0032 — Night in District 13
1674 Words
The door didn't just close behind him. It sealed.
Victor stood on the wet pavement, the heavy oak door of the Manor slamming shut with a finality that vibrated in his molars. The silence that followed wasn't peaceful. It was the silence of a diver who had just been cut off from his air hose.
Inside the Sanctuary, the air had been stale, smelling of old paper and copper pipes. Here, the air tasted like wet ash and battery acid.
A drop of rain hit his cheek. It hissed, warm and oily.
"Okay," Victor whispered. "Okay."
He felt the change in his skull before he saw it. The constant, low-level hum of the Manor—the connection to the boiler room, the pulse of the veins in the walls—was severed. It felt like someone had yanked a headphone jack out of his brain stem.
Then came the static.
He waited for the familiar blue text, the warning, the status update. Nothing came. The silence in his head was louder than the rain.
The blue overlay that usually painted his world with data shattered into nothingness. No warnings. No status bars. Just the raw, unfiltered gray of reality.
Victor leaned against the brick wall, gasping. He felt heavy. Gravity here wasn't a suggestion; it was a law enforcement officer holding him down. His knees shook.
"Fenrir?"
He looked down.
The massive, smoke-wreathed wolf had shifted forms. Usually, Fenrir shrank himself down to a pony-sized shadow to avoid frightening the locals—a tactical camouflage he enjoyed. But this was different.
He stood there, compressed into the shape of a large, shaggy black dog. He wasn't just hiding his mass; he was being crushed into it. The heavy, magic-starved air of the district clamped down on him like a vise, forcing his infinite void-fur into mundane biology.
Fenrir looked at his own paws, flexing them against the wet pavement. He looked up at Victor, his purple eyes narrowed not in confusion, but in annoyance. He tried to expand, to flare his aura, but the atmosphere swallowed the energy instantly.
"The Reality Anchor," Victor muttered, wiping the oily rain from his eyes. "It's locking your mass. You're stuck in economy mode."
Fenrir let out a low, vibrating huff—a sound that was definitely not a bark—and shook himself, sending a spray of dirty water onto Victor’s silk pajamas.
"Don't do that," Victor hissed, pulling his trench coat tighter. "We're incognito. It's a tactical choice."
He looked down at his feet. The pink bunny slippers were already turning gray in the slush. Tactical. Right.
He patted his coat pocket. The heavy pouch of gold was still there, a lead weight against his hip. Fifty thousand gold coins. Enough to buy this entire block. Or get his throat cut fifty thousand times.
"Calories," Victor muttered. "I need calories before I pass out."
They descended the narrow, twisting stairs that led from the Manor’s perch down into the sprawl of District 13.
The Lower City smelled of frying grease and burning plastic. It was a canyon of steel and concrete, lit by a chaotic riot of neon. Pink, toxic green, and ultraviolet light stabbed through the thick smog. Holographic advertisements danced in the rain, glitching and stuttering as the acid ate away at their projectors.
A fifty-foot-tall geisha flickered above a noodle bar, her porcelain face cracking into static every few seconds to reveal the skeletal wireframe beneath. She bowed endlessly to the empty air, offering a bowl of steaming, pixelated ramen.
Victor kept his head down. He felt absurdly soft. In the Manor, he was the Surgeon, the Landlord. Here, he was just meat.
Goblins in knock-off tracksuits squatted on the corners, smoking glowing cigarettes that smelled of sulfur. They watched him pass with eyes like beads of black glass. A cybernetic ogre lumbered past, his mechanical arm whirring— click-clunk, click-clunk —a rhythm of bad maintenance.
Victor’s stomach cramped. The smell of the grease from the noodle stand was agonizing. It promised salt. It promised fat. It promised life.
He saw it ahead. A small, grime-streaked stand tucked between a pawn shop and a ripper-doc clinic. A yellow tarp flapped in the wind. Underneath, a steam-shrouded figure was tossing noodles into a wok.
Victor collapsed onto one of the plastic stools. It was sticky. He didn't care.
"Bowl," Victor wheezed. "Big. Meat. Now."
The cook turned. He was a goblin, old and shriveled, with a cybernetic eye that zoomed in and out with a soft whir . He looked at Victor’s pale face, his shaking hands, the muddy bunny slippers.
"Credits," the goblin grunted. "Up front. You look broke, human."
"I have money," Victor snapped. The hunger made him reckless. "I have gold."
He reached into his pocket. His fingers were numb, clumsy from the cold and the hypoglycemia. He tried to pinch a single coin. Just one.
His hand spasmed.
He pulled the entire pouch out. It hit the metal counter with a heavy, dull thud .
The drawstring, already loose, gave way.
A spill of gold coins—heavy, crimson-tinted Hell Gold, minted with the screaming faces of the damned—slid out onto the sticky plastic. They caught the neon light, glowing with an inner, malevolent heat.
The goblin froze. His cybernetic eye whirred violently, zooming in until the lens nearly touched the coins.
Silence didn't ripple; it slammed into the street like a physical weight. The hiss of the wok seemed deafening.
The goblins on the corner stopped smoking. The ogre stopped walking.
Victor stared at the gold. The face on the nearest coin seemed to be winking at him.
Stupid, his brain supplied. Stupid. Stupid.
Shadows detached themselves from the alleyway across the street. Four figures. Tall, lanky, wearing matte-black rain gear and neon-visored helmets.
The Neon Vipers.
They didn't move with grace. They moved with the twitchy, jerky rhythm of cheap muscle grafts. Jer-clunk. Jer-clunk.
Victor tried to scoop the coins back into the bag. His hands were shaking so badly he dropped two. They rolled off the counter and clattered onto the wet pavement.
No one moved to pick them up.
The leader stopped three feet from Victor. He was tall, his face hidden behind a visor that displayed a scrolling equalizer graphic. He wore a jacket made of patches—leather, Kevlar, and something that looked uncomfortably like human skin.
"Nice coat," the leader said. His voice was modulated, synthesized into a deep, buzzing baritone. "Heavy pockets."
Fenrir growled. It was a low, rumbling sound. He stepped between Victor and the leader, baring his teeth.
The leader didn't flinch. He just tilted his head. A panel on his forearm slid open.
Click.
A modified nail-g*n extended from his wrist. The nails were barbed, glowing with a faint, green poison. He aimed it directly at Fenrir’s head.
"Cute dog," the leader said. "Be a shame to nail him to the pavement."
Victor froze.
In the Manor, Fenrir would have eaten this man and his g*n as an appetizer. But here? In the Reality Anchor? The void was compressed. Fenrir was locked in biology. A nail to the brain would kill him.
Victor slowly put his hands on the counter, palms flat. He could feel the cold metal biting into his skin.
He had no magic. He had no Iron-Jaw. He had no Carmilla.
He had a pouch of gold that was currently trying to bite his hip, and a PhD in Psychology that he hadn't used in three years.
"I need a diagnosis," Victor whispered to himself.
He waited for the prompt. For the familiar blue text to tell him what to do. But there was nothing. Just the wet pavement and the nail-g*n.
The System was gone. He was flying blind.
"You deaf, rich boy?" The leader stepped closer. The nail-g*n whined as it charged up. "Hand it over."
Victor looked at the visor. He couldn't see the man's eyes, but he could see the tension in his shoulders. The way his finger twitched on the trigger. Not a squeeze. A tremor.
Alcohol withdrawal? Adrenaline junkie? Or...
Victor took a breath. The air tasted of poison and rain.
"You don't want the gold," Victor said. His voice trembled, but he forced the words out.
The leader laughed. It was a harsh, digital static sound. "Pretty sure I do."
"It's... infected," Victor said. He pointed at the pile. "Look at them."
On the counter, the pile of Hell Gold shifted. A face on one of the coins seemed to scream silently. A tiny, crimson vapor curled up from the metal.
The leader paused. The nail-g*n lowered a fraction of an inch.
"What is that?"
"Hell Gold," Victor said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "It bites. Literally. It eats organic matter on contact unless you have the antibodies."
It was the truth, mostly.
The leader took a step back. But greed was a powerful anchor. "Bullshit. I'll take my chances."
Victor leaned forward. He needed to pivot. Now.
"You've got a tremor," Victor said. He nodded at the leader's hand. "Third finger. Right hand. It's twitching every four seconds. Rhythmic."
The leader’s head snapped back up. The equalizer on his visor spiked red.
"What?"
"Neural feedback loop," Victor said, the lie coming smoother now, wrapped in the authority of a diagnosis. "Cheap wiring in the wrist mount? It's shorting out your radial nerve. Give it a week, you'll lose the hand. Give it a month, it fries your cortex."
The other three g**g members shifted. They looked at their leader's hand. It was twitching.
"How did you know?" the leader asked, his voice losing the synthetic buzz for a second, sounding merely human and scared.
Victor smiled. It was a terrified, rictus grin, but in the neon light, it looked like confidence.
"I'm not a tourist," Victor said. "I'm a doctor. And I can fix it."
He paused, letting the rain hiss around them.
"But it's going to cost you a bowl of noodles."
- Writer
