2025-10-03 23:14:56Darkness inside Elian's home was no longer nothing; it was a heavy, clammy thing. Since the dinner at the courtroom, there had descended a savage new silence. Adeshewa only replied in monosyllables when absolutely necessary to do so, her comings and goings violently contrasted to the violent realities. Tobe made an effort to avoid him, hanging out in his room or with other friends he hadn't introduced Elian to. Only Zola still pestered him, but even she made tentative advances, her little hand on his arm a question she didn't dare ask.
He lived like a ghost in his own existence, a presence that was tolerated but not perceived. He commuted to work, endured the sabotage and the scorn, and returned to this silent home, the routine grinding him down to powder. He lived in this state of numbed dissolution when the invitation, or rather the non-invitation, arrived.
It was a Tuesday night. He scrolled through his phone, a budget, slow device that reminded him constantly of his place, going through the motions to see if there were any work emails to command his dwindling attention. A pop-up appeared on a social media site he barely used, a throwback to a more optimistic time. It was a tag from Uche, a person he used to regard as his best friend.
His heart did a feeble, unreliable leap. Uche? They hadn't talked in over a year, not since Elian had refused to invest in a "can't-lose" import venture Uche had been trying to sell him on, a venture that smelled of fake customs documents and paid officials. Uche had called him a "coward" and a "fool." The friendship had cooled, then hardened.
With trembling hands, Elian pressed the alert. Not to a personal message. It led him to a public event page.
"VICTORIA ISLAND VIBES: Uche's Reunion Bash!"
The photo had been a professionally taken shot of glinting skyscrapers against the backdrop of a dying sun. The details were a sucker punch: This Saturday. 8 PM until Dawn. Exclusive Guestlist. Valet Parking Available. The location was a penthouse loft in one of Victoria Island's priciest towers, a world of mirrored glass and money that seemed as distant as the moon.
He wasn't invited. No private note, no invitation, no guest of honor. Only this public page, and Uche had personally tagged him. Why? A mistake? A joke gone sour?
He tapped the growing list of guests. Name after name rolled past, a virtual roll call of his past. There was Kemi, whom he'd championed through her divorce; now she owned a successful boutique. There was Segun, his grizzled university roommate turned mid-tier politician who wore only designer agbadas. There was Bola, Chidi, Ngozi… all the people he had grown up with, shared dreams with, all of whom were now conveniently patronized on Uche's "exclusive" list. They had all taken the raft and swum on the calm, thriving waters as he perished in his cathedral of rock.
The treachery was a sharp, cold needle, piercing the numbing shell he had constructed around his heart. This was not the rough, professional sabotage of Bello and Adekunle. This was personal, precise, and calculated to cause maximum shame.
Saturday night arrived. Elian was at home, trying to fix a leaky kitchen faucet with a rusty wrench. Adeshewa was at the market, filling in late shifts for Mrs. Chukwu. Tobe was away. Zola was flipping through a cartoon on a tiny, grainy tablet. The banality of the scene was a lie. His entire presence focused on the phone on the counter, an immobile, malignant seer.
9 PM, the first photo. A group shot, Uche in the center, his arm thrown over smiling Segun. They were standing on a large patio, the Lagos cityscape glittering behind them like a bed of jewels. Both men wore the same, absurdly expensive-looking gold watches.
Elian's thumb lingered on the phone screen. Part of him screamed to put the phone away, to safeguard himself from the pain. But there was another, more brutal part, the one that must see the intensity of his devastation, that compelled him to scroll.
The dam broke. Image after image, clip after clip, poured into the feed, a live-action movie of his loneliness.
Kemi: "The mood is right! Good music, good people! #UchesBash #VictoriaIslandLife" – a video of a DJ playing on a deck overlooking the sea, amidst smiling, dancing silhouettes.
Chidi: "When the squad is reunited! Love only." – a photo of ten guys, all of whom Elian had known, hoisting glasses of champagne. In the background, a shiny, silver grille of a new Mercedes was seen.
Bola: "Wow, this view though! Lagos is quite lovely from up here." – a panoramic view shot of the penthouse, which Elian had only ever seen in movies.
He scrolled through each of them, his face a granite mask, but his heart flayed alive. He saw the effortless caresses, the laughter, the shared history playing out without him. He saw the proof of their victory in the fit of their clothes, the shine of their jewelry, the simple, unadulterated extravagance of their surroundings. They had not so much left him behind as they were celebrating the distance.
And then he caught sight of it. A video by Uche himself. It was a rowdy, tipsy clip. Uche was filming, panning across a room full of people lying on white leather couches.
"Look at us!" Uche exclaimed in a joyful slur. "We did it! We are the ones who said yes to life!" The camera panned, and for a brief moment, it stopped on a framed photo on a bedside table. It was an old, grainy university reunion one. A younger, hopeful Elian was in the center of the group, arm around Uche. They both laughed.
Uche’s voice came back, sharp and clear. “Look! Remember him? Elian Athen? The holy man! The one too pure for our little schemes.” The crowd around him erupted in laughter. Someone shouted, “The fallen professional!”
The camera panned in on the old photo, on Elian's pure, smiling face. "He sits in his run-down apartment in Bariga right now, counting his morals!" Uche bragged. "We invited the real ones tonight. The ones who understand the way the world works. To succeed! To those who dare take it!
The video had ended. Elian sat on the kitchen floor, the wrench still grasped in his hand. The silence in his modest home was now deafening, intensified by the lingering echoes of their laughter from a distant world. Each giggle, each cheer, each clinking glass from those videos was an infinitesimal, precise scalpel, eroding shavings of his soul.
This treachery was not the same kind of flame. Starvation was a physical, base ache. Poverty was a grinding, chronic concern. But this? This was a holocaust of the soul. This was a conscious removal of his humanity, his belonging to the human family. They weren't just excluding him; they were making his absence, his struggle, his unyielding stance the joke, the cement for their new successful society. His honesty was the foil to which their depravity was all the more vivid.
He saw a comment on Uche's video by Segun, the politician: "Don't be so hard on him, Uche. The world has to have fools. They make everyone else good."
The phone slipped from Elian's grasp, ringing on the cement ground. He didn't pick it up. He curled his knees up to his chest, there on the cold kitchen floor, and rested his forehead against them. He didn't cry. The pain was too deep for crying. It was a parched, barren grief, an ash heap of bone and ash.
The flicker in his mind, the existence of the System, which had been a nagging throb, now became a cold, commanding pressure. The ghostly green text, which had been transient and indistinct, now burned with an abrupt, harsh precision behind closed eyes.
Social Betrayal Noted: Circle of Trust. Severity: Maximum.
Integrity Noted: In The Face Of Complete Ostracization. Purity: Absolute.
Catalyst Threshold Reached.
System of Moral Equilibrium… Online.
The words hung in the blackness of his mind, no longer a mysterious message but a final statement. The burning betrayal in his heart did not cease, but now augmented by something else: an icy, vast, and terrifying sense of purpose. Exclusion was complete. The last bridge was burned. And as he sat on the ground, utterly alone, Elian Athen finally understood. He was no longer the fellow pleading for a place at the table. He was the fellow that would turn the table over.
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Chapter 12 – The First Quest
The emptiness did not reclaim him. Instead, Elian Athen forced himself awake through a haze of constant, cyan light. The announcements that had declared his rebirth were gone, but their stamp remained in a permanent, ghostly exhibit seared into the very fabric of his perception. In the lower left of his field of view, a pulsing status bar: [Vitality: 12%]. In the lower right, another: [Willpower: 9%]. They were not metaphors; they were quantifiable realities, as real to him now as the damp, cold concrete he rested against.The storm still stormed. The rain still came down in relentless sheets, and the wind screamed its scorn under the bridge. But the bitter cold, the bone-freezing chill that had been draining the life from him, was… contained. It was still present, a body sense, but not the kiss of death anymore. His physical body, while weakened, no longer trembled with spasmodic convulsions. Low-grade, systems-whir of energy was maintaining his vital systems humming, fighting the hy
Chapter 11 – System of Betrayal and Integrity
The vacuum no longer spoke.It was filled with a low, thrumming vibration, the thunder of a huge engine accelerating from the bottom of emptiness. Elian Athen did not awaken so much as he was restarted. Perception slammed into him not as a golden dawn, but as a lightning strike. The physical ache of hunger, the chill ache of rain, the crushing weight of hopelessness—all were stripped away. Or better still, it was listed, recorded, and stored as data points.He was swimming in a sea of pure blackness, but he was seeing his own hands, white and whole, before him. The rot, the filth, the shakes—vanished."Integrity logged," a voice said. It was not male or female, not human or divine. It was simple information, presented as sound—cold, mechanical, absolute. It originated from everywhere and nowhere, resonating in the very core of his being."Betrayal registered."Elian was shocked, or felt the specter of shocking. His eyes, or the impression of them, opened wider. The shadow before him b
Chapter 10 – Collapse Under the Bridge
The golden command—[AWAKEN.]—had been a spark in nothing, but nothing was ravenous and vast. It had devoured him not, but illuminated the gulf of his descent before he continued to fall. The days after the laughter of children blended together in a grayscale smear of agony. Starvation was a constant, grinding stone in his stomach, but it had become the normal, almost mundane, suffering, like the persistent hum of the generator. The real wound was to his soul, which was hollowed and left empty, a vacancy where a man used to be.The sky, which had been so hot, brassy blue, began bruising later in the afternoon. Dark grey-bottomed clouds piled up on the horizon, and the air thickened, swollen with the threat of a storm. The city held its breath. To the house and the safe, it was a minor inconvenience. To Elian, it was a death sentence in action.He had been walking in a daze, his body a zombie marionette whose strings were cut. He was drawn to the underground area beneath the Third Mainl
Chapter 9 – Hunger's Bite
The cold ember of rage that Deji’s betrayal had forged was a feeble defense against the slow, methodical siege of the body. The resolve that had felt like granite on the bridge and in the aftermath of Ojuelegba began to crack under a far more ancient and inexorable force: hunger.The first day of fasting had been bearable, a hunger he could attribute to tension. The second day had been a dull gnaw, a whine of want in the back of his mind that colored everything. But today, on the fourth day, it was no longer something he sensed; it was something he felt. Something alive had formed in his stomach, a worm or a snake, twisting and contorting, its demands dominating all else—pride, recollection, even the soothing numbness of the System's equations.His body, kept up by constant meals though plain, now consumed itself. A relentless shudder had taken up residence in his hands. His eyes would spin on a sudden motion, the ground on a greased axis. Walking from his generator camp to the highwa
Chapter 8 – The Friend Who Looked Away
The ember of rage that had flashed on the Third Mainland Bridge did not burn him up into a flame overnight. It smoldered, a slow, constant warmth in his gut that kept at bay the freezing clutch of despair. It gave his rambling a new, sinister purpose. He was no longer just a ghost drifting towards dissolution; he was a spy in a strange land, reconnoitering the boundaries of his own destruction.His days settled into a bleak routine. He discovered the relative safety of a concealed space behind a screaming generator near the Obalende motor park, where the perpetual, pounding noise deterred most and the waste heat from the generator gave some semblance of heat in the damp nights. His world had contracted to a few square kilometers of relentless city wilderness, a circuit of pavements, under-bridges, and bazaar alleys where he was as much of a fixture as the mounds of discarded plastic and the ubiquitous potholes.It was on a scorching afternoon in the demented whirlpool of Ojuelegga tha
Chapter 7 – Streets of Lagos
The four walls of the house he once knew had been a cell, but they were his cell. They had held within them the ghosts of his past, the shreds of a life defective but nonetheless his own. The notice to vacate, now enforced, had taken even that away from him. The bailiffs, abrupt and faceless, had fitted new locks in place with a few efficient turns of screwdriver, piling his few remaining belongings—a box of clothes, a folder of dusty documents, the old family photo album—onto the dirty sidewalk outside. The door, his once, now became one of exclusion, closed to him.Homelessness did not creep up on Elian Athen slowly; it engulfed him in one brutal swallow.His first night was a master class in surrealist displacement. He moved through the familiar streets of Bariga, his briefcase—the last pathetic symbol of his working life—under his arm. The sounds of the neighborhood remained the same: the cackling of families behind doors, the stridence of televisions, the distant thump of music.
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