The world came back in slow, ragged breaths.
Akira's—David's—eyes opened to gray light leaking through a hole in the roof. His mouth tasted of copper and dust. Pain threaded through his skull like barbed wire; the back of his neck felt raw where bandages rubbed against skin. He tried to move and the body protested—each tendon and joint announcing itself with a dull, furious ache. For a second he was David again: fluorescent gym lights, the sting of leather, the clinical smell of a hospital. Then the stale, sour tang of something else pushed through—mold, rot, spilled stew, the copper of old iron—and he realized he wasn't in Tokyo, he wasn't in his cramped apartment, and these were not the hands he had typed emails with for five years.
A tiny, splintered child's sled cradled him. A torn blanket lay over his legs, smaller than the quilts he remembered. The room itself was low-ceilinged, the furniture small. A cracked wooden table pushed against a wall plastered in mildew. A single candle guttered in a jar; the jar's oil had long gone rancid. Shadows clung to the corners like cobwebs. The smell hit him in waves—old soot, unwashed bodies, the sour stink of poverty.
And then she turned.
The woman who had been crouched by the doorway moved toward him with the slow, careful steps of someone who knew how to carry a life on her back. Her hair flowed in long black curls that shone where the candle caught it; her face bore the map of years—frown lines, hollows beneath her eyes, a scatter of freckles across her nose. But there was something in the way she looked at him that made his chest implode: the raw, unfiltered love of a mother.
"My son," she said, and her voice cracked. Her lips trembled as if she had been holding back a storm. "Are you—are you okay? My boy—Akira, don't scare me like that."
He tried to answer and the world lurched. Words tore free in a hoarse whisper that sounded thin and too high for the voice he had been used to: "Mom?"
Tears pooled in the woman's eyes. She dropped to her knees beside him with one motion, careful, practiced. She was older than he expected, but then Akira's world had always been carved early by hardship. She cupped his face with rough hands, thumb ghosting across his temple. "You gave me such a fright," she said. "Rest. Drink this."
She pressed a chipped cup into his small palm. The liquid inside smelled faintly of tea and something medicinal. His throat moved automatically. The water slid down and his vision steadied a fraction. The pain in his head was still there, an electric ache that flared with every breath, but the world arranged itself into focus around the woman—around the fact that she had called him "my son."
David swallowed hard. Dream. Not dream. The conditioning of a life lived through screens told him to test everything—pulse, tiny details, the absurdity of the scene. He felt the bandages on his ribs and the dull numbness in his legs and noticed, with a jolt, how small the blanket felt against his shoulders, how thin his arms were. He stretched out a hand and saw the size of it: a child's hand, soft at the knuckles, the nails bitten close. Panic rose. He looked into the woman's face again and realized he sounded like a child when he breathed.
"Where—" the word came out clipped and higher than he expected. His throat felt like someone else's.
The woman's worry sharpened. "Shh, rest. You had an accident, honey. Jenny and Jorge found you half-dead and brought you home. You scared us all." She swallowed, and the corners of her mouth trembled. "You're only six, Akira. You're small, but you're brave. Eat a little. I'll fetch the poultice."
Six.
The number struck him like a cold wall. He was David—twenty-five in a city where trains made everyone late—but now he inhabited the body of a six-year-old boy. The concept upended his calculations, forced every plan to rearrange around a tiny frame. That smallness made the bandages and the ache suddenly more urgent; it added a fragile, pressurized edge to the fury that had been coiled in him since the hospital lights of his old life.
He tried to force clarity — and a flash ignited behind his eyelids.
He was fifteen again for a moment, running full out, laughter tearing from him. Then the bushed memory split into the wrong scene: headlights like knives in the rain; the metallic scream of a crash; hospital lights humming white and sterile. Doctors had looked at his parents with tired, practiced pity and used the word "lucky" like a consolation. Lucky. Lucky and ruined.
Then Ray.
A memory rose that fit into the new, smaller frame like a jagged stone. Ray. Everyone in the slum called him Ray; the streets had taken to whispering his true name between their teeth: Bloodslayer. He fancied himself a power broker—small-time noble, mob boss, man with an arcane core of three stars and a talent for fire. He owned corners of Kurohama and enforced rules with a grin. Once he had been a man who could be seen and bargained with; now he had a reputation that made mothers pull children inside.
Akira's little chest tightened. He remembered fists and laughter, remembered Jenny and Jorge dragging a broken child down an alley and handing him over to a mother who used the last of her coins for a poultice. He remembered Ray's hand like a closing vice and the way he'd sneered and called another boy worthless. In this child's body, the humiliation was sharp as a brand: being small under the hand of a man like Ray meant being visible and helpless.
The woman's lips pressed together. "You'll get better," she said, but her voice had the brittle edge of someone who had no illusions. "The doctor—there wasn't much he could do with what we could pay. But you're here. Jenny and Jorge helped. We'll manage."
David's plan-mind — the gamer-patterned thinking that had poured perks and tactics into Akira's build only hours before — snapped into motion anyway. If he had a month until the next horrific toll, as rumors said, thirty days still mattered whether he was twenty-five or six. A small body changed tactics, not objectives.
The pieces slid faster now: the slum's name, Kurohama — the Black Harbor — a coastal sprawl of rotting docks, low houses sewn together by rusted chain and superstition. Where the nobles ignored the world, the slum was a festering economy of survival: fishing, illicit trades, protection fees, and the sort of bargains that ended with someone's child being fed to the marsh-god. They called the monster Nagu — the snake-god in the marsh that demanded a face in exchange for relative peace. People whispered that Ray sent a child each month to keep Nagu from sending worse beasts. A ritual of cruelty cloaked as protection.
Anger coiled in David's chest, but now it was tempered by the knowledge of fragility: a six-year-old could not storm an alley and split a mob. He needed cunning, patient steps. He needed to move like the slum moved: invisible, precise, strategic. He felt Akira's burns and bruises and the hollow where a father's hand had crushed the marrow of him. He also felt his own old grudge as David, the man robbed of motion by an accident he never asked for. The two became a single incandescent thing.
"Don't worry," he thought, as if voice could be a plan. "Don't worry, Akira. We're one body now. I'll make him pay. I'll take Kurohama for myself. I'll make him kneel before the people he thought he owned."
The woman came back with a small bowl of thin soup. He accepted it with hands that shook; the broth was bland and warm and tasted like survival. She tucked the blanket closer around his shoulders as if it could keep out the long reach of Ray's influence. Outside, he could hear the muffled clatter of the market, the creak of a cart wheel, the low argument of a man arguing protection fees.
The fact that he was small did more than complicate plans — it gave him a cover. A six-year-old who could practice without suspicion could learn the alleys, memorize who carried knives, who slept with a wand under the pillow. He could watch Ray's men from windows. He could listen. He could, with cunning, turn the slum's own secrecy into advantage.
A flash of the night before — the gamelog, his purchases, the perks he had chosen — bled into his resolve. He had bought something foolish and magnificent: a void inventory, cursed blades that ate magic, a build designed to erase enchantments and close the distance on spellcasters. It had felt like fantasy in his apartment at midnight. Now it felt like a possible blueprint. If he could find tools, allies, and time, he could turn that fantasy into reality — not for fame, but for survival and justice.
He swallowed, the soup warming his belly. The bandage crept at his ribs when he breathed, the ache reminding him that he could not leap to the alley and be vengeance incarnate. He would need patient effort. He would need to practice without being noticed. He would need to find Jenny and Jorge and the others who had carried him home.
"Sleep," the woman whispered, pressing her palm to his forehead. The warmth steadied him. "You're burning. Rest, Akira. Tomorrow we'll mend more. We'll make soup, we'll make you stronger."
David let his head fall back. Through the small window he could see a sliver of moon over Kurohama's broken roofs, the sea beyond black and listless. For the first time in years, his future felt raw with possibility and danger. He had a child's body that could hide, a mind that had fought in gyms and strategies that had won tournaments, and thirty days to fashion a plan.
He closed his eyes and let sleep come like a blade sheathed with care.