On the giant screens in the square, the imagery shifted from the frozen "New World" vistas of the nuclear winter to steaming plates of fresh food, and my stomach twisted with a hunger that felt like a serrated blade. The voice of Vivaricus filled the square like the hollow grace of a false god.
"A life in peace, the continuation of your lineage, and a piece of bread on your table every day... All this is possible through your loyalty."
I look at them. I look at the thousands surrounding me. Stomachs fused to spines, the light in their eyes extinguished, a mass of people capable only of dreaming about their next meal. One by one, their knees strike the concrete. This sound—it is the sound of a thousand bones surrendering simultaneously. This humiliation spreads like a wave. The concept of "honor," that relic of the old world, burns and turns to ash in the face of starvation.
"Masters..." muttered an old man at the front. His hands trembled toward the screen as if warm soup might flow directly from the digital pixels."Deliver our rations... We will pay the price when we reinvent cities and technologies like our ancestors. Have mercy on us!"
I grind my teeth so hard I can hear the creak of my jawbone inside my ears. I hate these people. I loathe these cowards prostrating in the shadow of their own executioners; these spineless heaps of flesh putting their souls on the market for a cup of synthetic liquid.
Yet, at the same time, in the darkest corner of my heart, I feel an indescribable debt to them. They are slaves who do not know what they do—minds castrated by the algorithms of Vivaricus. We did not make them this way, but it is our duty to pull them out of it. I must carry the honor they no longer possess.
As the wind whips my coat, I stand tall, never averting my eyes from the screen. My knees do not bend. My head does not fall. I can feel my friends beside me standing with the same steel will. We are the jagged rocks in this ocean of submission. I can sense Joseph's silent rage, Adalin's masked hatred.
In the second our eyes meet, an oath heavier than a thousand words passes between us. My lips do not move, but my mind screams:
"Meet in the abandoned subway tunnels."
The message lands. While the crowd continues to kiss the virtual feet of their masters, I take my first step into the darkness. We will not pay for technology with blood; we will steal that technology to bring the palaces of our enslavers crashing down upon their heads.
Under the gray sky, I wait in the endless queue stretching between rusted metal sheets. The Annual General Scan. Vivaricus's coldest, most statistical massacre. Here, no one cares who you are; only your lung capacity, genetic resilience, and "efficiency" speak.
The System marks those predicted to die naturally—infants and "expired" elders—as "Waste Data." If you offer no future for the system, your rations are halved. This is the polite, "statistical" way of killing you slowly.
In front of me is an old woman leaning on a cane. Her back is bent, her hands purple from the cold. I see a group of young men swarming around her like a flock of vultures. Witnessing my own kind debase themselves like this poisons my soul more than nuclear radiation ever could.
"You're almost dead, you rotting hag!" barked a young man, his face riddled with sores. "Every crumb you eat is a morsel stolen from our future! Get out of the line!"
The old woman shakes a finger that looks like a withered branch. Her voice is as sharp as the nuclear winter wind:.
"I sacrificed three sons to this Vivarium during the Civil Resistance! Three lives! When the vampires sealed our water tanks and left us to die of thirst, I sent my lions to the barricades so you could live! And now you call me 'rot'? Traitors! Faithless curs!"
Chaos erupts. Curses, fists... The weak are pushed out of line by the strong, shoved into that lethal void. I watch them, and my hatred doubles.
Do these creatures—who trample their own past, their own elders for a slice of stale bread—deserve to be saved? Yes. That is exactly why they do. Because Vivaricus didn't just make them slaves; it turned them into monsters. Reclaiming their stolen humanity is the heaviest shackle of my life.
As my lenses carry this chaos to Dante's screen second by second, the results flash on the giant digital board. Silence falls over the crowd like a guillotine.
The "rotting" woman's genetic resilience—the sheer stubbornness of a womb that birthed five sons in a nuclear storm—has condemned her to a longer future than any of the healthy-looking youths who insulted her. While the red 'Short Lifespan' warning flashes for the man who pushed her, the woman's green light shines like a victory torch.
I cannot stop the hysterical, painful laugh rising within me. I chuckle in the midst of this misery. This isn't a twist of fate, I think. This is the universe's way of f-cking with us.
At that exact moment, I feel a strange warmth at my temples and the roots of my hair. There is no physical hand, I know. But Dante is directly manipulating my nerve endings, sending the illusion of stroking my hair. Golden letters appear in my field of vision:
[MASTER DANTE: "You should laugh more often, Dorian. I must make you happy more frequently. This expression suits your face so well..."]
Then, as if invisible, warm hands are placed on my shoulders. The chronic tension in my muscles, hardened to the bone, begins to melt under a synthetic but perfect massage wave sent by the System.
[SYSTEM: Reward privilege pack activated. Shoulder massage simulation: 10 minutes.]
Outside, people are tearing at each other's throats, trampling their dignity for a piece of bread, while I am enveloped in the digital affection of a vampire. This artificial comfort is, in truth, the heaviest weight of the "Premium" shackle I wear. Dante wants to make me happy; just as an owner enjoys the singing of a bird in a cage. My pain is his entertainment; my smile is his prize.
I close my eyes. As the warmth of the massage seeps into my marrow, I etch the old woman's proud gaze into my mind. To them, we are only numbers. But sometimes, those numbers cling to life with a stubbornness that even the Masters cannot calculate.
PROPAGANDA: THE DARK MIRROR OF APRIL 2026
Suddenly, the screens go dark. That familiar, nauseating propaganda music begins.
The title: "THE PURGE OF THE PATHETIC: APRIL 2026."
The footage begins. Hyper-realistic, where every drop of blood is visible... It isn't the vampires killing people in these clips. No, the ones butchering each other are us. April 2026. The month the sky first turned completely black, and nuclear ash descended upon the cities like a shroud.
I look at the woman on the screen; she is handing her infant to a soldier in exchange for an oxygen canister. I look at the men; they are crushing the skull of their best friend with a stone for a single bottle of antibiotics. As the images shift, the narrator's velvety, hypnotic voice echoes.
"Look at yourselves. In April 2026, when the sky darkened, you didn't turn to each other. You turned on each other. Before the radiation could even touch your lungs, you ate your own kind. You burned a library just to stay warm for a single hour; you turned thousands of years of knowledge into ash. You were a virus, and you had finally run out of cells to infect."
In the footage, a mob of people sets a wounded woman on fire just to steal a bowl of water from her hands. I am repulsed. These images aren't lies; I know this. My father used to tell me about that dark April. How humanity transformed into monsters...
"We did not conquer you," the voice says. "We simply salvaged the bleeding remains of your dignity from the gutters you bled into. You are not victims of the Vampires. You are the survivors of your own savagery. You need us, because you have seen what you destroy when left to yourselves."
The film ends with a vampire reaching out a pristine, white hand to a crying child covered in mud, while the ashes of the burning library swirl in the background.
Dante's digital fingers are still moving on my shoulders. He wants me to feel that he has separated me from this "savage" species, that he has saved me by making me "Premium." But there is something he does not know.
I am the grandson of those who burned the libraries, yes.
I am the heir to the dignity that fell into those gutters. But I am also the man who, amidst those ashes, keeps a baby alive with the tips of needles.
These people I hate see themselves as monsters in this foul mirror of Vivaricus and prostrate themselves even further. "Yes," they say, "we are monsters; our masters protect us from ourselves."
No. We are not monsters.
We are simply a species that has been starved, whose light has been extinguished, and who have been pitted against one another. And I, in every second of this digital massage, swear an oath to shatter this "savior" mask. The heavy burden of history will not crush my shoulders; instead, this pressure will transform me into an explosive that will bring down the very pillars of the palaces.
I will go to the subway tunnels. In those tunnels, I will whisper the truth that remained on the dusty pages of history to my friends.
"In April 2026, it wasn't the nuclear bombs that finished us—it was losing our faith in one another. And today, we will take that faith back with blood."