Shadow & Drift Kings — Episode 1: "Drift Stock"
Cold Open — The Text
Gin was elbow-deep in a junkyard transmission when the world lit up in his pocket.
MISSION ALERT
School Grid: Neutral Dispatch
Target: "Churchyard" Crew — 3 units, human/vamp mix
Location: Skyline Interchange / Eastbound
Condition: Night / Wet asphalt / High civilian density
Objective: Pursuit. Pass. Capture.
Reward: 450 EXP per capture
Bonus: +200 EXP for solo completion
He stared at the cracked screen, grease blackening the edges of the notification. Rain pattered on corrugated metal. Out in the dark, the junkyard's watchdogs barked and went quiet, as if even animals understood what that tone meant.
"Don't do it," said Rue, the yard boss, flicking a cigarette into a puddle. "You're off-grid, Gin. No crew. No school backing. You run solo into a three-car hunt, they'll scrape what's left of you out of a median."
Gin wiped his hands on a rag and never looked at Rue. The thought was already burning through him—clutch bite, weight transfer, brake flick, countersteer. He could see the interchange, the slick sheen of rain, the mean little slither of tail lights.
He pulled the steel door on the storage bay. Inside, beneath a torn tarp, the shape waited—low, white, lethal.
A Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut. Drift stock.
Rue's laugh was a crow's caw. "Level one with a fighter jet. You don't even have a crew chief. You've got… a legend's ghost and a bad hobby."
Gin's fingers traced the body seam by instinct. It wasn't awe. It was a greeting; a ritual you perform when you have no gods left. The Jesko's door arced up like a blade unfolding.
Everyone had opinions about Gin—the son of two max-prestige racers who vanished at the top. People said his blood was thin, all show, no gift. That the Jesko was a cosplayer's prop, bought on pity, parked for clout. That drifting was a dead art in a world that rewarded raw level.
Gin dropped into the cockpit and the world shrank to instrument glass and rain-beaded carbon. He slid the phone into the magnetic cradle. The mission card redrew on the Jesko's console in clean monochrome.
MISSION ACTIVE
Churchyard Crew moving east on Skyline.
Estimated window: 300 seconds.
Capture Requirement: Overtake within 2m proximity / front axle.
The engine churned awake with a sound that pressed the rain outward. Rue stood there, a silhouette in the door, cigarette ember the color of warning lights.
"Gin," he said, quieter now, "your parents were ghosts before they were gods. You don't owe their worshipers anything."
Gin tightened his harness and felt the old scar under his left collarbone itch. It always did, right before he drove.
"Good thing I don't worship," he said, and closed the door.
Act I — Skyline Interchange
The city's pulse shuddered through overpasses and concrete basilicas. Onramps snaked down like arteries. Headlights smeared into milky ropes in the rain, and the human chorus of panic—horns, the wet hiss of brakes—lifted as three black shapes knifed between lanes with more entitlement than physics should allow.
Churchyard Crew. One sedan too clean for this neighborhood. Two hatchbacks, ugly and efficient. Stickers on their bumpers: faded white crosses. People got cute with their branding when they ran blood.
Gin merged without mercy. The Jesko walked the lane at idle like a carnivore leashed. Drivers saw him in their mirrors and got out of the way because the human animal knows certain silhouettes mean predator. He clicked the grid channel open with a knuckle.
Static. Laughter. A woman's voice: "Is that him? The kid with the museum piece?"
Another voice: "Max-prestige mommy and daddy's boy. Bring your autograph marker, Ginny. You can sign the median."
He killed the channel. The Jesko rode up on boost like a tide.
The world narrowed: white dotted lines becoming a metronome. Wipers ticking time. Gin's heart too steady.
He had learned early to fear the calm. When he felt himself like this—smooth, clinical—something inside him itched for chaos. That itch was the only inheritance he believed in.
He slid left, triple-blipped the paddle, caught the hatchbacks. They were quick but sloppy, their tail lights jittering on throttle like hands that hadn't slept. The sedan in front—their chief—carved clean arcs. That one had a wheelman with a spine.
The mission's capture rule was brutal and simple. You didn't ram. You didn't pit. You passed. If the system registered your front axle crossing theirs in proximity, the tech-curse in every student rig took a byte out of their engine management and bound their car to your ID. It made street hunting feel like dueling sigils more than metal. Ancient. Ugly. Addictive.
Gin took a breath so long it hurt, and the world went still.
Brake tap. Weight forward. Feint left. Cut right under the hatchback's arc as it drifted wide to cover the faster sedan.
The Jesko's tail whispered out. For a blink, the rear wanted to pass the front. The car was stock; no band-aid aero. It asked for a partner who could speak in slips and weights, who could hear the road whisper through rubber.
Gin answered without words. He let the slide breathe, held the steering with the softness you reserve for holding a throat you don't want to bruise, and then fed throttle like confession.
The Drift.
It wasn't neon. It wasn't wings. It was geometry done with violence. The rear traced a clean, murderous arc and the front snapped onto a line that didn't exist for anyone else. He passed the hatchback by the width of a knuckle and felt the capture ping in his bones.
CAPTURE: HATCHBACK 02
+450 EXP
Solo Bonus tracking…
Gin didn't look back. He was already through a seam in traffic that wasn't there until he made it. The second hatchback panicked at the physics he'd just written and twitched, scraping a delivery truck. Metal screamed. Someone yelled a prayer that was really a curse.
The sedan didn't brake; it bowed slightly in acknowledgment, the way wolves dip their heads before they try to kill each other. Its tail lamps held a steady, calm distance.
"Churchyard, chief," Gin said, channel open again. He hadn't planned to speak. The words came out dry. "Drop your two or I take them."
Silence hissed. Then the chief's voice, almost amused: "Who taught your voice to lie that well, little relic?"
The weather went from rain to blades. Skyline's overpass opened into a long downhill S. You could make a life and lose it on that S. Gin's parents had run it a hundred times. People said they'd carved their initials into wet concrete with nothing but tire rubber and nerve.
Gin breathed. Heart too steady.
"Drift stock," the chief went on. "Cute. Your parents liked showpieces. Did you inherit their taste?"
Gin said nothing and cut in under his taillights.
The chief tried to block. Clean, assertive. But Gin didn't live in the same axis. He went sideways to go forward, turned an S into a scalpel, made the wet road choose him. The Jesko's rear smoked a white thought. The capture distance flashed and screamed and then dinged.
CAPTURE: SEDAN 01 (CHIEF)
+450 EXP
Solo Bonus +200 EXP UNLOCKED (pending mission clear)
The third hatchback—alone now, angry in a way that makes adults into children—did something stupid and noble. It juked into Gin's side path to protect its chief. That's what crews were at their best: dumb bravery written with steel.
Gin could have avoided. He didn't.
He danced. He feathered the brake without dropping revs, pivoted the car on an axle he invented in that millisecond, and let the hatchback's attempt become its own trap. He flowed by. The capture ping felt like a heartbeat in somebody else's chest.
CAPTURE: HATCHBACK 01
+450 EXP
MISSION CLEAR (3/3)
Total EXP: 1,550
LEVEL UP: 1 → 2
Car Evolution (Body Kit Stage 01) Available
Traffic exhaled like a stadium after a shot sinks. The rain suddenly sounded like rain again instead of whispers. The Jesko floated in a pocket of air that had no business existing at 120 mph.
And it was there, in the quiet, that Gin realized his hands were shaking.
Act II — Drift Core
He pulled into a gas station with busted lights and an underpaid clerk who didn't look up. Churchyard's cars ghosted themselves to the shoulder, hoods cooling, ownership rewritten. The grid would dispatch a tow. The world cleans itself when hunters make a mess.
Gin stayed in the cockpit. He didn't want to see his face in wet glass. He didn't want to see his parents' bone structure wrap itself around the son who hadn't earned it.
On the console, a new card ghosted in. It wasn't from Neutral Dispatch.
PRIVATE PING
From: Unlisted
Subject: Inheritance
He almost ignored it. Then the header unfurled like a mechanical flower and bled a small block of text.
Your drift is waking. That's not talent. That's a device.
You can break him with it. Or he will break you.
If you want it named, meet me where your parents made the road scream.
One hour. Come alone.
Gin's mouth went dry. He didn't remember swallowing.
He had given his life to a lie he could live with: that drifting was just geometry, that anything supernatural about it was a myth sold to children. He had done that because legends killed the people who wore them. He had watched it happen—in old footage, in whispered talk, in the way school heads moved mouths like knives.
If there was a device, if there was a name, it meant his parents had not left him a wound. They had left him a tool. Or a curse dressed as a tool.
The Jesko pinged again.
Car Evolution: Stage 01
Options:
– Widebody A (clean fitment / track width +)
– Front Split B (low-profile / stability +)
– Side Skirt C (flow control / transitional grip +)
– Cage Prep (chassis rigidity / safety +)
Reminder: Body kits only. Visual changes will be minimal at this stage.
He didn't want to dress the car like a fighter. He wanted it to stay honest. He selected Cage Prep and Side Skirt C—bones first, then the subtle geometry that made his sideways moves translate into forward theft.
Bolts would show. Welds would sit like scars. He liked scars. They told the truth that paint could not.
He sat there until the rain softened into a hiss like the city had rolled onto its side and slept.
Then he turned the Jesko toward the interchange.
Act III — The Place They Screamed
The Skyline S felt like a ritual site even when it was empty. Floral ghosts tied to guardrails fluttered in the wet. Someone had spray-painted a crown on the inside of the long right. People grieved with symbols when they didn't have bodies.
He parked on a service road where the city let weeds pretend they were trees and climbed the trash-speckled embankment. From here, you could see both lanes, the S bending like a spine. Gin had watched videos of his parents here, pushing it at dawn when the cops were more myth than presence. He'd memorized their lines, the way their back ends breathed like animals.
A man stood on the shoulder of the upper lane. Black coat. No umbrella. The rain seemed to hit him and then reconsider its life choices.
Gin didn't call out. The man didn't wave. He just pointed—two fingers—to the apex of the right-hander.
"Put your car there," the man said when Gin reached him. His voice had that compromise of alcohol and time. "Front wheels on the seam."
"Who are you?" Gin asked.
"A mechanic." A flicker in the man's jaw, which was the only sign the answer was a joke. "And a debt your parents owed me."
Gin didn't move. "If this is a ransom story for their memory, I don't have the budget."
"Not a ransom. A delivery." The man crouched and traced a line in the wet with his finger. The water made the shape itchier than chalk. "They built something and hid it in plain sight. They gave it a math problem's name so no one would worship it. And then they stopped using it when they realized people will burn churches to steal altars."
A cold numbness crawled Gin's spine. "You're saying—"
The man held up a hand. "Drive. Then stop talking."
Gin brought the Jesko onto the lane, eased the front wheels onto the seam of tarmac the man had indicated, and waited for instructions that didn't come. The man simply nodded at the S like a priest nodding at a door to a room you weren't supposed to enter until you'd lost your first tooth and your last pride.
"Ten percent throttle in. Lift at the first retch of your gut. Turn as if your hands don't belong to you. Let the car fall where fear wants it to. Then—" He tapped the glass roof with a knuckle. "—say no."
"That's not physics," Gin said.
"That's why it works," the man said.
Rain beaded on the console. The smell of wet rubber rose up like a ghost of grandstands. Gin put the car in gear, rolled forward, and the S came to greet him.
Ten percent throttle. The Jesko crept like a knife testing a throat. The road pitched into the first curve and Gin's stomach bucked—the body's idiot response to sheer drop.
Lift. The nose tucked. The tires murmured. He turned in with hands that felt borrowed.
Then the car began to fall.
Not slide. Not rotate. Fall. As if the road had rotated ninety degrees and decided he would taste gravity like a new flavor.
"No," Gin said.
He didn't shout. He breathed the word into the steering, and in that instant something under the car and inside his chest answered in the same voice.
It caught.
The rear came wide on an arc too smooth for wet asphalt. The front rode a line that existed in an angle no one should be able to draw without a drafting board and a lie. He was sideways and forward and held. Not balanced by throttle. Held by something that made geometry feel like a tame pet.
Gin's eyes burned and he didn't blink because blinking would mean the spell was his eyelids' fault.
He clipped the apex by a coin's thickness. The Jesko wrote its name in steam. The second corner greeted him and he breathed "no" again—no to sliding too far, no to following fear's vector, no to obeying a universe that lacked imagination.
The Drift caught a second time.
He came out of the S pointed wrong and right at once, a paradox resolved by speed, and let the car breathe straight.
He put it in neutral before he stopped shaking.
The man was smiling in a way that didn't show teeth. "There. You have the word."
"What is it?" Gin asked, knowing the answer and not knowing anything.
The man tapped the console.
DRIFT CORE: LOCK DETECTED
Designation: 'DENIAL'
Status: Dormant 1/5
Warning: Overuse at low level may cause neural burn / systems lockout
Note: This is not a skill. This is a pact.
The console shouldn't have been able to show that. The Jesko's software had no schools' hooks installed, no aftermarket nonsense. Either the message was a Trojan riding piggyback on the private ping, or the car had been waiting to tell him a secret once he gave it the password.
"Denial," the man said, relishing how ugly and apt it sounded. "Your parents called it that because it refuses the road's verdict. Five locks, five denials. The first lets you anchor a drift where it should die. The second lets you write angles that aren't printed on the earth. The third—" He looked up into the rain like it held a projector. "—well. You'll get there if you survive level twenty."
Gin exhaled. His lungs felt two sizes too small. "Why me?"
"Because you're the one who will break it or be broken by it honestly." The man's smile closed. "And because the schools are already writing purchase orders for your corpse."
The Jesko pinged a second time.
MISSION ALERT
School Grid: Villain Dispatch (Interception)
Target: 'Grindhouse' Pack — 2 units, augmented
Location: Skyline S — Current
Condition: Ambush
Objective: Survive.
Reward: ???
Headlights crested the far end of the S. Two shapes slid into the lane with noses like predatory fish and liveries that telegraphed budget and contempt. You didn't need decals to know a Villain Dispatch when you saw one. They moved with the moneyed arrogance of people who believed the grid owed them a tax.
The man stepped back into the weeds. "Time to decide," he said. "Hero School will call and ask for your oath. Villain School will call and ask for your soul. Or you can keep saying no and see who runs out of road first."
Gin didn't take his eyes off the approaching lights. "Where do you stand?"
"Off the road," the man said. "With the dead."
He was gone before Gin could argue with ghosts.
The Grillhouse pair slid in low and locked their clean, expensive aim on him. Their grid channel was open by default, a mockery with manners.
"Evening, legend's scrap," one of them said, smooth as fine bourbon. "We're here to collect a rumor."
"Stop the car and step out," said the other, bored. "You can keep your wrists."
Gin's hands went to the wheel like they were tired of not killing him.
"Denial," he said to the Jesko, and the car's consoles went bloodless with focus.
The skyline's right-hander waited, wet and hungry. The pair fanned to box him from both sides, confident that level and money meant truth.
Gin breathed, heart too steady.
He turned in with hands that did not belong to him, and the car began to fall.
"No," Gin said, and the Drift caught.
Ending — Cliffhanger
He went through a gap that should not have existed, between two cars that believed less in miracles than in their payrolls. He felt their breath on his doors. Capture distance blinked and failed and blinked again. A horn sobbed. Someone said, "How—" and didn't finish the question.
The Jesko did not grow wings. It did not glow. It simply obeyed a geometry no one else could convince the road to allow—because Gin said no, and the S listened.
He slid past the first Grillhouse car's front axle by a distance that would not pass inspection in a rational universe and heard the capture system's little bell ring like a church that hated its congregation.
CAPTURE: GRINDHOUSE 02
+??? EXP (Classified)
Warning: Unauthorized opponent. Disciplinary action pending.
The second Grillhouse car twitched into panic and then into rage, both of which made it faster and dumber.
"Who are you?" the driver screamed into the channel, manners ripped out by velocity. "Who are you?"
Gin didn't answer. He drifted the second apex like a confession no one got to hear and lined for the exit ramp like a promise to the future.
His console lit with two calls simultaneously.
INCOMING CALL — HERO SCHOOL: "We can protect you."
INCOMING CALL — VILLAIN SCHOOL: "We can make you invincible."
And beneath them, in small, mean letters that tasted like home:
PRIVATE PING — Mechanic: "Keep saying no."
Blue lights flashed three curves back. Civilian sirens woke. The rain decided it had done its part and softened into a priest's whisper.
Gin smiled for the first time since the junkyard.
He didn't answer any call.
He fed the Jesko a line that didn't exist until he drew it and whispered the word that would ruin him or save him.
"No."