2026-02-09 19:56:25Eduardo kicked off the muddy seabed.
BOOM!
The force of the kick created a small vortex, launching his body toward the surface like a bullet.
As Eduardo shot upward through the seawater, he read the system notifications with a faint smile.
[PASSIVE SKILL: BONE BREAKER ACTIVATED.]
[BONE DENSITY INCREASED: 200%.]
On the pier above, the rain was still falling, though not as violently as before. The bald man with the scorpion tattoo, Rico, stood beneath the leaking warehouse roof, lighting a cigarette. Beside him, two other thugs, Jojo and a skinny young man named Ben, laughed while counting several thick stacks of cash.
“Damn, Claude really is brutal,” Jojo chuckled, spitting to the side. “Eduardo was basically mush when we tossed him in. I doubt even sharks would want meat that wrecked.”
“Whatever, job’s done,” Rico replied, exhaling smoke. “Hey, I heard Eduardo’s wife, Emily, is getting taken straight to the main brothel tomorrow morning. Such a waste. We should enjoy her ourselves tonight, right?”
Ben grinned lewdly. “That’s a great idea. Boss Claude would never know if we take a little taste of the collateral. Her husband’s already a corpse down there. Who’s gonna report us?”
“Hahaha. You’re right,” Rico laughed crudely. “After this, let’s swing by their apartment. We’ll say we’re there to ‘secure’ the assets.”
BYUURR!
The explosive sound of water erupting at the edge of the pier cut their laughter short. All three turned toward the noise. Through the rain mist and darkness, a shadow crawled up from the wooden edge.
“What the hell is that? A seal?” Ben squinted, trying to see.
The shadow stood upright. The figure was drenched, clothes torn to shreds, skin pale like a corpse soaked for days. Its head hung low, rainwater streaming from tangled hair.
“Who the hell are you?” Rico shouted, reaching for his waistband, searching for his gun. “Hey. If you’re a bum, get lost now before I put a hole in your head.”
The figure lifted its face. Under the flickering pier lights, Rico staggered back, the cigarette dropping from his mouth.
“E… Eduardo?”
“That’s impossible,” Jojo whispered, trembling, his face turning white. “I threw him in myself. He wasn’t breathing.”
Eduardo stepped forward. Each step was heavy, leaving wet footprints mixed with dark red blood. He said nothing. His crimson eyes stared at them with terrifying emptiness.
“Y… you’re a ghost, you bastard?” Rico finally drew his pistol. “Die again!”
TAKK!
He pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. Or maybe his hands were shaking too badly, and he forgot to disengage the safety.
In the blink of an eye, Eduardo moved. He did not run. He lunged. His speed surpassed anything Rico had ever seen. Before Rico could react, Eduardo’s hand clamped around the wrist holding the gun.
KRAAAKK!
The sound was sickeningly crisp in the pier’s silence. Rico’s wrist bones shattered into pieces. Not just broken, but pulverized, like they had been run over by a truck.
“AAAAARRGGHHH. MY HAND. MY HAAAAND!” Rico screamed hysterically, dropping to his knees and clutching his mangled arm.
“You said you wanted to ‘taste’ my wife,” Eduardo said in a low, hoarse voice, as if it rose from the bottom of a deep well. “Did you really say that, Rico?”
Jojo and Ben, panicking, tried to attack Eduardo from behind. Jojo stabbed a folding knife toward Eduardo’s back.
TINGG!
The blade struck Eduardo’s shoulder blade, but instead of piercing skin, the metal snapped clean in half. Jojo’s eyes bulged.
“What the fuck. What are you made of, demon?”
Eduardo turned slowly. He looked at Jojo like a predator eyeing prey. With one hand, he grabbed Jojo by the throat and lifted him off the ground, his legs kicking helplessly in the air.
“Please… Eduardo… spare me…” Jojo whimpered, his face turning blue.
Eduardo did not answer. He tightened his grip. He felt monstrous power flowing through his fingers. Bone Breaker. He wanted to know how strong a human neck really was now.
KRETEK.
The sound of a neck shifting. Jojo stopped struggling. His eyes bulged, his head slumped at an unnatural angle. Eduardo tossed the corpse aside like a sack of rice.
Ben, the youngest, collapsed to the ground. He crawled backward, urine soaking his pants.
“Don’t kill me… please… it was Rico’s idea. I just went along with it.”
Eduardo walked toward Ben. Every step forced Ben to crawl back until his spine slammed into a pillar.
“You’re all the same,” Eduardo whispered. “Brave only when someone else is helpless.”
Eduardo raised his foot and stomped down on Ben’s thigh.
BRAKK!
The femur shattered instantly. Ben could not even scream. The pain was so intense his nervous system shut down. He passed out, his leg now bent like rubber instead of bone.
Finally, Eduardo turned back to Rico, who was still whimpering on the pier floor, trying to crawl away with his remaining arm.
“Where is Claude?” Eduardo asked, stepping on Rico’s back and pressing him into the wooden planks until they began to crack.
“I… I don’t know,” Rico sobbed, tears streaming down his face. “He usually goes to a bar called The Red Cage around this time. Please, Eduardo… don’t kill me. I have a kid…”
“You have a kid?” Eduardo tilted his head slightly. “Funny. You didn’t think about my kid when you talked about dragging Emily to a brothel.”
Eduardo bent down, his hand gripping Rico’s jaw, the same jaw that had laughed at him earlier.
“Tell the devils in hell… Eduardo sends his regards.”
With one violent twist, Eduardo snapped Rico’s neck. The crack was the last sound on the old pier that night, aside from the rain, which was finally easing.
Eduardo stood amid the pile of bodies, breathing hard. He stared at his blood-soaked hands. A flicker of disgust surfaced, then quickly vanished, replaced by cold calm. The system had truly changed him.
Suddenly, it felt as if his head had been struck by a sledgehammer.
“AAAKKKH!”
Eduardo dropped to his knees, clutching his throbbing head. His vision spun. In the darkness of his mind, an image was being forcibly erased. He saw a small child running through a park, chasing a brown-furred dog barking happily.
What was the dog’s name? Eduardo tried to remember. I loved him so much. Come on, remember. His name… his name…
ZING!
The memory vanished. Gone. He remembered having a dog, but the name, the sound of its bark, and the feeling of holding it were completely erased.
[PAYMENT RECEIVED: MEMORY OF ‘MAX’ (PET DOG) HAS BEEN DELETED.]
[USER LEVEL INCREASED: LEVEL 2.]
Eduardo panted, cold sweat mixing with rainwater on his face. He looked at the corpses before him with eyes colder than before.
“The price…” Eduardo muttered hoarsely. “I’m starting to lose myself.”
He searched Rico’s lifeless pockets, taking the phone and car keys. He had no time to mourn the lost memory. He had less than twenty minutes before Claude’s other men reached his home.
“I don’t need memories,” Eduardo whispered to the night. “I only need Claude’s blood.”
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Ch 13. The Lost Memory
The world in Eduardo’s eyes felt like an old television broadcast that had lost its signal. Everything appeared gray, flickering, and filled with a deafening hiss of static. He could feel violent jolts, his back slamming against the stiff car seat, and the sharp smell of gasoline mixed with sweat stinging his nose. “Boss! Hey, Boss Eduardo! Wake up, damn it! Don’t die in my car. I just cleaned the seats with my spit this morning!” Gord’s voice sounded very far away, as if it were coming from underwater. Eduardo blinked his eyes, which felt glued shut by thick fluid. He touched his own face. Wet. Cold. When he looked at his palm under the dim glow of the streetlight, the color was not red. It was black. Pitch black, like bitter squid ink that smelled of rotten copper. “Hah... hah...” Eduardo jolted upright, his body shooting up so fast that his head slammed into the roof of the battered sedan. THUD! “Whoa, easy, Boss! You just passed out for ten minu
Ch 12. Dawn Raid on the Gambling Shop
The shop house on Roses Street stood arrogantly among rows of shabby buildings that seemed to have long surrendered to poverty. Behind its steel doors, Claude's football gambling operation pulsed like a dark heart, pumping dirty money into the mafia boss's pockets while the surrounding residents struggled to survive. Eduardo shut off the engine of the stolen sedan two blocks from the target. Pale blue dawn light washed across the asphalt, casting long shadows that looked like the fingers of death. "I can't believe you actually brought me here, Boss," Gord whispered while struggling with the zipper of his jacket that had jammed again. His cursed luck at work as usual. "This place is the most heavily guarded spot in the district. These guys aren't the market thugs you shot earlier. These are Claude's elite crew. They carry real toys, not rusty pistols." Eduardo did not look at him. His red eyes, the result of exhaustion and the strain of the system, stared coldly at the
Ch 11. The Madman's Luck
Eduardo crouched in the shadows behind a pile of rotting wooden crates, his eyes narrowing as he watched the dark comedy unfolding before him. In the middle of a narrow alleyway that reeked of stale urine, a scrawny man with wild, unruly hair was being systematically beaten by three large thugs. The man was Gord. He looked more like a failed vagrant than a fighter. Yet, there was something about him that kept Eduardo from turning away. "Die, you dog!" one of the thugs roared, swinging a thick wooden plank directly at Gord’s head. Gord, who was busy trying to spit out a mouthful of bloody phlegm, suddenly slipped on a banana peel that had appeared out of nowhere. His body flopped to the side in a ridiculously clumsy motion. CRACK! The wooden plank smashed into the concrete wall exactly where Gord’s head had been a split second before. Even more absurdly, the plank snapped clean in two. "Damn it! This wood is rotted through with termites!" the thug cursed, st
Ch 10. The Predator's Preparation
Eduardo stood in front of the motel door, its paint peeling and flaking, staring at the loose change left in his palm. There were only a few coins and one crumpled ten dollar bill. Enough to buy two pieces of cheap bread, not enough to pay for his family’s shattered dignity. He placed the money on the small table beside the bed, right next to Emily’s limp hand as she slept. Eduardo did not leave a note. A ghost left no messages. “I’m going to get breakfast,” he whispered softly, more to himself than to Emily, who might have been trapped in another nightmare. Eduardo stepped out of the room, closing the door so gently that not even a click was heard, a new habit formed since the Shadow Step system had taken root in his body. He walked toward the stolen sedan parked beneath a dark, leafy tree. Once in the driver’s seat, Eduardo checked his weapon. Rico’s Glock 17. “Two bullets,” he muttered, staring at the nearly empty magazine. “One for the lock, one for the sur
Ch 09. The Breathing Ghost
The mirror above the motel sink was crusted with grime and split by cracks, reflecting a man Eduardo barely recognized as himself. He pulled off his shirt, which now looked more like a blood-soaked rag than clothing. Under the flickering neon light, his body was a horrifying sight. His skin was pale as porcelain, yet his muscles appeared denser, more pronounced, as if forcibly carved from within. On his left side was a stab wound from Jojo’s knife that had slipped between his ribs. It was no longer bleeding heavily. Instead, a clear fluid mixed with black flecks pulsed from it. “Damn it,” Eduardo hissed. He grabbed the rough motel hand towel, clenched it between his teeth, then poured cheap alcohol he had found in the stolen car’s first aid kit directly onto the wound. “ARGHH!!!” The scream was muffled by the towel. The pain was not just a surface sting, but like electrical current burning through his nerves. Strangely, in the middle of that agony, a system not
Ch 08. Flight Beneath the Rain
The SUV’s worn tires screamed as Eduardo wrenched the steering wheel, forcing the vehicle onto a muddy dirt path. Rain poured down relentlessly, as if the sky itself wanted to drown this city of sins. Inside the car, the atmosphere felt colder than the air outside. “Edu, slow down! You’re going to get us killed!” Emily shouted, clutching the handle above the door. Eduardo ignored her. His eyes were locked on the trembling rearview mirror. He had just seen the flash of police lights at a major intersection. They were looking for this car, a stolen vehicle already wrecked and soaked in blood. “We need to change vehicles,” Eduardo muttered. His voice was flat, emotionless, like a machine processing data. “How are we supposed to do that? We don’t have any money, Edu! We didn’t even pack enough clothes for Chloe!” Emily’s voice edged toward hysteria. She glanced back at their daughter, who was asleep from exhaustion, though her body jolted every time the car hit a potho
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