The God of Ruin’s Pocket Change

CHAPTER 4: System Error

I looked up.

The crowd had stopped.

It was a sea of grey and brown. People wrapped in plastic ponchos, people wearing coats made of duct tape, people with limbs replaced by rusted iron. They were all frozen, standing in the middle of the street like statues in a graveyard.

And they were all looking at me.

No. Not at me.

They were looking at Jori’s fist.

They couldn't see the penny anymore. Jori had buried it against his chest. But they had seen the flash. They had seen the color.

In a world of rust, copper was a sun. It was a color that didn't belong. It was a promise of heat, conductivity, and value so high it made their heads spin.

I saw a woman standing near a drainpipe. She was holding a bag of aluminum cans. She dropped the bag. Clatter. She didn't notice. Her eyes were locked on the old man in the mud. Her mouth hung open, revealing gums black with rot.

I saw a man with a shovel strapped to his back. He took a step forward. Then another. His eyes were wide, dilated, predatory.

The air in the street changed.

Before, it had smelled of exhaust and wet trash. Now, it smelled of something else.

It smelled of iron. It smelled of adrenaline.

It smelled of greed.

I shifted my weight. The mud sucked at my shoes.

"He's fine," I announced to the crowd, pointing at Jori with my rat skewer. "He just... appreciated the tip. He is overwhelmed by the generosity."

Nobody laughed. Nobody smiled.

They just stared.

A low murmur started to ripple through them. It wasn't words. It was a vibration. A collective realization.

Money. Real money. The giant has money.

I looked back down at Jori. He was still twitching. He was making a low, keening sound, like a wounded dog protecting a bone.

"Sir," I said, nudging his boot with my toe. "You are getting dirty. This is unsanitary food preparation practice."

He didn't move. He just squeezed his fist tighter.

I sighed.

"Fine," I said. "Keep the change. Sleep it off. But I am noting this in my review. One star. Would not recommend."

My stomach roared again.

The pain was sharp enough to make me wince. I had forgotten about the hunger for thirty seconds while watching the vendor reboot, but now it was back, and it was angry.

I looked at the skewer in my hand.

The rat was charred black. It dripped grease that solidified instantly in the cold air. It looked like a piece of wood that had been set on fire and then dropped in a sewer.

"Nutrients," I told myself. "Fuel."

I lifted the stick to my mouth.

The crowd watched.

I took a bite.

It was awful.

It wasn't just bad. It was an assault on the concept of food.

The outer layer was carbonized ash that turned to powder on my tongue. The inside was rubbery and tough, fighting my teeth with every chew.

And the taste...

It tasted like burnt hair. It tasted like gasoline. It tasted like the fear of a small animal that had spent its entire short life running away from things bigger than it.

It tasted like sadness.

I gagged. My throat seized up, trying to reject the foreign matter. Spit it out, my divine instincts screamed. This is poison. This is filth.

Swallow it, my mortal body begged. We are dying. We need this.

I forced my jaw to work. I ground the gristle between my teeth. I swallowed.

The lump of meat slid down my throat like a hot stone. It hit my empty stomach with a heavy, wet thud.

I shuddered.

"Ambrosia," I whispered sarcastically, wiping grease from my lip. "Truly, the cuisine of the gods."

I looked at the skewer. There was still half a rat left.

I wanted to throw it away. I wanted to hurl it into the mud and demand a refund. But I couldn't. The bite I had just taken had sparked a tiny, flickering flame of energy in my core. My hands stopped shaking. The cold rain felt slightly less biting.

I needed the rest.

I took another bite. This one was mostly bone. Crack. I chewed that too. Calcium. I probably needed calcium.

I looked down at Jori one last time.

He was still in the fetal position. The rain was pooling around him, turning the dirt into a soup. He wasn't waking up. He had checked out of reality the moment the copper touched his skin.

I felt a flicker of annoyance.

I had paid him. I had overpaid him. By his own admission, I had given him a fortune. And he couldn't even stay conscious long enough to say 'have a nice day'?

"Service is slow," I muttered.

I stepped over him.

I didn't walk around. That would have required navigating the deeper mud. I just lifted my leg and stepped right over his prone body.

My sneaker landed on the other side with a splash.

I started walking.

The crowd parted.

They didn't move out of respect. They moved out of confusion. They had just watched a man drop a fortune into the mud, eat a piece of garbage, and then step over the body of the vendor like he was a pothole.

They didn't know what to make of me.

Was I a king? A madman? A monster?

I walked through the gap in the crowd. I kept my head up, my eyes fixed on the neon signs in the distance. I chewed my rat with mechanical grimness.

Behind me, the silence broke.

I heard the splash of boots hitting mud. I heard whispers rising into shouts.

"Did you see it?"

"Copper. Pure copper." 

"Get the old man!" 

"No, the giant! Get the giant!"

I didn't turn around. I didn't run. I couldn't run. My legs were too heavy, and my stomach was too busy trying to process the biological hazard I had just introduced to it.

I just walked.

But I could feel them.

The eyes.

Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. They were peeling off the walls. They were leaning out of shattered windows. They were emerging from the shadows of the alleyways.

They weren't looking at me like a person. They were looking at me like a loot box.

I felt a prickle on the back of my neck.

"I should have asked for a bag," I mumbled, taking another bite of the rat tail.

I turned a corner, heading away from the market, heading deeper into the labyrinth of Sector Z. The buildings here were taller, darker. The streetlights were broken. The shadows stretched out like fingers.

I was alone.

Or at least, I pretended to be.

But I could hear them behind me. The soft squelch of footsteps in the mud. The rattle of metal on metal.

They were following the money.

And I was the bank.

I shoved the last piece of the rat into my mouth and tossed the stick into a gutter.

"That," I said to the rain, "was the worst meal of my life."

I wiped my hands on my hoodie. The grease stained the white fabric for a second before the celestial weave rejected it, pushing the oil out until it dripped off like water.

I felt dirty. Inside and out.

I kept walking, listening to the footsteps behind me get closer, and closer, and closer.