The rain wasn't going to stop.
Leo Carter knew this because he'd been staring at it for twenty minutes, huddled under a convenience store awning with a cardboard box clutched to his chest. The box was getting colder by the second. So was he.
"Twenty-three years old," he muttered, watching a taxi splash through a puddle the size of a small lake. "College dropout. Part-time delivery driver. Full-time disappointment to my father."
His phone buzzed. Another notification from the app.
[Order #4041: Delivery Time Exceeded]
[Customer Complaint Pending]
[Rating: — ]
"Yeah, yeah," Leo sighed, stuffing the phone back into his pocket. "I'm going. I'm going."
He made a run for it.
The box contained a three-course meal from his father's restaurant—the one his father had poured his life into, the one Leo was supposed to inherit before he decided that cooking "wasn't his passion." Now he just delivered other people's food while his father's shop sat empty, sold to a chain restaurant that served frozen dumplings reheated in a microwave.
The address was an old apartment building on the edge of the city. The kind of place where the lights flickered and the elevator smelled like someone had given up on life inside it.
Leo took the stairs.
Third floor. Apartment 3B. He knocked twice, the way the instructions said.
No answer.
He knocked again. The door creaked open on its own.
Inside, the apartment was dark. The air smelled like dust and something else—something sharp, like ozone before a storm. Leo stepped forward cautiously, holding up his phone light.
"Hello? Delivery for…" He squinted at the receipt. "Mr. Chen? Your order's here."
The light fell on an empty chair. A half-drunk cup of tea sat on a low table, still steaming. A newspaper lay open beside it, the crossword puzzle half-finished.
And in the center of the room, carved into the wooden floor, was a circle.
Not drawn. Carved. The lines were deep and precise, filled with something dark that might have been ink or might have been something else. Symbols lined the edges—characters Leo didn't recognize but somehow felt he should.
He took a step back.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Nope. Absolutely not."
He turned to leave.
The door slammed shut.
The symbols lit up—golden light erupting from the circle, flooding the room with warmth that had no business being there. Leo dropped the food box. The tea cup shattered on the floor. And the light began to pull.
It wasn't wind. It wasn't gravity. It was something older than both, something that reached into his chest and wrapped around his bones and said, very clearly, you're coming with me.
Leo's last thought before the world dissolved wasn't about his life flashing before his eyes.
It was about the delivery.
Mr. Chen is never gonna leave a review now.
He woke up on his back, staring at a ceiling made of rough wooden beams.
The air smelled different. Not like rain and asphalt, but like woodsmoke and herbs and something faintly rotting—like vegetables left too long in a bin. Sunlight filtered through a grimy window, casting long shadows across a room that looked like it had been hit by a small explosion.
Empty bottles. Broken chairs. A counter covered in dust so thick someone could have written a novel in it.
Leo sat up slowly, his head pounding.
"Where the hell…"
A voice interrupted him. Loud. Rough. And very, very angry.
"You've got three days, Carter."
A man filled the doorway. He was enormous—easily six and a half feet tall, with arms like tree trunks and a face that looked like it had lost a fight with a brick wall and won. His jaw was covered in scars, and when he smiled, his teeth gleamed gold.
"Three days to pay what you owe. Ten thousand gold. Or I start taking pieces."
Leo blinked. "I'm sorry. Who are you?"
The man's smile didn't waver. He stepped forward and picked up a bottle from the counter, turning it over in his massive hands. "The name's Ironjaw. Marcus Ironjaw. And this little tavern of yours? It's mine if you don't pay up. The deed, the building, the dirt it sits on. All of it."
He set the bottle down and walked toward the door, pausing at the threshold.
"Three days, boy. Don't make me come back."
The door slammed.
Leo sat there for a long moment, waiting for the punchline. Waiting for someone to jump out and say gotcha.
No one did.
He looked down at his hands. Same hands. Same fingers. But the shirt he was wearing wasn't his. It was rough linen, stained with something brown. His delivery jacket was gone. His phone was gone. His shoes were gone.
And then something else was there.
A flicker of light at the edge of his vision. He turned his head, and a translucent blue screen materialized in front of his face, glowing softly in the dim room.
[System Initialization Complete]
[Gourmet Delivery System — Version 1.0]
[User: Leo Carter (Designated: Otherworld Delivery Personnel)
[Status: Active]
Leo stared.
The screen flickered, and a new line appeared.
[New Order Received]
[Objective: Repay Debt — 10,000 Gold Coins]
[Time Limit: 3 Days]
[Penalty for Failure: Termination (Permanent)
"Termination," Leo whispered. "Like… fired termination? Or…"
The screen pulsed once, as if waiting.
He looked around the ruined tavern. The empty bottles. The broken chairs. The dust that had settled like snow on every surface.
And then he noticed the door behind the counter—a door that led to a kitchen. He'd worked in enough restaurants to know what a kitchen should smell like. This one didn't. It smelled like nothing. Like no one had cooked in it for a very long time.
Leo stood up slowly, his legs unsteady. He walked toward the kitchen, pushing the door open.
The room was small. A stone hearth dominated one wall, cold and dark. A wooden table sat in the center, scarred with knife marks. And on that table, covered in a thin layer of dust, were three things:
A cast iron pot.
A wooden spoon.
A single potato.
[System Notification]
[Starting Ingredients Detected]
[Would you like to begin your first delivery? Y/N]
Leo looked at the potato. Then at the screen. Then at the door where Marcus Ironjaw had stood, his gold teeth gleaming like a promise.
He'd spent two years delivering other people's food. Running from one address to the next, watching his life shrink down to a phone screen and a bike and a cardboard box that was always just a little too cold by the time it arrived.
He'd told his father that cooking wasn't his passion.
But right now, standing in a dusty kitchen in a world he didn't recognize, with a debt that was going to get him killed in three days, Leo Carter realized something.
He didn't need passion.
He needed to cook.
[User Accepted]
[First Delivery: A Meal Worth 10,000 Gold]
[Timer: 71:59:58]
He picked up the potato.
And for the first time in two years, he smiled.