster. His fist cracked into someone's cheek with a sound like snapping wood. He felt the bone give. Shock flared across their faces.
For a moment—just a moment—he thought he might win.
Then the numbers caught up to him.
A pipe to the back of the head.
The world exploded in white.
He dropped.
Boots rained down.
A blade again.
And again—
Darkness.
—
He woke with a roar.
Not a gasp.
A roar.
His eyes snapped open before the pain could settle. His body surged upward with violent force. The pipe that had cracked his skull lay beside him—but his skull was whole.
He felt it this time.
The change.
Muscle tightening like coiled rope. Bones heavier. Senses sharpened until the world felt carved in brutal detail.
He stood slowly.
The ground beneath his feet cracked.
Strength flooded him—raw, intoxicating.
The third time he met them, it was not a fight.
It was a slaughter.
He broke the first boy's arm with a single grip. Shattered another's knee with a kick. The last tried to run.
Jullius caught him.
He didn't enjoy what came next.
But he didn't look away either.
When it was over, the alley was silent.
For the first time in his life, no one laughed at the name Jullius Narva.
—
Word spread.
Not about resurrection. No one knew that secret.
They whispered about the boy who couldn't be beaten. The one who came back stronger after every defeat. The gutter ghost.
Challenges came.
Street fighters. Small-time enforcers. Drunk brutes who thought his reputation exaggerated.
Some fights he won.
Some he didn't.
Every time he fell—every time darkness claimed him—he returned.
Stronger.
Faster.
Harder.
Pain became his teacher. Death became his forge.
With each rebirth, something else changed too.
His fear dulled.
His hesitation thinned.
His mercy… eroded.
The world had shown him its rules when he was weak.
Now he was learning to write his own.
—
One night, months later, Jullius stood on the roof of an abandoned warehouse overlooking Virel City.
The skyline flickered with torchlight and alchemical lamps. Towers of the wealthy rose like polished teeth beyond the canal. The noble districts. The real power.
They had looked down on him long before the streets did.
A memory surfaced—polished shoes stepping over his collapsed mother when he was a child. A noble boy wrinkling his nose at "slum trash." Guards laughing as they turned him away from the academy gates.
He clenched his fists.
Each death had made him stronger.
But the city was vast.
The gangs were nothing.
There were fighters in the arena who crushed men for sport. Mercenaries trained in distant wars. Knights who wielded techniques passed down for generations. Rumors spoke of those who could split stone with a palm or outrun arrows.
And above them all—the High Houses.
If he was to become the strongest, truly the strongest, he would have to climb through all of them.
He would have to die more times than he could count.
A slow smile formed on his face.
Let them beat him.
Let them break him.
Let them kill him.
Every grave would be a stepping stone.
Every death a promise.
Jullius Narva stepped to the edge of the rooftop and looked down at the streets that once swallowed him whole.
"You looked down on me," he whispered to the city.
A gust of wind carried his voice into the dark.
"Now watch me rise."
And somewhere deep within his chest, beneath muscle and bone and the echo of countless heartbeats, something ancient stirred—as if his power had only just begun to wake.
The boy who would not stay dead had chosen his path.
And the world would soon learn what it meant to try and bury him.