Reborn As The King Of Wealth

"Oi, fatty, catch!"

The ball slammed into William's stomach before he even registered the shout, and the air punched out of his lungs in one ragged gasp. He doubled over on the worn grass of the campus field, glasses sliding down his nose, sweat and something worse prickling under his oversized shirt. The late afternoon sun hung low and orange behind the goalpost, throwing long shadows across the grass, and for one disoriented second William thought the shadows themselves were laughing at him too.

Laughter erupted from the small crowd gathered near the goalpost. Someone was filming.

"Again, again!" Dimas yelled, already lining up another kick. He was grinning the wide, easy grin of a man who had never once in his life had to wonder whether he belonged somewhere. "Let's see how many it takes before the pig squeals!"

"He's not a pig," Rani said, tossing her hair, lips curling into something too polished to be called a smile. "Pigs are useful. This one's just — " she gestured vaguely at William's heaving body, at his damp shirt clinging to the soft slope of his belly, " — this."

William tried to straighten up. His ribs screamed in protest, a hot, bright ache blooming under his sternum. He wanted to say something — anything — but his throat had closed around the words the way it always did, the way it had for four years now. He settled for silence, because silence never made things worse. Talking back always did. He had learned that lesson early, in his very first semester, when a single sarcastic reply had earned him a week of shoved lockers and stolen notebooks. Silence was cheaper. Silence, at least, he could afford.

The second ball caught him in the side. He staggered, knees buckling into the mud, and somewhere behind him a girl he didn't recognize laughed so hard she had to lean on her friend's shoulder for balance.

"You're supposed to run, idiot," Dimas said, jogging closer, feigned patience dripping from every syllable like he was training a dog that refused to learn a trick. "It's called dodging. Even a cow could figure that out."

"He's slower than a cow," someone added. "Cows can at least gallop."

"Moo," another voice called out, and the crowd dissolved into fresh laughter, phones angled to catch every second of it.

William pressed his palm flat against the grass, willing his arm to hold his weight, willing his vision to stop swimming at the edges. Through the blur he could see his own reflection in the puddle beneath him — round face, thick lenses fogged with breath, a mouth that had forgotten what it felt like to smile without flinching first. He hated that reflection. He had hated it for years, quietly, the way you hate something you've stopped believing you can ever change.

Get up, he told himself. Get up before the next one.

He didn't get up fast enough.

"C'mon, William," Dimas said, crouching slightly, ball balanced under one foot, voice dropping into something almost gentle, almost cruel in its gentleness. "You used to be fun to play with. Don't tell me you're getting soft on us now."

"I'm not — " William started, and immediately regretted it, because the sound of his own voice, thin and cracked, only seemed to delight them further.

"He talks!" Rani said, clapping mockingly. "Somebody get a recording, this is historic."

The third ball caught him square in the temple, and the world tilted sideways, sound smearing into a long wet ringing. He heard Dimas laughing from somewhere very far away, heard Rani's voice saying something about how even his blood probably tasted like lard, heard the phone cameras clicking, clicking, clicking, a dozen small electronic shutters stitching his humiliation permanently into the record of the day —

And then he heard nothing at all.

When William came to, the field was empty and the sky had turned the color of a fading bruise, purple bleeding into gray at the edges of the clouds. He simply lay there in the mud for a long moment, staring up at the darkening sky, feeling the cold seep slowly through the back of his shirt, wondering — not for the first time — whether it would be easier to just stop trying to get up at all. The thought didn't frighten him anymore. That, more than anything, frightened him.

A shadow fell over him. He flinched before he could stop himself, some animal part of his brain still braced for another kick.

"It's just me," said a quiet voice.

Natasya crouched beside him, her school bag dropped carelessly in the grass, already pulling out a small first-aid kit that looked more duct tape and cotton balls than actual medicine. Her own face carried a faint yellowing bruise along the jaw — last week's cruelty, not quite healed, a matching set to whatever new marks he'd carry by morning.

"You should stop walking near the field during practice hours," she murmured, dabbing carefully at the cut above his eyebrow. Her hands were steady even though her voice wasn't. "They always find you there."

"I had class," William rasped, wincing as the antiseptic found the cut. "The shortcut—"

"I know." She didn't look up, focused entirely on his eyebrow, on the tremor she was clearly trying to hide from her own fingers. "I know you had class."

Neither of them said what they were both thinking: that there was no version of campus that was safe for him, shortcut or not, because the danger had never been about geography. It had always simply been about him — about the particular shape of his body, the particular sound of his voice, the particular, unforgivable crime of having nothing and no one.

William let his eyes fall shut, the sting of antiseptic sharp against his skin. "Why do you still help me?"

Natasya's hands paused, just for a second, the cotton ball hovering an inch from his skin. "Because somebody should," she said simply. Then, quieter, almost to herself, so quiet he almost missed it entirely: "And because nobody ever helped me either."

He wanted to say thank you. He wanted to say a hundred things — that she was the only reason he hadn't walked into the sea himself some night out of sheer exhaustion, that her kindness felt like the last warm thing in a life gone cold and gray. Instead he just nodded, because that was all his throat would allow, and let her finish taping gauze over the cut in silence.

He didn't see the black sedan parked at the far edge of the lot, engine idling, windows tinted, watching the two of them with a patience that had nothing to do with concern.

He didn't see it pull away only after Natasya helped him to his feet, one of his arms slung across her shoulders, the two of them limping slowly toward the dorm as the first stars appeared overhead.

He had no way of knowing that somewhere in that car, a woman was speaking into a phone, saying words that would matter more than anyone could yet imagine: "He survived the field test. Move the timeline up. The Board wants him in the water by the end of the month."

The car pulled away into the darkening street, its taillights disappearing around the corner, leaving no trace at all — nothing but the faint smell of expensive cologne lingering over an empty parking lot, and a future already being written for a boy who didn't yet know he was being watched.