Sunlight found him like an accusation.
He woke with a taste in his mouth that didn't belong to him—metal and dust and the bitter tang of sleep not meant for that face. For one stupid second he thought he was back at the warehouse, breath fogging in the cold air, fists still clenched around a promise he'd meant to keep. Then the ceiling above his eyes was wrong. The light came through blinds instead of rain-slick rafters. The smell around him was bone dust and old lacquer, not concrete and rain.
Panic arrived like a fist.
He pushed himself upright and the room swam. His hands—small, pale, uncallused—were shaking. He brought them to his face and felt strangers: soft skin where there should have been the rough map of a life that had worked and gotten used to grief. He scrabbled for memory like a drowning man, desperate for foothold.
The warehouse uncoiled in him. The bound man's eyes. The cracked laugh from the man he had dragged forward. The words he'd spat—Only the devil can rescue you from my hand—and then the pause, the way the air had gone wrong. The sound of something answering. Everything after that was a blank, a stretch of white where motion used to be.
"No." The word tore out of him, small and ridiculous. He slapped at his face. Nothing. His voice was higher than he remembered. The name on the papers in the drawer said someone else—"Rin Hale"—and the way the system chimed at him before had been polite, indifferent, as if addressing property.
He dug through pockets, rifled drawers, palms slick. A cheap wallet, a license with a face that wasn't his, receipts for things he didn't recognize. It all sat there like evidence in a trial against him. He felt foolish for needing proof and angrier for having to look for it.
Something cold and huge moved behind his ribs—grief, he decided, like an animal with the patience to wait until he was ready. He thought of his wife's laugh, the way her hair had fallen across her cheek; of their daughter asleep with a mismatched stuffed toy tucked under a small chin. Those images burned warm and then were gone like heat off a pan. He found himself saying each memory aloud, as if speaking them could anchor them to him.
"Where am I? What did you do—" His voice cracked on the last word. He had told himself he would be calm. He had imagined bargaining and breaking and maybe, maybe taking back his life. None of that had prepared him for the smallness of this body, for the way it felt as if someone else had put a coat over his bones.
Anger rose like bile. It was immediate and viscous. He slammed a fist into the nearest spear rack, because the rack was useful and because he couldn't reach the devil through a wall and because the thing inside him needed a place to go. Bone snapped. The sound echoed sharp and wrong inside the tiny room.
Pain flared—not the clean, useful pain of battle but a wide, jagged flare that set teeth on edge. He swore, then pashed his head into the wall. The first impact stung and then the second; the world narrowed to a single, repeating rhythm: a dull thunk, breath, a small bright light behind his eyes. He hit again. He struck until the room blurred and the sound became a muted drum, until the taste of iron pricked his tongue and he found he could not stop.
He hadn't meant to go so far—nobody does at first—but grief is a long lever and rage is a short fuse. He hit until his skull announced a surrender all its own: a hot bloom of pain, a ringing that stole thought. He slumped back, hands over his face, the world tilting sideways. The spears around him seemed suddenly obscene, their perfect, patient gleam mocking him with the quiet labor that had made them.
He pressed his forehead to his knees and wept. Not because he was weak—no, this was not weakness. The tears were a furnace of fury made visible. He thought of small things: the softness of his wife's pillow, the way his daughter used to whisper silly secrets at night. He let his chest heave with a sound that might have been a sob if he'd the habit left for words.
When the trembling eased just a fraction, something cool and mechanical chimed in the back of his skull—not the System's bright, transactional prompt but an echo of the trade he had made. The memory of the shadow, patient smile, the soft promise that balance must be kept. Those words slid under his teeth like a blade.
He laughed then, a short sound like a match struck and blown out. "Balance," he repeated. "Right. Balance." He spat the syllables out like phlegm. "You took my life and left me this—this shell. You think that's balance?"
He crawled toward the window and stared at his reflection—the glass the only honest thing left. The face that looked back was thin, pale, and sharp-featured, hollowed by sleepless nights and grief, with high cheekbones and a slightly crooked nose he didn't remember owning. His green-hazel eyes burned with a new intensity, fierce and determined, and his jawline, stronger than he expected, seemed to carry the weight of every promise and every loss. He traced it with a trembling fingertip, tasting the vow before it fully formed in words.
"I will find you," he said, not knowing whether he spoke to the devil, the face in the window, or the ceiling boards. "I will find you and I will make you—" His voice broke, and whatever cruelty he intended dissolved into the raw, animal grief he could not deny. "—know what it is to lose everything."
He thought of the old man who'd been rescued in the warehouse; of the one who had maybe, possibly, started everything. He thought of Rin Hale—if he could find him—of what that boy might mean to someone else's life. Anger folded inward into something harder and brighter: purpose. The map of his life had been burned away, but he could still choose the road to walk.
He slid down the wall and curled up on the floor, arms around knees, breathing in and out as if each exhale drove stakes into the ground. The room hummed with the small noises of life: a delivery truck outside, a neighbor's muffled radio, the tick of a radiator. Normalcy continued, soft and indifferent.
He had no idea how to begin. No clue about the System's rules, the Tower, sponsors, or where Underworld meant in this architecture of power. He had only the fact of his loss and the single, bright ember of his vow.
"I'll learn," he whispered. "I'll learn everything. I'll find you. I'll take it back."
The words were small, but they took root in the quiet. He closed his eyes only for a moment and let the dark come down. Exhaustion took him—not peace, but something like collapse—and when sleep took him, it felt like a necessary deception: a brief truce before the hunt.
Outside, the city moved on. Inside, a new and terrible resolve had been planted. The devil had collected. The debt had been registered. And somewhere, in a world of bone and system calls, a child's name sat waiting for a story that no longer belonged only to him.