1/. Chapter One: You are alive
In this city constructed in darkness, far from the blessing of the sun, surrounded by nuclear radiation everywhere, shadows moved in silence to create a story from another realm.
In an upscale residential neighborhood of the Middle Tier, Blade, a pale-skinned young man with gray hair, slipped into one of the houses, After a key appeared out of nowhere in his hand.
It was routine for him. He easily bypassed the external and internal security of the house and entered the dark front door as if mocking the homeowner and the guards.
Blade moved smoothly through the darkness to the second floor, where he heard the sound of water washing the floor like a waterfall. Blade knew his target was bathing, so he sat waiting for him to come out on a sofa placed in the intermediary space of the house. The sofa faced a small metal table on which various types of fruit were placed.
"Forgery runs in the blood of the rich," Blade said, checking a plastic apple before tossing it carelessly onto the plate without a sound.
As he waited, he heard a noise coming from one of the rooms—a small cracking sound—so he went to check it out. He stood and slowly advanced towards a door to the right of the sofa.
The door was securely closed with an advanced device integrated with a bomb. It was strange that the room had a sophisticated security system while the house did not. Blade needed the passcode or an electronic card for the door, unless he decides to enter by force .
Blade searched the surroundings for the electronic card or the door's passcode, as he had nothing else to do anyway.
He searched in different places: the library, inside books, on tables, behind plaques and drawings, under rugs... He searched without noise until he stood before a painting with a yellow background that could only be described as profound.
The painting, with a red frame, contained a strange scene merging three figures of people, only the upper parts of their bodies visible.
The first figure, on the left side of the painting, was dripping crimson blood from his bowed head to his waist, looking like a slave. He held a dagger to his neck, attempting suicide.
The second, who took the central place, appeared intact with bright, good skin, except for the place where his heart had been removed, which dripped a bright, golden liquid. The central figure held his heart out with both hands in a submissive and vulnerable manner.
As for the last one, who took the right side with skin black like embers, he held a sword full of blood while being full of tortured wounds. His eyes told of the agony of his harsh suffering and his struggle to live.
The explanatory plaque below the painting was black, written in real blood: "The painting before you,understand it as you wish. But I promise you, if you are like one of these three, you are truly lost."
Blade focused his gaze on this particular painting for a few seconds before searching behind it to find a hidden safe. Blade opened the safe very slowly, cautious of anything that might happen. When he opened it, inside was a card, a white map with some scribbles.
The map was hand-drawn, Draw a yellow line in the form of a right angle, but the line was clearly drawn by a blind person or an infant. Blade knew the line pointed to the Black River.
Within the right-angled space behind the zigzag line in the northeast, which took up two-thirds of the paper, was a drawing of a black tube, next to which was a drawing of a card, then a drawing of some kind of machine, and below them a drawing of a door like a net.
The drawing Blade was looking It is an animal head drawn on the yellow line and written next to it 'dragon'.
Tap... The sound of a door closing.
Blade stopped his search and put the card and map in his jacket pocket. He exited the room like a seasoned military veteran with a dagger that hadn't been there before now in one of his hands. When he reached the source of the sound, he was in front of the same door as before, and it was still closed. He wondered, contemplating: "Did someone leave? Or enter?"
"Who are you?" a person asked from behind Blade, illuminating the place by pressing a button on a remote control in his wet hands.
"You shouldn't have trespassed against someone from the Marginal Tier, Mr. Paul," Blade answered, turning to face a balding forty-year-old man with a light beard, wearing pajamas and still wet from bathing.
"Get away from me!" Paul ordered in an annoyed voice.
"The code for the room. I want to confirm something before you die," Blade requested, ignoring him.
Upon hearing Blade's words, Paul stood frozen in place like a nail without the slightest whisper. They both looked at each other for seconds. For Blade, standing like this aimlessly was undesirable; he thought Paul was waiting for someone. He launched at him quickly, tilting the dagger at a precise angle, which resulted in severing Paul's head in an instant before it fell.
Blade was fast and agile. In a moment, he crossed the table between them and cut off Paul's head with the grace of a killer.
Blade looked at the severed head and sighed.
'Is this really Paul?'
Blade thought but decided to ignore the matter because delving into it would make him regret his ignorance. He didn't originally believe that Paul, a famous gang leader, was this weak. This led him to conclude that something strange was happening that he was completely unaware of.
Although he decided to ignore this strange feeling, it made him unsteady in his actions. It could be said he decided to speed up the implementation of his plans.
Blade touched the closed door of the room. It began to decompose slowly and steadily, creating a hole in it. The decomposition seeped into the ground like an earthy waterfall. As the hole widened to fit his size, he entered the room.
Inside, Blade found a five-year-old girl lying against the wall near the door. She was sweating, exhaustion evident on her, and she was barely breathing. He helped her with precise first aid, but her condition only worsened. The girl's condition was contradictory; she wasn't sick or harmed, but her condition worsened with time.
Blade picked up a dirty, tattered doll lying beside her and tucked it into her hands, whispering in her ear: "The one you love is coming. It's better not to make him worry about you." The girl's breathing slowly changed and became calm. But she remained semi-sick. Blade left her on the floor and went to Paul's office, where he had found the safe earlier.
He searched through some documents until he found his target: an information sheet attached with a picture of the girl. The girl was fatherless, and her mother was currently a hired killer for Paul. Her kills were Paul's competitors and others, while the payment was her daughter's safety.
Blade searched for information about the mother but found only the targets and their locations. Blade took the location of the current target and headed towards it smoothly.
---
Upon arriving at the target's house, Blade found a policeman watching the house. Blade knew he was investigating the mother to confirm if she was a killer. He got rid of him and began to peel the skin off his face with a dagger.
Inside, in a dimly lit room, a man in his sixties lay on a sofa, blood seeping from his mouth despite his futile attempts to suppress it. On top of him sat a beautiful young woman in her late teens, nineteen years old, pressing a short knife, which seemed designed for combat, not general use, slowly into his heart.
She continued pressing the knife calmly, watching the man's features, which began to change from desperate to indifferent to death, which increased the intensity of her gaze, making her look like a toxic rose. She had fed him a paralyzing poison that made him unable to move or resist.
When the man's breath extinguished, losing the sparkle in his eyes, she pulled the knife from his corpse. Then, with a barely noticeable movement, she severed his head from his body, let it roll on the ground with a cracking sound and his dull eyes, with fresh blood invading the floor. Indifferent to all this,she left the room, cleaned the knife in the toilet with one hand, and left the house.
She contemplated a little in the outer garden. It was so dark that the only light came from the faint street lamps, and the smell of humidity mixed with mold filled the breath, even though this was noon when the sun should be at its hottest.
After five minutes of silence, she too decided to leave the garden of the man's house.
As she exited the main gate of the outer wall, she found Blade, who now appeared as a muscular forty-year-old with grief invading his features. Blade scrutinized the knife in her left hand.
"So it was you then, Yama!" Blade sighed, speaking as he rubbed his black hair in despair. "Do I have the right to know something... or do I have no right?"
"No, and... aren't you a policeman?!" the mother smiled calmly under the yellow light of the luxurious neighborhood's lamp, which made her look like an angel, with her dark skin and bluish-black hair, her dead eyes a light greenish-blue, with dark, broad eyebrows and unusually black eyelashes as if dyed, a small nose suited for women, and a short, wonderful smile. "Aren't you going to arrest me?"
"Policeman... arrest..." Blade muttered, his ash-gray eyes revealing the emptiness of his thoughts and his psychological distraction. "Well, it doesn't really matter... it's already too late." Blade remained still for some time. "Actually, your daughter is not well..."
"Strange, you're not the policeman who was following me! But why do you look like him? And how do you know my name then!?" the mother interrupted with a tilted head. "Well, I don't care, boy, why you took his form. But what do you mean by 'your daughter is not well'? Are you playing with me?"
"Paul is dead. I think that clarifies everything," Blade spoke while leaving the place. "Let's leave the rest to fate."
"Fate," the mother muttered, and mocked as she aimed her words at Blade, "So you are still alive, Faruq."