He walked into his apartment like a ghost. He hadn't known Elin was home from the clinic. She was leaning on the back of the couch, a book resting in her lap, her golden hair a beacon of warmth in the dim light. She looked up as he entered, and her welcoming smile faltered, replaced by a look of deep concern.

"Sal? What's wrong?" she asked, her voice soft.

He didn't answer. He wanted to lie. He wanted to say he was just tired, that work was hard. But the words felt like ash in his mouth. How could he speak of his day when his hands still felt the phantom weight of the gun, when his soul was stained with the blood of a stranger?

She saw the way his shoulders were hunched, a new, defensive posture she'd never seen before. She saw the faint, almost imperceptible tremor in his hands. But most of all, she saw his eyes. The warm, kind light in them was gone, replaced by a hollow, haunted emptiness.

Elin rose from the couch and walked towards him, her own eyes, a clear, loving blue, filled with a gentle worry. "Salvador, you're scaring me. Talk to me."

As she reached out a hand to touch his cheek, he flinched. It was a violent, full-body recoil, a desperate stumble backward as if her touch were a naked flame. He raised a hand, not to strike, but as a ward, a shield to keep her, the one pure thing in his life, away from the filth that now clung to his soul.

His stomach churned. The gunshot echoed in his mind, and for a horrifying, split second, Elin's face flickered, her loving blue eyes replaced by the wide, unseeing green eyes of the girl in the desert. The scent of Elin's simmering stew was momentarily overpowered by the phantom, acrid smell of gunpowder.

Elin froze, her hand hovering in the air between them. The smile was gone. The man who had left that morning had not come home. A stranger, a haunted, terrified killer, stood in his place.

They stood there, a universe apart in their small, quiet apartment.

The night in the apartment was a suffocating, silent thing. Salvador lay in a fetal position on the couch, his gaze fixed on a water stain on the ceiling that looked like a screaming face. He couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, the scene replayed in a perfect, horrifying loop: the young woman's wide, terrified green eyes; the cold, unstoppable weight of Zarthus's cybernetic hand forcing his own to pull the trigger; the deafening bang that had become the new soundtrack to his life. He could still feel the phantom recoil of the pistol in his arm, a jolt that echoed the woman's death. The acrid, chemical smell of the discharge seemed to be a permanent stain in his nostrils, a scent he knew would haunt him forever.

He fought the urge to throw up, his stomach a tight, acidic knot. He stumbled to the bathroom and opened the cabinet, his reflection a pale, hollow-eyed stranger he didn't recognize. He glanced inside and took out a bottle of pills. Elin's sleeping pills. He shook a few into his trembling hand and swallowed them dry. He headed back to the couch, and then, finally, a dreamless, chemical sleep embraced him.

The days passed in a blur of numb routine. He was still Salvador, the mechanic, clocking in at the workshop. And he was still Zarthus's apprentice, a ghost in the city's violent underworld. Day or night, when Zarthus called, he answered. The next missions were not very different. More kills were added to his conscience, each one another chip in the foundation of his soul.

Zarthus treated him like a pack mule, like a disposable asset. Even when he finally started to pay him, he took the largest cut, gave Salvador the worst gear, and used him as a point man to draw fire. But Zarthus also showed him the ropes. "You want to make real money, mechanic?" he'd sneer after a particularly bloody job, his voice a poisonous whisper. "You need to upgrade. More mods, more credits. More credits, better mods. You think your little fairy is going to be saved by a good heart? This city eats good hearts for breakfast."

So Salvador began to change. His first mod was a simple reflex booster, paid for with blood money. Then came subdermal armor, then a cheap optical scanner. With each new piece of chrome, his body became harder, his eyes colder. The soft, kind man was being buried under layers of steel and wiring.

His relationship with Elin, the very reason for his descent, became strained. He would come home late, the stench of blood and cordite clinging to his clothes, a new, menacing piece of cyberware gleaming under his skin. She would look at him, her bright, loving eyes now clouded with a fear he had never seen there before. The silence between them grew, a chasm of unspoken horror.

Finally, one night, the dam broke. Salvador came home early in the morning, from another mission with Zarthus. Elin was sitting on the couch, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.

"Sal," she said, her voice a raw whisper. "Please, tell me. What is happening to you?" she pleaded.

Salvador looked at her, and his heart felt like it was being squeezed by a vise. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to confess, to purge the poison from his soul and beg for her forgiveness. But how could he? How could he tell her that he had become a monster for her? That the hands that held her were the same hands that had taken so many lives?

"I told you," he said, the lie a bitter taste in his mouth. "Those mods are for work. I opted for a more physically intensive job at the warehouse."

Elin's lips thinned, her gaze searching his, looking for the man she had married and finding only a stranger. His heart hurt like it was impaled by glass shards, but he didn't let it show. He walked to their bedroom and laid down on the bed, the gulf between them now as wide as the city itself.

They had more discussions like that, and all ended the same. Then her condition worsened, and she had to stay at the clinic. Every time he came to visit her, he could see the man she had fallen in love with fading, his warmth replaced by a cold, hard emptiness that mirrored the slow shutting down of her own body. Her body was dying, while the soul of Salvador was dying with it.

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The night reeked of oil, chemical spills, and the biting salt of the ocean. A thunderstorm bruised the distant sky, casting brief, strobing flashes of light over the rusted, corrugated steel of the warehouse. The strong waves of the bay crashed against the improvised docks, a relentless, angry rhythm.

Salvador glanced at Zarthus, a familiar knot of acid tightening in his gut. The plan replayed in his mind—too simple, he thought, dangerously so. Zarthus had laid it out with that cocky grin of his, radiating a confidence that, by now, Salvador knew was a mask for a deep and lethal recklessness.

His eyes then found Kao, and a wave of guilt washed over him. His friend was fiddling with the fingers of his gloves, a nervous tic Salvador knew well. He shouldn't be here. This world of concrete and gunfire wasn't his. "Are you sure you want to do this?" Salvador had asked him earlier, hoping for a different answer.

"Zarthus is my brother," Kao had said with a small, resigned smile that didn't reach his eyes. "He says he needs me. How can I say no?"

From the second floor of a derelict warehouse next door, Salvador was providing fire support, the cold stock of his rifle pressed against his cheek. That's when everything went to hell. A cacophony of alarms blared to life, their shrieking tearing through the night. Zarthus had ignored intel about guard rotations. Floodlights snapped on, painting the yard in a harsh, unforgiving glare. Shadows moved with deadly speed, and Salvador picked them off with tight, controlled bursts, but there were too many. They were surrounded.

Then a voice crackled in his earpiece, thin and sharp with panic. Kao. "I can't move! I need cover!" The words shot through Salvador like an electric current.

He spotted him instantly—pinned near a loading dock, desperately working to disable the last security lock. Kao's hands trembled so badly Salvador could see it even from his perch, bullets sparking off the metal inches from his head. Zarthus was nowhere to be seen, having bolted behind a shipping container. He was barking orders over the comms, his voice a steady, infuriating drone, as if this were all just part of the plan.

"Zarthus, we have to help him! He's your brother!" Salvador screamed into the comms, his own voice raw with desperation. The reply was ice in his ear. "He's a liability," Zarthus' voice crackled back, cold and pragmatic. "The package is the objective. Stick to the plan."

A burst of automatic fire ripped through the alley. Through his scope, Salvador saw it all. He saw Kao's body jerk violently, thrown backward by the impact as if by an invisible hand.

A sound tore from Salvador's own throat, a raw, strangled cry of "Kao!" His vision swam with red as he emptied his magazine blindly into the yard, firing at shadows, at the unfeeling steel, at anything. But it was too late. The silence on the comms was absolute. Kao was gone.

When Zarthus finally swaggered out, his gun still smoking, he had the gall to look annoyed, wiping blood that wasn't his off his coat. "He panicked. That's why he died."

The world went quiet. The gunfire, the rain, the distant sirens—it all faded into a dull roar in Salvador's ears. All he could see was Zarthus's smug face. The agreement between them, already strained, shattered into dust. A cold, terrifying clarity washed over him. He walked toward Zarthus, each step heavy and deliberate.

"He was your brother," Salvador said, his voice flat and dead.

Zarthus scoffed. "Yeah, and he got himself killed."

Without a word, Salvador closed the remaining distance. He put all the night's horror, all the betrayal, and all the grief for Kao into his right arm and punched Zarthus across the face. A clean, hard right that snapped Zarthus's head sideways with a wet crack.

Zarthus stumbled, then looked up, his lip split and bleeding. "You done?"

Salvador didn't answer. He turned around and walked away. He didn't look back. The arrangement was over. Zarthus was a ghost to him now. All that was real was the crunch of broken glass under his boots, the cold rain plastering his hair to his skull, and the hollowed-out space in his chest where his friend used to be. It all ended that night, in the rain, beside Kao's broken body.

After Kao's death, something in Salvador was cauterized. The grief was burned away by a cold, hard rage that settled deep in his bones. He embraced the mods, the violence, with a new, terrifying resolve. He became a better merc than Zarthus—smarter, faster, more ruthless. And Zarthus, seeing the man he once commanded now eclipse him, let his arrogance curdle into a corrosive jealousy. He began to hate him for it.

And when Zarthus hated someone, he made sure they disappeared.

The job was a ghost contract, a big score in The Shallows. Moving through the labyrinth of rusting metal and weeping concrete, Salvador felt the familiar thrum of anticipation. His crew was waiting at the docks. Tonight, they hit a private submarine, hijack the yacht it was servicing, and head north towards Virelia. Once there, they'd sell the vessel and its cargo. They would be set for life.

He rounded the final corner and saw it: the sleek, black hull of the submarine bobbing silently in the oily water. And standing there, bathed in the sickly yellow dock lights, was Zarthus, looking smugly at him. Between them stood Salvador's crew. His crew. Their guns were already raised.

Zarthus raised a hand, in a lazy, insulting wave.

The air exploded.

Salvador dove as the roar of gunfire deafened him, rounds chewing through the air where his head had been. He slammed behind a thick metal container, the impacts of heavy-caliber rounds vibrating through the ground. Betrayal wasn't a hot stab of anger; it was a cold, clarifying calm. He slammed the injector for his Z-Dragger, overclocking it to its limits. He felt the familiar pressure build behind his eyes as capillaries burst. A warm trickle of blood dripped from his nose. Time seemed to stretch, the muzzle flashes of his former crew blooming like slow, deadly flowers. He stared at them, his prey.

With a surge of overclocked adrenaline, he exploded from cover. Two serrated blades hissed from the housing on his forearms. He wasn't a man anymore; he was a missile of chrome and vengeance. He closed the distance in a heartbeat. The first traitor didn't even have time to scream as the blades opened his throat. Salvador spun, using the man's falling body as a shield, and drove his right fist, knuckles reinforced with carbon steel, through the chest of another.

He fought with the ferocity of a cornered animal.

But he was outnumbered. A massive, heavily modded ganger with arms like pistons weathered the storm and tore through his defenses. Salvador saw the attack coming, but his Z-Dragger sputtered, his vision strobing from the strain. He couldn't counter in time. The beast grabbed his right arm, and with a horrifying shriek of tearing metal and a flash of white-hot agony that overloaded his senses, ripped it from his shoulder.

He fell, bleeding out on the grimy pavement, his systems shrieking with cascading error codes. His vision, once dimming under the haze of blood loss, suddenly sharpened—every shadow, every flicker of light becoming painfully crisp. The agony drained away, replaced by a cold, crystalline rage.

Then it came—the voice. His voice. It didn't whisper. It roared into his skull, jagged and merciless. Pathetic. Weak. Useless scrap pretending to be a man. Each word was a nail driven into the coffin of who he had been. Look at you—bleeding in the gutter like the trash you are. Can't even save yourself, let alone her.

The voice circled him like a predator, relentless. Elin… You failed her. Every scream, every drop of blood—yours to answer for.

The weight of those words crushed Salvador, stripping away what was left of the kind, patient mechanic who once held her hand. And in that filthy alley, something else clawed its way into existence—cold, monstrous, and hungry.

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