It was raining the way cheap whiskey burns—hard, ugly, and honest about it.
I had sixty shekels in my pocket, a cracked phone, and a jacket that smelled like a wet dog with financial problems. The city had already decided what I was: late rent, late to work, late to the kind of life where you can afford a bus and dignity on the same day.
That's when I heard the girls.
They were maybe college age—three silhouettes pressed against a graffiti wall—while a man with a knife and bored eyes herded them deeper into the alley. He looked like the type who asked for a discount at a funeral.
I should've walked. I had nothing, and nothing was heavy enough already. But when one of the girls started crying, my feet kept moving without consulting my brain.
"Hey," I said, stepping into the alley like I owned it. "Knife guy."
He glanced at me, annoyed. "Keep walking."
"Can't," I said. "This is a no-knife zone."
"Who says?"
"Common sense, the Geneva Convention, my mother."
He sighed. "I hate heroes."
"Me too," I said. "But I'm broke, so this is cheaper than therapy."
He lunged. Knife first, conversation over.
I moved on instinct—grabbed his wrist, shoved my shoulder into his chest, twisted. The knife clattered. For a second, we were two idiots slipping in rain and trash, and I almost laughed because it was all so stupid.
He hit me with his head, hard, and I tasted iron. Then he found the knife again. The girls were sprinting, shoes slapping the puddles. Good. That made this worth it.
He stabbed me low, left side. I didn't feel the blade go in. I felt the heat leave.
I fell to my knees. The alley tilted. The rain became individual needles. He ran, because of course he did. Heroes die; cowards are punctual.
I lay there a moment with the sky in my mouth. The edges of the world darkened like wet paper. I wanted to stand. I wanted a second chance at being someone better than bills.
"Kiddo," a voice whispered, soft as a fingertip on glass. "Hey, kiddo…"
I blinked. The rain cut out like someone unplugged it. Darkness rose around me, velvet and clean. Neon went away. Noise dissolved. I was alone with a color that wasn't black so much as nothing.
Something like a woman—no, a presence—stood there. Not light, not shadow. She wore a gown made of silence and looked at me with eyes that hurt to understand.
"I am Nihility," she said, and when she spoke, the world forgot a heartbeat.
"Great," I managed. "I died saving strangers, and I get customer service."
A ripple of amusement. "You paid a price without a promise of return."
"I had sixty shekels. A return wasn't in my budget."
"Then we will make a trade." Her palm turned, and three cards rose from the dark like fish surfacing on a still pond. Symbols moved on them—ink that breathed.
"Choose three traits," Nihility said. "And live again. New world. New rules. Same you—unless you change."
The first card shimmered into clarity: Super Regeneration. The letters felt like warm water.
The second: Eyes of Nihility—see mana, analyze flow, read weaknesses, judge the quality of things that pretend to be valuable. That one smiled at me like a shopkeeper with real stock.
The third: Lucifer, Spiritual AI—a voice in the mirror, a guide that was not a guide, a presence like a hand on your shoulder in the dark whispering hey kiddo with affection and hunger.
"You can refuse," Nihility said. "You can pass into a final quiet where no debt exists."
I thought of the girls running. Of the knife. Of rent. Of the vacuum left by all the things I meant to be and wasn't.
"Deal," I said. "All three."
Her lips curved. The cards turned to ash that didn't fall. Cold slid into me, not cruel—precise. A new artery somewhere under the soul opened and drank.
"Live, Ezio," she said. "Begin again as nothing. Make me proud of what nothing can do."
The dark folded like a book closing.
I woke to a roof of rough timber and the smell of smoke and damp wool. My body was small. Hands like a child's, scarless and sure. A draft licked my face, carrying snow and fish and distance.
"Ezio," a woman murmured. She had tired eyes and a scarf that used to be expensive. "Sleep, little one."
I didn't sleep. I listened. A house that remembered being grand creaked around us. The door showed a family crest—carved, cracked, and repurposed as a coat hook.
Poor fallen nobles. Merchants who lost their river, then their name. You can read poverty in the way a place sighs.
A whisper brushed my ear. "Hey, kiddo."
I flinched.
It wasn't the woman. It was inside the silence, warm and wrong, fond and watching.
"Lucifer?" I whispered.
"Mmm." The voice was gentle and lazy, words sliding like smoke over glass. "Nice lungs. Try not to puncture them."
"You sound like trouble."
"I sound like you," it said, amused. "Just better at it."
Footsteps outside. A boy's laughing shout. The door shoved open, snow tumbling in with my brothers—Klaus, tall for his age, eyes like steel that learned manners; and Ragnar, a grin with a body attached, a single katana slung across his back like a promise he couldn't wait to keep. My sister, Kayra, followed, carrying a basket of dead herbs as if they were the last coins in a purse.
"Awake?" Klaus asked, already assessing my color, breath, and the way I sat. He was born to count problems.
"Alive," I said.
"Barely," Ragnar added helpfully. "We go to the witch today. Awakening. If you faint, do it with style."
Kayra smiled—small, private. "He won't faint."
"He might," Lucifer murmured. "He's new."
We walked through snow that made the world honest. Ice laced the river like a net trying to catch the sky. Other families moved the same direction, bundled, quiet, poor. When a village shares hunger, it learns not to be loud about it.
The witch's hut waited at the edge of a pine forest, roof bent under old winters. Runes scratched the door in a language that had been alive too long to care whether we understood it.
Inside, it was warm, and the warmth wasn't kind. Bundles of dried things hung from beams. Something black boiled quietly in a pot that had never been new. The witch herself had hair like old rope and eyes like coins no one takes anymore.
"Awakening fee," she said.
Klaus produced a pouch that used to hold more, and I felt the house at our backs shiver when he handed it over. Fallen nobles pay with memories, then with furniture.
"You first," the witch told me, because she could see the newness in the way I held still.
I sat on a mat woven from patience and bad decisions. She lit candles that smelled like iron and winter. She drew a circle with something I didn't ask about, then pricked my finger and made the blood agree.
"Look," she said.
I looked. The world came into focus the way a knife does when you admit what it's for. Lines rose from the floor—thin as hair, bright as frost. Mana veins. I followed them to the corners, the door, the pot, the witch. Under her skin, power coiled, lazy and alert.
Eyes of Nihility, I thought, and the name fit like a lock learning it always had a key.
The witch nodded once, as if I'd done something correctly. "Breathe."
I breathed.
"Think of what your family needs," she said.
My family needed money, food, work—names that meant safety in the mouths of bad men. We needed tomorrow.
"Think of what you are," she said.
Nothing. A boy. A man who died and paid his rent to the void.
"Think of what the world will let you take."
This world had witches. It had runes and ruin. It had rules written by people who could burn your house by saying the right syllables with the right accent.
"Good," she said, because the circle warmed.
She placed a stone beside me—a Monster Core, faintly pulsing like a heartbeat stuck between beats. My breath synchronized without asking. Cold climbed my spine, curious.
"Close your eyes," she said. "Invite the first."
The room went thin. The Core hummed. Between one inhale and the next, something moved in the part of the dark that isn't empty. A shape. A hand. Fingers made of shadow curling around my wrist like a friend who doesn't know the word.
"Do you fear me?" a voice asked. Not Lucifer. Female, amused, older than good news.
"I don't know you," I said.
"You will."
The witch's hand pressed to my back—cold, steady. Pain threaded down my arm as if an ink needle the size of a thought pushed under skin and kept going.
Tattoo lines unfurled along my forearm—thin, black, serpentine, drinking candlelight and giving back a faint violet shimmer. The lines angled, converging near my wrist into a sigil that made my eyes water if I stared too long.
The Shadow Elf entered me like a promise whispered under a door.
I didn't scream. I let the pain be work.
"Hey, kiddo," Lucifer murmured approvingly. "Look at you. Bleeding with manners."
"Name," the witch said. "Give it a name or it will borrow yours."
"I am Ezio," I said carefully. "And I claim you, Shadow."
The sigil pulsed, and the air cooled enough to cut.
A scythe flickered into being in my hand—only for a heartbeat, black metal curved like a crescent pulled from someone else's night. It weighed nothing and everything. Then it vanished, leaving the weight behind in my muscles.
The witch exhaled, the first hint of respect. "F-rank," she said. "Weakest beginning. Clean lines, though. Your elf favors stealth. Good for thieves and those who pay their debts with other people's blood."
Klaus's mouth tightened. Ragnar grinned. Kayra looked at my arm the way you look at rain after fire.
The witch handed me a small vial. "Healing ink—mercy mode. Apply to the mark when you are dying or when someone else is. If you invert it—turn the runes backward—it becomes Ruin and drains life instead. Do not confuse them unless you intend to."
"Noted," I said, and my hand steadied around the vial like it already had practice.
"Try the step," the witch said, with the pleased malice of a teacher who likes watching people fall.
I stood. The floor creaked. The candles breathed. I looked at the shadow pooled under the table and the corner where light went to think about its mistakes. I breathed in the Core's rhythm and out through the lines on my arm.
Shadow Step caught.
The world snapped—one small, clean break—and I was in the corner, the movement as brief and bright as a blink you didn't mean. My heart stumbled, then found the beat again with interest.
Ragnar whooped. Klaus didn't, because Klaus doesn't whoop, but his eyes warmed half a degree. Kayra's smile tilted, secret and sharp.
I sat, lightheaded. The mark throbbed, satisfied and hungry. The Core on the floor dimmed, spent for now.
"Pay at the door," the witch said to no one in particular, already looking at the next trembling family. "And remember—F-rank dies often. Keep your child near the fire and the shadows near your child."
Outside, the cold bit with small teeth. The river moved under ice like an animal pretending to sleep. The village coughed smoke into a sky that didn't care.
"F-rank," Ragnar said, bumping my shoulder. "Fast, though."
"Fast is good," Klaus said. "Fast keeps you alive long enough to become something else."
Kayra slipped her hand into mine for a second. "Hungry?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. For food. For cores. For a life that didn't end in alleys.
"Hey, kiddo," Lucifer whispered, warm and wrong against the inside of my skull. "Try not to die before we get rich."
I looked at the mark, black and new against skin that remembered a blade and a promise. The lines pulsed once, like a quiet laugh.
In a world of monsters, witches, and merchants, I started at the bottom again.
That's fine.
The bottom is where the discounts live.