“Even in a city built by gods, monsters always rise to the top.”

  The city of Lumina gleamed like a dying star, its skyline fractured by jagged towers and neon-lit ruins. Magic pulsed through its veins — not as hope, but as control. In this place, power was everything, and mana was the only currency that mattered.

  They called it a gift from the gods — a birthright etched into your bones before your first breath. It defined your worth, your strength, your future. Everyone in Lumina was born with it.

  Everyone… except Maki Yoshiro.

  He wasn’t supposed to survive here.Not in a world that hunted people like him like vermin.

  Mana wasn’t just power — it was survival. Your capacity for it, fixed from birth, was inherited like a curse or a blessing. It waned with time, with overuse, but it never grew. There were no second chances. No leveling up. You either had enough… or you didn’t.

  Shiro, the city’s sovereign and its most powerful living being, possessed mana so dense it bent reality around him. They said a single spell from him could erase half the city — not theory, fact. But even he dared not act without reason. The cost was too great. Even gods learned restraint.

  On the other end of Lumina’s broken map was a name whispered like a disease: Sage. He ruled the western half with cruelty that made even Shiro pause. A former hero turned tyrant. A man who defied the laws of magic — who wielded every element as if the gods themselves had handed him the keys to creation.

  He’d once spoken of salvation.Now, he burned people alive for sport.

  Shiro and Sage split the city in two, a silent war kept in check by mutual devastation. Neither side was safe — but in Sage’s half, people stopped praying for miracles.

  They only prayed to die quickly.

  Maki never stood a chance.

  His parents, average citizens with modest mana, were slaughtered when he was five — their deaths a message carved into flesh by Sage’s enforcers. That was Maki’s introduction to the world.

  Since then, he’d lived in the cracks between districts, scavenging like a rat beneath glowing skyscrapers. The only reason he was still breathing was thanks to an old bartender who offered him a place to hide — a dimly lit tavern just outside the edge of Shiro’s domain, where the shadows were deep and questions were few.

  In exchange, Maki worked.He scrubbed blood from the floors. Hauled crates. Took beatings.And waited.

  He trained in silence, obsessively, desperately. No mana. No spells. Just raw survival instincts, knuckles cracked open on brick walls, and a single truth carved into the marrow of his soul:

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  “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill Sage, no matter what it takes.”

  Hatred was his strength.Grief was his fuel.

  If mana-lackers were trash, then Maki was the bottom of the bin. He wasn’t just worthless — he was disposable. But Lumina had found a use for people like him.

  Mana rifts — tears in reality — had begun appearing all over the city. Fractures that spat out twisted creatures and unstable energy, threatening to swallow districts whole. Closing them required sacrifice — often death.

  And death was something Maki could offer.

  The enforcers — Shiro’s elite soldiers — didn’t waste their own on rift duty. Instead, they rounded up the unwanted. People without mana. People like Maki.

  Thrown in with rusty blades and barely functional gear, they were marched into hell to patch the bleeding city. If they died, so what? If they lived, no one clapped.

  

  No one remembered the names of corpses.

  Maki had survived over a dozen rifts. Every time, he came back bloodied, bruised, and more dead inside than before. But every mission was another step. Another day closer to his revenge.

  The bar was dead silent when they came. The kind of silence that only falls when death walks in.

  Three enforcers, clad in gleaming obsidian armor, stepped through the door like they owned the world. Their helmets reflected the flickering light, empty and cold.

  Behind them came a shadow taller than the rest — a man in a black coat and high-tech mask, eyes sharp as broken glass. His presence was suffocating. Even the dust dared not move.

  Maki stood behind the counter, wiping a chipped mug. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t breathe. But his fingers curled around the cloth like they might snap.

  The captain didn’t ask.He commanded.

  

  “Maki Yoshiro,” he said, voice metallic and unmoved.“You’ve been conscripted.”

  The words hit harder than any fist. Maki glanced up slowly, jaw tight.

  

  “What now?”

  The captain pulled a scroll from his coat — sealed with the blood-red sigil of Lumina’s High Council.

  

  “Rift. District 7 outskirts. Dangerous. You’re coming with us.”

  Maki didn’t bother arguing.He just tossed the rag onto the counter, his dark eyes burning.

  

  “No choice, huh?” he said flatly.

  The captain’s mouth twisted into a sneer.

  

  “If you had even a spark of mana, we wouldn’t be wasting time on you. But you don’t. You’re a ghost with skin.”

  And just like that, Maki’s next death march began.

  By the time they reached the staging zone, Lumina’s western horizon had vanished into choking fog. The city’s edges always felt wrong — as if reality struggled to hold itself together.

  Their team was five men deep. Barely. A squad in name only. Disposable assets. The kind of people whose bodies would never be recovered.

  Maki scanned them, his eyes lingering on a tall man with blonde hair tied in a neat bun. Something about him felt out of place. He wasn’t cocky. Wasn’t cruel. He moved with calm precision — a strange contrast to the dread soaking the air.

  

  “Name’s Naru,” the man said quietly as he approached, offering no handshake.“You’ve been briefed, but let me be clear — this isn’t normal. This rift’s unstable. We don’t know what’s inside. No maps. No safe zones.”

  His voice wasn’t loud. But it cut through the cold like a blade.

  

  “We go in together. We stay tight. We don’t play heroes. You see something you can’t handle, you run. Got it?”

  One by one, the squad nodded.

  Maki didn’t.He just looked at the swirling blackness beyond the wall.

  

  And he smiled — not with joy, but with something far colder.