The man knelt without a word.
In his mind, the whisper kept replaying, over and over again, quiet but impossible to silence.
You failed your family once. Don't fail again.
He didn't know what that voice was - or why it spoke to him.
Only that it knew too much.
More than he wanted to remember.
His mechanical arm whirred, sliding beneath the boy as if he weighed nothing. Raizen folded over the cold metal, limp.
The man's other arm, scarred yet steady, hooked under the girl. Her golden hair spilled over his shoulder.
He rose in one smooth motion.
A few steps away, between roots and steel, the wall had a secret.
A thin seam, almost invisible.
The man shifted his load, adjusted the weight of the two bodies without strain, then lifted his mechanical hand and pressed his steel fingers against the wall.
Something inside the wall clicked.
The seam opened, and a narrow passage appeared in front of him, cold air sneaking out.
He stood still for a single breath, listening. No footsteps. No guards or Wardens.
He stepped through.
The door sealed behind him with a quiet sound.
Along the tunnel, old bulbs burned a low orange glow. The air was heavy with oil, rust, and smoke stenches.
The tunnel sloped downward, turning from patched metal to smooth stone.
Then, all at once, it opened.
The Underworks ahead revealed itself like a whole new world under Neoshima - an undercity for the unwanted. A place for those who couldn't find one.
Pipes and vents ran in every direction, tangled. Scrap bridges stitched one level to another. Chains drooped from the unseen ceiling, holding lamps that flickered and buzzed.
People moved everywhere.
Cloaks hunched against cold. Barefoot kids running between stalls that sold scraps of food, nearly broken tools and knives that had seen too much.
Voices woven into a constant murmur - bargaining, swearing, laughing, crying, all together.
Life. Hard, ugly, stubborn life.
The man walked through it at a slow pace.
Eyes found him from every direction. The iron arm. The scars. The eyepatch. The way he carried two unconscious bodies without a flinch.
People stepped aside out of instinct. Some looked away quickly, others stared for too long. But nobody got in his way.
Next to a leaning street lamp, a cluster of kids huddled with their hands out. Their clothes were three sizes too big and patched everywhere.
"Please, sir... just a coin... anything..."
A woman in the shadows quickly stepped in, trying to hush them, throwing nervous glances at the man as if fear could protect them.
He stopped.
His shadow fell over the kids. They shrank on instinct when they saw his face and the steel arm. For a few seconds he simply stood there, as if deciding whether the world still deserved kindness.
Then his real hand - flesh and scarred - reached inside his cloak.
A coin flashed in the weak light. Real gold. Not alloy or scrap. The kind you didn't see twice.
He flicked it.
One boy snatched it out of the air, eyes going wide. He held the coin to his chest like it was something holy.
By the time he thought of thanking, the man was already gone.
To those kids, that coin was days of food. Maybe weeks, if they were careful.
The Underworks changed as he walked deeper. The market noise thinned. Lamps grew fewer.
He passed a propaganda poster bolted to the stone - four silhouettes against a lotus symbol, weapons raised. Bold letters proclaimed:
DIVISION ONE: NEOSHIMA'S SHIELD
Nearby, two men leaned against a wall, voices low.
"Division One got deployed east last night, I heard" one muttered.
"Another Nyx attack?"
"Some small fishing village got hit. They said it was bad."
The first man spat into the dirt. "They'll just take all the credit and pretend they can fight. I bet I could take on a Vanguard in a fair fight"
"But they're our protectors! We can live peacefully while they fight off the Nyxes!" The other tried to calm him down.
"Neoshima's shield, my arse! If they cared the tiniest bit about Neoshima, we wouldn't starve down here."
The man didn't slow down when he saw the poster.
He stopped believing in shields a long time ago.
Symbols stained the walls - symbols for gangs, warning marks, drawings half rubbed away.
Doorways appeared on small buildings made of scrap metal or stone, barely holding together.
He stopped at one of them.
But this one was different. A reinforced metal door. Not too pretty, but maintained. No gaps in the frame, or rust on the hinges.
He unlocked it with a thick key from inside his coat. The door opened.
Inside was a small, tidy room. Concrete walls, patched with older plates. Against a wall sat a workbench crowded with unorganized tools.
A single mattress in another corner. Along one rack, blades of every length rested, clean and sharp.
The bulb overhead flickered once, then turned on.
The man laid Raizen on the mattress. He moved, but didn't wake up.
Then, he lowered the girl beside him. Her breathing was shallow, but steady.
The man just stood there for a long moment, simply watching, face unreadable.
The mechanical arm whirred as he flexed it. Then he pulled a chair to the workbench, set his elbow down, and began to pull the prosthetic apart.
Screws. Plates. Cable tendons and small rods.
Time in the Underworks didn't move the way it did above. No sunrise. No sunset. Only the hiss of pipes and the tired buzz of the lightbulbs.
After a few hours, Raizen suddenly gasped his way back to consciousness.
He felt pain before anything else.
His arm burned. His chest ached with every breath. His body felt like it had been crushed under something heavy for too long.
For a second, he thought he was back in the village. Smoke. Fire. Screams. The Nyxes.
Looking up, his eyes finally focused.
A ceiling, not clouds. Thin pipes running across it. Somewhere out of sight, air hissed through vents. The smell of oil and metal pressed in around him.
He turned his head, slowly.
The girl lay close, still unconscious. Her face was turned toward him, hair fanned over the pillow. Her chest rose and fell in slow, small breaths.
But her face was too close.
He looked away fast, cheeks catching a warmer color.
She was alright.
His muscles loosened a fraction, and the entire body felt more relieved.
He tried to sit up, but pain screamed across his ribs and arm. He grunted and fell back, teeth clenched.
The man sat at the workbench, minding his business.
Now, his coat was off. Raizen could clearly see the Scars running across his face, and the eyepatch. It covered more than the eye, hiding half his cheek on the same side as his iron arm.
Metal parts lay arranged in clean lines on the bench. He was fighting with a tiny screw that didn't want to go in his place yet.
A soft creak from the mattress made his head tilt. Just a bit.
He gave the screw one last chance to behave, but it just didn't want to fit. He let it win, put the tools aside, and turned.
His gaze met Raizen's. Dark. Steady. Measuring.
Raizen's throat felt dry. The fear that had gone quiet in the village came back all at once.
The man's eyes flicked to the girl. To the fresh bandages on Raizen's chest. Then back to his face.
"I'm surprised you're still alive, kid" he finally said.
His voice was deep and resonant. The kind that imposed authority everywhere.
He turned back to the bench.
Raizen looked at the bandages on his arm and chest properly this time. Someone had cleaned the wounds, wrapped them tightly. Someone had pulled him out of the dirt and given him another chance to life.
His body wanted to sink back into the mattress and vanish. But his mind refused to let him. His head spun with questions, each one louder than the last.
He dragged his gaze around the room, searching for answers on the walls.
That was when he saw the map.
It covered almost an entire side of the room. Paper layered on paper. Streets, tunnels, scribbled notes. Pins stabbed into it in clusters. Black-and-white photos. Faces with red Xs drawn over them. Names crossed out.
Red strings connected points into something like a web.
One word appeared again and again, written in a sharp, practiced handwriting.
Moirai.
On a small shelf under the map, a framed photo sat alone. The glass was cracked, the crack running straight across the woman's face, stealing the details.
The man's voice came again, low.
"Rest. You will need your strength. Tomorrow, you will understand more than you might want."
Raizen glanced at the girl one more time. Her breathing stayed slow and even.
For now, he let his head drop back against the thin pillow, pressed a hand to his forehead, and forced a tiny, thin smile that no one saw.
Darkness moved in at the edges of his vision. This time it did not feel like the village night. It felt softer. Not safe, but… Less dangerous.
"Raizen..." he whispered, almost without meaning to.
"My name is Raizen."
The man didn't turn away from his work, but he answered, trying to hide a smile.
"I'm Takeshi."
Raizen's eyes closed.
But the cold whisper didn't leave him alone. It curled up from the dark, into his mind again.
Do not fail her...
Or I will choose someone else.