As he walked, he replayed the fight in his mind, a masochistic ritual he couldn't seem to stop.
Grak was slow, predictable. Ryu had seen every punch coming. He had dodged the first three, his smaller frame and natural agility giving him a brief, fleeting advantage.
He'd even landed a solid kick to Grak's knee, a move that should have buckled the bigger man. But it was like kicking a pillar of solid rock.
Grak hadn't even flinched. He had simply absorbed the blow, a predator amused by its prey's futile struggles, before his massive fist had connected with Ryu's side.
After that, it was over. The rest was just a performance for the crowd.
That was the difference. It wasn't just muscle. Even low-level clan members like Grak had a flicker of ChainForce, a subtle reinforcement that hardened their bodies, sharpened their senses, and amplified their strength.
It was a baseline enhancement that put them on a completely different plane of existence from the likes of him.
For a dust-rat, fighting a clan member was like a child throwing stones at an armored transport. The outcome was never in doubt.
He made his way to the communal washroom, a grimy, tiled chamber with a single sputtering water tap. He stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt and splashed cold, recycled water on his face, hissing as it hit the cut on his cheek.
In the cracked, distorted mirror, he saw a stranger—a boy of seventeen who looked closer to thirty, with hollow cheeks, a perpetual shadow of exhaustion under his eyes, and the quiet, haunted look of someone who had never known a true victory in his life.
The room he shared was a small, windowless cube carved out of what might have once been a storage facility.
It contained four simple cots, three of which were already occupied by sleeping forms—the other forgotten souls who pooled their meager earnings for this slice of misery.
One of them, a man named Corvus, was a former cargo hauler who'd lost his nerve after a pirate attack.
Another, Jax, was a failed technician whose hands now trembled too much to handle delicate circuitry. Ryu didn't know the third man's story. They rarely spoke. They were just bodies sharing a space, a collective of quiet desperation.
He sank onto his own cot, the thin mattress doing little to cushion his bruised body. The metal frame groaned, a sound that seemed to mimic the weariness in his bones.
This was his life. The arena, the tunnels, this room. A closed loop of failure and want.
The dream wasn't even to be a hero anymore. It was simpler, smaller.
The dream was a full meal. The dream was a room with a window. The dream was a single day without the gnawing reminder of his own worthlessness.
As sleep finally began to claim him, pulling him down into a merciful darkness, the last thing he felt was the phantom pain in his ribs and the cold, unyielding certainty that tomorrow would be exactly the same.