The God of Ruin’s Pocket Change

CHAPTER 5: The Uncuttable Thread

I walked away from the crowd, chewing on a mistake.

The rat meat was a rubbery, charred lump of regret. It tasted of sulfur, burnt hair, and the distinct, metallic tang of fear. Every time I clamped my jaw down, a pocket of rancid grease exploded in my mouth, coating my tongue in a film that refused to be swallowed.

"Texture is... challenging," I muttered to the rain.

I kept my head down. My white hoodie was the only bright thing in Sector Z. It glowed with a soft, ethereal luminescence that seemed to irritate the shadows. I felt like a flare drifting through a dark room full of people who had adjusted to the blackness.

I could feel their eyes.

Back at the stall, the silence had been heavy. Now, as I moved away from Jori’s unconscious body, the silence broke. It shattered into a thousand whispers that skittered along the pavement behind me like dry leaves.

I walked faster.

My legs felt heavy. My knees popped with every step, a wet, grinding sound that vibrated up my thighs. I wasn't used to gravity. I wasn't used to friction. In the Celestial Palace, movement was a thought. You wanted to be across the room? You were there.

Here, movement was a negotiation with physics, and physics was losing its patience with me.

I turned a corner,ducking into a narrow alleyway to break the line of sight.

The noise of the market faded instantly, replaced by a damp, suffocating quiet. The alley was a canyon of rusted brick and corrugated steel that stretched up toward the smog-choked sky. The ground was a mosaic of mud, oil, and things that had been flattened by tires a long time ago.

I stopped near a dumpster that smelled like fermenting cabbage.

I leaned against the brick wall, taking a moment to breathe. The air here was thick. It tasted of ozone and wet dog.

I looked at the half-eaten skewer in my hand.

"I should throw this away," I whispered.

But my stomach cramped again. A sharp, violent twist that nearly doubled me over. It was a biological command. Fuel. Now.

I sighed. I took another bite. I chewed grimly, staring at a puddle where a dead beetle floated on its back.

I swallowed the lump of meat. It hit my stomach with a heavy thud.

I pushed myself off the wall. I needed to find a place to sit. A place with a door. Maybe a chair that didn't have three legs.

I took a step deeper into the alley.

The sound was soft. Almost imperceptible against the hiss of the rain.

I stopped.

I didn't turn around. I just listened.

Rain. Distant sirens. The hum of a dying neon sign somewhere above.

And then, the sound of a boot lifting out of mud. 

Someone was behind me.

I wasn't worried. I was six-foot-five. I had shoulders wide enough to block a doorway. And I was wearing a hoodie that cost more than this entire solar system. Most mortals took one look at me and assumed I was either a genetically modified soldier or a lunatic.

"I don't have any more copper," I called out over my shoulder, keeping my eyes on the dark path ahead. "And the rat is terrible. I do not recommend it."

Silence.

I took another step.

Splash.

Faster this time. Closer.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. It wasn't fear but it was an alert. A prickle of static electricity that warned of a pressure change.

The presence behind me wasn't shuffling like the zombies in the market. It was moving with intent. It was light. 

It moved like a predator that had spotted a limping gazelle.

I sighed, staring at the charred stick in my hand.

"If you are a fan," I said, "I am not signing autographs. My hands are greasy."

I started to turn.

I was too slow.

My mortal body was a laggy machine. By the time my brain sent the signal to my feet to pivot, the air behind me had already shifted.

Just a sharp intake of breath and the scrape of rubber on wet asphalt.

A shadow detached itself from the gloom.

It was small. Fast. A blur of grey rags and desperation launching itself at my right side.

I saw a flash of metal.

It wasn't a sword. It wasn't a gun. It was a piece of jagged steel, wrapped in duct tape—a shiv made from a saw blade. It was ugly, rusted, and serrated like a shark's tooth.

The attacker wasn't aiming for my throat. They weren't aiming for my heart.

They were aiming for my pocket.

The pocket where the Ten Dollar Bill lay folded. The pocket where the coins jingled. The pocket that bulged with the impossible wealth I had flashed back at the stall.

"Hey—" I started to say.

The collision hit me hard.

The attacker slammed into my ribs. They were light but they hit me with the momentum of a starving animal. A shoulder dug into my side. A hand grabbed the hem of my hoodie, anchoring them to me.

And then, the knife slashed.

It was a vicious, practiced motion. A downward rip meant to slice the fabric wide open and spill the contents onto the mud.

The serrated edge of the scav-knife bit into the white fabric of my hoodie.

Maybe that would have killed me but my hoodie is different.

It was spun from the silk of nebular spiders. It was stitched with threads pulled from the event horizon of a singular point. It was designed to withstand the heat of a birthing star, the cold of deep space, and the corrosive splatter of galaxy-wine.

It was not designed to be cut by a piece of rusty scrap metal held by a malnourished teenager.

The knife hit the fabric.

The sound was shockingly loud in the confined alley. It wasn't the sound of cloth tearing. It was the sound of metal failing. It sounded like a dry branch stepping on a landmine.

The blade didn't tear. It didn't snag. It didn't even leave a crease.

The force of the blow had nowhere to go. The fabric refused to yield, so the kinetic energy reflected instantly back into the steel.

The blade shattered.

Shards of jagged metal exploded outward. They pinged off the brick wall next to us. One piece spun through the air and landed in a puddle with a hiss.

The attacker gasped.

It was a sharp, wet sound of pure shock.

The person stumbled back, their momentum arrested by the unbreakable wall of my laundry. They slipped in the mud, flailing for balance, and landed hard on their backside.

I stood there.

I blinked.

I looked down at my hip.

The white fabric was pristine. There was no cut. No loose thread. Just a slight smudge of mud where the attacker’s hand had grabbed me.

I looked at the attacker.

It was a girl.

She was huddled in the muck, staring up at me. She couldn't have been more than eighteen, but her face looked fifty. Her cheeks were hollowed out, creating sharp, dangerous angles under skin that looked like parchment paper. Her lips were cracked and blue.

She was wrapped in a coat that was clearly scavenged from a dead man. It was huge, grey, and stained with oil. Her hair was chopped short, matted against her skull by the rain.

But it was her hands I looked at.

She was clutching the handle of her knife.

Just the handle.

The duct tape was peeling. The metal stump where the blade used to be was jagged and broken.

She stared at the handle. Then she stared at my hoodie. Then she looked at my face.

Her eyes were grey. Not the soft grey of a cloud, but the hard, flat grey of concrete. And right now, they were wide with a terror that I couldn't quite understand.

She wasn't scared because she had failed.

She was scared because of how she had failed.

"It..." she whispered. Her voice was a rasp, unused and dry. "It didn't cut."

She looked at the shards of metal littering the ground.

"It cuts tires," she stammered, her chest heaving. "It cuts synth-leather. It cuts... skin."

She looked back at my hoodie.

"It didn't even ripple."

I slowly lowered the rat skewer. I chewed the piece of gristle I had in my mouth and swallowed it. It scratched my throat on the way down.

I brushed the spot on my hip where she had struck me.

I felt nothing. No pain. No scratch. Just the soft, impossible texture of the weave.

I looked at the girl. She was shaking. Violent tremors rocked her thin frame, sending ripples through the puddle she was sitting in. She looked like she was waiting for me to strike her down. To crush her. To finish what the alley had started.

I tilted my head.

I wasn't angry. I was mostly just... confused.

"Did a mosquito just bite me?" I asked.

The question hung in the air, heavy and absurd.

The girl stared at me. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. She looked at me like I was an alien. Like I was a glitch in the simulation of her miserable life.

"A... a mosquito?" she whispered.

"Yes," I said, rubbing the fabric. "I felt a tap. A slight pressure. Like a bug."

I looked at the broken handle in her hand.

"Or perhaps a very aggressive moth," I added.

The girl scrambled backward. She kicked her heels into the sludge, pushing herself away from me until her back hit the wet brick wall. She pulled her knees to her chest, making herself a small, tight target.

She threw the broken handle away. It splashed into the dark water.

"What are you?" she hissed.

I looked at her. I saw the hunger carved into her ribs. I saw the desperation that had driven her to attack a giant in a dark alley with a piece of scrap metal.

I looked at my hand. The hand that had held the penny. The hand that had held the rat.

"I'm Russ," I said simply.

I took a bite of the skewer.

The sound was loud in the quiet alley.

The girl didn't move. She just watched me eat, her grey eyes locked on the man who wore armor made of silk and didn't know the difference between a knife fight and an insect bite.

I wiped grease from my lip.

"And I think," I said, looking at the dead end of the alley, "that I am lost."