The fluorescent lights of the Burger Barn flickered with the kind of passive-aggressive energy that suggested even the electricity was disappointed in Marcus Theodore Blackwell III's life choices. Not that he'd had much choice in the matter. That was sort of the whole point, wasn't it? The cosmic joke that nobody bothered to tell you until you were already drowning in it.
Marcus stood behind the grease-stained counter, his brown hair matted with the kind of sweat that only came from standing next to industrial fryers for eight hours straight, and stared at the clock. The second hand moved like it was personally offended by the concept of time moving forward. Each tick felt like a small death. Each tock, a reminder that he still had three hours and forty-seven minutes left in his shift.
"Hey! Hey, burger guy! I said NO pickles! What's wrong with you? Can't you understand basic English? NO. PICKLES. It's two words! Two! Even my five-year-old can understand two words, and he still thinks the moon is made of cheese!"
Marcus looked down at the burger in question. There were, in fact, no pickles on it. There had never been pickles on it. He had specifically remembered this woman's screeching request and had gone out of his way to ensure that not a single molecule of pickle had contaminated her precious Quarter Pounder knockoff.
"Ma'am, there are no pickles on your—"
"DON'T YOU 'MA'AM' ME! I CAN SEE THE PICKLE JUICE! IT'S RIGHT THERE! THE BREAD IS GREEN! THAT'S PICKLE CONTAMINATION!"
Marcus looked at the bread. It was not green. It was the same vaguely yellowish-brown color that all Burger Barn buns came in, a color that food scientists had probably spent millions of dollars engineering to look just appetizing enough that people wouldn't question what they were actually eating.
"That's just... that's just the bread color, ma'am. It comes like that from—"
"I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR MANAGER!"
Of course she did. Of course.
Marcus turned around, his soul departing his body somewhere between the fry station and the soft drink machine, and walked toward the back office where his manager, a twenty-two-year-old named Skyler who had somehow failed upward into a position of minor authority, was probably scrolling through TikTok instead of doing inventory.
This was his life now.
Thirty-four years old. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science that he'd gone forty-three thousand dollars into debt for. A certification in game development that he'd spent two additional years earning. Dreams of creating worlds, of crafting stories, of making something that mattered.
And here he was.
Burger Barn.
Ten dollars an hour.
No pickles.
The thing about the American Dream, Marcus had realized somewhere around his twenty-seventh birthday, was that it was less of a dream and more of a collective hallucination. A mass delusion propagated by people who had either gotten incredibly lucky, inherited their success, or were simply lying through their teeth about how they'd achieved it.
He remembered being seven years old, sitting in Mrs. Patterson's second-grade classroom, a bright-eyed kid with a Pokemon lunchbox and the unshakeable belief that the world was fundamentally good. Mrs. Patterson had stood at the front of the room, her floral dress swaying as she gestured enthusiastically, and said the words that would haunt Marcus for the rest of his life:
"You can be anything you want to be! You just have to believe in yourself and work hard!"
And Marcus had believed her. Why wouldn't he? She was an adult. Adults knew things. Adults had figured out the secrets of the universe and were generously sharing them with the next generation.
He remembered being twelve, sitting in Mr. Henderson's sixth-grade homeroom, still believing. Still dreaming. Mr. Henderson had shown them a video about careers, about possibilities, about the endless opportunities that awaited them in the adult world. "The only limit," the narrator had said with the kind of confidence that could only come from someone who had never worked a service job in their life, "is your imagination."
Marcus had imagined being a game developer. He'd spent hours drawing character designs in the margins of his notebooks, writing story outlines instead of doing his math homework, learning the basics of programming on his family's ancient desktop computer.
He remembered being seventeen, sitting in his high school guidance counselor's office, still somehow maintaining the flickering flame of hope despite mounting evidence that the world was not, in fact, a meritocracy. Mrs. Chen had smiled warmly, her desk covered in college brochures and career aptitude tests, and assured him that if he just got good grades, went to a good college, and got a degree, success would follow.
"The games industry is very competitive," she'd admitted, "but with your passion and talent, I'm sure you'll find your way."
Find his way.
Ha.
Ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Marcus had found his way, alright. He'd found his way to a degree that no one wanted to hire him for, a job market that demanded five years of experience for entry-level positions, and a economy that seemed specifically designed to extract every last drop of hope from the human spirit.
He'd applied to over two hundred game development positions after graduation. Two hundred and forty-seven, to be exact. He'd kept a spreadsheet. He was organized like that. Responsible. The kind of person who did everything right.
He'd gotten three interviews.
One had told him he was "overqualified" for the position. He still wasn't sure how that worked. How could you be too qualified for a job you were applying for? That was like saying someone was too tall to play basketball.
One had told him they were "looking for someone with more experience." He'd had an internship. He'd had personal projects. He'd had a portfolio of games he'd made on his own. But apparently, that wasn't "real" experience. Real experience, it seemed, could only be gained by already having real experience. It was a beautiful catch-22 that would have made Joseph Heller weep.
One had simply never called him back. Not even a rejection email. Just... silence. An endless void of professional ghosting.
And so Marcus had done what every responsible adult was supposed to do when their dreams crumbled to dust: he'd gotten a "real" job. Something to "pay the bills" while he "figured things out."
That was eight years ago.
He was still figuring things out.
"Marcus! Earth to Marcus! Are you even listening to me?"
Marcus blinked, his thoughts scattering like startled pigeons. His shift had ended (somehow, miraculously, the universe had allowed time to pass), and he was now standing in his parents' kitchen, his mother waving a hand in front of his face with the kind of exasperation that only came from thirty-four years of dealing with him.
"Sorry, Mom. What were you saying?"
Linda Blackwell sighed the sigh of a woman who had raised three children, buried one husband, and somehow maintained her sanity through it all. She was sixty-three years old, her once-blonde hair now a dignified silver, and she had the kind of tired patience that suggested she'd seen it all and was no longer surprised by anything.
"I was asking if you're going to eat dinner with us tonight or if you're going to hide in your room again."
Ah. There it was. The subtle disappointment. The unspoken question that lingered beneath every interaction: When are you going to get your life together?
Marcus was thirty-four years old and living with his parents. He knew how that looked. He knew what society thought of him. Man-child. Failure. Loser. Pathetic millennial who couldn't cut it in the real world.
Never mind that his ten-dollar-an-hour job barely covered his student loan payments. Never mind that apartments in their area started at fifteen hundred dollars a month, which was more than he made in a month. Never mind that the math simply didn't work, that the numbers didn't add up, that the equation of modern life was fundamentally broken.
No, no. The problem was clearly him. His lack of motivation. His failure to bootstrap himself into success. His inability to manifest his destiny or whatever other pseudo-spiritual garbage the self-help gurus were peddling these days.
"I'll eat with you guys," Marcus said, forcing a smile that probably looked as fake as it felt. "Just let me change first. I smell like a deep fryer."
"You always smell like a deep fryer."
"Yes, Mom. That's sort of the point."
He trudged up the stairs to his childhood bedroom, which was exactly as depressing as it sounded. The walls were still covered in posters from his high school years: video game characters, anime heroes, bands that had long since broken up. His twin bed was still pushed against the same wall where it had been when he was sixteen. His desk, once covered in homework and game development notes, was now buried under a pile of overdue bills and job rejection emails he couldn't bring himself to throw away.
Marcus sat down on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall.
His phone buzzed. A text from his ex-wife.
JENNIFER: Your child support is late AGAIN. This is the third time this year Marcus. I'm calling my lawyer.
Ah, yes. Jennifer. The woman who had promised to love him forever and had lasted exactly eleven months and sixteen days before deciding that actually, she didn't.
He tried to remember why he'd married her. He really did. There must have been something, right? Some spark, some connection, some reason beyond "we were both lonely and our families were pressuring us to settle down."
But all he could remember now was the fighting. The endless, exhausting fighting. About money (there was never enough). About housework (he did too much of it, according to her, because it made her feel guilty, and also he didn't do enough of it, because she still had to do some of it). About his "lack of ambition" (this from a woman who had quit three jobs in two years because her coworkers were "too mean").
Jennifer had wanted a provider. A breadwinner. A man who could afford to give her the life she deserved. And when it became clear that Marcus was not, and would never be, that man, she had left.
She'd taken the car. She'd taken the furniture. She'd taken their two kids, Tyler and Madison, ages eight and six respectively, and moved back in with her parents in another state.
Now Marcus saw his children twice a year, if he was lucky, and even then they barely looked up from their tablets. Last Christmas, he'd tried to show Tyler his old Nintendo 64, tried to share the magic of Ocarina of Time, tried to create some kind of intergenerational bonding moment.
Tyler had looked at the chunky controller with visible disgust. "This is so old. Why doesn't it have touch screen? Can I go back to my iPad now? My Roblox tower defense is about to start."
Marcus had never felt more ancient in his life.
MARCUS: I get paid Friday. I'll send it then.
JENNIFER: That's what you said last month.
MARCUS: I actually did send it last month. You cashed the check on the 15th.
JENNIFER: Whatever. Just don't be late again. The kids need things.
The kids need things. Right. Things like iPads and Roblox gift cards and whatever else they were into these days. Not a father, apparently. Not quality time or life lessons or any of the stuff that Marcus's own dad had tried to give him before the cancer took him.
No, they just needed things.
Everything was about things.
Marcus flopped backward onto his bed and stared at the ceiling. A water stain had formed in the corner, shaped vaguely like a skull. That felt appropriate somehow.
He thought about his manga.
He hadn't thought about it in years, really thought about it, but suddenly it was there, vivid and bright in his mind's eye, the story he'd spent his teenage years developing. The characters he'd loved like they were real people. The world he'd built, piece by piece, dream by dream.
Untitled Cleaner Manga, he'd called it, because he'd never been able to settle on a proper name. Everything he came up with felt either too edgy or too generic. But the story itself? The story was good. He knew it was good. Or at least, he knew it could have been good, if he'd ever gotten the chance to tell it.
Edge, the protagonist with the living trench coat. Lucy, the gun-wielding airhead who was simultaneously the most dangerous and most oblivious person in any room. The muscle-bound idiot whose name Marcus had never quite decided on (he'd gone back and forth between "Brick" and "Tank" and "Chad," never settling on anything permanent).
The Cleaners, who dealt with corrupted Full Bonds. The outskirts, where they lived and trained. New Dawn City, gleaming and advanced and completely dependent on the people society overlooked.
It was all still there, preserved in amber somewhere in his mind, waiting for a creator who would never come.
Because that was the other thing about dreams: they didn't die clean. They didn't disappear all at once. They lingered. They haunted you. They showed up at 2 AM when you couldn't sleep, whispering about what could have been, what should have been, what you'd sacrificed on the altar of "being realistic."
Marcus had looked into the manga industry, once. When he was twenty-three and still stupid enough to think he might have a chance. He'd researched how Western artists could break into the Japanese market, how original English-language manga were starting to gain traction, how the rise of digital publishing had opened new doors.
And then he'd learned about the reality.
The eighteen-hour workdays. The assistants sleeping under their desks. The deadlines that never stopped coming. The health problems that plagued every mangaka who lasted more than a few years. The cancellation rates at publishers like Shonen Jump, where more series were axed than ever got the chance to find their audience.
One website had tracked every series that debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump over a twenty-year period. Out of hundreds of series, only a handful had reached proper conclusions. The rest had been cancelled, their stories cut short, their potential forever unfulfilled.
That was the dream. That was what you were fighting for. A chance to work yourself to death for a 90% probability of failure.
Marcus had quietly closed his browser and tried to forget.
But you never really forgot, did you? You just buried it. Packed it away in some dusty corner of your soul and pretended it wasn't there, even as it slowly rotted and poisoned everything around it.
Marcus's phone buzzed again.
MOM: Dinner's ready. Come down before it gets cold.
He looked at the water stain skull. The skull looked back.
"This is fine," Marcus said to no one. "Everything is fine."
Dinner was meatloaf. Marcus's mom made excellent meatloaf, at least, so there was one thing in his life that wasn't a complete disappointment.
He sat at the kitchen table across from his mother, his stepfather Harold reading the newspaper like it was still 1985, and tried to focus on the food rather than the crushing weight of existential despair pressing down on his skull.
"So," Harold said without looking up from his paper, "any luck with the job search?"
The job search. Right. The eternal job search. The Sisyphean task of applying to positions he was either overqualified or underqualified for, getting rejected from both, and somehow finding the will to do it all again the next day.
"Still looking," Marcus said.
"Hmm." Harold turned a page. "You know, when I was your age, I walked right into the steel mill, shook the foreman's hand, and got hired on the spot. Worked there for thirty-five years."
Marcus resisted the urge to scream.
"Things are a little different now, Harold."
"Are they? Seems to me like people just don't want to work anymore. All these young folks with their phones and their video games, expecting everything to be handed to them."
Marcus took a very long, very slow breath.
"The average entry-level job now requires three to five years of experience," he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. "Wages have been stagnant for four decades while the cost of living has tripled. A house that cost thirty thousand dollars in 1980 now costs three hundred thousand. College tuition has increased by over one thousand percent. The economy is fundamentally—"
"There he goes again with the excuses." Harold shook his head. "In my day—"
"Harold." Linda's voice was sharp enough to cut glass. "That's enough."
Harold grumbled but went back to his newspaper.
Marcus stared at his meatloaf and tried to remember what hope felt like.
After dinner, he retreated back to his room, the only space in the world that was truly his (and even that was borrowed, rented, temporary). He sat at his desk and opened his laptop, a machine so old that it wheezed audibly whenever he asked it to do anything more complicated than load a web page.
He should be applying for jobs. He should be updating his resume. He should be networking on LinkedIn, reaching out to contacts, doing all the things that career counselors and self-help books insisted would lead to success.
Instead, he opened a folder he hadn't touched in years.
MANGA_PROJECT_DO_NOT_DELETE
Inside were hundreds of files. Character designs. World-building documents. Plot outlines. Script drafts. Everything he'd ever created for his untitled Cleaner manga, preserved like fossils from a more hopeful era.
He clicked on a file at random.
CHARACTER_PROFILE_EDGE_V7.docx
Edge (working name - need something cooler)
Age: 17-19 (depending on story timeline)
Height: 5'11"
Build: Lean but athletic
Appearance: Think 90s punk aesthetic. Spiked black hair. Perpetual scowl. Skull t-shirt under a long black trench coat that is literally alive and bonded to his soul.
Personality: Comes across as edgy (hence the working name, ha ha) and antisocial, but this is a defense mechanism developed from years of living in the Outskirts. Actually deeply caring and protective of his team. Has a dry sense of humor that takes time to emerge. Gets embarrassed when people point out his softer side.
Backstory: Orphaned young (cliché, I know, but it works for the setting). Raised in the Outskirts by an old Cleaner who died during a Level 4 corruption event. Blames himself for not being strong enough to help. Drives his obsession with becoming stronger.
ABILITIES (Trench Coat Full Bond - "The Abyss"):
Level 1: Can reach into coat and pull out small objects. Mostly random. Once pulled out a sandwich and wasn't sure if it was his or if the coat generated it. (Comedy beat)
Level 2: More control over what he pulls out. Can summon specific items if he concentrates. Items become more useful (weapons, tools, etc.)
Level 3: Coat becomes semi-sentient. Can move on its own, extend to grab things, create tendrils for combat. Edge can pull out increasingly powerful items, including Level 3 awakened objects.
Level 4 (Full Bond): The coat becomes a true symbiote. Can form armor around Edge's body. Can teleport by wrapping around him and "folding" through space. Can open pocket dimensions within itself. Can pull out fragments of eldritch entities (dangerous, hurts to use, last resort). Energy blasts. The coat can speak directly into Edge's mind now. They argue sometimes. (Good comedy potential)
SECONDARY ABILITY (Guitar Full Bond - "The Beat"):
(Acquired during story, not starting equipment)
Edge finds an old electric guitar in an abandoned concert hall during a mission. The guitar responds to him, awakens, and eventually reaches Full Bond.
The Beat is the rhythm of existence. Everything has a Beat - objects, people, animals, even concepts. With his guitar, Edge can:
- "Hear" the Beat of his surroundings (early chapters, sensing danger)
- Manipulate the Beat of objects (mid-story, making things move, breaking structures)
- Manipulate the Beat of opponents (late-story, controlling enemy movement temporarily)
- Create Concert State (Full Bond ability): An area of effect where The Beat is amplified. Edge becomes a one-man symphony of destruction. Music notes become physical projectiles. Sound waves can heal allies. Reality bends to the song.
Marcus stared at the words he'd written over a decade ago and felt something crack in his chest.
This was good.
This was genuinely good.
Not perfect, sure. There were rough edges and clichés and ideas that needed more development. But the core was there. The heart was there. The thing that made stories matter was there.
And it would never exist.
Because dreams didn't matter. Because the world didn't care about good ideas or passion or potential. Because Marcus was thirty-four years old, working at Burger Barn, living with his parents, and slowly dying one minimum wage hour at a time.
He closed the file.
He closed the laptop.
He lay down on his bed and stared at the water stain skull.
"I should have listened," he said to the ceiling. "When everyone told me to give up, I should have listened. Would have saved me a lot of pain."
The water stain skull, being a water stain, did not respond.
Marcus closed his eyes.
He opened them again, and everything was wrong.
The ceiling was different. Not the off-white of his childhood bedroom, with its water stain skull and flickering light fixture, but a deep gray, almost black, made of some material he didn't recognize.
The bed was different too. Harder. Narrower. And covered in fabric that felt like leather but somehow softer.
Marcus sat up, and his body felt wrong.
Not bad wrong. Just... wrong. Like he was wearing a suit that almost fit but not quite. Like his limbs were slightly longer than they should be, his muscles slightly more defined, his center of gravity slightly different.
He looked down at his hands.
They were not his hands.
Oh, they had the same basic structure – five fingers, palm, wrist, the usual hand stuff – but the skin was paler than his, smoother, younger. And there, on the back of his right hand, was a tattoo he'd never gotten in his life: a swirling pattern of black lines that seemed to move when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Marcus very calmly processed this information.
Then he screamed.
"WHAT THE FU—"
A door he hadn't noticed burst open, and a figure rushed in. A figure with bright pink hair, impossibly large eyes, and a body that seemed specifically designed to give teenage boys confusing feelings.
"Edge! Edge, are you okay?! I heard screaming and I thought maybe the corruption got in again like last time when that Level 3 snake thing phased through the walls and tried to eat your face and you had to use The Beat to vibrate its molecules apart which was really cool but also kind of gross because snake guts got everywhere and—"
Marcus stared at the talking anime girl in front of him.
The talking anime girl stared back.
"Edge? You're looking at me weird. Weirder than usual, I mean. You always look at me kind of weird, but not like weird weird, more like confused weird, which is weird because we've known each other for like six years so you'd think you'd be used to me by now but—"
"Lucy?" Marcus said, and his voice wasn't his voice. It was younger. Deeper. With a slight rasp that suggested years of yelling over loud music or battle or both.
The girl—Lucy—tilted her head. "Yeah? That's my name? You know that? Did you hit your head? Oh no, did you hit your head?! I told you that training exercise was too dangerous but you said, and I quote, 'danger is just opportunity wearing a scary mask,' which sounds really cool but also doesn't make any sense because masks aren't scary, well some masks are scary, like that one corrupted Level 4 we fought last month with the porcelain doll face that kept screaming about how it wanted to wear our skins as a coat which—"
"Lucy," Marcus said again, slowly, carefully, like he was trying not to spook a wild animal or break reality more than it was already broken. "I need you to answer a question for me."
"Okay!"
"Where am I?"
Lucy blinked. Then she blinked again. Then she started laughing.
"Oh, Edge! You're so funny! 'Where am I,' he says, like he doesn't know where he—" She stopped laughing. Her eyes narrowed. "Wait. You're serious. You're actually serious right now. I can tell because you're making your 'I'm actually serious right now' face, which is different from your regular face because your eyebrows do this little—"
"LUCY."
"You're in the base! The Outskirts HQ! Building 7, Room 342, your personal quarters! The room you've lived in for four years! With the poster of The Screaming Skulls that you definitely didn't put up even though everyone saw you put it up! And the secret collection of romance novels under your bed that you think nobody knows about but everyone totally knows about!"
Marcus looked around the room. Really looked this time.
It was exactly as he'd imagined it. Or not imagined, exactly – designed. Written. Created in his mind all those years ago when he was young and stupid and thought dreams meant something.
The dark walls. The minimalist furniture. The poster of a fictional band called The Screaming Skulls that he'd invented for a throwaway joke about Edge's secret love of loud music. Even a bed with a suspiciously book-shaped lump under the mattress that he'd included as a running gag about the tough protagonist having a soft spot for cheesy romance.
This was his manga.
He was in his manga.
He was Edge.
He was—
Marcus looked at his reflection in a small mirror hanging on the wall. A young man stared back at him. Black hair, spiked up at impossible angles. Pale skin. Dark eyes that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Sharp features arranged in what appeared to be a permanent scowl.
And draped over his shoulders, moving slightly as if breathing, was a long black trench coat that he somehow knew was more than just fabric.
The coat shifted. Rippled. And a voice spoke directly into his mind.
"YOU SEEM... DIFFERENT TODAY."
Marcus screamed again.
It took about an hour for Marcus to stop screaming.
It took another hour for him to convince Lucy that he hadn't been possessed by a corruption entity and didn't need to be shot "just in case."
It took a third hour for him to sit down, take a deep breath, and try to process the absolute insanity that had become his existence.
He was in his manga.
He was the main character of his manga.
The manga he'd created when he was a teenager.
The manga that didn't exist because he'd never actually written it.
The manga that was now, apparently, reality.
"YOU KEEP THINKING IN CIRCLES," the coat observed. It had introduced itself as The Abyss, which was the name Marcus had given it in his notes, which meant his notes were real, which meant nothing made sense anymore. "IT IS SOMEWHAT ANNOYING."
"I'm having an existential crisis," Marcus said out loud. "Give me a minute."
"YOU HAVE BEEN HAVING THIS CRISIS FOR THREE HOURS."
"Well, excuse me for not adjusting instantly to BEING TRANSPORTED INTO A FICTIONAL WORLD I CREATED!"
"...AH."
That got the coat's attention. The fabric rippled in what Marcus somehow knew was curiosity.
"EXPLAIN."
And so Marcus did. He told the coat – The Abyss, God, he was talking to a coat – about his previous life. About Earth. About Burger Barn and student loans and the death of dreams. About creating this world, this story, these characters, as a way to escape from a reality that didn't want him.
About dying.
He must have died. That was the only explanation that made sense. He'd gone to sleep in his childhood bedroom and simply... not woken up. Heart attack, maybe. Aneurysm. The universe finally putting him out of his misery.
And somehow, impossibly, his consciousness had ended up here.
"FASCINATING," The Abyss said when he finished. "YOU ARE CLAIMING TO BE OUR CREATOR."
"I mean, technically, yes? I came up with the concept, the world-building, the characters. You. I designed you during a particularly boring history class in tenth grade."
"I DO NOT KNOW WHAT 'TENTH GRADE' IS, BUT I FIND MYSELF STRANGELY UNSURPRISED BY YOUR CLAIM."
"Really?"
"NO. I AM EXTREMELY SURPRISED. I AM SIMPLY VERY GOOD AT HIDING IT."
"You're a coat. You don't have facial expressions."
"EXACTLY."
Marcus laughed. It was a slightly hysterical laugh, the kind that happened when your brain simply gave up trying to process reality, but it was a laugh nonetheless.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. So I'm here. I'm Edge. I have a living coat and apparently a guitar somewhere that lets me manipulate the fundamental rhythm of existence. Cool. Cool cool cool. This is fine."
"YOU DO NOT SOUND FINE."
"I am definitely not fine. But I've spent the last decade pretending to be fine while working soul-crushing minimum wage jobs, so I'm pretty good at it."
A knock on the door interrupted whatever existential breakthrough Marcus was about to have.
"Edge?" Lucy's voice, muffled through the door. "Are you done being weird? Because Brick says we have a mission and it's like a Level 3 and you know how he gets when we're late, all 'discipline builds character' and 'muscles are the answer to everything' and—"
"Brick?" Marcus said. "So his name is Brick?"
"HIS NAME HAS ALWAYS BEEN BRICK."
Right. Of course. When Marcus couldn't decide on a name, the universe apparently just picked one and ran with it. Made as much sense as anything else.
"I'll be right out," Marcus called.
He stood up. His body moved differently than he was used to – smoother, more controlled, like it had been trained for combat. Which, he supposed, it had been. Edge was a Cleaner. A warrior. Someone who spent their life fighting eldritch abominations born from corrupted Full Bonds.
Marcus had spent his life fighting depression and the McDonald's ice cream machine that was always broken.
This was going to be interesting.
The Outskirts were exactly as Marcus had imagined them.
Rusted metal buildings stretched toward a perpetually gray sky. Streets paved with cracked concrete wound between warehouses and training facilities. The air smelled like ozone and something else, something that made the back of Marcus's neck prickle in a way that suggested danger.
Corruption. That was what he was smelling. The ambient corruption that seeped out from the Wastes, the areas where reality had broken down entirely.
The Cleaners existed to push back that corruption. To fight the monsters it created. To keep the normal world – New Dawn City and the countless other cities like it – safe from things most people didn't even know existed.
And now Marcus, a former burger flipper with no combat experience whatsoever, was one of them.
"Okay," he muttered to himself as he walked toward the mission briefing room, "okay, this is fine. I designed Edge to be competent. His muscle memory should handle the fighting. I just need to not do anything stupid."
"YOU SAY THAT AS IF NOT DOING ANYTHING STUPID IS EASY FOR YOU."
"First of all, rude. Second of all, you've known me for like three hours."
"AND IN THOSE THREE HOURS, YOU HAVE SCREAMED SEVEN TIMES, FALLEN OFF YOUR BED TWICE, AND ASKED LUCY IF SHE WAS 'REAL' IN A WAY THAT MADE HER VERY CONCERNED FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH."
"Fair point."
The briefing room was a large space filled with mismatched furniture, holographic displays, and about a dozen other Cleaners in various states of readiness. Marcus recognized some of them from his character notes – the woman with metal arms who could fire concentrated sound waves, the old man whose shadow moved independently of his body, the twins who shared a single telepathic link and finished each other's sentences.
Others he didn't recognize. Characters he'd never designed. People who existed in this world without his input.
That was... concerning. It meant the world had taken on a life of its own. That it was more than just the sum of Marcus's teenage imaginings. That it was real in a way he couldn't fully control or predict.
"Edge!"
A mountain of muscle with a face like a friendly boulder waved from across the room. Brick. The muscle-bound idiot with a heart of gold. Marcus had designed him as the team's tank, the guy who charged headfirst into danger and came out smiling.
Looking at him now, in the flesh (so much flesh, God, his biceps were bigger than Marcus's entire torso), Marcus felt a strange mix of pride and terror.
He'd created this man. This absurd, wonderful, terrifying man.
"You're late," Brick said as Marcus approached. "You're never late. Are you sick? Did something happen? Do you need a hug? Hugs solve most problems, you know. Not Level 4 corruptions, obviously, but most things."
"I'm fine," Marcus said, which was a lie but whatever. "What's the mission?"
Brick's perpetually cheerful expression flickered. Just for a moment. Just enough to let Marcus know that something was seriously wrong.
"Level 3 corruption. Downtown shopping district. Appeared about an hour ago, been growing since."
"Growing?"
"It started as a mannequin. Store display thing. Some woman's Full Bond apparently went wrong – her emotional attachment to looking good, to appearances, to being seen. The corruption fed on that. Now it's..."
Brick gestured toward the holographic display in the center of the room. An image flickered to life, and Marcus felt his stomach drop.
The thing on the screen might have once been a mannequin. Maybe. If you squinted. If you ignored the way its limbs had multiplied, the way its plastic face had split open to reveal row after row of porcelain teeth, the way its body had grown to the size of a small building and sprouted what looked like hundreds of smaller mannequin-things from its torso.
"We're calling it The Perfect Image," Brick said. "Level 3 and growing. If we don't stop it soon, it might hit Level 4."
Level 4. Full corruption. The point of no return, where a corrupted Bond became something that could threaten cities. Countries. Potentially the world, if left unchecked.
Marcus had designed Level 4s to be the big arc bosses. The enemies that required entire teams of Cleaners, complex strategies, and usually some kind of dramatic power-up to defeat.
He had not designed Level 4s with the expectation that he would actually have to fight one.
"ARE YOU FRIGHTENED?" The Abyss asked.
"Terrified," Marcus admitted silently.
"GOOD. FEAR KEEPS YOU ALIVE. JUST DON'T LET IT PARALYZE YOU."
Solid advice. Marcus took a deep breath, tried to channel the confidence that Edge was supposed to have, and nodded at Brick.
"Let's go kill a mannequin."
New Dawn City was beautiful.
That was the first thing Marcus noticed as the Cleaners' transport vehicle – a heavily armored van with what looked like an actual jet engine strapped to the back – raced through the streets. Glass and steel towers rose toward the sky, their surfaces covered in holographic advertisements and streaming data. Flying vehicles hummed overhead. People walked on elevated walkways, dressed in fashions that seemed equal parts futuristic and retro.
Marcus had designed this city during a particularly boring math class junior year. He'd wanted something that felt like Tokyo and New York had a baby, then that baby had been raised by cyberpunk aesthetic and given unlimited budget.
Seeing it in reality was... overwhelming.
"First time in the city proper in a while, huh?" Lucy asked from the seat next to him. She had materialized a massive rifle from somewhere (her awakened pistol could transform into pretty much any gun, Marcus remembered) and was checking its sights with practiced efficiency. "You usually avoid downtown like it's got the plague."
"I don't like crowds," Marcus said, because that seemed like something Edge would say.
"Yeah, you always say that, but I think you're just embarrassed because that time you accidentally pulled a live octopus out of your coat in the middle of a fancy restaurant and—"
"We don't talk about the octopus."
"We literally talk about it all the time! Brick has it saved as his ringtone!"
"THE OCTOPUS INCIDENT WAS NOT YOUR FINEST MOMENT," The Abyss agreed.
"I hate all of you."
"NO YOU DON'T."
No. He didn't. And that was maybe the strangest part of this whole situation. These people – Lucy with her endless chatter, Brick with his overwhelming positivity, even the sarcastic coat living on his shoulders – felt like family. Like friends he'd known his whole life.
Because in a way, he had. He'd created them. Shaped them. Given them personalities and histories and hopes and dreams.
And now they were real. And they cared about him. About Edge. About whoever Marcus was becoming in this world.
It was more than he'd had in his old life. More than the ex-wife who'd left him. More than the kids who wouldn't talk to him. More than the parents who loved him but couldn't understand why he couldn't just be normal.
Here, he had people who would die for him. Who would fight beside him. Who would—
The van screeched to a halt.
"We're here," the driver announced.
Marcus looked out the window.
The Perfect Image looked even worse in person.
The shopping district had been evacuated, thank God. Emergency barriers flickered with energy, keeping civilians away from the rapidly expanding corruption zone. But Marcus could still see the thing that had once been a mannequin, rising above the buildings like a nightmare given form.
It was easily ten stories tall now, its body a writhing mass of plastic and porcelain and something that might have been human flesh, integrated from who knew where. Hundreds of smaller figures crawled across its surface – miniature mannequins, each one wearing a different outfit, each one with that same terrible smile full of porcelain teeth.
The thing's voice echoed across the district, a chorus of discordant tones that somehow formed words:
"LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT ME. TELL ME I'M BEAUTIFUL. TELL ME I'M PERFECT. WHY WON'T YOU LOOK AT ME?"
"Well," Lucy said cheerfully, "that's terrifying."
"Level 3 my ass," Brick muttered. "Look at that thing. It's halfway to Level 4 already."
He was right. Marcus could feel it, in a way he couldn't quite explain – the wrongness radiating from The Perfect Image, the reality-warping pressure of a corruption that was growing beyond control. His notes had described this sensation, the way Cleaners could sense corruption levels instinctively, but experiencing it was something else entirely.
It felt like nails on a chalkboard. Like the moment before a thunderstorm. Like every bad feeling Marcus had ever experienced, concentrated and focused into a single point of existential dread.
"Orders?" someone asked. The woman with metal arms. Her name was... something. Marcus couldn't remember. He'd only sketched her briefly, a minor character meant to fill out the roster.
But she was real now. A real person, looking at him for guidance.
Because Edge was the leader. The protagonist. The one who made the hard calls.
Oh God.
"RELAX," The Abyss advised. "TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS. TRUST ME. WE'VE DONE THIS BEFORE."
"I haven't," Marcus thought back.
"EDGE HAS. AND YOU ARE EDGE NOW. THE KNOWLEDGE IS THERE. YOU JUST HAVE TO ACCESS IT."
Easy for you to say, Marcus thought. But he took a deep breath and tried.
He looked at The Perfect Image. Really looked. Analyzed it the way he'd analyzed game mechanics and story structures back when he thought he had a future in development.
The main body was the core. Obviously. That was where the corruption was centered, where the woman's twisted Full Bond had fused with her desires and spawned this nightmare. To truly stop it, they'd need to reach that core and either sever the Bond entirely or purify it.
But the smaller mannequins were the immediate threat. Hundreds of them, crawling and leaping and multiplying. Each one a fragment of The Perfect Image's consciousness, each one capable of attacking from multiple angles.
They needed crowd control. They needed someone to draw the main body's attention. And they needed a strike team to reach the core.
"Lucy," Marcus heard himself say, and his voice was Edge's voice now, confident and commanding. "You're on crowd control. Use wide-area suppression, keep the smaller ones off our backs."
"Got it!" Lucy's rifle shifted, the metal flowing like liquid, reforming into something that looked like a cross between a minigun and a cannon.
"Brick. You're the distraction. Get in close, make noise, hit it as hard as you can. I need its attention on you."
Brick grinned, his muscles already beginning to glow with the heat of his awakened power. "My favorite kind of job."
"Everyone else, support positions. Keep the perimeter secure, assist where needed. The Abyss and I are going for the core."
"FINALLY. I WAS GETTING BORED."
Marcus stepped forward. The coat on his shoulders shifted, extending, wrapping around him like armor. He felt power flowing through him – the power of Edge, the power of The Abyss, the power of a Full Bond that had been designed to be one of the strongest in this world.
He'd created this. He'd imagined this. He'd dreamed of this during all those lonely nights when reality felt too heavy to bear.
And now he was living it.
"Let's go," Edge said.
And charged toward the monster.
Fighting was nothing like Marcus had expected.
He'd played video games. He'd watched anime. He'd read countless manga and written fight scenes in his stories. He thought he understood how combat worked, at least on a theoretical level.
He was wrong.
The Perfect Image screamed as Brick's first punch connected, a haymaker that would have leveled a building, delivered with a fist literally wreathed in flames. The sound was physical, a wave of force that would have knocked Marcus off his feet if The Abyss hadn't anchored him to the ground.
"ANALYSIS COMPLETE," the coat rumbled in his mind. "THE CORE IS LOCATED APPROXIMATELY CENTER MASS, SEVENTEEN METERS UP. PROTECTED BY MULTIPLE LAYERS OF CORRUPTED FLESH AND APPROXIMATELY THREE HUNDRED SECONDARY ENTITIES."
"Three hundred?!"
"GIVE OR TAKE."
Lucy's cannon-rifle opened fire, and the sound was like thunder. Massive shells of pure energy tore through the smaller mannequins, each one exploding in a shower of plastic and porcelain. But for every one she destroyed, two more seemed to take its place.
"THERE ARE MORE COMING FROM WITHIN THE MAIN BODY. THE CREATURE IS REGENERATING THEM FASTER THAN THEY CAN BE DESTROYED."
"Then we need to stop the regeneration. Reach the core, sever the Bond."
"AGREED. INITIATING ASSAULT PROTOCOL."
The Abyss extended.
Tendrils of living darkness shot from Marcus's coat, wrapping around a nearby light pole, and suddenly he was flying. Swinging through the air like some kind of nightmare Spider-Man, carried by the coat he'd designed during a boring tenth-grade history class.
The wind roared in his ears. The smaller mannequins reached for him, their porcelain fingers grasping, but The Abyss knocked them aside with contemptuous ease. Marcus reached into the coat, his hand plunging into a darkness that went deeper than fabric, and pulled.
A weapon emerged. A crowbar, glowing with strange energy. He recognized it from his notes – a Level 2 awakened object, capable of prying open anything, including spatial barriers.
He threw it.
The crowbar spun through the air and struck The Perfect Image's chest, digging deep into the corrupted flesh. Reality cracked around it, just slightly, just enough for Marcus to see a glimpse of the core within.
"THERE. THE BOND IS VISIBLE. YOU NEED TO REACH IT."
"Working on it."
Marcus swung again, higher this time, the coat carrying him in a dizzying arc around The Perfect Image's body. Mannequins leaped at him from every direction, but the coat was faster, always faster, extending and retracting and reforming into whatever shape was needed.
A tendril became a blade, slicing through three mannequins at once. Another became a shield, blocking a spray of porcelain teeth. A third became a hook, catching a building ledge and redirecting his momentum at the last possible second.
Below, Brick had entered what he called "Heat Mode." His entire body was glowing now, muscles steaming with thermal energy, each punch sending shockwaves through The Perfect Image's lower body. The creature was screaming, a constant, ear-piercing sound of rage and pain and desperate need.
"WHY WON'T YOU LOOK AT ME?! WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME?! I'M PERFECT! I'M BEAUTIFUL! LOOK! LOOK! LOOOOOK!"
Somewhere under all that corruption, Marcus realized, was a person. A woman who had just wanted to be seen. To be appreciated. To be loved.
And something had gone wrong. Her Full Bond, instead of empowering her, had consumed her. Twisted her desires into this nightmare.
Could she be saved?
"UNLIKELY," The Abyss said, reading his thoughts. "THE CORRUPTION IS TOO ADVANCED. THE WOMAN IS GONE. ONLY THE MONSTER REMAINS."
Marcus gritted his teeth. This was what he'd designed, what he'd wanted – a dark world where choices were hard and victories came with costs. He hadn't thought about what it would feel like to actually live those choices.
To be the one who decided if someone could be saved or had to be destroyed.
He pushed the thoughts aside. Later. He could have his existential crisis later. Right now, he had a job to do.
Marcus reached the crack in The Perfect Image's chest. The crowbar was still lodged there, maintaining the opening, letting him see the core within – a pulsing mass of light and darkness, beautiful and terrible, the corrupted heart of someone's dream.
He reached into his coat again. Deeper this time. Past the weapons and the tools and the random objects that The Abyss could summon. Down into the darkness itself.
"CAREFUL," The Abyss warned. "WHAT YOU'RE ATTEMPTING—"
"I know what I'm attempting."
Full Bond ability. Level 4 power. The thing he'd designed as Edge's ultimate technique, used only in the most desperate circumstances because the cost was so high.
Pulling fragments of eldritch entities from within The Abyss itself.
His hand closed around something. Something that writhed. Something that screamed in frequencies that human ears couldn't hear but human souls could feel.
He pulled.
The thing that emerged from his coat was not meant for this reality. It was a shard of something greater, something older, something that existed in the spaces between dimensions. It looked like a blade, but also like an eye, but also like a mouth, but also like nothing human language had words for.
The Perfect Image recoiled.
"NO! NO NO NO! WHAT IS THAT?! DON'T—DON'T LOOK AT ME WITH THAT—I'M NOT—I DON'T—"
"I'm sorry," Marcus said. And he meant it. "I'm sorry you ended up like this. I'm sorry no one saw you when you needed to be seen. But I can't let you hurt anyone else."
He plunged the eldritch blade into the core.
The world went white.
Then black.
Then a color that Marcus didn't have a name for.
He felt the corruption dying, felt the twisted Full Bond coming undone, felt the soul of the woman who had become The Perfect Image finally, finally being released from the nightmare she'd been trapped in.
For just a moment, he saw her. Not the monster, but her. A middle-aged woman with sad eyes and laugh lines. Someone who had spent her whole life feeling invisible, overlooked, unappreciated.
Someone like Marcus, in a way. Someone whose dreams had curdled into bitterness.
"Thank you," she whispered. And then she was gone.
Marcus blinked.
He was lying on the ground. The shopping district was destroyed – buildings collapsed, streets cracked, debris everywhere. But the corruption was gone. The Perfect Image was gone. The smaller mannequins had dissolved into piles of inert plastic.
They'd won.
"Edge! EDGE!"
Lucy was running toward him, her face streaked with tears and dust. Brick was right behind her, no longer glowing but still looking ready to fight the world.
"Are you okay?! You used the eldritch thing! You NEVER use the eldritch thing! Brick, he used the eldritch thing!"
"I saw. That was incredibly stupid and brave. Mostly stupid. But also brave."
Marcus tried to sit up. His entire body felt like it had been put through a blender. The Abyss was silent, which probably meant the coat was recovering from the strain of summoning an eldritch fragment.
"Did we get it?" he managed.
"Yeah." Lucy laughed, a slightly hysterical sound. "Yeah, we got it. Level 3 corrupted, contained and eliminated. Well, mostly eliminated. Some of the smaller ones got away, but the cleanup crews can handle those."
Marcus let himself fall back onto the ground.
The sky above was gray, as always in the Outskirts. But through the gray, he could see the distant gleam of New Dawn City's towers. Real. Alive. Safe, at least for today.
This was his world now. The world he'd created. The world where dreams mattered, where power meant something, where people like Edge could make a difference.
It was violent. It was dangerous. It was filled with monsters and corruption and the constant threat of everything falling apart.
But it was better than Burger Barn.
It was better than ten dollars an hour.
It was better than a life where nothing he did would ever change anything.
"WE NEED TO TALK," The Abyss said, finally recovering enough to speak. "ABOUT WHAT YOU TOLD ME EARLIER. ABOUT BEING OUR... CREATOR."
"Later," Marcus said. "Let me enjoy the moment first."
"YOU ARE LYING IN A PILE OF DEBRIS SURROUNDED BY THE REMAINS OF A NIGHTMARE CREATURE. THIS IS A STRANGE THING TO ENJOY."
"You'd be surprised what counts as a good day when your baseline is fast food service."
"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU AT ALL."
"Join the club."
Lucy helped him stand. Brick clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to nearly knock him down again. The other Cleaners gathered around, congratulating each other on a mission successful, already planning the paperwork and the cleanup and the inevitable bureaucratic nightmare that came after every operation.
Normal. Routine. Just another day in the life of a Cleaner.
Except Marcus wasn't just a Cleaner.
He was the author. The creator. The god of this world, in a way, though a god who had been reduced to playing a character in his own story.
And as he looked around at the destruction and the people and the world that had somehow become real, Marcus felt something he hadn't felt in years.
Hope.
Not the stupid, naive hope of his youth. Not the desperate hope that kept getting crushed by reality. But something new. Something tempered by experience and loss and the knowledge that the world wasn't fair.
Hope anyway. Hope despite everything. Hope because he finally, finally had the power to make things change.
"Come on," Lucy said, tugging at his arm. "Let's go home. I think you've earned a rest."
Home. The Outskirts. A room with a water stain-free ceiling and a coat that was literally alive and friends who would fight eldritch abominations by his side.
It wasn't perfect. It wasn't what he'd planned. But it was his.
Marcus smiled – not Edge's perpetual scowl, but a real smile, the kind that came from somewhere deep inside.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's go home."
And as he walked away from the battlefield, the coat wrapped comfortable around his shoulders and the future stretching out before him like an unwritten manga page, Marcus Theodore Blackwell III – former burger flipper, failed game developer, divorced father, and disappointment to society – finally, finally felt like he was exactly where he was meant to be.
This was chapter one.
The story was just beginning.
And for the first time in his life, Marcus couldn't wait to see what happened next.
TO BE CONTINUED...