Oculus: Chapter 1 - The Unmarked
The city's new lights were the worst part.
They weren't just lights; they were advertisements, status symbols, warnings—all powered by the Oculus. A shimmering, story-high hologram of a woman winked, her iris a complex, spinning galaxy. Aethelred Securities, the text below her pulsed. We See Your Future. A man on a floating billboard flexed, the sigil of a muscular arm etched in his eye glowing in tandem with the spotlights. Get the Edge. Kronus Body Enhancement. For them, the world was a canvas of brilliant, attainable power.
For Kim Dae-Hyun, the lights were just a glare that made his ordinary, unmarked eyes water.
He kept his head down, shoulders hunched against the evening crowd on the neon-drenched sidewalk. His reflection in the polished chrome of a storefront was a ghost: a young man in a worn jacket, dark hair falling into eyes that held nothing but a common, dull brown. No shimmering gears, no etched symbols, no faint inner light. Nothing.
"Watch it, Oc-less!" a gruff voice snarled.
A large hand shoved him aside. Dae-Hyun stumbled, catching himself against a cold wall. The enforcer who'd pushed him didn't even break stride, his single marked eye—a simple, glowing hammer sigil—glancing back with contempt. He hefted a crate of industrial parts onto his shoulder with effortless, augmented strength, earning a respectful nod from a street vendor.
Dae-Hyun's jaw tightened. Unmarked. Null. Oc-less. The insults were as common as the dirt under his fingernails. He was a zero in a city of ones and tens. A blank space. Invisible.
He pushed off the wall, his destination a dive bar called The Rusty Bolt in the tangled undercity, where the glow of the high-level Oculus ads didn't reach. The air grew thicker, smelling of fried food, rust, and ozone. Here, the marks were lesser, but they were still everything. A woman haggling over the price of synth-vegetables had an eye that flickered with a faint, calculator-like sigil—a low-level arithmetic Oculus for bargaining. A group of kids chased a grimy ball, one of them occasionally stopping to squint, his eye marked with a tiny magnifying glass, tracking the ball's trajectory a second before it happened.
Dae-Hyun felt a familiar, hollow ache in his chest. He wasn't jealous of their power. He was jealous of their place. They belonged. He was a ghost haunting a world that was no longer his.
His hand went to the small, hard case in his inner jacket pocket. The reason for this humiliating errand. Ocular dampeners. Black-market tech that could temporarily suppress a low-level Oculus. His boss, a sweaty Low-Marked smuggler named Gwin with a sneer and a "Lie-Detection" eye that looked like a wobbly scale, had ordered him to pick them up. The pay was terrible, the risk was high. But it was pay. It was credits that would buy the imported medicine that kept his sister Mina's own Oculus from burning her out from the inside.
Mina. Her face, pale and strained but always smiling for him, was the only thing that kept the simmering resentment from boiling over. She was Marked. Her sigils—twin, delicate silver chains that seemed to float in the violet of her irises—were a death sentence if the wrong people saw them. A High House would pay a fortune to "acquire" her, to study her rare and valuable lineage. His job was to make sure that never happened. To be her unseen, unremarkable shield.
The Rusty Bolt was a cacophony of stale beer and loud conversations. Dae-Hyun weaved through the crowd, avoiding eye contact like a religion. In the back booth, a man was waiting. Joon, the contact. He had a shifty, rodent-like face and a single Oculus: a simple, unblinking eye-within-an-eye that constantly scanned the room. A low-grade Perception Oculus. Good for spotting tails, not much else.
"You're late," Joon hissed as Dae-Hyun slid into the booth.
"The streets are crowded," Dae-Hyun muttered, placing the case on the table and sliding it over.
Joon didn't touch it. His marked eye narrowed, the pupil dilating slightly as he stared at Dae-Hyun. "Gwin sent his little errand boy. The Null. Funny."
"The credits," Dae-Hyun said, his voice flat.
Joon smirked, pulling out a thin stack of cred-sticks. He placed them on the table, but kept his finger on them. His Oculus gleamed. "He only sent half. Says the last shipment was faulty."
It was a lie. Dae-Hyun could see it in the man's twitchy smile. Gwin was trying to cheat him, knowing Dae-Hyun had no recourse. Who would an Unmarked complain to? The Oculus Commission? They'd laugh him out of the building.
"Gwin said full payment," Dae-Hyun insisted, the hollowness in his chest tightening into a hot knot of anger.
Joon's Oculus scanned him, and the man's smirk widened. "I don't see any proof of that. You calling me a liar, Null?"
Before Dae-Hyun could respond, the atmosphere in the bar shifted. The noise dipped. Three figures swaggered in, their postures radiating casual threat. Low-Marked gang types, their jackets adorned with crude embroideries of a cracked eye. Their leader was a hulking brute Dae-Hyun recognized—Tae-Sik. His reputation preceded him, carved into the faces of those who'd crossed him.
And his Oculus was active. A single, jagged shockwave symbol pulsed with a dull orange light in his right iris. A Kinetic Pulse eye. Not high-level, but more than enough for the undercity.
Joon's face went pale. "Shit."
Tae-Sik's gaze swept the room and landed on their booth. He grinned, a predatory flash of teeth, and ambled over. His two lackeys, one with reinforced knuckles (a permanent Strength Augment), the other with eyes that darted around too quickly (probably a minor Reflex enhancer), fanned out.
"Joon," Tae-Sik said, his voice a low rumble. "Heard you had a delivery for us."
"This… this isn't yours, Tae-Sik," Joon stammered, his Perception eye wide with fear.
"It is now." Tae-Sik's gaze fell on Dae-Hyun. "And who's this? Gwin's little Null fetch-dog." He leaned down, his breath smelling of cheap synth-whiskey. The orange jagged sigil in his eye seemed to burn. "What's an Oc-less like you doing with Oculus-tech? Looking to get yourself hurt?"
The lackey with the Strength Augment grabbed Dae-Hyun's shoulder, pinning him to the booth with impossible force. Dae-Hyun struggled, but it was like being held down by a machine.
"The package. And the credits," Tae-Sik demanded, holding out his hand to Joon, who immediately complied, shoving both the case and the cred-sticks forward.
Tae-Sik pocketed it all, then turned his attention back to Dae-Hyun. The mockery was gone, replaced by a cold, casual cruelty. "Can't have you running back to Gwin and giving him the wrong idea about us."
He raised his hand, index finger pointed at Dae-Hyun's forehead. The air around his fingertip began to shimmer, distorting like heat haze. A low hum filled the space between them. Dae-Hyun's heart hammered against his ribs. A direct Kinetic Pulse to the head wouldn't kill him—Tae-Sik wasn't that powerful—but it would scramble his thoughts, leave him a drooling mess. Unmarked and brain-damaged. He'd be less than a ghost. He'd be a burden Mina couldn't carry.
No. The word was a silent scream in his mind. Not like this. I can't go out like this.
Terror, cold and absolute, washed over him. But beneath it, something else surged. A raw, primal fury he didn't know he possessed. A refusal to be nothing. To be powerless.
His eyes, wide with fear, locked onto Tae-Sik's. Onto that glowing, pulsing, jagged mark of power.
He didn't know what he was doing. It was pure instinct. A drowning man clutching at anything.
He stared.
For three agonizing heartbeats, nothing happened. Tae-Sik's grin returned. Then, confusion flickered in his eyes. The hum from his finger faltered.
A sensation erupted behind Dae-Hyun's own eyes—a violent, sucking void. It was cold and painful, like a wire being yanked from the base of his skull straight into Tae-Sik's brain. He couldn't look away. He was trapped in the connection.
Tae-Sik's grin vanished. His confidence shattered into panic. "What… what are you doing? Stop it!" he slurred, his voice losing its power. The shimmering air around his finger dissolved.
The orange, jagged sigil in his eye didn't disappear. But the light within it died. It became a dull, inert tattoo, a dead thing etched into his iris.
The pressure on Dae-Hyun's shoulder vanished as the lackey stared in shock.
And then, the void behind Dae-Hyun's eyes was filled.
It was a surge. A raw, crackling, beautiful energy flooding his veins, filling the emptiness that had been his constant companion. It was a thrumming, living thing in his skull, in his hands. He understood it. It was pressure. It was force. It was his to command.
The lackey recovered, swinging a reinforced fist at his face.
Dae-Hyun didn't think. He raised his own hand, not to block, but to push.
The air between them rippled.
It wasn't a shimmer. It was a concussive wave of invisible energy that erupted from his palm with a sound like THUMP of a heavy book slamming shut. The lackey didn't just stumble; he was flung off his feet, crashing into a table five meters away, sending glasses and patrons scattering.
Silence. Deafening silence.
Dae-Hyun stood, his body thrumming with the stolen power. It felt… clean. Pure. He'd seen Tae-Sik use his Pulse before, always wincing afterward with a feedback headache. There was no pain. Only perfect, terrifying control.
Tae-Sik was on his knees, clutching his face. "My eye… it's gone dark. What did you do?" he whimpered, his voice raw with a terror Dae-Hyun had felt just moments ago.
The horror of his action finally caught up with the exhilaration. What did I do?
He saw the package and the cred-sticks on the floor where Tae-Sik had dropped them. He snatched them up, turned, and ran. He didn't look back.
He didn't stop until he was deep in a dank, deserted alley, the only light a flickering sodium lamp overhead. He slumped against a wet brick wall, chest heaving. The stolen energy still coursed through him, a thrilling, addictive vibration in his bones.
His hands were trembling. He looked down at them, half-expecting to see the orange jagged symbol burned into his skin.
Slowly, he pushed himself toward a grimy puddle near an overflowing drain. He needed to see. He needed to know.
He stared down at his own reflection in the murky water. The face of Kim Dae-Hyun, Unmarked. Pale, frightened, breath misting in the cold air.
And in the depth of his ordinary, brown, unmarked iris, a faint, jagged, orange symbol flickered like a dying ember.
It held for a single, impossible second.
Then it was gone.
His heart stopped. The alley seemed to tilt around him.
His life as an Unmarked was over. Something new had begun. And he had absolutely no idea what it was, or how to control it. The only thing he knew for certain was the cold, chilling truth that had settled in his gut.
He could take their sight. And it had felt good.