Ash Vale didn't remember the moment his life was stolen. He had been five months old when it happened, too young for the mind to store memory, too small to understand what it meant when arms that weren't his mother's scooped him from a warm blanket and vanished into the night.
But the world remembered.
Especially the family that lost him.
And so did the underworld.
Because one day, the boy would come back—not with rage, not with fire, not even with noise.
He would return with perfect memory, dangerous kindness, and an apron.
The day Ash was taken, the sun had just set. The nursery was filled with warmth—golden glow from a bunny-shaped nightlight, the scent of warmed formula, the soft shuffle of his mother's socks on polished hardwood.
Selene Vale had stepped away for less than a minute. A dropped pacifier, a bottle she hadn't rinsed. It was supposed to be just another quiet evening in a perfect life.
By the time she returned, the crib was empty.
The curtains stirred with breeze that didn't belong. The window latch had been snapped.
And her son was gone.
The world had moved on.
Authorities issued alerts. Drones scanned airways. News stations flashed his baby picture—a happy child with wide, dimpled cheeks and a quiet little smile.
They called him "the Sunshine Baby." For two months, the world searched. Then headlines quieted.
The posters faded.
But not his family.
They searched still. Quietly. Constantly.
Ash's earliest memory, the one that truly belonged to him, came at the age of two.
He was crouched in a metal room, tracing a crack in the floor with the edge of a spoon. He'd memorized the pattern of that crack a dozen times before, but something about it kept drawing his eyes.
At first, the world had been blurry. Noise. Cold.
But when his memory started working—really working—it never stopped.
Faces. Rooms. Maps. Codes. Even smells. Every detail that passed his senses stuck. Like his brain didn't believe in letting anything go.
He was never praised for it.
The men watching him—faceless, sharp-voiced, heavy-booted—weren't impressed by prodigies.
They were impressed by price tags.
The K.N.G. Syndicate wasn't just a criminal group.
It was a machine. A well-oiled, multi-national chain of trafficking routes, data laundering, extortion, and silent disappearances.
Ash lived in the center of its silence.
He wasn't tortured. He wasn't raised with affection either.
He was treated like property: fed, washed, moved from place to place. Cameras followed him constantly. The men in black suits referred to him by a barcode, not a name.
They didn't notice when he started watching them back.
At the age of four, Ash picked up his first book—a discarded manual about surveillance network maintenance.
By six, he had built a miniature signal jammer out of scrap phone parts and gum foil.
He used it to black out the internal cameras during lunch breaks.
Nobody noticed.
He escaped three facilities before anyone realized he was doing it on purpose.
Not to flee. But to map them. Every duct, code, camera cycle, patrol pattern.
Ash didn't want to just run.
He wanted to clean up.
By eight, he had made his decision.
The underworld would end.
It began in a rainstorm.
A warehouse in the outskirts of a forgotten town—a storage hub for the Syndicate's operations.
Drugs. Passports. Shipment schedules. Children.
Ash arrived on foot.
White hoodie. Black gloves. An old canvas apron tied neatly around his waist. Because, even during a war, rice had to be respected.
He entered through a side door he'd unlocked with a keycard he'd replicated from memory six weeks earlier.
Inside: chaos.
Men shouted, startled. One pointed. "Who the hell are you?!"
Ash answered by dropping a gas canister at his feet. It hissed. Smoke exploded.
The first thug swung a pipe.
Ash ducked under it, kicked the man's knee, and jabbed a needle into his neck—homemade sedative, borrowed chemistry.
Three more came running. One had a knife. The other two guns.
Ash rolled between crates, yanked a switch hidden under a tarp, and smiled as the floor released a net trap—one he'd built from fishing wire and salvaged scaffolding.
"You guys really ought to diversify your floor plans," he muttered. "Same warehouse model three times in a row? C'mon."
He moved like a breeze. Quiet. Soft-footed.
But when he hit, he hit fast.
An elbow to the throat. A tripwire along the corridor. A flash bomb disguised in a ramen cup.
Fifteen men fell in under seven minutes.
He didn't kill yet. Not until the control room.
Not until the one man he'd waited for—the man with the scar across his face, the one he'd seen in surveillance photos, the man who'd whispered once, on a mic Ash had bugged: "Just a baby. No one's gonna miss it."
That man fought hard.
Ash fought smarter.
The first blow was to the ribs. The second, to the temple. The third… The third ended it.
He left him there.
Along with the rest of the Syndicate leadership.
He had programmed the building's power core to overload on a five-minute delay. By the time the police—fed anonymous evidence from a "concerned citizen"—arrived, the place had already collapsed.
No survivors.
No data left unbacked.
Ash had mailed the hard drives to Interpol himself.
From there, it spread.
He hunted every connection. Every splinter cell. Every buyer. Every vault. He used their own tools, their own maps, their own money.
He never left fingerprints.
But he always left a meal. Simple. Homemade. Always warm.
Beside it, a napkin with a name.
HappyByte.
In six months, the underworld stopped operating.
Globally.
No one could figure out who'd done it.
Governments assumed a private black-ops syndicate had gone rogue.
Hackers assumed it was a militant AI.
But some people whispered about a child. A boy with calm eyes and a ridiculous apron. The boy who "smiled too much while flipping grown men."
But Ash never stayed to explain.
When the war was over, he packed up his tools. Burned the last warehouse. Watched the smoke rise.
Then turned and walked.
Not toward a city. Not toward glory.
Just… somewhere quiet.
He walked for nine days.
Through forests. Over rivers. Across empty fields. He followed the clouds. The wind. The direction that smelled most like spring and rainwater.
He had no map.
He was tired.
Not from the battles.
From being alone.
It was on the morning of the tenth day when he saw it.
A valley. Sunken deep between cliffs. Hidden from roads, planes, satellites.
Waterfalls spilled into mirror-clear lakes. Trees bowed gently in the breeze. Wildflowers grew like they were celebrating something.
Ash stepped forward, exhaled slowly, and felt his chest ache.
This place… This place smiled.
He dropped his bag. Took off his apron. Sat by the lake.
For the first time in his life… he let himself cry.
Just for a minute.
Then wiped his eyes, looked around, and said to the birds, "Right. Let's build a kitchen."