The harsh clang of metal on asphalt echoed in the silent, suffocating darkness. Dev hadn't heard it with his ears, not really. It had vibrated through the very last flickers of his awareness, a final, brutal punctuation mark to a life that had been nothing but a long, drawn-out ellipsis. He was dead. Kicked into oblivion on a forgotten street corner, his head a burst canvas of pain and cold, unforgiving concrete.
So why the hell was he floating?
A dull, thrumming emptiness surrounded him, an endless black canvas painted only by the whisper of absolute silence. No cold, no heat, just a pervasive nothingness that pressed in, thick and heavy. He tried to move, to thrash, but his limbs felt disconnected, like borrowed things. His chest, which should have been still, throbbed with a phantom ache, a ghost of the breath he no longer drew.
"What... what is this?" His voice, a reedy, unfamiliar sound, seemed to dissipate into the void the moment it left him. It felt wrong, like speaking underwater.
Then, with an almost physical jolt, a luminescence bloomed before him. Not a light, precisely, but a semi-transparent screen, shimmering with an ethereal blue. It was vast, dwarfing his vision, its edges crisp and defined against the pervasive gloom.
[ WELCOME !! ]
The words pulsed, vibrant and immediate. He blinked, or tried to, his eyelids feeling heavy and unresponsive. This wasn't the pearly gates, nor the fiery pits. It looked… manufactured. Like a display from a game. But games didn't follow you beyond the grave. Did they?
[ Do you want to become a member of
SYSTEM OF NEXUS? ]
Dev instinctively recoiled, a surge of raw, unadulterated fear lancing through his phantom body. System of Nexus? The words were alien, yet they resonated with a bizarre, unsettling familiarity, like a half-remembered dream. He pushed back, tried to swim away from the glowing intrusion, but the screen simply mirrored his movements, remaining precisely one foot from his face, tilted slightly, perfectly tracking his every futile attempt at escape.
"Why is this following me? I'm not—I just want to go home!" His voice cracked, desperation tainting every syllable. The tears that welled in his eyes felt like hot acid, though no moisture seemed to fall in this bizarre, airless realm. Home. The word tasted like ash. That cramped, musty apartment with his grandfather, the chipped mug of lukewarm tea, the suffocating silence that was only ever broken by the distant, muffled sounds of the city below. Was that truly home, or just another prison?
"Home? Where? You call that hell, a home?"
The voice wasn't his. It was deeper, richer than any sound he'd ever heard, resonating not through the air, but through the very fibers of his being. It vibrated in his teeth, in his bones, in the space where his heart used to beat. It wasn't accusatory, not exactly, but it carried an ancient, weary certainty that chilled him to the core. Dev froze, his eyes wide and unblinking, his body locked in a sudden, statuesque stillness.
His mind, which had been a tangled mess of confusion and fear, suddenly flickered. A single, sharp memory, bright and burning, cut through the fog. The scuffed toe of a shoe, looming. The sneering face of Devis, twisted with a casual cruelty he'd learned to expect. The pain, blossoming behind his eyes, then the sudden, absolute darkness.
No.
The voice, calm now, almost a whisper, echoed in the vast emptiness. "Don't you remember, what happened with you before you came here?"
And then, the dam broke.
Memories, vivid and sickening, erupted in his mind, not like a gentle wave but a tsunami. The dank alleyway, the smell of damp concrete and stale garbage. Three, maybe four, figures silhouetted against the distant glare of the highway. His classmates. Devis, Aadi, and two others whose faces blurred in the sudden, visceral replay.
"Shut his mouth!" Devis's command, sharp and unforgiving.
The heavy boot on his chest, pressing him into the grit-strewn ground. The world narrowing to the sickening stench of worn leather and the metallic tang of his own fear. His frantic, desperate pleas, muffled and ignored.
"I haven't done anything! Let me go!"
The futile scrabbling of his hands, trying to protect his ribs, his spine, anything from the relentless kicks. They weren't angry, not all of them. Some were just bored. Seeking entertainment in his pain. Gen Alpha, they called themselves. A generation of casually cruel gods in the making, and he, Dev, was their favorite sacrifice.
"You thought that complaining to teacher will make you free from us, die!!"
Devis, his face a mask of primal rage, his foot retracting, then lashing out. A sickening CRACK. The world exploded into crimson. A geyser of blood, his own blood, hot and wet, splattering across their faces. The shock, the sudden, absolute silence that followed his last, choked scream.
Then, the fear in their eyes. The stammering, the sudden, panicked retreats. "He's dead!" Aadi's whispered horror. The sickening realization that he was truly gone. Devis's desperate attempts to deny it, to cajole him awake, even as his own hands trembled, stained red. The final, cold advice: "Pretend like nothing happened. Get rid of bloody shoes."
The alley. The darkness. The cold. The end.
Dev gasped, a ragged, empty sound in the void. His vision swam, not with tears, but with the stark, horrifying clarity of his final moments. He had died alone, brutalized, unwanted. A disposable life, easily forgotten. His grandfather, frail and tired, struggling to make ends meet. His parents, long gone, leaving him with a hollow ache and a string of unanswered questions. He was nothing. A victim.
"Do you still want to go there? Even after you know how you ended up here. You are already dead, so it's impossible to return." The unknown voice was patient, persistent, probing the raw wound of his memory.
Impossible to return. The words echoed the desolation he'd felt his entire life. But the idea of not returning… was there another option? A terrifying, exhilarating spark ignited in the emptiness where his hope once resided. The system… the power.
He was 14. Skinny, sickly, easily pushed around. Friend of diseases, foe of bullies. He had accepted it. He had internalized it. He was weak. Always.
But that voice… the power…
A new kind of screen materialized before him, bolder than the last, its blue luminescence pulsing with an undeniable gravity.
[ Do you want to become a member of
SYSTEM OF NEXUS?
Accept or Deny? ]
The choice hung in the infinite darkness, heavy and absolute. Accept, and step into the unknown. Deny, and… what? Fade into true oblivion? Or worse, return as the same helpless Dev, only to face the same fate, perhaps an even crueler one?
His mind screamed at him to run, to choose the path of least resistance, to deny this monstrous, tempting offer. But his soul, raw and bleeding from years of abuse, screamed louder. It yearned for something else. Something more.
He remembered Devis's sneer. Aadi's indifference. The way they had laughed.
No. Never again.
The word ripped from his throat, infused with every shred of humiliation, every ounce of unspoken rage he had ever felt. It was a promise to himself, a defiance hurled into the cosmic abyss.
"Accept!!"