Arin's POV
He opened his eyes.
Not in a bed, but on cold concrete, half-submerged in shadow.
Pain throbbed through his skull. His face was swollen, his lips split, and blood was drying beneath his nose. Every breath scraped his chest like broken glass. He tried to move, to push himself up, but his body answered with weakness so profound it felt unnatural, as if something vital had been hollowed out.
Slowly, painfully, he forced himself upright.
The alley was narrow and filthy. Trash bags split open along the walls. The smell of rot and stagnant water hung thick in the air. A flickering streetlight buzzed overhead, barely holding back the dark.
He looked down.
A school uniform. Wrinkled. Torn. Dirt ground into the fabric. His hands were trembling, thin, pale, knuckles bruised purple and blue. He staggered toward a pothole filled with rainwater and stared at the reflection.
The face staring back wasn't Arin's.
Blond hair, matted and dirty. Eyes swollen nearly shut, bloodshot, and ringed with exhaustion. A young man, nineteen at most, stared back with an emptiness that made his chest tighten.
This wasn't Solkara, but Earth.
And he wasn't Arin.
The realization settled with a strange, muted calm.
"…Jason Smith," he murmured.
No panic. Just confusion. Thick, suffocating confusion.
Fragments of memories surged up, uninvited. A different life. A different world. A different kind of hell.
So this is my trial, he thought bitterly.
How unoriginal.
His legs shook as he staggered out of the alley, instinct guiding him through streets that felt both familiar and alien. He walked for a long time, ignoring the pain, ignoring the stares, until he reached a small, worn-down apartment building.
Home.
Or what passed for one.
He pushed the door open.
Silence.
No mother rushing over. No father asking where he'd been. No concern. No anger, even.
Nothing.
The emptiness was familiar.
Memories began to surface, slow at first, then relentless.
Jason had been a brilliant child once.
Smart. Well-mannered. Handsome. Always near the top of his class. Teachers praised him. Neighbors admired him. His parents smiled when they spoke his name.
He had been their pride.
Then his sister was born.
He loved her more fiercely than anyone. Held her when she cried. Protected her. Stayed awake beside her bed when she was sick. He had been there for every scraped knee, every nightmare.
But as they grew older, the balance shifted.
She was smarter. Sharper. Perfect.
Ninety-eight percent. Ninety-nine. A hundred.
His parents' eyes stopped following him.
Praise turned into comparison.
Comparison into disappointment.
Disappointment into contempt.
"Why can't you be more like your sister?"
"You're the older one. What's wrong with you?"
Eventually, they stopped pretending.
They called him a failure.
And the sister he had loved followed their lead.
"I don't have a brother," she said once, her voice cold and distant.
"Especially not a loser like you."
Something inside him broke that day.
The incidents blurred together after that.
His grades fell. He stopped trying. Depression wrapped around him like a fog that never lifted.
Then came the night his mother stared at his report card and began to cry, not in sorrow, but in disgust.
"I didn't give birth to such a stupid child," she sobbed to his father.
"I shouldn't have given birth to you at all."
"You should've died in my womb."
His father said nothing.
Just looked at him.
Indifferent. Detached. As if Jason were already dead.
His sister watched from the doorway.
Disgust etched plainly across her face.
Jason's appearance changed. He stopped caring. His hair grew unkempt. His eyes dulled. He became invisible until he became a target.
At school, the whispers started.
Then the laughter.
Then the fists.
The same children who once envied him now cornered him in hallways, beat him behind buildings. Left him bleeding on the roadside like garbage.
No one helped.
No one ever helped.
Games, Movies, Anime, Light novels, Mangas.
At first, they were an escape.
Then even those lost their color.
Nothing mattered anymore.
Not even pain.
Even the girl he had liked, the one person who used to follow him like a love-sick maiden, he'd foolishly believed might still see him as human, proved him wrong.
Her confession had never been real.
It was just a dare, a cruel joke. Something to pass the time.
She smiled as she said it, sweet and practiced, just enough to make his heart stutter. For a moment, he'd believed it. For one fragile, stupid moment, he'd thought maybe things were changing.
Then she laughed.
"You really thought I'd go out with a disgusting pig like you?"
The words landed harder than any fist.
She didn't look at him again.
And something inside him finally broke.
Laughter exploded around them, sharp, cruel, relentless. Fingers pointed. Someone whistled. Someone clapped, as if it were a performance worth applauding.
Hands shoved him from behind. He stumbled, caught himself, only to be kicked in the back of the knee and sent crashing to the ground. Someone yanked his collar, dragging him upright just to slam him back into the wall. Fists rained down, into his ribs, his stomach, his face, each blow stealing breath, each one accompanied by jeers and mockery.
"Look at him shaking."
"Didn't he used to be smart or something?"
They stripped him of what little dignity he had left. His clothes were torn away, tossed aside, stomped into the dirt. Cold air bit into his skin, but the shame burned hotter than anything else.
Then someone lit a cigarette.
He smelled it before he felt it.
A hand forced his jaw open. Fingers dug into his cheeks, stretching his mouth painfully wide. The cigarette pressed against his tongue, not long enough to kill him, just long enough to hurt. He screamed. They laughed harder.
Another burn, his arm this time. Then his shoulder. A deliberate, slow press, just to watch him flinch.
"Careful," one of them said mockingly, the glowing tip hovering near his eye. "Wouldn't want to ruin what little you've got left."
Tears streamed down his face. He begged, quietly at first, then louder, but it only encouraged them.
When they finally got bored, they left him there.
Curled on the ground. Shaking. Barely breathing.
He didn't know how long he lay there before he managed to stand. Didn't remember walking home. Only that every step felt like dragging a broken body through glass.
When he reached the apartment, bruised, burned, trembling—
No one asked what happened.
His mother looked at him and scoffed.
"Loser."
His father didn't even look up.
"Failure."
His sister glanced at him once, eyes full of disgust, then turned away.
"Why don't you just die?"
That night, Jason ran.
No one called after him.
No doors opened.
No footsteps followed.
He ran until his lungs burned raw, until bile crawled up his throat and his legs stopped obeying him. He stumbled through streets that didn't care, past houses glowing warm with lives that weren't known to him. His shoes filled with water from a broken gutter. His knees scraped the pavement when he fell, but he didn't stop.
Eventually, he reached a crosswalk.
He stood there for a long time. Thirty minutes. Maybe more. Time had stopped meaning anything. Below him, the road stretched on like a dark river, headlights carving brief lines through the night. His hands trembled. His body hurt everywhere. His mind was empty, not peaceful, just hollowed out.
Then light flooded his vision.
An engine roared.
A truck came screaming down the road, too fast, too heavy to stop.
Jason didn't think.
He smiled for the first time in years, small, broken, relieved.
And stepped forward.
Impact.
Bone shattered. Breath vanished. Pain flared for a heartbeat, white, overwhelming, then everything collapsed inward.
Darkness swallowed sound.
Silence smothered thought.
And that night, Jason Smith died.