The warehouse still leaked, but the rain had thinned. It fell from holes in the roof in long, steady threads, each droplet catching faint morning light before it struck the cracked stone floor and vanished into the dirt. Kairo woke to that sound and to the smell of wet timber. His body lay where he had collapsed the night before—one shoulder pressed to cold stone, knees tucked, hands curled near his face like a child guarding a crust.
He was not shivering. He noticed that first, and it surprised him. The air had the clammy chill of morning in the Dregs, but the cold that usually lived in his bones—an ache that had never left him—was dull now, distant. He pushed himself upright. The movement sent a jitter through his limbs. Too strong, too fast, not yet his. He steadied against a pillar, breathing slowly until his hands stopped trembling.
The System whispered.
---
[System Recognition: Survival Achievements Unlocked]
> Passive Gained: Streetwise – Years in the Dregs sharpen your sense for danger. You feel eyes that linger and footsteps that shadow.
Passive Gained: Endure the Cold – Rain, hunger, and filth harden the body. Resistance to exposure and sickness increased.
---
Kairo read the lines twice, then a third time, letting the glow burn into him. The words faded, leaving the afterimage printed across the warehouse shadows.
"It's watching me," he murmured. His voice sounded different in the quiet—scratchy, careful, like he was testing it for cracks. "Not just what I take. What I've lived."
He stood, a slow push that almost launched him into the beam above. He had to correct mid-rise, knees unlocked, back braced. The strength was there, coiled, but not trained. He pressed his fingers into the wood of the pillar. His grip bit deep enough to find soft grain, and the pillar groaned.
"Too much," he said softly, and released.
He moved. One step, then two, then a circle around the open floor, bare feet whispering on damp wood. His body wanted to glide and vanish, to race and ricochet, the way it had the night before—like a thrown stone skipping across black water—but his balance lagged by a fraction. He took a corner and nearly slid into debris, catching himself with a palm against a broken crate. The planks cracked. He frowned.
"Strong. Quick. Stupid in the wrong hands," he said, which earned him a quiet laugh from himself, thin and humorless. "My hands."
The laugh died as soon as it was born. He spent a few minutes turning tight circles, then longer loops, rehearsing a rhythm: press, release; drive, check; breathe in quarters; don't cut too sharp. Each adjustment filed a new edge into the strange shape he'd become, tuning it by feel. The ache of old bruises sang a muffled note in his ribs. Pain should have bent him more than it did. He flexed the ache like you might test a bruise with a thumb. Numb Pain, he thought, touching the memory of the drunk's sleeve—though he had taken that later; the edge of the memory was already blurring under the weight of new ones.
A bottle clinked outside. Bootsteps scuffed near the door. Kairo stilled and slid behind a fallen beam without thinking. His breath spread thin and even. The door scraped open.
"Oi… this place again," a voice slurred.
The same man from the night before—soaked, sour, hugging a chipped bottle to his chest as if it were a stove in winter. He wobbled inside, blinking, peering through the dim. His eyes found Kairo, and his mouth twisted.
"You," he said, pointing the bottle. "Rat under the stairs. You took my spot."
Kairo stepped out from behind the beam. He did not hide. He did not smile.
"Your spot leaks," he said.
The drunk blinked at the ceiling, then at the puddle, then at Kairo again. "Everything leaks," he muttered. "That's the Dregs for you. Leaks and thieves." He squinted, eyes trying to fix on Kairo's face. "You got bread, boy?"
"Not for you."
"Then get out."
Kairo tilted his head. "No."
The word hung in the cold, small and absolute. The drunk set his bottle down on a crate and rolled his shoulders, a motion meant to be intimidating that turned into a shiver. He took two steps and reached toward Kairo's shirt.
Kairo lifted his hand and let his fingers brush the man's sleeve. Not random, he told the System. Choose. Numb Pain. Only that.
---
[Target: Drunk – Civilian]
Available Traits: Tolerance (Alcohol), Numb Pain, Slack Reflexes
> Focused Theft confirmed. Extract: Numb Pain (Passive)
---
Heat—quiet, precise—moved from skin to skin and into Kairo's hand, less a burn than a slow slither. The drunk's expression flickered, then slackened. He swayed, another shiver, and his hands went limp at his side.
"Ah," he said, blinking. "Eh." He picked up the bottle with both hands, held it close like a prayer, and sank to his haunches, confused but no longer interested in fighting.
Kairo let go gently. The System was a blade; he could press with it or just rest the edge against a mark and watch what bled out. He had asked for something small, and the System had listened. That mattered. Choice was control. Control kept you alive.
"You should sleep," he told the man.
"Been sleepin' three days," the drunk muttered. "Still tired." He curled against the crate and shut his eyes. Kairo stood above him for a few breaths and then moved to the doorway.
Outside, the morning had brightened to a pewter gray. The Dregs steamed. The rain's thin veil turned everything a shade softer, but the corners still cut deep. Laundry lines sagged between buildings like broken ribs. A woman wrung a shirt with red hands beneath a warped awning. A dog sniffed refuse and growled when another dog tried to nose in. Two boys argued at the mouth of an alley over a red string, one still trying to pretend it was worth more than it was.
The city above would be waking in silk and stone; the city below was always awake. The difference was what the day did to you. Kairo watched pairs of feet pass by, some quick, some heavy, in sandals and boots and wrapped cloth, and he catalogued them the way he always had: which would run, which would stand, which would crush you if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Streetwise hummed under his skin now, a new thread woven into the old pattern. He felt attention like a draft; he counted watchers on instinct. Someone looked too long; he shifted without thinking and the gaze skated off.
"The System can be trained," he said under his breath, liking the taste of the sentence. "So can I."
He stepped into the alley, letting the drizzle bead on his arms. He wanted to test more than a small trait on a harmless drunk. He wanted to feel the edge of focused theft—what it could do, how quickly it could move, what it cost.
A boy slid out of a doorway two houses down. Kairo clocked him as a street rat before the rest of him arrived—thin neck, quick hands, the way his eyes tried to look bored and failed because they needed too many things. The boy saw Kairo at the same time and brightened for a heartbeat in acquisition, not greeting.
"You," the boy said, and strode toward him. The drizzle kept his hair flattened and made his grin seem too wide. "You were eatin' last night."
Kairo was not surprised he'd been seen. People were always watching. Eyes grew in the Dregs like mold on bread.
"Was I?" Kairo asked.
"I saw crumbs on your face when you came out of the baker's alley. I followed you. You ran like a ghost." The boy's chin tipped up, testing a bluff he couldn't afford to lose. "I want what you got left."
Kairo's expression didn't move. "I don't have anything left."
"Liar."
The word came out bright and childish and dangerous. The boy was younger than Kairo by a year or two but larger in the jaw. He wore a rag of a shirt and a strip of leather at his wrist, and tucked into it—Kairo saw it now that he was closer—was a sliver of metal. It was no proper knife, just a shard sharpened against stone, but it had a point.
The boy saw Kairo's glance and bared teeth. "You try to run, I cut you. You push me, I cut you. You scream, I—"
Kairo stepped closer until the words ran out of space. The boy stumbled on the last syllable, eyes flickering the way eyes do when they strike an edge they weren't expecting.
"You'd cut me," Kairo said. Not a question. A measure.
"If you make me," the boy said, thin, louder than he wanted to be. His hand went to the shard, the leather cuff squeaking, and he pulled the metal free. He held it wrong, fist wrapped around the blade so only a triangle of steel stuck out between his fingers, better for hurting yourself than your mark.
Kairo looked at the shard as if it were an insect he'd seen before. It was not contempt. It was calculation. He drew a breath, let Streetwise hum through him, felt the air move behind him and to the side. Two women under an awning pretending not to watch. A door cracked to peer. Footsteps slowing at the mouth of the alley, then passing on.
"If I take from you," Kairo said, and the boy flinched but held his ground, "I live. If I let you take from me, I die. If I let you go, maybe I die later when you tell someone how I moved last night." He tilted his head. "What is that worth to you?"
"Just give me what you got," the boy said, and the desperation made his voice break. "I don't care about you."
"That," Kairo said softly, "makes two of us."
The boy lunged.
The shard came fast enough to cut if Kairo had been the boy Kairo had been yesterday. But the shard met a hand that moved without sound and with too much precision. Kairo caught the boy's wrist. He did not squeeze. He didn't need to. Iron Grip turned his palm into a trap, and Lightfoot let the step forward whisper instead of stomp.
"Don't," Kairo said.
The boy twisted, tried to rake the shard, tried to push with his other hand. He was strong for hungry, but the kind of strength that burns hot for two seconds and then collapses. His breath went high and ragged. Kairo felt a different kind of urgency—Streetwise flaring, the weight of watching eyes. Enough people were pretending not to see to be dangerous.
"Let me go," the boy hissed. He tried to headbutt. Kairo leaned back and it missed by an inch.
"Drop it now," Kairo said.
"No."
Kairo looked at the boy's face. The eyes were too old, the mouth too thin. He saw the shape of himself there and did not find comfort in it. His grip tightened a hair, and the boy gasped.
"Drop it."
"I'll kill you," the boy said, and it might have been funny if it hadn't been true for other people in other alleys every day of the year. He drove his knee up for Kairo's stomach.
Pain Endurance blunted the edge, but Kairo still felt it. He felt it and filed it away and did not let go.
"Bad angle," Kairo said, not cruel, simply accurate. "You'll only bruise me like that."
He could have tripped the boy and run. He could have twisted the wrist until the shard fell and pushed him into a puddle and kicked him once and left. Those were options and he considered them in a fan of quick Calculation that lit in his head like struck flint.
He did not take any of those options.
"Not random," Kairo whispered to himself, and to the System. His voice was steady. "Focused. Hold. Choose."
The System stirred like a beast that knew the scent of blood.
---
[Target: Street Thief – Novice]
Highest Stat: Agility (14)
Available: Silent Step (Active), Pickpocket's Touch (Active), Escape Artist (Active)
Passives: Street Cunning (Minor), Rat's Resilience (Minor)
> Focused Theft: Contact stable. Select transfer.
---
The boy's breath wheezed between clenched teeth. He slashed again, wild, and the shard nicked Kairo's forearm. Warmth trickled; Kairo barely felt it.
Kairo looked down at the cut, then at the boy's wrist in his hand. "I told you to drop it."
"Fuck you; make me!" the boy screamed, hatred and fear in his eyes
Kairo's left hand slid up and caught the boy's other wrist when it came swinging. Two points of contact. The proximity wrapped the System's thread tighter.
"Silent Step," Kairo said. "Pickpocket's Touch. Escape Artist. Street Cunning. Rat's Resilience." He spoke the names like a merchant reading a list. Then he added, still soft, still careful, "Agility. Not all—just a part. Take them."
The System drank.
---
> Focused Extraction Commencing…
Transfer Rate: Moderate (dual-contact)
Resistances: Low (malnourished, injured, panicked)
Yield: Abilities x3 (Active), Passives x2 (Minor), Stat: Agility +2
---
The boy sagged as if a cord had been cut inside him. The makeshift dagger in his fingers trembled. The shard loosened. It fell, clinked against the cobble, spun, and lay still.
Kairo could have released him then. He knew it. He felt the shape of release, the weight of stepping away. The boy's eyes were wide now, bewildered, not just hungry. The watching women under the awning had stopped fidgeting. The cracked door had opened another finger's width.
But the boy's first sentence replayed in Kairo's skull as clearly as Photographic Recall could make it: I just want what you got left. He had meant it. He would mean it again if he were stronger. He would follow; he would watch; he would sell the way Kairo moved because in the Dregs everything was for sale, especially you.
"If I let you go," Kairo said, and his voice did not rise, "you live. If you live, you talk. If you talk, I die."
The boy groaned. "I won't—"
"You will," Kairo said. "You should. It's smart." He tilted his head, and Wisdom—not his, but bought, stolen, taken—showed him the line of cause and effect as cleanly as chalk. "I need you to be too weak to do it."
He didn't let go.
He pressed the System again. Not random. Not small. Everything.
The System went very quiet, the way a room does before lightning finds a tower.
---
> Manual Override:
Total Extraction Protocol requested.
Warning: Lethal on targets below resilience threshold.
Target Condition: Weak (severely malnourished; low blood volume; high stress).
Estimated Duration: Prolonged — typical > 60s.
Adjustment: Dual-contact + Intent + Panic → effective duration reduced.
Proceed? [Y/N]
---
The boy tried to jerk away. Kairo held both wrists like hooks in meat. He looked at the boy and saw himself, a half-mirrored shape in water. His face did not change.
"Yes," he said.
The System took. Not a slither, not a stitch. A pull.
The boy made a thin sound. It wasn't a scream. Screams took more air. This was the scrape of breath being counted and spent. His knees hit the cobbles. Kairo followed him down without letting go, because the Rule that had already written itself in his head said never let go once you commit to a thing.
"Stop," the boy whimpered. "Please."
Kairo's heart ticked. It did not stutter. His arms trembled—not from mercy; from power moving through them like heat through wire. He felt it, the shape of the boy's small abilities unhooking, the little passives that had kept him alive in gutters for as long as he had lived, the few points of Agility stacked like a row of bones. They came out of the boy and into Kairo with the simple inevitability of water deciding to go downhill.
The women under the awning had gone very still. The door was closed again. Streetwise whispered a line of caution across Kairo's shoulders. He glanced once left, once right. No guards. No boots. Only the rain and the sound of a shard on stone.
The boy's eyes weren't pleading now; they were surprised. He had not known this could happen. Kairo hadn't known either until the System offered it to him like a choice behind a locked door. He held on because he had chosen.
The boy sagged. His head bowed. The thin mouth that had said liar softened into something that could have been a child's if there had been time for it. Kairo watched, and he hated the part of him that thought this is what a good mark looks like.
Then the System finished.
---
> Total Extraction Completed.
Abilities: Silent Step (Active), Pickpocket's Touch (Active), Escape Artist (Active) → Upgrades Consolidated
Passives: Street Cunning (Minor), Rat's Resilience (Minor) → Merged
Stat: Agility +3
Essence Residual: trivial.
Target Vital Signs: terminated.
---
The boy collapsed. His body folded into itself the way an empty sack does. The breath went out of him. It did not come back.
Kairo let go and stepped away one pace. He didn't run. He didn't kneel. He stood. His own breath came steady and thin. The rain threaded the air, soft as silk around steel. The shard lay on the ground next to the boy.
He crouched and picked it up. He turned it between two fingers. He had no sheath, so he cleaned it on his already-damp shirt and slid it into the rope at his waist, point tucked, edge turned away from skin.
He looked at the boy one last time. The face had turned ordinary in death. Hunger makes saints and devils, but the dead look the same.
A voice from the awning, a whisper: "Saints keep us."
Kairo's eyes cut that way and the whisperer flinched back as if cut in turn. He did not threaten. He did not snarl. He simply stood there long enough for the message to carry: this is not your business.
He turned and walked away. Not too fast. Not silent—he didn't need to show off. His steps were quiet anyway. The alley let him go.
He didn't go far. A narrow lane ran alongside a wall where the brickwork had sloughed away into a shelf. He sat there in the lee of the wall and held his forearms out and looked at his hands.
They were the same hands. Thin, knuckled, callused wrong in a dozen little ways only a thief would notice. But there was a new ease in the flexion, a catch in the tendon that wasn't a weakness but a readiness. When he leaned forward to stand, his balance came earlier than before, and when he didn't move immediately, his body didn't twitch with borrowed speed; it waited because he told it to.
He exhaled. Calm Mind did its quiet work. Wisdom laid out the facts and did not ask for penance. He didn't feel proud. He didn't feel ruined. He felt adjusted. A lock had turned; a door had opened into a room he already knew existed but had never been inside.
"It takes too long" he said to himself, remembering the System's warning. " not enough time to pull everything. Unless they're weak; if they're already falling."
He touched the new knife at his waist. The point pricked his finger through fabric just enough to be real.
"I'll never," he told himself, the knuckles on his hands whitening as he clenched his hands into a ball.
He needed to move. People had seen. People always saw. He rose and circled back toward the warehouse, letting Streetwise guide the angle of his path. Twice he shifted because footsteps behind him matched too many beats; once he slid between two hanging sheets and a crate to avoid a man whose eyes had too much purpose in them for this hour of the day. No one stopped him.
The drunk still slept against the crate inside, bottle hugged to his chest like a brother. Kairo stood in the doorway and watched him breathe. The System could have taken from him everything too, if Kairo had wanted it, if Kairo had held on and pressed. The thought arrived, sat down beside him, and waited to see what he would do with it.
He did nothing with it. He let the man sleep.
He crossed the warehouse and climbed the broken ladder to the half-loft. The first two rungs creaked but held. At the top, he found a corner where the roof was less broken and the shadow deeper. He crouched there, legs folded, back against a support beam, and let his thoughts run.
They ran faster than his breath. Faster than the rain. He watched them pass and reached for one and let the others go. He thought of the boy's first sentence and of his last, and of the way both had been the same thing said out of different holes in the same hunger.
He would not be weak. He would not let go once he started a thing. He would take without apology and leave without explanation. He would help only when help paid better than harm.
He set the rules in the dark and the rules did not fight him.
He closed his eyes.
The System came softly, like a hand against his hair telling him he had done something worth writing down.
---
SYSTEM: THIEF – STATUS REPORT (Mini Update)
User: Kairo
Age: 8
Class: None
Authority Level: 0
---
Current Stats
Strength: 21
Dexterity: 20
Agility: 22 (+3 this chapter)
Constitution: 20
Intelligence: 21
Wisdom: 18
Charisma: 4
Luck: 7
---
Passives
Physical: Iron Grip; Lightfoot; Pain Endurance; Endure the Cold (New)
Mental: Calm Mind; Photographic Recall; Numb Pain (New)
Instinctual/Street: Brawler's Instinct; Opportunist; Spiritual Awareness; Streetwise (New)
Survival: Iron Hunger; Will to Live; Will to Rise
---
Abilities (Active Techniques)
Core: Quick Strike; Disarm Swipe; Escape Artist (Upgraded via consolidation)
Movement/Stealth: Shadowstep; Silent Step (Upgraded); Unseen Tread
Recovery/Focus: Second Wind; Prayer of Focus
> Consolidation Note: Silent Step + Pickpocket's Touch + Escape Artist merged into advanced expressions based on user intent; efficiency improved, detection chance further reduced.
---
Titles & Rewards
Theft-Touched – First theft.
Reward: +1 Agility.
Whisper in the Rain – Vanished while pursued in a storm.
Reward: Passive Veil in Storms (harder to detect in rain/fog).
First Reaping (New) – You drained a target completely through sustained contact.
Reward: Passive – Extractor's Poise (maintain steady contact under struggle; minor resistance to grapples and flailing).
---
System Rule Notes
Random Theft: Brief touch → random steal.
Focused Theft: With intent + contact, choose trait/stat/ability; amount scales with duration.
Total Extraction: Possible on weak targets via sustained contact; lethal; duration usually long, reduced by multi-contact + intent + target panic.
All is Stealable: Stats, skills, knowledge, essence. Nothing is immune.
Instability: Stolen power destabilizes body/mind until trained; upgrades and consolidations improve control.
Titles: Permanent proofs of theft; each grants a lasting reward.
---
Kairo opened his eyes to the dim. The lines were still there, burning faintly on the inside of his skull even after they faded. He let the new passive roll through his shoulders—Extractor's Poise—recalling the way the boy had flailed, the way Kairo's grip had stayed level and patient. The System rewarded the act, not the intention, and the act had been survival.
He leaned his head back against the beam and let the drizzle whisper on the roof above.
"The world is full of marks," he said to the empty room. "I'll choose the right ones."
His hands—still a child's hands, scarred wrong in small ways—folded in his lap. He watched them until the tremor was only the memory of a tremor. Then he slept without shivering.