Chapter One
The fan was screaming again.
Not a whir. Not a hum. A ragged, metallic shriek a 2021-gen chassis doing work it was never built for, four years past its prime and still going because nothing better had come along to replace it. Marshal's wrist rested on the edge of the box the laptop had shipped in, the cardboard gone soft and grey where his skin had worn it down over two years of use.
On screen: Ironveil. The old swordsman raised his blade for the forty-seventh time that session.
Clang. Whoosh.
The parry window flashed white. Marshal's thumb twitched a half-frame late.
YOU DIED.
He didn't slam the desk. Didn't swear. He exhaled through his nose, tapped to restart, and reset his shoulders the same small ritual, every time. He wasn't the kind of person who broke. He was the kind who kept going until whatever was killing him got tired first.
Sixteen gigabytes of RAM sat in that machine now, installed with shaking hands at 2 AM, a tutorial propped against a water bottle for light. Three months of saving for it. Before that, months of gym shifts to pay his dad back for the laptop itself money borrowed from the neighbors, repaid one session at a time, rupee by rupee, until the debt was his and not his father's anymore.
Nobody in the house understood what any of it was for.
The door swung open without a knock. A splash of cold orange juice hit the back of his neck.
"Wha" Marshal nearly headbutted the monitor.
Manya was already retreating, glass half-empty, grinning like she'd just won something. "There. You're cool now."
"I'll get you for that."
"Yeah, yeah." She was gone before he could turn the chair around.
He almost smiled. Almost.
The front door opened at exactly 3:00 PM, and the house changed shape around it.
His dad's footsteps were heavier than usual the weight of a long shift and a longer mood. Marshal heard him pause in the hallway outside the room, and the conversation was already forming in the air before either of them said a word.
The door opened. His dad stood there in his work clothes, arms crossed.
"Gym owner called this week," he said. "Said you're not teaching well. Distracted."
Marshal didn't turn around. "I was running their sets."
"At what cost?" His dad's eyes went to the screen, then away from it, like he couldn't stand to look too long. "You were talking about a world title once. Now it's this. Even a coder with half your discipline would've built something real by now. A portfolio. A project. Something."
Marshal said nothing.
"If that job goes, I can't keep carrying the rest of it." His dad's voice didn't rise that was almost worse. "I'm getting old, son. Money isn't something I can keep pretending isn't a problem."
The laptop fan hummed between them, the only sound in the room.
Then his dad's tone shifted, and it was somehow harder to hear than the anger. "Look at what you've built in that body. Men twice your age would kill for that discipline. You're not a bum. You're not lazy. That's what makes this so hard to watch you're better than this, and you're choosing it anyway."
Marshal kept his eyes on the floor.
"And that friend of yours. Vince." His dad said the name like he'd been carrying it around all week. "You used to talk to him half the night. Laughing. Planning. He was going to help you with the career side of it said he knew people."
Silence.
"What happened to that?"
Marshal didn't answer. His dad nodded once, like the silence was the answer.
"You chase things that don't need you," he said, moving to the door. "And the things that could actually use you you let them go quiet."
He was gone before Marshal could figure out what to say back.
His mom's voice found the hallway before she did. "Leave him alone. At least he's not doing something bad. Not addicted to anything, not out running the streets like half the kids his age."
"That's a low bar," his dad said, somewhere out of sight.
"It's a real one." A pause. "You want to know what Priya's son is doing right now?"
His dad didn't answer that. The conversation ended the way most of theirs did not resolved, just distant.
His mom looked in on Marshal for a second on her way past. The look said I defended you don't make me regret it. Then she was gone too.
Manya came back a few minutes later with a fresh glass of juice, moving quieter than before. She didn't ask what happened. She set the glass down like noise might make it worse, then climbed onto his bed and sat cross-legged, saying nothing. That was her way of staying.
Marshal opened the laptop again. Not to the game.
One window. Pinned at the top of his desktop for four months now the AI he'd built himself, scraped together from open-source models over eight months of late nights until it learned to sound like someone talking back. He'd called it NAVI. Nobody outside this room knew it existed.
Above it, a second thread. Gray. Unanswered.
The last message was his own, sent on a Tuesday at 2 AM:
oi you alive or what?
No reply. Same as yesterday. Same as the forty days before that. Vince had gone offline mid-callout, mid-round, mid-sentence one day walking Marshal through crosshair placement and pre-aim angles, the next just gone. Profile gray. Status blank.
He's busy, Marshal had told himself. Time zones. He'd told himself a lot of things over four months.
He typed one more line.
it's been four months. still here if you are.
No checkmark. No green dot. Just the dark.
Marshal closed the lid.