Arc 1: Chapter 1 – “The Beginning of the Fall”
District 9, 2048 – The Apartment
District 9 didn’t sleep—it twitched.
Neon signs buzzed outside the apartment window like dying stars, casting streaks of red and blue across walls that were cracked and stained with time. A half-broken ceiling fan squeaked overhead, struggling against the thick summer heat. Rain whispered against the gss, blurring the world outside into a smear of flickering light and motionless smog.
Inside, the apartment was more battlefield than home—littered with instant noodle cups, cigarette butts, and the faint, metallic scent of gun oil.
Kun lounged in a colpsing chair, shirtless, one leg kicked up onto the table. His messy brown hair stuck out in wild tufts, like it hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. A faint scar traced his left shoulder, and a dull silver chain hung loose around his neck. His frame was lean but honed—like a fighter who didn’t train, just survived.
His sharp amber eyes scanned the old COUNTERS ACADEMY flyer between his fingers, flipping it idly like a pying card.
“Yo,” Kun muttered with a crooked grin, “imagine if the Academy’s full of instructor babes in tactical skirts. One wink and I’m selling my soul.”
Across the room, Suho sat cross-legged on a beat-up futon, quietly adjusting the strap of a knife sheath. His expression didn’t change.
“You flirt with one of them,” he said ftly, “and they’ll send you straight to the Cat-5 frontlines in a trash bag.”
Kun snorted. “Death by thighs. Worth it.”
Suho remained focused. He was shorter than Kun by a few inches, but carried himself like someone twice his size. His short brown hair, darker than his brother’s, hung slightly over his calm, storm-gray eyes—the kind that saw through bullshit and didn’t blink at monsters.
A low buzz came from the cracked tablet on the table beside him. He gnced at it, thumbed through a message, then stood to gather his gear.
Kun’s grin faded just a bit. “Another job?”
“Takeda construction ruins. Cat-1 cleanup,” Suho said, buckling on a bck jacket that looked too clean for how much blood it had probably seen.
Kun groaned, dropping his boot to the floor with a dull thump. “That pce again? It's crawling with crackheads and bad karma.”
Suho didn’t respond.
Kun tossed the flyer onto the floor like it insulted him. His voice lowered.
“You ever get tired of this mercenary bullshit?”
Suho paused—just for a moment.
“This is better than signing up with those people.”
Kun stood, grabbing a lukewarm can of beer off the table and cracking it open. He took a swig, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and stared out the window.
“At least they’ve got showers,” he muttered.
Lightning lit the apartment for half a second, casting both brothers in stark relief. They looked like survivors from another life. Two kids in the wreckage of something bigger than either of them.
“I’m serious,” Kun said, still watching the rain. “We’ve been hopping gigs for two years. Different names. Different contracts. Same damn loop. Kill, sleep, lie, repeat.” He turned to face his brother. “I’m done.”
Suho looked up now, but said nothing.
Kun’s voice softened, just barely. “I’m joining. Academy reached out. Said I qualified. Said we did.”
“You trust them?” Suho asked.
Kun shrugged. “Hell no.” A bitter smirk tugged at his lips. “But I trust us. And I’m tired of roaches and moldy sinks.”
He slung his duffel bag over his shoulder, bck and torn from a dozen jobs too many. “You don’t have to come. I get it. You’ve always been the careful one. But I’m out of reasons to stay.”
Suho looked back down at the tablet, thumbing through the coordinates one more time.
Kun paused at the door. “Who’s the client, anyway?”
Suho’s response came slower than usual. “…Didn’t give a name. Just said I was ‘recommended.’”
Kun raised a brow. “Ooh, mystery sugar daddy? Hope he’s cute.”
Suho didn’t smile—but something flickered across his face. Maybe amusement. Maybe concern.
“I’ll be back before sunrise.”
Kun leaned against the doorframe. “If you die, I’m selling your stash and telling everyone you cried before you left.”
“If I die,” Suho said as he opened the door, “I’m haunting your sorry ass until you graduate.”
The door clicked shut behind him. Rain poured harder.
Kun stood alone now, staring down at the flyer on the floor. The letters were worn and slightly smudged, but the words still burned:
> COUNTERS ACADEMY
Join the fight. Defend what remains.
He picked it up and let out a quiet ugh.
“…Hope she’s got a nice sword arm.”
The scene faded into neon rain, broken gss, and the quiet weight of change.
---
The rain hadn’t stopped since noon. It didn’t fall in drops—it smeared like oil, clinging to skin and windows, streaking neon lights into ghosts. Smoke slithered through the alleys—acrid, chemical-ced, the kind that clung to your throat and made your eyes burn.
Suho walked alone.
His boots spshed through puddles stained with artificial colors—crimson from a cracked ramen sign, electric blue from the pulse of a scanning drone. The city around him twitched and buzzed with static energy, like a broken circuit refusing to die.
A gunshot cracked behind a building, followed by shouting—two voices, one cut short.
He didn’t turn.
To his left, a vendor with a half-metal jaw barked at passing mercs, selling fried noodles and stim packs from the same greasy countertop. The flickering sign above him read “NüTokyo Taste?”—but half the letters glitched into nonsense.
Further down, a child no older than ten sat on a crate beneath a rusted umbrel, selling recycled firearm parts out of a cooler filled with melted ice and broken dreams.
Suho passed them all, eyes forward, steps even.
The city breathed, but not like something alive. More like something trying not to be dead.
Above it all, the Administration’s emblem floated on a translucent holo-screen—projected across a dozen floors, casting a cold blue light like a silent command. The rain made it shimmer like a mirage, but no one could mistake its presence.
In an alley just ahead, Suho caught a glimpse—two Administration guards, clean armor, pinned against a wall by ughing mercenary Counters. One helmet was half-off, steam fogging between lips pressed in a kiss. The other guard leaned back, head tilted, eyes gzed from some half-chewed drug.
Suho didn’t blink.
Didn’t judge.
This was District 9.
Everyone here was selling something—even the ones who thought they weren’t.
A burst of static hit his ear.
> “Client Update: Zone breach stable. Cat-1 activity confirmed. Proceed to Takeda Construction.”
Still no name.
Still that cold, sanitized voice that came with every job you weren’t meant to understand.
He adjusted the strap across his shoulder and moved deeper into the city. Buildings towered above, stacked like rusting bones. Signs in four nguages blinked and overpped—Japanese, Korean, English, Russian—all crumbling into irrelevance.
He passed an old arcade with shattered windows. Inside, one screen still glowed:
> GAME OVER_
Dust clung to the machines like tombstone moss. A half-burned plushie hung from a cw crane, its smile melted off.
Ahead, a mechanical dog limped across the road, dragging a thick cable from its back—sparking every few feet, leaving small scorch marks on the pavement. One of its eyes flickered red. The other was missing.
Suho slowed for half a second, watching it disappear into the fog.
He didn’t know why, but that damn thing always made him feel something he couldn’t name.
A low hum overhead—VTOL drone, humming like a hive god, sweeping the streets below with dull white light. The people didn’t even flinch anymore.
As he approached the breach zone, the noise behind him began to fade—blurring into the hum of neon, the cough of exhaust, the whisper of the forgotten.
Before him stood the jagged frame of a building—the Takeda Construction Ruins.
Concrete pilrs jutted from the earth like fractured bones. Rebar reached into the sky like broken fingers. Half-covered signs warned of radiation exposure, though no one gave a damn. A caution barrier, blinking weakly, swayed in the wind. The pstic tape was torn.
He reached into his coat and pulled out an Admin-issued scanner. The flickering blue glow cast sharp lines across his face, highlighting the subtle tension in his jaw. The casing was cracked—like it had been dropped one too many times—and a piece of tape held the battery cover in pce.
> TARGET ZONE: ACTIVE
CLASS: CATEGORY 1
ESTIMATED COUNT: 3–5
THREAT LEVEL: LOW
Bullshit.
There was no such thing as a low-threat zone in District 9.
Suho exhaled through his nose, slowly.
He remembered this pce.
Two years ago, he and Kun had dragged a dying contractor out of this same ruin—only to watch him choke on blood and mutter about “something wrong in the dark.”
They never found the body he was screaming about.
Suho’s fingers clenched slightly.
He hated this part of the city. Not because of the noise, but because it always sounded like what he felt inside—alive, but wrong.
A single raindrop slid down his cheek.
He blinked it away.
“This city always buries something,” he whispered to no one.
Then he stepped into the dark.
---
Inside the Takeda Ruins, the silence wasn’t peaceful. It was the kind that felt hollow—as if the building itself was waiting to scream.
Concrete pilrs loomed overhead like gravestones. Rusted scaffolding creaked in the wind. Water dripped from somewhere high up, the sound echoing like slow footsteps.
Suho moved with no hesitation.
No fear.
No excitement.
Just focus.
His boots spshed through a shallow pool of rain and rot. The scanner buzzed faintly in his hand, flickering between two readings.
> ESTIMATED COUNT: 4
SIGNAL DISTORTED
Distorted? He frowned slightly.
A low, static gurgle answered from deeper in the shadows.
Then it lunged.
A Cat-1 Corrupted burst from behind a rusted loader crane—its body barely human, arms stretched too long, head twitching like a broken puppet. Its skin was mottled gray, veined with bck lines that pulsed like wires. Where its eyes should be, there was only flesh.
It let out a gurgling screech—like static vomiting itself—and sprinted on all fours.
Suho didn’t flinch.
He stepped sideways. Quick. Clean.
The thing smmed into the concrete column behind him with a wet crack, leaving a bck smear of whatever the hell it used for blood.
By the time it turned—
Suho’s bde was already in motion.
One silent slice through the neck.
The head—misshapen and twitching—hit the floor with a sptter, its tongue still writhing like a parasite.
The body dropped half a second ter, legs twitching in a slow, ugly rhythm.
Suho exhaled.
Another one shrieked. Then two more.
From the scaffolding. From the rebar above.
They moved like spiders—jittery, twitchy, erratic. Glitching things. Born wrong.
He reached behind him, drew his secondary dagger, and slid into a low stance.
The first one pounced—he ducked under it and jammed the bde through its throat, dragging it downward in a single, brutal motion. Blood—bck and foaming—spshed across his coat.
The next one tried to fnk.
He spun, smmed his heel into its ribs with a crack, and shoved the dagger into its eye-socket until the handle disappeared. It let out a noise like metal shrieking—then slumped, twitching.
Last one.
This one was bigger. Twisted. Too many joints. Its fingers ended in nails made of bone shards. It screeched at him, smming its arms against the walls like it didn’t know what pain was.
Suho didn’t move at first.
He stood still—too still—his eyes locked onto the beast, lips barely parting.
The air around him began to ripple.
Just slightly.
As the creature screeched and lunged forward—
Everything stopped.
The shadows behind Suho thickened, rippling outward in jagged tendrils. The walls distorted. Light bent. The very air pulsed like it was holding its breath.
“Void.”
The word wasn’t spoken—it echoed.
From Suho’s palm, darkness erupted—not like smoke or fire, but like space breaking apart.
A curved arc of pitch-bck matter spun forward in a perfect line. It didn’t shine. It didn’t fsh.
It just erased.
The Corrupted froze mid-charge.
Then its entire left side vanished—clean gone, like someone had erased part of it with a cosmic scalpel. Blood didn’t even spray—it had nowhere to go.
The creature dropped to one knee, confused, twitching—trying to understand what was missing.
Suho walked toward it.
Calm. Silent.
His bde finished the job—thrust up through the jaw, deep into the skull.
The body fell. No scream. Just meat and twitching nerves.
The darkness around Suho faded—like it had never been there.
Rain leaked through the broken ceiling. The flicker of neon barely reached the blood-soaked floor.
He cleaned the bde against his coat, then paused. The scanner buzzed.
> THREAT: NEUTRALIZED
CLIENT: WATCHING_
Suho didn’t move.
His head slowly turned toward a dark corner above the scaffolding—where a faint shape had stood the entire time. Motionless. Observing.
Then, it stepped back.
Out of view.
Polished dress shoes. A long coat. And a presence too calm for this pce.
Gone.
Suho stared at the empty space for a moment longer, the tension in his grip fading.
He didn’t know who that was.
But they weren’t just a client.
---
---
The rain hadn’t stopped.
But Suho had.
He stood beneath a flickering streetmp, its cold blue light stuttering above him. Blood washed clean, bde lowered, but the scent of steel still clung to him—sharp and metallic, like the taste of a memory.
Behind him, the Takeda Ruins were silent again.
No screams.
No corrupted.
Just wreckage and wet concrete soaked in things better left unnamed.
Then—
Footsteps.
Measured.
Deliberate.
Too clean for the ruins.
Suho turned slightly. He hadn’t heard the approach—but the man was already there.
Saito.
Coat untouched by rain.
Shoes polished like they hadn’t touched the ground at all.
Even the wind didn’t seem to touch him.
He tilted his head, eyes scanning Suho like he was appraising a weapon—not for beauty, but for damage dealt.
And then, he spoke.
Softly.
Like this was all just conversation.
“You fight with elegance.”
Suho didn’t respond. His shoulders stayed square, body still as stone.
“Void manipution… not many can use it that way,” Saito continued.
“Not with such control. Or such emptiness.”
He took a single step forward. The puddle beneath his feet didn’t ripple.
“You didn’t kill because you wanted to.
You killed because you had to.”
Suho’s jaw tightened. A flicker of movement—just enough to show he was listening.
“And yet,” Saito added, “you still looked them in the eye.”
Another step.
The rain curved around Saito’s shoulders like it refused to touch him.
“That’s rare.”
Finally, Suho spoke—low, cold, unreadable.
“Who the hell are you?”
Saito offered a faint smile, like the question amused him.
“I’m someone who gives people like you… a way out.”
He reached into his coat—slowly.
Not threatening. Not rushed.
Just calcuted.
From the inner pocket, he pulled out a card.
Bck metal, cool and smooth, catching the dim light.
A silver insignia pulsed faintly at its center like a memory trying to resurface.
> COUNTERS ACADEMY
Division: Special Squad Recruitment
Status: Provisional Clearance
[Cssified Access: Granted]
Suho stared.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t trust.
His voice dropped, sharper now.
“How the fuck do you know my name?”
Saito paused.
Just for a second.
Then answered, calm and almost… satisfied.
“Because someone made sure I would.”
That hit something beneath Suho’s calm.
But he didn’t show it.
Didn’t blink.
“You’re with the Administration,” he said.
“No,” Saito replied, turning the card slowly in his fingers. “I’m something worse.”
He let the card fall.
It nded in a shallow puddle—face up, the silver seal reflecting Suho’s face in rippling fragments.
“I don’t recruit soldiers,” Saito said quietly. “I find catalysts.
You’re not a killer, Suho.
You’re the kind of person the world rewrites itself around.”
He stepped back into the mist.
But just before vanishing, he stopped—one final line, half-whispered:
“Tell Kun… the world is waiting to see what you two become.”
And then he was gone.
No footsteps.
No echo.
Only rain.
Suho stood alone, staring at the card in the water.
His reflection stared back—tired, hollow, changed.
“…Bastard.”
But he didn’t walk away.
---
District 9 never slept.
But it never really woke up, either.
Suho walked with his hood pulled low, shadows clinging to him like regret. The streetlights flickered in sickly hues—blue, red, yellow. Neon signs buzzed above shuttered shops, casting warped reflections across puddles and cracked pavement.
He didn’t look up.
Didn’t flinch when a gunshot cracked somewhere two blocks down.
Didn’t react to the scream that followed.
This was normal.
A girl sat on a broken vending machine, smoking something cheap and glowing.
An old man hosed blood off the steps of his noodle shop without breaking rhythm.
A drone zipped overhead, scanning his face with a dull red light.
TARGET: NON-THREAT. STATUS: CLEAN.
VOID RESONANCE: 3.4%
Suho exhaled slowly.
Even the machines could feel it now.
He didn’t know what haunted him more—Saito’s words, or the fact that they made sense.
You’re not a killer. You’re a catalyst.
He hated how those words stayed.
He passed a broken holo-sign, glitching out with an old advertisement for the Counters Academy.
A smiling girl with blue pigtails posed with a glowing bde.
“DEFEND YOUR WORLD. BE A HERO.”
The screen sparked and died.
Suho kept walking.
His thoughts drifted to Kun.
To their cheap apartment.
To all the times they fought just to stay fed, to stay off the radar, to survive.
What if this changes that?
No. He shut the thought down fast.
There’s always a catch. Always a cost.
And yet…
He looked at the card in his hand again.
It was still warm.
---
District 9 smelled like rust, rot, and regret.
As Suho made his way back to the apartment, another junkie stumbled out from a nearby alley.
Face sunken, eyes wild.
“Suho… hey, man. You got money?” the man slurred. “Just a few creds. I’m good for it, swear…”
Suho didn’t even blink.
He kept walking.
Same steps. Same silence. Same story.
The man didn’t follow.
Third floor. Broken lights. Damp walls.
He unlocked the door and stepped inside.
---
“Yo.”
Kun was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, slurping noodles straight from the pot.
“You look like shit,” Kun said casually, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
Suho didn’t respond.
He walked straight to the table, reached into his jacket—
—and tossed the bck card in front of Kun.
Clink.
Metal on wood.
Kun blinked.
“…What the hell’s this?”
He picked it up slowly, reading the glowing silver text.
> COUNTERS ACADEMY
Division: Special Squad Recruitment
“Wait, wait—seriously? This is real?” Kun said. “I thought you’d tear it in half or feed it to a stray cat or something.”
Suho stayed quiet, his face unreadable.
“Look… if you wanna go… I’m in,” Kun muttered. “This pce? This life? It's fucked, bro. Merc gigs pay in scrap and stress, and we owe like five months' worth of ramen.”
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The door jumped on its hinges.
“OI, LITTLE SHITS!”
The voice outside was a war horn dipped in gravel and alcohol.
“You got two days! If I don’t see rent, I’m feeding you both to my Category-3 pet!”
Kun flinched. “Damn… she upgraded the threat tier.”
He looked at Suho.
Suho didn’t react.
“I’m serious, man,” Kun said. “This city’s insane. We’re not gonna make it out of here unless we change something.”
He grabbed the crumpled flyer from the table.
Dialed the number.
The dial tone barely sted two seconds before a calm voice answered.
> “Counters Academy. You’ve reached Special Recruitment. State your location.”
“Uh… Fuhara Apartments. District 9,” Kun said.
> “Confirmation received. Pick-up scheduled for tomorrow. 0800 hours. Don’t be te.”
The line cut.
Kun blinked. “Damn. That was fast.”
He looked at Suho.
“Suho? You good?”
Suho didn’t answer.
Just stared at the card on the table like it might explode.
---
That night, the city didn’t sleep.
But the brothers tried.
Kun packed everything—two torn duffels, their combat gloves, backup bdes, some dried food, three shirts each, and a dented medkit.
He added a broken watch Suho once fixed, and his old photo of the two of them from years ago—faded, but still real.
Suho moved slower, quieter.
He packed only what he needed.
His bde.
His coat.
And the card.
---
Later…
Kun was passed out on the couch, snoring like a dying engine.
Suho y in bed, eyes wide, staring at the leaking ceiling.
Outside, it rained—soft, constant, like the city itself was warning them.
The room felt heavier than it should’ve.
His fingers touched the card aga
in.
“Will we survive?” he whispered.
---
