Three in the morning. Year 2226.
Lam Uyen sat in the ground-floor security booth of apartment complex C-7, both feet propped up on the edge of the desk, holding a cup of tea that had gone cold two hours ago.
Beyond the thick glass door was the city. Or rather — what remained of one. Streetlights burned at half capacity, alternating working and broken in uneven intervals, casting fractured streaks of light along the empty road. Farther east, a warning siren wailed — long, flat, exhausted, like the city itself. D-rank demons had appeared in District 9. The defense unit was handling it. None of his concern.
The cracked phone screen glowed faintly in his palm. He was rewatching an old clip — a hunter team's helmet-cam footage from last year, back when a C-rank demon sighting was enough to bring an entire neighborhood out into the street to watch. Nobody bothered watching anymore. People had gotten used to it.
So had he.
Lam Uyen yawned, set the tea down on the desk with a soft clink, and looked out the window with the eyes of someone who had sat in this exact spot long enough to stop seeing anything worth noting. Twenty-eight years old. Building security guard, three years running. F-rank, no identifiable combat ability — according to the registration card pinned on the wall over there.
Everything was normal. Exactly as he wanted.
---
[Detected: E-rank Demon — Venomfang Rat — infiltrating via drainage pipe, Basement Level B. Grid coordinate: C-7-04. Suggested action: Capture / Eliminate / Ignore.]
The line appeared in his mind, pale blue background as always — sharp, evenly spaced, unhurried. The System was never in a hurry. He appreciated that.
Lam Uyen looked at the three options for a second.
Ignore.
Not possible. Mrs. Nam on the first floor had a habit of waking early to water her plants on the balcony, and the path from the elevator down to the basement ran directly past that drainage access point. The Venomfang Rat was small — about the size of a toy terrier — but its venom caused full neural paralysis within fifteen minutes. Mrs. Nam was seventy-two, moved slowly, and would have no chance of running in time.
Eliminate.
He stood up, pocketed his phone, and grabbed nothing else. For a Venomfang Rat, nothing else was needed.
---
Basement Level B was dark and damp, the smell of old concrete and motor oil thick in the air. A fluorescent tube at one end had died and now flickered at uneven intervals, like the breathing of someone about to fall asleep. Lam Uyen stopped at the door, didn't turn on a flashlight, and let his eyes adjust.
[Target confirmed. Distance: 4.2 meters. Direction: Northeast. Status: Moving.]
The demon was in the far corner beside a cluster of old motorcycles. He saw it with his own eyes — not through the System — a low, elongated shadow moving by pressing itself flat against the floor. Its jaw opened occasionally to expose a row of fine teeth sharp as injection needles, secreting a dark viscous liquid that clung to the concrete surface below.
Ugly. But still just an E-rank demon.
Lam Uyen didn't move. He only adjusted something very small on the inside — something that, if anyone had been standing beside him at that moment, they would not have seen, felt, or known how to name. The System received the command.
Four seconds later, the Venomfang Rat detonated in a silent, invisible field pressure. Clean as a passing thought.
No sound. No blood spray. Only a small dark dampness spreading across the basement floor, and the distinctive burning smell of a low-rank demon's elimination.
He looked at the wet patch for a moment.
[Elimination complete. No significant material debris. Recommendation: Clean before 5:30 AM to prevent detection.]
"Too loud," he muttered to the empty air.
He went to the storage room for the bucket and professional-grade odor neutralizer he'd bought out of pocket the year before — the kind actual hunter teams used, more effective than what the district administration handed out. Fifteen minutes later, the basement floor was spotless. He poured the last bucket of rinse water, checked the time: 3:17 AM. Mrs. Nam usually woke at five.
Enough time to go back to sleep.
---
On the way upstairs, he passed the old security office — the one that used to have two staff on shift, now just him since the complex's budget had been cut. The announcement board on the wall was still up from last month: a list of resident abilities registered with the district administration, printed out to "facilitate coordination during incidents."
He stopped. As he always stopped when he walked past it.
LAM UYEN — F-rank. No identifiable combat ability.
Below that, three other names: NGUYEN MINH PHAT — D-rank, physical enhancement. TRAN THI HOA — C-rank, small-scale fire manipulation. BUI VAN LONG — B-rank, reflex acceleration. Retired.
Three years ago, at the district ability registration office, Lam Uyen had sat with their cheap ballpoint pen in hand and stared at the "Ability Rank" field for about twenty seconds. Around him, other registrants filled in their forms with varying expressions — pride for the ones with something worth recording, resignation for the others. He was neither.
He wrote: F. No identifiable combat ability.
The intake clerk looked at him with the expression of someone who had processed enough F-rank registrations to have long stopped feeling anything about them. "Are you certain you don't want to retest? People sometimes underestimate themselves."
"Certain," he said.
She stamped the form and moved to the next applicant.
The System, running silently in his mind the way it always did, offered no comment. It never commented on his choices. It registered, executed, waited. That was what made it reliable — it didn't have opinions about what he chose not to use it for.
All three of the registered residents combined couldn't handle a C-rank demon in decent combat condition. And he, with the System currently managing twenty-three demon units ranging from F to B, plus his own direct intervention capacity —
He looked at his own name for three more seconds.
F-rank. No identifiable combat ability.
Then he turned off the hallway light, went upstairs, and went back to sleep.
---
Seven in the morning, a short burst of sirens from the neighboring district jolted him awake. Different from the usual sustained warning tones — these were short alternating bursts, which meant the demons had entered the residential perimeter.
Lam Uyen climbed up to the rooftop via the rusted iron ladder at the end of the twelfth-floor hallway, one hand holding a canned coffee he'd gotten from the vending machine on the first floor.
From up here, District 9 was clearly visible. Black smoke rose from somewhere between two apartment towers, rolling westward with the morning wind. Screaming carried faintly in the distance, blended with the sirens and something heavier — a crashing, tearing sound — the kind that someone who had never heard it before wouldn't immediately recognize, but someone who had could never mistake.
Iron Shell Wolves. He recognized the attack pattern from the way the smoke moved.
[Detected: 7 D-rank Demons — Iron Shell Wolves — moving northwest. Average speed: 12 km/h. ETA to C-7 perimeter: 11 minutes. Suggested action: Alert residents / Activate defense / Stand by.]
Eleven minutes.
Iron Shell Wolves were pack hunters. Seven of them — not a coincidence. Seven was enough to tear through a standard residential defense unit in roughly three minutes. Someone on the demon world's side understood tactical calculation, or this was simply pack instinct refined through generations of invasion.
He looked at the smoke rising in the distance, took a sip of the canned coffee — too sweet, as always — then looked down at the courtyard. A few kids from the third floor were playing badminton below, not yet aware of anything. Mrs. Nam was watering her plants on the first-floor balcony, back bent, unhurried as every morning.
Eleven minutes left.
He set the can down beside his foot, closed his eyes, and adjusted.
[Coordinating: Iron Shell Guard — B-rank — move to intercept point, northern perimeter.] [Coordinating: Twin-Head Hounds — C-rank, 2 units — encircle from the east.] [Coordinating: Thunder Grubs — D-rank, 4 units — support.]
Ninety-two seconds later, a short burst of sound came from the C-7 border — brief, compact, then nothing. No screaming. No additional sirens. Mrs. Nam was still watering her plants, hadn't looked up. The kids in the courtyard were still playing badminton.
They didn't know. They would never know.
Exactly as he wanted it.
Lam Uyen finished his canned coffee, tossed it in the bin near the ladder, and went back inside.
---
Late afternoon, the last of the daylight turned the security booth window frame gold.
Mrs. Nam knocked at a quarter to five, both hands holding a steaming bowl of pork-bone noodle soup. She did this sometimes — when she cooked too much, she'd bring some over, citing "no wasting food," though he had lived here long enough to know she always cooked enough for two.
"Lucky, wasn't it," she said, setting the bowl on the desk beside the monitor. "Demons hit District 9 this morning but didn't spill over here. Must've been the hunters blocking them in time."
"Yeah," Lam Uyen said.
"Heard the other districts weren't so fortunate. District 11 lost some people." Mrs. Nam shook her head and sat in the old wooden chair in the corner. "Eat it while it's warm."
She talked while she sat with him. Not because she needed someone to listen — her son was in a province somewhere, called once a month — but because she was the kind of person who believed silence needed to be filled with something. Voices. Small stories. Little things proving that life was still going on normally, despite what existed outside.
He never interrupted her. Not because he particularly wanted to listen, but because there was something in the cadence of her storytelling — slow, steady, rambling — that made breathing a little easier.
"When you first moved in," Mrs. Nam said, smoothing the edge of her old cloth bag on her lap, "you looked awfully thin. Still thin now, but different. You look... steadier."
Lam Uyen looked at the bowl. "I'm fine."
"Fine is good. These days, fine is more than most people get."
She stood up, brushed her hands on her skirt, and looked at him once more with the eyes of someone old enough to have seen enough that they no longer needed to say more. "Finish it. I'm going home."
He heard her footsteps in the hallway, the elevator doors closing. Then silence came back.
Through the small window, he looked out at the courtyard. The kids had gone inside for homework. He looked at the wooden chair in the corner — its surface worn smooth over time, the right front leg still wrapped in a strip of blue nylon he'd tied around it last month as a temporary fix while he waited to buy a replacement. He hadn't bought the replacement.
There was a moment, when Mrs. Nam had been looking toward the courtyard and he didn't need to pretend to be listening, that he looked at that window — the empty lot, two swings motionless, the angled afternoon light falling across it all — and let his gaze stay there longer than necessary.
Not because he was thinking anything in particular. Only that sometimes he looked at ordinary things like that and felt something — not heavy enough to be loneliness, not clear enough to be sadness — just a small familiar gap, like knowing there was something missing but having forgotten a long time ago what it was.
The evening visit lasted about twenty minutes in total. She talked about the neighbor on the sixth floor who had ordered demon ward seals from some online shop — three million dong each, guaranteed to repel any demon below B-rank. She thought it was a scam but hadn't said so directly, because he was getting on in years and she didn't see the point in taking something from him that made him feel safer, even if what he felt was false safety.
"People need to believe in something," she said. "Especially now."
Lam Uyen ate and didn't respond to that.
After she left, he washed the bowl and turned off the booth light and went to lie down. Outside the window, the city's nighttime sounds continued indifferently — a distant siren, the low hum of an emergency generator, the occasional bird that had apparently decided apartment rooftops were adequate habitat.
Sleep didn't come right away. It rarely did on nights when the System had been active. He lay with his hands folded under his head, watching the ceiling water stain that had been slowly expanding since last rainy season, and thought about nothing in particular.
This was the part of the life he had built that he was best at: the thinking about nothing. The practiced absence of expectation. He had gotten very good at it.
Then the System interrupted, and everything changed.
There was no good reason to walk toward it. The System had said do not approach — the only time in three years it had issued a direct negative recommendation rather than simply listing options. He had spent three years carefully doing nothing, carefully being invisible, carefully being the person whose name on a district registration board next to F-rank meant exactly what it claimed to mean.
He zipped his jacket and stepped out into the night anyway.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Three in the morning. Year 2226.
Lam Uyen sat in the ground-floor security booth of apartment complex C-7, both feet propped up on the edge of the desk, holding a cup of tea that had gone cold two hours ago.
Beyond the thick glass door was the city. Or rather — what remained of one. Streetlights burned at half capacity, alternating working and broken in uneven intervals, casting fractured streaks of light along the empty road. Farther east, a warning siren wailed — long, flat, exhausted, like the city itself. D-rank demons had appeared in District 9. The defense unit was handling it. None of his concern.
The cracked phone screen glowed faintly in his palm. He was rewatching an old clip — a hunter team's helmet-cam footage from last year, back when a C-rank demon sighting was enough to bring an entire neighborhood out into the street to watch. Nobody bothered watching anymore. People had gotten used to it.
So had he.
Lam Uyen yawned, set the tea down on the desk with a soft clink, and looked out the window with the eyes of someone who had sat in this exact spot long enough to stop seeing anything worth noting. Twenty-eight years old. Building security guard, three years running. F-rank, no identifiable combat ability — according to the registration card pinned on the wall over there.
Everything was normal. Exactly as he wanted.
---
[Detected: E-rank Demon — Venomfang Rat — infiltrating via drainage pipe, Basement Level B. Grid coordinate: C-7-04. Suggested action: Capture / Eliminate / Ignore.]
The line appeared in his mind, pale blue background as always — sharp, evenly spaced, unhurried. The System was never in a hurry. He appreciated that.
Lam Uyen looked at the three options for a second.
Ignore.
Not possible. Mrs. Nam on the first floor had a habit of waking early to water her plants on the balcony, and the path from the elevator down to the basement ran directly past that drainage access point. The Venomfang Rat was small — about the size of a toy terrier — but its venom caused full neural paralysis within fifteen minutes. Mrs. Nam was seventy-two, moved slowly, and would have no chance of running in time.
Eliminate.
He stood up, pocketed his phone, and grabbed nothing else. For a Venomfang Rat, nothing else was needed.
---
Basement Level B was dark and damp, the smell of old concrete and motor oil thick in the air. A fluorescent tube at one end had died and now flickered at uneven intervals, like the breathing of someone about to fall asleep. Lam Uyen stopped at the door, didn't turn on a flashlight, and let his eyes adjust.
[Target confirmed. Distance: 4.2 meters. Direction: Northeast. Status: Moving.]
The demon was in the far corner beside a cluster of old motorcycles. He saw it with his own eyes — not through the System — a low, elongated shadow moving by pressing itself flat against the floor. Its jaw opened occasionally to expose a row of fine teeth sharp as injection needles, secreting a dark viscous liquid that clung to the concrete surface below.
Ugly. But still just an E-rank demon.
Lam Uyen didn't move. He only adjusted something very small on the inside — something that, if anyone had been standing beside him at that moment, they would not have seen, felt, or known how to name. The System received the command.
Four seconds later, the Venomfang Rat detonated in a silent, invisible field pressure. Clean as a passing thought.
No sound. No blood spray. Only a small dark dampness spreading across the basement floor, and the distinctive burning smell of a low-rank demon's elimination.
He looked at the wet patch for a moment.
[Elimination complete. No significant material debris. Recommendation: Clean before 5:30 AM to prevent detection.]
"Too loud," he muttered to the empty air.
He went to the storage room for the bucket and professional-grade odor neutralizer he'd bought out of pocket the year before — the kind actual hunter teams used, more effective than what the district administration handed out. Fifteen minutes later, the basement floor was spotless. He poured the last bucket of rinse water, checked the time: 3:17 AM. Mrs. Nam usually woke at five.
Enough time to go back to sleep.
---
On the way upstairs, he passed the old security office — the one that used to have two staff on shift, now just him since the complex's budget had been cut. The announcement board on the wall was still up from last month: a list of resident abilities registered with the district administration, printed out to "facilitate coordination during incidents."
He stopped. As he always stopped when he walked past it.
LAM UYEN — F-rank. No identifiable combat ability.
Below that, three other names: NGUYEN MINH PHAT — D-rank, physical enhancement. TRAN THI HOA — C-rank, small-scale fire manipulation. BUI VAN LONG — B-rank, reflex acceleration. Retired.
Three years ago, at the district ability registration office, Lam Uyen had sat with their cheap ballpoint pen in hand and stared at the "Ability Rank" field for about twenty seconds. Around him, other registrants filled in their forms with varying expressions — pride for the ones with something worth recording, resignation for the others. He was neither.
He wrote: F. No identifiable combat ability.
The intake clerk looked at him with the expression of someone who had processed enough F-rank registrations to have long stopped feeling anything about them. "Are you certain you don't want to retest? People sometimes underestimate themselves."
"Certain," he said.
She stamped the form and moved to the next applicant.
The System, running silently in his mind the way it always did, offered no comment. It never commented on his choices. It registered, executed, waited. That was what made it reliable — it didn't have opinions about what he chose not to use it for.
All three of the registered residents combined couldn't handle a C-rank demon in decent combat condition. And he, with the System currently managing twenty-three demon units ranging from F to B, plus his own direct intervention capacity —
He looked at his own name for three more seconds.
F-rank. No identifiable combat ability.
Then he turned off the hallway light, went upstairs, and went back to sleep.
---
Seven in the morning, a short burst of sirens from the neighboring district jolted him awake. Different from the usual sustained warning tones — these were short alternating bursts, which meant the demons had entered the residential perimeter.
Lam Uyen climbed up to the rooftop via the rusted iron ladder at the end of the twelfth-floor hallway, one hand holding a canned coffee he'd gotten from the vending machine on the first floor.
From up here, District 9 was clearly visible. Black smoke rose from somewhere between two apartment towers, rolling westward with the morning wind. Screaming carried faintly in the distance, blended with the sirens and something heavier — a crashing, tearing sound — the kind that someone who had never heard it before wouldn't immediately recognize, but someone who had could never mistake.
Iron Shell Wolves. He recognized the attack pattern from the way the smoke moved.
[Detected: 7 D-rank Demons — Iron Shell Wolves — moving northwest. Average speed: 12 km/h. ETA to C-7 perimeter: 11 minutes. Suggested action: Alert residents / Activate defense / Stand by.]
Eleven minutes.
Iron Shell Wolves were pack hunters. Seven of them — not a coincidence. Seven was enough to tear through a standard residential defense unit in roughly three minutes. Someone on the demon world's side understood tactical calculation, or this was simply pack instinct refined through generations of invasion.
He looked at the smoke rising in the distance, took a sip of the canned coffee — too sweet, as always — then looked down at the courtyard. A few kids from the third floor were playing badminton below, not yet aware of anything. Mrs. Nam was watering her plants on the first-floor balcony, back bent, unhurried as every morning.
Eleven minutes left.
He set the can down beside his foot, closed his eyes, and adjusted.
[Coordinating: Iron Shell Guard — B-rank — move to intercept point, northern perimeter.] [Coordinating: Twin-Head Hounds — C-rank, 2 units — encircle from the east.] [Coordinating: Thunder Grubs — D-rank, 4 units — support.]
Ninety-two seconds later, a short burst of sound came from the C-7 border — brief, compact, then nothing. No screaming. No additional sirens. Mrs. Nam was still watering her plants, hadn't looked up. The kids in the courtyard were still playing badminton.
They didn't know. They would never know.
Exactly as he wanted it.
Lam Uyen finished his canned coffee, tossed it in the bin near the ladder, and went back inside.
---
Late afternoon, the last of the daylight turned the security booth window frame gold.
Mrs. Nam knocked at a quarter to five, both hands holding a steaming bowl of pork-bone noodle soup. She did this sometimes — when she cooked too much, she'd bring some over, citing "no wasting food," though he had lived here long enough to know she always cooked enough for two.
"Lucky, wasn't it," she said, setting the bowl on the desk beside the monitor. "Demons hit District 9 this morning but didn't spill over here. Must've been the hunters blocking them in time."
"Yeah," Lam Uyen said.
"Heard the other districts weren't so fortunate. District 11 lost some people." Mrs. Nam shook her head and sat in the old wooden chair in the corner. "Eat it while it's warm."
She talked while she sat with him. Not because she needed someone to listen — her son was in a province somewhere, called once a month — but because she was the kind of person who believed silence needed to be filled with something. Voices. Small stories. Little things proving that life was still going on normally, despite what existed outside.
He never interrupted her. Not because he particularly wanted to listen, but because there was something in the cadence of her storytelling — slow, steady, rambling — that made breathing a little easier.
"When you first moved in," Mrs. Nam said, smoothing the edge of her old cloth bag on her lap, "you looked awfully thin. Still thin now, but different. You look... steadier."
Lam Uyen looked at the bowl. "I'm fine."
"Fine is good. These days, fine is more than most people get."
She stood up, brushed her hands on her skirt, and looked at him once more with the eyes of someone old enough to have seen enough that they no longer needed to say more. "Finish it. I'm going home."
He heard her footsteps in the hallway, the elevator doors closing. Then silence came back.
Through the small window, he looked out at the courtyard. The kids had gone inside for homework. He looked at the wooden chair in the corner — its surface worn smooth over time, the right front leg still wrapped in a strip of blue nylon he'd tied around it last month as a temporary fix while he waited to buy a replacement. He hadn't bought the replacement.
There was a moment, when Mrs. Nam had been looking toward the courtyard and he didn't need to pretend to be listening, that he looked at that window — the empty lot, two swings motionless, the angled afternoon light falling across it all — and let his gaze stay there longer than necessary.
Not because he was thinking anything in particular. Only that sometimes he looked at ordinary things like that and felt something — not heavy enough to be loneliness, not clear enough to be sadness — just a small familiar gap, like knowing there was something missing but having forgotten a long time ago what it was.
The evening visit lasted about twenty minutes in total. She talked about the neighbor on the sixth floor who had ordered demon ward seals from some online shop — three million dong each, guaranteed to repel any demon below B-rank. She thought it was a scam but hadn't said so directly, because he was getting on in years and she didn't see the point in taking something from him that made him feel safer, even if what he felt was false safety.
"People need to believe in something," she said. "Especially now."
Lam Uyen ate and didn't respond to that.
After she left, he washed the bowl and turned off the booth light and went to lie down. Outside the window, the city's nighttime sounds continued indifferently — a distant siren, the low hum of an emergency generator, the occasional bird that had apparently decided apartment rooftops were adequate habitat.
Sleep didn't come right away. It rarely did on nights when the System had been active. He lay with his hands folded under his head, watching the ceiling water stain that had been slowly expanding since last rainy season, and thought about nothing in particular.
This was the part of the life he had built that he was best at: the thinking about nothing. The practiced absence of expectation. He had gotten very good at it.
Then the System interrupted, and everything changed.
There was no good reason to walk toward it. The System had said do not approach — the only time in three years it had issued a direct negative recommendation rather than simply listing options. He had spent three years carefully doing nothing, carefully being invisible, carefully being the person whose name on a district registration board next to F-rank meant exactly what it claimed to mean.
He zipped his jacket and stepped out into the night anyway.
You've reached the end of this chapter