Back in Xing Long District

  Farrah paced. Three steps forward, pivot, three steps back—boots wearing a pattern into already-worn floorboards, movement the only thing standing between her and the fact that she couldn't fix this.

  The room smelled of crushed herbs and something underneath them. Something no amount of medicinal effort could cover.

  She knew that smell. Had learned it in the Inside, where bodies finally stopped fighting what they'd been absorbing for decades.

  Her fingers trembled as she checked Castor's pulse for the dozenth time in an hour. It fluttered beneath her fingertips—irregular, struggling, like a bird that had forgotten what its wings were for.

  This isn't good. He was fine five hours ago.

  But she knew how it worked. Organs held together through willpower and spite, then all at once remember they're damaged past repair. Not one thing killing him. Everything. Decades of accumulated damage finally arriving at the same address.

  Across the room, Marla knelt beside the bed, whispering prayers—some to gods whose names survived only in old women's memories, others invented on the spot. Desperate bargaining with whatever was listening.

  Castor's hand twitched.

  It grasped Marla's with strength that had no right to exist in a body this far gone. His eyes opened—clouded, fever-bright, working to find focus.

  "Honey..."

  Barely breath. Cracking through the stillness.

  Marla went still mid-prayer, clutching his hand.

  "It's okay..."

  He said it with the particular certainty of someone who'd already made peace with the conclusion.

  "Farrah." Marla's voice came quiet. "Stop with the scrolls. He's... at peace with it."

  "No."

  Farrah was already reaching for another potion—cellular regeneration, youth restored, miracles in liquid form.

  "We get him out of the district, there's a specialist two over who handles organ failure, if we move now we can—"

  "Farrah."

  Castor's voice, louder than it should have been. Then the cough overtook him—violent, full-body, his back arching off the bed. Blood on the sheets. Bright red, arterial, the kind that meant internal bleeding past the point of intervention.

  He squeezed Marla's hand. Wiped his mouth with the back of the other.

  "It's over." The wry smile. Characteristically, painfully him. "Face the music." A beat. "I'm already dying—do I really have to raise my voice too?"

  Farrah froze. The scroll half-unfurled in her hand.

  All the arguments died in her throat—fighting harder, not giving up, holding on until the last possible second. She couldn't say them because he was right. This wasn't something stubbornness could outlast.

  The scroll dropped. It rolled to the wall and stopped. She sat beside him and pushed a damp lock of hair from his forehead, her fingers not entirely steady. His skin burned.

  "I lost a friend three years ago."

  Her voice broke on the syllables. Bella's absence, unprocessed, rising up through the floor of this moment.

  "I can't—" The words came apart. "—I can't lose you too. It's too soon."

  Castor made a sound that started as a laugh and caught in his throat.

  "That's your fault for befriending an old couple. We're closer to the bucket than you."

  Farrah bit back a sob. Managed a brittle sound that was almost a laugh. Her grip tightened on his hand.

  "You always knew how to lighten the mood. Even when everything's falling apart."

  "It's what he does," Marla murmured, her thumb tracing the familiar contours of his face. The map she'd memorized over decades. "That's why I love him." She looked at Farrah, soft and sad and sure. "He's been holding on for us. Now it's our turn to let him go."

  "Yeah, I'm glad the kids are out." Castor's voice found a last reserve of strength. "All that crying and whining—I'm already dying, I don't need to hear complaints on my way out."

  Farrah pressed the back of her hand to her eyes—her biological hand, because the cybernetic one had never learned how to be gentle with her own face.

  "But if you want to help..." His voice shifted. More serious. Breath shorter. "Do one final prayer with Marla. Give me a proper send-off."

  "You know I'm an Apatheist, right?"

  "Then flip a coin. Pick a sky ghost. I don't care about Apath-ee-sis or whatever—just—"

  The cough cut him off. More violent than before. His whole body seized with it.

  Farrah and Marla looked at each other. The kind of look that didn't need words. He was making jokes to maintain control over his own departure. To die the way he'd lived.

  They knelt beside him. Hands entwined. Marla placed her free hand gently on his forehead.

  Farrah leaned in close. The heat radiating off him was cruel against the cold opening in her chest, the emptiness already forming where he'd been.

  "I'll do it. For you."

  His eyes lit—just for a flicker. Then dulled again. Ember going quiet.

  Marla's voice began, trembling but steady. Walking barefoot over broken glass—painful, deliberate, each word chosen.

  "Gracious Yahawah, we come before You in sorrow, yet in hope, for Your servant Castor. We entrust him into Your loving hands, praying that through Your mercy, he may find rest in Your kingdom. We ask Your forgiveness for all his sins, trusting in the grace of Your Son, Yahaw, who died so that we might live."

  Farrah's eyes closed. She held Castor's hand and aimed her thoughts at whatever might be listening.

  If you're out there—any of you—he deserves rest without pain. Peace without fear. Whatever comes next without suffering.

  "May his soul be welcomed into the company of saints. For those of us left behind, grant Your comfort. Ease our pain, give us strength to mourn with hope rather than despair. Help us hold to the love we shared, the memories we carry, the life Castor lived—and find peace knowing he is now at rest with You."

  Farrah's shoulders shook. Grief too large for her body, expanding until breathing became something she had to remember to do.

  "Sustain us, dear Lord. Empower us to move forward, holding to the promise of reunion in Your timing. Guide us to live in ways that honor Castor's memory. Always looking to You, the author and perfecter of our faith."

  Silence.

  Not peaceful silence. Not the comfortable quiet of sleep. This was absence—the specific quality of silence when breathing stops, when the heart forgets its rhythm, when life evacuates flesh and takes something irreplaceable with it.

  Castor's chest was still. His eyes open, fixed on the ceiling—or heaven, or whatever void lay beyond the capacity of the living to see.

  Farrah's grip didn't loosen. White-knuckled. As though she could hold his soul in place by refusing to let go of his hand.

  Marla's fingers closed around the cross at her throat. Then, slowly, she leaned in and kissed his forehead. Her tears fell onto his face.

  Too late to wake him.

  "We ask all this in the precious name of Yahaw, our Lord and Savior..."

  She whispered it while her fingertips closed his eyes. Gently. She knew every line of his face.

  Her voice faltered under the weight of it.

  Amen...

  Farrah echoed it. The word foreign in her mouth—ritual she didn't believe in, performed because some moments demanded ceremony regardless of faith.

  She reached over and covered his face with a towel.

  The room held the smell of herbs, and underneath that, the weight of what had just left it. Settling into the furniture. The walls. Their clothes.

  Staying.

  "I'm surprised you're so calm."

  Farrah said it finally. Voice rough with the effort of holding everything in—not screaming, not breaking things, not giving in to any of the releases her body kept demanding.

  "Even after losing your husband."

  Marla gave her a tired smile. The kind earned through decades of attending funerals, of watching loss become ambient background noise.

  "I'm fifty-five, Farrah. Around here? Most don't make it past twenty-five." Her thumb traced the edge of her cross. "I've seen men kill each other over a silver coin. Buried friends for reasons so stupid they'd be funny if they weren't so tragic."

  She exhaled—long, slow, weighted.

  "I'm just grateful sickness took him. Not a sword, not fire, not some drunk with a grudge. He died in bed, surrounded by people who loved him." A pause. "That's a luxury most people here never get."

  She turned to Farrah, voice gentling. "But it's not the end. We'll meet the Lord, all of us. I hope one day you'll put your faith in Him too."

  Farrah looked down. The floorboards, stained with decades of accumulated life.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  I don't even know what I believe in anymore.

  "I don't really know myself," she murmured. Dangerous to say out loud. In a world twisted by magic and machinery—where Chimerasylphs evolved in real-time and corporations sold human modification—gods felt like old stories written for other people.

  But watching Marla right now, that particular peace despite loss, Farrah felt something she didn't have a clean name for.

  "If there is a god, it wasn't kind to me."

  Slow. Pulling from somewhere she usually kept locked.

  "I've been on my own since I could walk. When I was eight, my parents—both junkies—sold me for a hit. Traded their daughter for chemicals that'd be gone in hours."

  Marla sat down, patient, heavy with something that wasn't pity. "Well then, my child. Since you opened the door..."

  She patted the bed beside her.

  Farrah crossed the room like someone stepping back into old wounds. She sat, kept her eyes on Castor's covered form—using his death as an anchor so she didn't have to look at Marla while the words came out.

  "I've slept in alleys, abandoned shops, under freight trains. Places most people wouldn't walk past, let alone rest in." Her breath came sharp, lungs protesting the effort of it. "And no matter where I was—there was always some man. Young, old, didn't matter. Always assuming a little girl alone meant a little girl available."

  Marla's fingers tightened on her cross.

  "Farrah—"

  Farrah raised her hand. Sharp. Dismissive.

  "It was funny, though. They never knew what I was."

  A bitter smile. Didn't reach her eyes. The satisfaction of violence justified, compressed into an expression.

  "When they found out I was a Viltrumlight—the look on their faces, right before I bashed them in. Watching the realization that they'd picked wrong. That the little girl they thought was helpless could tear them apart with her bare hands."

  Glass and gravel in her voice. She'd never told this to anyone—not even Bella. And now that it was moving, it kept moving, feeding itself.

  "You've carried that alone for a long time."

  Marla said it without judgment. Without the pity Farrah had learned to hate on sight.

  "That kind of pain—it's suffocating. No child should've had to survive the world like that."

  Farrah gave a hollow sound. "At eighteen I found a coliseum in Bingxue District. Death matches—legal, sanctioned, the city's entertainment. I had nothing. No family, no food, no future. So I signed up." She looked at the wall, eyes somewhere else. "Figured dying in combat was better than dying in an alley."

  She held up the robotic arm. Flexed the fingers. Watched the servos move.

  "That's where I lost this. Fought a water mage—talented bastard, could shape moisture in the air into blades sharp enough to cut steel." Her voice stayed flat, but the pain lived underneath it, muscle memory of something her brain hadn't forgotten even if the flesh had. "He took it clean off. I didn't feel it until I saw it on the sand, still twitching."

  She flexed the metal fingers again. The soft whirr.

  "But I'm still standing. Turns out losing an arm just made me angrier. Harder to kill."

  Marla's eyes had gone misty. "You're stronger than anyone I know. But there's something I need you to understand."

  Farrah glanced at her. Guard rising.

  "The love of the Lord isn't earned. It's given—freely, without conditions." The certainty in Marla's voice came from somewhere foundational, something she'd built her whole life on. "No matter what you've done. No matter what you've survived. His arms are open to you in the blood and the dirt and the dark. Especially there."

  Farrah said nothing.

  But something in her jaw softened. The silence between them held something it hadn't before.

  Possibility.

  "It couldn't have been all bad," Marla said, offering a gentle shift. "You met Bella, at the brothel—didn't you?"

  Farrah's eyes settled on a spot on the wall. A faint smile came—slow, heavy with memory, nostalgia arriving like warm rain that never quite arrived without an ache underneath it.

  "Yeah." Her voice drifted. The present loosening its grip. "She was just a kid back then."

  Sixteen years ago, when Farrah was eighteen.

  She moved through Zhumo District's midnight streets like something that had decided to be left alone—cybernetic arm catching the streetlights in cold flashes, the katana across her back less a weapon than a statement. The blade had cost more than most Inside residents earned in a lifetime. Worth it for the edge that never dulled, for metal that cut through magical shields like they'd only been imagining themselves.

  Two men materialized from shadow ahead—the family resemblance written in their noses, their jawlines, the particular slouch that accumulated through generations of poverty and got passed down like furniture.

  "Yo. I've seen her before." The older one spoke around a cigarette, his voice carrying the texture of sandpaper and old tobacco. The smell arrived before he did—smoke and alcohol and body odor layered into something that preceded him by several feet. His bloodshot eyes tracked her as she passed, cataloguing, calculating, deciding the math didn't work in his favor. "Champion of the Bingxue District."

  "Yeah." The younger one—nephew, probably, from the way he angled for approval. "Fifty wins. No losses."

  "Bet you think she's pretty too, huh?"

  The older man's elbow connected with the nephew's ribs—hard enough to make him stumble, soft enough to be affectionate about it.

  "She's pretty dangerous." The kid's voice dropped, caught somewhere between excitement and something that hadn't decided yet whether it was fear. "Forty-five kills. Only spared five. I'm guessing she's not into the meat diet, if you know what I mean..."

  He shuddered. Couldn't seem to resolve whether the shudder was one thing or another. The Inside manufactured that—responses that arrived before the mind could label them, arousal and terror wearing each other's clothes.

  Farrah kept walking. Eyes forward. Face arranged into nothing.

  She didn't need to turn to feel their stares trail behind her like smoke. Didn't need to hear the rest to know the shape of the conversation—her body, her kill count, the arithmetic of whether approaching would be worth the outcome.

  I quit a month ago and they're still talking.

  A smirk moved across her lips before she could stop it. Let the stories grow. Let the next man who considered testing her carry those stories into the calculation and reconsider.

  The abandoned building sat at the top of a cracked stairway that groaned under her weight like it was registering a complaint. She settled onto the porch, let the cold air press against her face, let her breath fog and dissolve.

  The money was good.

  The words arrived with a sour aftertaste—the admission beneath them, that she'd liked it. The crowd's approval. The specific clarity of fighting someone who was simultaneously trying to kill her. The way violence, when it went her direction, felt like the only honest transaction the Inside offered.

  The fire mages. The earth mages. Tough. Fair. Superior technique against magical advantage—that's a solvable problem.

  Her arm twitched. Ghost pain fired from nerve endings that no longer existed, her brain still filing reports from tissue that had been gone for years.

  The wind mage.

  The memory surfaced before she could decide against it—visceral, detailed, the kind that didn't soften with repetition. The invisible blades. The way they'd moved through her guard like her guard was a suggestion. The moment she'd looked down and understood what she was looking at.

  Almost cut me in half. Shock took my voice before pain could find it. Just—nothing. Fish on land.

  She leaned back against the cold wall. Three hours of fighting had deposited themselves into her body all at once, the weight of it settling into her bones now that adrenaline had finished its work.

  "Figure it out later," she said, to no one. More reflex than decision.

  Her hand found the hilt. Drew the blade halfway—held it across her chest the way a child holds something familiar in the dark, comfort through the specific warmth of capacity for violence. The metal sat cold against her sternum. She let it.

  Her eyes moved across the shadows—exits catalogued, threats assessed, the perimeter checked and rechecked with the automatic thoroughness of someone who'd learned that stillness and carelessness were different things.

  Then she closed her eyes.

  Not sleep. The half-rest of someone who'd learned to recover without lowering their guard—body going quiet while the part that listened stayed awake, ready to surface fully at the first sound that didn't belong to the night.

  Hours later, a younger Urbano put his boot through the doors of the Lustful Oasis with enough force to make the hinges shriek.

  "Where the damn toms at?!"

  His voice thundered through empty hallways—twenty-nine years old and still operating on the conviction that volume solved problems, that aggression was respect spelled differently.

  "They usually crawlin' out for pussy by now!"

  Bella followed close behind, heels clacking against worn floorboards. Twenty years old, beautiful, three years in this place and still somehow intact in the specific way that made everyone around her simultaneously protective and baffled. She smacked his back with an open palm.

  "You're right, Urba, it's weird. Guess we're not pretty enough tonight?"

  The grin that came with it pulled one from him despite everything.

  "Nah, baby doll." His hand dropped to the modified pistol at his hip—leather creaking as the cyber-muscles beneath his tattooed vest tensed. "Somethin's up."

  He shoved through the front door into neon night.

  A cluster of regulars huddled on the far side of the street like frightened schoolboys—faces drained, eyes fixed on something with the particular stillness of men who'd decided not to move until they understood what they were dealing with.

  Urbano followed their gaze.

  Farrah. Slumped against the wall across the street, sword in hand, entirely asleep—the posture of someone who'd sat down for one moment and had consciousness quietly removed from them mid-thought.

  "Y'all scared of her?"

  He crossed the street with contempt curling his lip, disgusted by grown men trembling at a sleeping girl. Nobody answered. Just a ripple of nervous energy moving through the group, bodies angling toward exits, preparing the geometry of flight.

  Urbano reached her. Nudged her boot with his. "Ain't no homeless camp, chump. Get up."

  Nothing. No twitch. No shift in breathing.

  He bent down, hand reaching for her shoulder. "Bitch, I said—"

  "NO!" The crowd screamed it in unison.

  Too late.

  THUD.

  The wet smack of meat on pavement. Something solid, suddenly separated.

  Urbano looked down.

  His hand sat beside his boot. Clean off at the wrist. His fingers still twitched against the ground, nerve endings filing their final reports, trying to close around a grip they'd been reaching for.

  "When did she..."

  He breathed it. Pain hadn't arrived yet—brain still working through the geometry of what had just happened, still trying to reconcile the before and after. His voice carried the specific tremor of a man watching his own understanding of events come apart.

  She cut me. While sleeping. Without opening her eyes.

  "BITCH! Do you know how much I paid for that hand?!"

  The fury arrived in a rush, burning through shock, overriding everything. He yanked the pistol with his remaining hand—aimed at her chest, finger finding trigger, safety already off.

  Before his finger moved—

  SNAP.

  The gun divided. Top half first, then into components, then into fragments, then into expensive scrap clattering across the concrete in pieces, ammunition scattering, the weapon simply ceasing to be a weapon.

  Urbano went still. Cold sweat moved down his spine in rivers. The color left his face.

  "Oh." A pause. "Oh, nah—"

  Farrah hadn't moved. Still resting. Still wearing the specific stillness of a loaded weapon that hadn't decided to go off yet.

  Across the street, actual shaking—knees knocking, bodies pressed together, the crowd performing the mathematics of proximity to something they didn't understand.

  "Who the hell is this bitch, bro?!"

  One man stepped forward. Braver than the others, or more foolish, the distinction collapsing in moments like this. His voice came out in glass-drop fragments.

  "That's Farrah. Farrah the Reaper." He swallowed. "Undisputed champion—men's and women's division. Hundred and fifty wins. No losses. Forty-five kills, most of them mages who thought magic made them untouchable."

  The crowd parted behind him like something making room—a clear channel away from her, maintained instinctively, in case she woke, in case the calculus changed.

  Urbano stood with his mangled pistol and his twitching severed hand and the specific silence of a man whose entire model of the situation had just been rebuilt from scratch.

  "C-champion...?"

  Bella moved past him. Slowly, carefully, hands open at her sides—the universal posture of something that wasn't a threat. She crouched beside Farrah and studied her face: young, exhausted, beautiful in the precise way that weapons were beautiful, in the aesthetic particular to things engineered to end lives efficiently.

  "She's just a girl," Bella said, more to herself than anyone else. "Just a girl who learned to survive the only way the Inside allowed."

  Her hand reached out. Paused. Then settled gently on Farrah's shoulder.

  Farrah's eyes opened.

  Star-shaped pupils focused immediately, the sword rising a fraction of an inch—then stopping, recognition arriving before the motion could complete itself. Not a threat. Not an enemy. Just someone being kind.

  "Sorry," Bella said softly. "You looked cold. Thought you might want a blanket. Or maybe come inside where it's warmer?"

  Farrah held her in that gaze for a long moment—processing, calculating, running whatever assessment her body ran automatically now, the one that had kept her alive through a hundred and fifty fights.

  Then she nodded.

  That was how they met. Not through violence—through Bella's inexplicable impulse toward kindness in the direction of someone who'd just demonstrated, in vivid anatomical detail, exactly how dangerous that could be.