Swish.
Tap, tap, tap.
A final swoosh—then an irritated, breathless,
"Argh."
"Wait, wait—"
Bang.
The sound cracked through the alley like a hammer against old church bells.
When the dust settled, when the echoes finally bled out into the midnight air, a boy—fifteen, maybe sixteen—stood alone beneath a flickering neon sign that couldn't decide whether to stay alive or die out.
A thin white handkerchief, once pure, dangled between his fingers. Now, crimson streaks marred the white, the color pooling like spilled secrets.
Around him lay men—full-grown, broad-shouldered, street-seasoned—scattered in crooked shapes across the wet pavement. The rain had only just stopped; their blood chased itself through the rainwater in slow, lazy streams.
Max lifted his gaze. Those eyes… too calm for a kid, too old for his age. Like someone who'd lived twice and paid the price both times.
"I thought you guys had something," he said, voice low, cold enough to cloud breath. "Seeing you pull something that nasty… I expected strength. But this? Pathetic."
His shadow stretched long behind him, cut into pieces by the flickering light—like even the darkness couldn't hold him in one clean shape.
I'm Max Taylor.
Yeah, not from this world. Go ahead, roll your eyes—sounds cliché even to me. Isekai'd, straight out of a freak car accident that snatched my first life away. For a minute, I thought fate was giving me a do-over, a chance to rewrite everything the universe once stole.
But nah. Life doesn't hand out mercy twice.
Two years after I landed here? My new parents murdered their bodies also missing.
A high possibility of Assassination.
My mind crashed, like the universe was repeating a joke it didn't know wasn't funny.
I still don't know who ordered their deaths. Or why. Or what game I was dropped into. All I know is I ended up right back where I started in my first life—an orphanage, cold beds, colder stares, scraping survival from the bottom up.
But there was a twist in my story — not a good one, just… different.
A year after I landed in that first orphanage, everyone died.
They called it a disease.
Clean. Clinical. Wrapped in official reports and cold signatures.
But even as a kid barely touching four years old, I knew better.
It wasn't sickness.
It was poisoning — sharp, silent, and intentional.
Still, who would listen to a toddler with trembling fists and eyes too old for his face?
No one. So I carried the truth alone, a shard of glass in my pocket.
They moved me to another orphanage.
This one smelled of warm porridge, sunlit windows, and tired smiles — no death lurking in the corners.
Nothing catastrophic happened there.
Hallelujah.
But peace didn't feel like peace.
I kept waiting for something to break… or to arrive.
Because every isekai protagonist gets a cheat, right?
A golden finger to flex the universe.
Some cosmic hack.
Some divine buff.
Yet year after year, all I got was silence.
No glowing screens.
No mysterious voices.
Just me — breathing, hoping, doubting.
Then I turned five.
And for the first time since arriving in this world, I smiled.
It felt strange… like my face had forgotten how to do it.
That day became both the best and the worst gift fate ever dropped in my lap.
My cheat finally showed itself.
The Omni-Wish Stone.
A wish-type treasure — absurdly powerful, a dream come true.
But it came with a catch:
I needed to gather "Wish Points" to make anything happen.
And because the universe apparently hates me, my golden finger wasn't the cool, obedient system every protagonist dreams about.
Nah.
Mine was sentient — loud, snarky, moody, and disrespectful enough to make a saint commit arson.
Not the cheerful fairy-godmother type.
The "yank-your-hair-out-and-laugh-while-doing-it" type.
My curse… wrapped in a blessing… wrapped in attitude.
A pain in the ass is too gentle a title for this bastard. If I ever find a word sharp enough, venomous enough, fitting enough, I'll breathe it 'til the day I get buried again.
Anyway—back to where the madness truly started.
The Omni-whatever-it-was-called introduced itself with so much attitude that the only thing I could do was sigh… long and tired. That's how it got its name: Sy. One syllable, one emotion. My frustration made manifest.
But a cheat is still a cheat, even if it's the kind that makes you want to punch a wall. I had no golden finger, no divine blessing, no endless skill tree—just a sentient "gift" that talked back and judged me harder than any parent I ever lost.
Wish Points.
That's Sy's whole gimmick.
You stack them slowly, painfully, daily—like saving raindrops in a cracked cup.
E-tier wishes cost ten points. D-tier? A hundred. C jumps to a thousand and climbs on from there.
Basically, paradise on a payment plan.
Ten days.
Ten soul-grinding, nerve-breaking days of Sy's sarcasm, backhanded compliments, and smart-mouth energy… and I finally scraped together enough for my first wish.
You wanna know what I wished for, right?
Keep your curiosity warm—we'll get to that later.
What matters is the result: that tiny E-tier wish turned me into something dangerous.
Flexible.
Efficient.
A fighter who could walk into a room and walk out untouched.
At ten years old, I left the orphanage behind.
At ten, I started chasing a different kind of life.
Five years of digging through shadows, stalking rumors, and chasing ghosts… until I finally found an assassin organization worth my devotion.
Revenge played its part, sure. But honestly?
I'm just a die-hard fan of Assassin's Creed.
Some kids dream of capes. I dreamed of hidden blades.
So I took jobs—dirty ones, bloody ones, quiet ones—until the higher-ups started whispering my name. Payment? Digital. Anonymous. Crypto wallets humming in the background of my life like secret heartbeats.
Couldn't spend any of it yet, but stacking for the future never hurt anybody.
I eventually forced the right connections. Someone with pull handed my dossier to the Ministry of Education. Next thing I knew, my name was on a scholarship list for the best schools straight up to college.
But hell, I'm a reincarnator, for crying out loud—how could some mundane school slow me down? I tore through it all, leaving every textbook, every exam, every teacher in the dust. Clean A's across the board. Valedictorian wasn't just a title—it became my second name. By sixteen, I had college admission letters in hand, and high-level local jobs cleared like they were practice drills. I wasn't just surviving—I was killing it.
Literally.
I became a local sensation almost overnight, not for singing or acting, but for the whispers that followed me: the kid who handled high-level contracts like he'd been born to it, who could disappear into shadows yet leave a signature of chaos behind. Got into Hamilton College, a Five-star institute, if that's a thing. Got a house not far from campus—strategically placed, of course. Can't exactly have the cops or some nosy neighbor thinking a sixteen-year-old prodigy with shadowy connections is normal.
And that's where I ran into them—the pigs.