A hallway. Narrow. The wallpaper was peeling at the corners — a pattern of small blue flowers, the kind that had probably been fashionable once. The floorboards creaked under my boots every third step, and I knew which ones, because I had memorized them. You learned these things when you lived in a house where noise had consequences.

  I was holding something. A rabbit. Stuffed cotton, one ear half-detached, the button eye on the left side replaced at some point with a mismatched brown one. I didn't remember its name anymore. I had given it one, once.

  At the end of the hallway, my father was talking to a man I had never seen before. Their voices were low. The kind of low that meant the conversation wasn't for me.

  I squeezed the rabbit.

  I didn't know then what was being decided. I wish I still didn't.

  The man was a vampire. A former S-Rank — not that the title meant anything decent. He wanted something eternal to love. My father wanted a good price. They reached an agreement.

  I was the agreement.

  I can still remember the day I turned. Not because the memory is vivid — because it never left. There is a difference. Every bone in my body shattered and knitted back wrong. My veins felt like they had been drained and refilled with something that burned. The worst part wasn't the pain. The worst part was that the biology wouldn't let me lose consciousness. I screamed through every second of it. He watched, and called it love.

  After that came the cage. I stopped counting the years at some point. Time works differently when the walls don't change.

  The day a Titan found me — the undisputed peak of the S-Class hierarchy — was the first day I wanted something again. I didn't call it hope then. I just knew I wanted to be worth standing next to Him. That was enough to keep moving.

  It wasn't enough.

  The company was a meat grinder. The weak got used. The defiant disappeared. We were human brains in predatory bodies, told to be grateful for the upgrade. I kept climbing anyway, because the alternative was to stop — and stopping felt like giving my father the last word.

  Then came the evaluation.

  "Your blood quality has plateaued. You've reached your ceiling. From now on, focus on tactical understanding; don't expect further physical improvement."

  I nodded. I remember nodding very clearly, because it was the only thing left to do. Rank C. Fixed at birth — fixed by him, the man who turned me, his parting gift baked into my blood before I understood what blood even was.

  In this world, your quality is your destiny. Mine had been decided by a transaction on a kitchen table.

  I didn't cry. I just felt considerably lighter afterward, the way you do when you finally stop carrying something you were never going to put down on your own.

  That was when I started looking for another way.

  Devouring. Forbidden on the surface, practiced in the shadows — the act of draining another's Ichor, stealing their ceiling, making their potential yours. I spent months finding the right mark. Someone with high quality. Someone who wouldn't see me coming.

  And then I found him.

  Kang Eun-Woo.

  A Newborn. B+ Blood Quality — an anomaly by any measure. Limitless ceiling, zero awareness of what he was sitting on. A delivery boy who flinched at loud noises and apologized to people who bumped into him. The other Enforcers had noticed him too; I could feel it. Everyone was waiting for Vaughn to release him back into the world.

  I didn't wait as long as they did.

  I took his friend's phone. Simple. Clean. I picked the construction site myself — isolated, no witnesses, good acoustics for the kind of sounds I expected him to make. Everything was accounted for. I had run the variables a dozen times.

  He was supposed to break in the first ten minutes.

  He did break. I dismantled him piece by piece, exactly as planned. And then—

  The floor.

  The blue light.

  I remember standing over him and thinking: that's not Ichor. Ichor I knew. Ichor I had studied, stolen, tasted. This was something older. Something that had no business being inside a boy who delivered takeout and didn't know what he was.

  His first strike hit me like a verdict.

  Maximum Circulation active, every nerve in my body optimized — and I was a fly. Not even a challenging fly. The kind you swat without looking. The worst part wasn't the pain. The worst part was the realization that he wasn't angry. He wasn't even trying.

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  He was just correcting me.

  As I lay here, paralyzed on the cold concrete, I found myself thinking about the rabbit. The mismatched button eye. The half-detached ear.

  I wondered if my father ever thought about me the way I thought about that rabbit — something held tightly once, then simply left behind.

  Probably not.

  The boy I had chosen as prey had become something that rivaled the ancient monsters I had spent my whole life fearing. I had run every variable. I had accounted for everything.

  I had not accounted for this.

  His fist descended one final time. I didn't close my eyes.

  ?Please... let this be eternal peace.

  ***

  I paused after seeing that she had been neutralized by the final blow. She lay on the cold floor unconsciously, peacefully and weary.

  ?“What... just happened?”

  ?I looked at my hands. The blinding electric blue light was fading, retreating beneath my skin like a tide pulling back from the shore. The veins in my forearms darkened, returning to their crimson hue, but they felt... heavier.

  ?This perception—this absolute dominance—was completely different from anything I had felt as a vampire. For a few moments, it wasn't just blood flowing within me; it was starlight. It felt as if my will alone was enough to bend reality.

  ?I tried to recall the catalyst. The Silent River. The figure in the shadows.

  “If we let your story end here, it won't be very fun, right? 'Hero'.”

  The voice echoed in the back of my mind, elusive and mocking. Who was it? The face was a blur, dissolving like smoke in the wind. Maybe I hadn't seen them at all. Maybe it was just a hallucination born of near-death synapses firing their last spark.

  ?“Most likely...”

  ?I tried to take a step, but my legs refused to obey.

  ?A sudden wave of exhaustion hit me, not like a tide, but like a collapsing building. That burst of god-like energy didn't just leave; it took everything with it. My muscles felt like they had rusted instantly. The "superconductor" state of the blue blood had burned through my reserves in seconds.

  ?I felt like an engine that had run on nitrous oxide and blew its pistons.

  ?“Ugh...”

  ?My knees hit the floor with a heavy thud. A throbbing, hollow ache spread from my marrow to my skin. It wasn't pain from the fight; it was the pain of a void demanding to be filled.

  ?My throat felt like I had swallowed a handful of sand.

  [Warning: Hunger is at a critical level of 86%!]

  My gaze drifted downward. It didn't land on the exit. It didn't land on my severed arm that lay nearby.

  ?It landed on Hana.

  ?I swallowed dryly. The smell of wet cement and iron vanished. The only thing I could smell was her.

  ?She didn't look like a teammate. She didn't look like an enemy. She didn't even look like a person.

  ?She looked... delicious.

  ?The pulse in her neck was a rhythmic drumbeat, calling to me. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It was the sound of a cool drink on a scorching day.

  ?She tried to devour me, a dark voice whispered in my ear. She wanted to drain you dry. Wouldn't it be justice? Wouldn't it be natural to take back what you spent?

  ?I shook my head violently, trying to rattle the thoughts loose.

  ?“No... What am I even thinking? She’s... she’s human... no, she’s like me...”

  ?[Warning: Hunger is at a critical level of 87%!]

  ?The logic shattered. The "Hero" part of my brain was screaming, but it sounded so far away.

  ?When I looked at her again, I didn't see Hana. I saw a chalice full of life.

  ?I lost control.

  ?My dignity, my humanity, my morals—they dissolved in the acid of my starvation. I dropped to my hands and knees, crawling on all fours toward her defenseless body like a starving wolf finding a wounded deer.

  I slowly brought my face closer, my jaw unhinging slightly. The heat radiating from her skin was intoxicating. I opened my mouth, ready to sink my fangs into the soft flesh of her throat.

  ?The thought of the warm, red vitality flowing into me... it was the only thing in the universe that mattered.

  ?Just one bite. Just a sip.

  ?It was a matter of seconds. My teeth scraped against her skin.

  ?"NO."

  ?The command didn't come from the System. It came from the deepest, darkest corner of my remaining humanity.

  ?I bit my own tongue instead. Hard. The sharp pain snapped me out of the trance for a split second—just enough to regain control.

  ?I violently pushed myself away from her, scrambling backward until my back hit the cold concrete pillar. I gasped for air, clutching my chest, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

  ?I calmly gritted my teeth, leaning my head back against the rough stone, and looked up at the skeletal steel beams of the unfinished construction site.

  ?Hero, my ass.

  ?I let out a dry, self-deprecating chuckle that sounded more like a sob.

  ?"I'm not a hero," I whispered to the darkness. "I'm a monster that needs to be hunted down and caged."

  ?[Warning: Hunger is at a critical level of 88%!]

  ?[System Alert: Starvation Frenzy Imminent.]

  ?"Damn it."

  ?The hunger wasn't waiting for my moral crisis. It was clawing at my stomach, demanding fuel. If I didn't eat something in the next minute, I would lose my mind completely. And then, Hana would be nothing but calories.

  ?My eyes darted around the room, frantic. And then, they landed on it.

  ?Lying in the dust, about five feet away.

  ?My hand.

  ?No... it would be more accurate to say my old hand. The one Hana had severed. The one I had used as a phantom weapon.

  ?My eyes lingered on the pale, dust-covered limb. It lay there, fingers curled slightly, looking like a discarded prop from a horror movie. It didn't look appetizing. It looked grotesque. There was no guarantee that consuming my own dead flesh would even work.

  ?But it contains my Ichor. My biomass.

  ?I slowly lifted myself, my legs trembling under the weight of my exhaustion. I walked with lifeless, dragging steps toward the severed limb.

  ?When I finally reached it, I didn't hesitate. I couldn't afford to.

  ?I fell to my knees and pounced on it like a wild wolf.

  ?Crunch.

  ?There was no grace. No dignity. I tore into the cold flesh, chewing through muscle and bone. It tasted of copper, dust, and cold defeat.

  ?[System Alert: Biomass Ingested.]

  ?[Hunger Level Decreasing: 87%... 85%... 82%...]

  ?With each bite, I could feel a tiny fraction of the madness receding. My vision cleared slightly. The throbbing in my head dulled.

  ?But it wasn't a meal. It was barely a snack.

  ?It was like pouring a single bottle of water into a scorching desert. It didn't fix the drought, but it was just enough to keep me from dying of thirst.

  ?I sat there in the silence of the construction site, my face smeared with my own blood, chewing on the knuckles of what used to be my right hand.

  ?I had survived. But looking at the grisly scene, I knew one thing for sure:

  ?The innocent Kang Eun-Woo died in this construction site tonight.