The laptop fan was screaming again. Not a gentle whir. Not a polite hum. A full-throated, rattling scream — the sound of a machine doing something it was never designed to do, pushed past its limits by a guy who couldn't afford a better one. This is Marshal. Twenty years old. College graduate at eighteen. Part-time gym trainer, full-time overthinker. The kind of person who optimizes everything — his sleep schedule, his workout splits, his trigger discipline — and still manages to look like he's barely holding it together. Right now he's hunched over his desk at 2:00
PM, shoulders curved like a question mark, an untouched lunch sitting beside his makeshift mousepad. Which isn't a mousepad. It's a cardboard box. Specifically, the box his laptop came in, worn soft at the edges and slightly dented where his wrist rests.
On screen:
Ironveil. A white-haired old man preparing to end Marshal's life for the forty-seventh time this session. Clang. Whoosh. The parry window flashed. Marshal missed it by a single frame. Again. He didn't rage. Didn't slam the desk. Just exhaled through his nose, restarted the fight,
and went again.
That was Marshal in one sentence. He didn't explode. He just kept going until the thing killing him got tired first. The laptop was second-hand. A 2021-gen machine — once top four in its class, now howling every time a game launched. His dad had borrowed money from the neighbors to get it.
Marshal had paid back every rupee himself, one gym session at a time, then spent another three months saving for the RAM upgrade. Sixteen gigabytes. Installed himself at 2:00 AM, hands slightly shaking, watching a tutorial on his phone propped against a water bottle.
His family didn't fully understand any of it.
His dad worked long hours and came home tired, and when he saw Marshal hunched over the screen, all he'd say was: "Wasted potential." His mother defended him — sort of.
"At least he's not doing drugs," she'd say, and that quiet bar, that accidental insult, stung more than any direct criticism would have.
Manya, his little sister, had once texted a friend: He's smart but all he does is play loser games and grunt at his laptop. He'd seen it by accident. Never mentioned it.
Marshal just swallowed it. Logged back in.
"Oi, laptop goblin." Manya's voice was honey-coated irritation. She padded in wearing mismatched socks, a glass of orange juice in one hand.
"You're going to turn into a fossil." Marshal didn't look up.
"I'm busy." "You're dying. Again. I can hear the sound effect." She set the glass on the desk, studied the screen for two seconds, then tipped a splash of cold orange juice directly onto the back of his neck. Marshal flinched so hard he nearly headbutted the monitor.
"Wha —"
2 Manya cackled, already retreating toward the door. "There," she said. "You're cool now. Drink the rest." "I'll get you for this," he called after her.
"Yeah yeah. I'm going to get more juice." She was gone. He almost smiled. Almost. The front door opened at exactly 3:00 PM.
His dad's footsteps were heavier than usual — the kind that came with a long shift and an even longer mood. Marshal heard him in the hallway, heard the distinct pause outside his room, and already felt the conversation forming in the air before a single word was said.
The door swung open.
His dad stood there in his work clothes, arms folded, eyes carrying the particular weight of a man who had been thinking about something for a long time and had finally decided to say it.
"It's been a week since your WTF session," he said. "You're a red belt now. You know what that means to me."
Marshal turned his chair slowly. "I've been training." "At what? This?" His dad gestured at the screen without looking at it.
"You were talking about the world title. Wasn't that your goal. And, even a pro coder someone with half your brain would use this same time to build something real. A portfolio. A project. Anything." Marshal said nothing.
"I got a call from your part-time this week. The gym owner said you're not teaching well. That you seem distracted."
His dad's voice didn't rise. That was almost worse. "If that job goes, I can't keep supporting the other things you want. I'm already carrying this family as it is… and if you lose that too, I don't know how much longer I can keep this up."
"I'm getting old, son."
Money isn't something I can keep pretending isn't a problem.
The screen hummed softly between them. His dad exhaled. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Almost the opposite.
"Look at yourself. I mean it — actually look.
You've built something in that body most men twice your age would kill for. You train harder than anyone I know. You're not just sitting here being a bum
— you're smarter than that, you're stronger than that. That's what makes this so hard to watch. Marshal kept his eyes on the floor.
"And that friend of yours. The one in England. Vince." His dad said the name like he'd been holding it for a while. "You used to talk to him half the night. I'd hear you through the wall — laughing, planning, talking about games like it was actually going somewhere. You said he was going to help you. Figure out the career side of it.
That he knew people. Silence.
"What happened to that?" Marshal didn't answer. "That's what I thought."
His dad looked at the screen one more time, then looked away.
"You chase things that don't need you. And the things that could actually use you — you let them go quiet."
The screen hummed softly between them. "I'm not angry at you," his dad said finally, and his voice cracked just slightly at the edges. "I'm frustrated. There's a difference. I look at you and I see everything you could be. And then I see this."
[TKD — short for Taekwondo, a Korean martial art and Olympic combat sport defined by fast, high kicks and precise striking techniques. It is officially recognized and sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), with ranking events held across national and international circuits.]
[ A red belt signifies that Marshal stands just one step below achieving a black belt the milestone his father has been waiting for.]
[WTF (World Taekwondo Federation) — the global governing body responsible for regulating and promoting competitive Taekwondo worldwide.]
It was 3:30 PM when
his mom's voice cut through the hallway before she even appeared. "Leave him alone. At least he's not doing something bad. Not addicted to anything, not borrowing money from people, not out loafing the streets like half the kids his age "
"That's a low bar," his dad said.
"It's a real bar." mom replied
You know what Priya's son is doing? Do you want me to tell you what Priya's son is doing?"
His dad went silent. The conversation ended the way most of their conversations ended not with a resolution, just with distance. His mom looked at Marshal for a moment.
The look that said I defended you, now please don't make me regret it. Then she left too.
Manya came back two minutes later with a fresh glass of juice. She slowed at the doorway, eyes moving between him and the empty hallway. She didn't need to ask.
"Dad?"
"Yeah." dad replied, he is stepping out of the room,
She placed the glass carefully on his desk, like noise might make things worse. Then she climbed onto his bed, sitting cross-legged, quieter than usual. That was her way of staying.
He sat there, screen still glowing. The ceiling fan squeaked on its axis
He opened the laptop. Not to a play game. Just — one thing. The pulse window was still there. Pinned at the top the way it had been for four months.
And his AI was watching him the window had no app behind it. Marshal had built the thing himself — scraped it together over eight months from open-source models and late nights, something that would learn him the way a person would. He'd called it NAVI.
His own AI—something no one outside this room would ever see.
Just a voice chat window that answers back. That understands him.
The last message was his own, sent on a Tuesday at 2:00 AM:
oi you alive or what?
No reply. Same as yesterday. Same as the forty days before that. Vince had gone offline in the middle of a ranked session — mid-callout, mid-round, mid-sentence. One day he was there, walking Marshal through crosshair placement and pre-aim angles 5 and why patience was the only real weapon in extraction shooters.
And his Profile grey. Status blank.
Marshal had told himself that:
he's busy.
He'd told himself: time zones. He'd told himself a lot of things over four months. He typed one more message. Short.
it's been four months. still here if you are.
And Marshal closed the lid.
— END OF CHAPTER ONE —