There’s more than one way to move through a city—most folks just take the roads because they’re laid out in front of ‘em like a promise. Straight lines, traffic laws, the illusion of order. But a city like Kuroyami? She’s a liar by design. Her real veins run deeper, through rusted grates and forgotten tunnels, where the light don’t reach and the maps don’t go. You want to move unseen, you don’t follow the streets—you follow the scars.

  And tonight, he needed to be invisible.

  Malik had started riding again, but it didn’t take long to feel the noose tightening. The streets got narrower, the traffic thinned out. He killed the engine beneath a leaning water tower, the metal frame creaking like old bones overhead. The bike ticked softly as it cooled, that sharp little sound echoing in the stillness like a clock that didn’t want to keep time. He stood in the dark, one hand on the grip, eyes sweeping the gloom. He’d ditched the black sedan, sure—but the quiet that followed wasn’t victory. It was the kind of silence that came before a hammer dropped. The hunt hadn’t ended. It had just slipped its boots off and started creeping.

  The city around him was still. Too still.

  He lit a cigarette with a snap of his stolen lighter, the little flame casting flickers across the hard lines of his face. The nicotine hit like a bitter friend, calming the edge just enough for him to think. They were tracking him. That much was clear. The way they showed up behind him—like they’d drawn it up on a chalkboard the night before—told him it wasn’t dumb luck. These weren’t street thugs with a score to settle. No, this was coordinated. Measured. Which meant they knew where he was... or at the very least, where he was headed. He exhaled slow, watching the smoke curl upward and vanish like a ghost who'd overstayed its welcome.

  “Alright,” he muttered, glancing at the inked map again. “You know where I started… and where I’m going. That means you’re covering the space in between.”

  The direct roads would be watched. Set up like a goddamn mousetrap. Arcane scrying didn’t feel right—no telltale tingling on the nape of his neck, no eyes prickling on his back like needles. Besides, something deeper inside—some instinct he couldn’t name—whispered that the race itself had rules. Unspoken, maybe, but binding. And something about this D?o system didn’t seem to play nice with cheap magic tricks when it came to the race.

  No... this wasn’t mystical surveillance.

  This was predictive positioning—they were playing the odds, staking out the cleanest arteries across the city. Major boulevards, tunnels, bridges—any place a sane man would take a ride to get from point A to the far side of hell.

  So don’t be sane.

  He dropped the spent cigarette and crushed it beneath his boot. Then he turned his eyes toward the grating just ahead of him—half-buried beneath rust and a mess of weeds, tucked beneath a collapsing stairwell like a secret only the rats remembered.

  Storm drains.

  Big enough for the older maintenance carts, maybe just wide enough for a smart biker who knew how to duck and lean. It wouldn’t be easy. Hell, it wouldn’t even be safe. But safe wasn’t the game anymore. He reached down, yanked the grate free with a metallic screech that echoed down into the dark like a warning... or an invitation. Looks like that point added to Grit was paying off.

  “Better to ride where no one’s watching than die where everyone is,” he said to no one.

  Sliding his bike forward, he found the sloped lip of concrete slick but manageable. He thumbed the throttle and eased down into the dark. The wheels caught the grooves just right, the old racer rumbling beneath him like a loyal dog finally off the leash. The city above might’ve been watched. Bought and paid for. But down here, in the bones of it—Malik was the only goddamn thing moving.

  And he liked it that way.

  The storm drain was a ribcage of rusted steel and mildew-stained concrete, echoing with the distant growl of his motorcycle and the soft, unsettling skitter of claws on wet stone. Malik’s tires whispered through a thin ribbon of runoff, the slick channel snaking like a lazy serpent beneath the city. Above him, the city slept restlessly, neon dreams flickering through sewer grates like the breath of something fevered. But down here? Down here, it was nothing but the dark and whatever decided to call it home.

  He throttled back, slowing to a crawl, the faint hum of the engine bouncing off the curved walls in ripples. Pulling the bike to a stop, he kicked the stand down and leaned back in the saddle. His left hand moved instinctively to his holster. The pistol slid free with the comfort of an old habit—warm, familiar, deadly. Malik thumbed the magazine release and ejected the clip with a practiced snap. Three rounds left. Sloppy. He slid a fresh mag from his tactical harness and slammed it home with a soft click. Chambered a round. Checked the slide. The little ritual felt good, grounding. The D?o system hadn’t whispered a warning in his ear, but his gut—a far older oracle—was humming like a live wire.

  A glance to his watch, still ticking along with stubborn resolve on his wrist, showed he had just under an hour to make delivery. Fifty-seven minutes, give or take. He figured if he stayed on track and kept the throttle pinned, he’d be walking up to that mansion’s iron gate just in time to knock. But the shadows around him disagreed.

  The first sound came soft. A drip interrupted by a splash, like something heavy dipping a paw into the shallows. Then another. Then a hiss—wet and guttural, followed by claws on stone. He kicked up the stand and revved the throttle once, just to hear the engine snarl. The sound echoed out, defiant. But it did something else too—it drew them in.

  They came out of the dark like the city’s sins given fur and teeth.

  Malik spotted the first one when a ripple of movement caught the corner of his eye—something low and fast scuttling just ahead of the headlamp’s reach. Then another. Then too many to count. They slithered from grates, poured from cracks in the ceiling like sewer runoff made flesh. Rats, but not the kind that skittered away from light. These things were warped, dripping with whatever magic bled through the bones of Kuroyami’s underworld.

  He twisted the throttle with a quiet curse under his breath and leaned forward into the motion. No use praying when hell was already in your rearview.

  They were fast—too fast. Big as dogs, but lean like wolves, and wrong. Their bodies were stretched and bent in unnatural places, spines crooked like bent coat hangers. One of them had two heads that snarled in opposite directions; another had limbs that bent backwards, knees kicking high like a marionette pulled by a drunk puppeteer. Their eyes burned red-orange, like coals left too long in a dead fire.

  “Of course it’s rats,” Malik muttered, flicking the safety off with his thumb. “Couldn’t be old bones or ghost kids or anything classy.”

  The tunnel around him shuddered with noise—scratching, hissing, the wet slap of paws on concrete. The trickle of water beneath his tires became a mess of ripples. The whole tunnel felt like it was narrowing, walls pressing in under the weight of whatever curse these things crawled from.

  He didn’t wait. He fired.

  The

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  "Stay down," he muttered, rolling through the chaos.

  He weaved the motorcycle through the tunnel like it was a dance floor and he was born with rhythm.

  Three more tried to hem him in. He fired again—tight, controlled bursts. Two shots to the chest of one, and the thing folded like a bad poker hand. Another hissed and vanished into the dark, smarter than its friends. The third leapt onto his rear pannier, clawing at the leather strap. Malik twisted, pistol in reverse grip, and fired into its gaping mouth. Blood sprayed behind him like ink spilled in the dark.

  “That’s right,” he growled through clenched teeth, “come for the courier, get a mouthful of lead and bad attitude.”

  As he neared what felt like the end of the tunnel system—an iron grate half-rotted with rust, maybe ten meters ahead—he felt the pressure behind him building. The rats weren’t retreating. No, they were converging. His instincts told him something worse was coming. He hadn’t seen her yet, but he could feel her—the matriarch, the queen rat, the broodmother from whatever nightmare this city had stuffed in its forgotten pipes.

  But he was on a clock, and that clock didn’t care about pride or unfinished business.

  The bike roared as he pushed it to the limit, the pipes screaming in fury. The grate loomed up fast, and Malik knew he didn’t have time to slow down, not without giving the swarm time to catch his back tire. He stood on the pegs, braced himself, and slammed through the rusted metal with a howl of steel. The gate gave way with a shriek, tearing free from one hinge as he and the bike flew out onto the gravel and trash-strewn edge of some derelict parking lot.

  He kept the throttle wide open, didn’t slow until the bike cleared the last of the incline and the storm drains dropped behind him like a sealed door. Gravel turned to cracked pavement. The city rose up again, looming and familiar.

  The vermin didn’t follow.

  He rolled the throttle back and coasted into a sliver of shadow between two sagging buildings, engine idling like a panther catching its breath. Then the system spoke—cool, detached, and smug as ever:

  

  Ghostly energy floated from his skin like steam rising from a street grate. It flowed through him with that same addictive rush—electric in his veins, grounding in his bones.

  The belt unfurled again in his HUD, new cartridges flicking into place with that satisfying click he was growing to love. But then—

  

  Malik sneered and spat onto the pavement. “Figures. Guess it ain’t a win unless you kill the damn queen.”

  

  “Good,” he muttered. “Means I can ride circles around the next poor bastard who tries to tag me.”

  The voice faded.

  Malik checked his clip, replaced it with a fresh one, and let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He was two, maybe three blocks from that mansion now. Still on time—barely. But somewhere behind him, deep in the city’s guts, something monstrous waited. And next time… he’d make damn sure she didn’t.

  The sky was starting to bleed at the edges, the inky night giving way to the first hints of gray and bruised blue. Malik rode the last few blocks in that strange liminal hush between darkness and day, the kind of silence that felt earned, like the city was exhaling after holding its breath all night. He rolled through narrow side streets, past shuttered cafés and boarded-up shops, the smell of old newspapers and alley grease thick on the breeze. Neon signs buzzed as they died with the night, flickering into silence like tired ghosts. The wind nipped at his collar as he rose with the slope of the hill, the city falling away behind him, sprawling and jagged like the scarred hide of something once proud and now bleeding out slow.

  At the crest, it waited.

  The mansion was perched like a carrion bird over the city, gothic and quiet and far too still for comfort. A wrought iron fence circled the property like a crown of thorns, its gate wide enough for a carriage, its hinges black with age and soot. The house itself was the color of old ash—gray timbers weathered by time and neglect, gables rising like hunched shoulders against the dimming sky. Ivy clung to the fa?ade like veins, curling around cracked stone saints with eroded faces, their prayers long since lost to moss and silence. The stained glass windows caught the faint morning light and turned it into blood-red glints behind dust and grime. It didn’t just look old—it looked like it remembered things no one had asked about in a long, long time.

  Malik let the engine sputter down and coasted to a stop at the bottom of the hill’s long cobbled drive. His pulse still hadn’t quite come down from the chase, and his fingers twitched involuntarily on the throttle. The package sat snug in the pannier, untouched but humming with a kind of presence, like it knew the destination was close. He reached back and gave the compartment a reassuring pat, not for the package’s sake—hell, he didn’t know what was in it—but maybe for his own. He’d come too far for it to end in some dumb twist like the thing cracking open right before he handed it off.

  The iron gate ahead gave a low, resonant creak and began to swing open before he’d even dismounted. A man stood beside it, tall, square-jawed, and still as a tombstone. His ink wasn’t like the others Malik had run afoul of—no serpents or coiled dragons. This man’s tattoos looked older, more formal. Not street ink. Not flash. His arms bore marks that looked like symbols from some forgotten dialect, etched deep into his flesh with a reverence the Yakuza lacked. He said nothing, just met Malik’s eyes and nodded once, then stepped aside and let the gate open wide.

  Malik eased the bike forward, tires crunching soft on gravel slick with dew. The long drive up to the house felt like riding into the belly of something that didn’t eat often but was always hungry. The mansion loomed larger now, its steep gables cutting the morning sky into jagged slices. Fog clung to the base of the hedges like smoke curling from a cigarette, and somewhere out of view, a crow called out once, then fell silent.

  At the top of the drive, two more men flanked the veranda steps, dressed in dark suits that didn’t look off-the-rack. They stood like statues, no telltale bulges at their hips but Malik knew they were carrying. Eyes like flint. Posture like coiled springs.

  And between them, seated in a weathered wicker chair that looked older than the city itself, was the man.

  Thin. Pale. Draped in layers of black and charcoal gray, the lines of his coat sharp as razors even in the soft light. His hair was white and combed back smooth, not a strand out of place. He sat with his hands resting lightly on the arms of his chair, like he’d been expecting Malik for hours and had all the time in the world.

  But it was his eyes that stopped Malik cold. Clear. Sharp. Ageless in a face that was anything but. Eyes that had seen kingdoms rise and fall and never blinked. He didn’t speak. Just met Malik’s gaze and dipped his chin slightly.

  That was the signal.

  Malik killed the engine and let the silence settle around him like a well-fitted coat. The low growl of the bike faded to ticking metal and cooling chrome, the kind of quiet that wrapped itself around the bones of a man who’d just outrun death. He didn’t move right away. Instead, he sat there, one boot still on the peg, eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his hat as he let the stillness have its say.

  With slow, deliberate ease, he reached into his coat and pulled out the crumpled pack of cigarettes he’d taken off a dead man and thumbed one free. The lighter followed—silver, scratched, etched with some gangland symbol half-worn by time. He flipped it open with a practiced flick, flame catching like it knew better than to argue. He lit the smoke, inhaled deep, let the burn work through his lungs and the shake leave his hands.

  The taste was bitter, cheap, but steady. Like most of the good things in life—rough around the edges, but it kept you grounded.

  Then he swung his leg off the bike and stood, stretching his spine slow, the heat of the ride still lingering in his chest like a shot of good bourbon. The package in the pannier weighed heavier than it ought to, like it knew what it was, like it had a say in what came next.

  He looked up at the mansion.

  It rose before him like a verdict, all gothic edges and gloom—ancient wood graying with time, wrought iron gates that whispered secrets when the wind passed through, overgrown gardens hiding cracked statues of saints who’d long stopped listening. The whole place stared back like a judge peering over the rim of his glasses, waiting for the guilty to break and confess.

  Malik just smiled.

  “Hope you brought your robe and gavel, old man,” he muttered, flicking ash to the gravel. “’Cause I ain’t here to beg.”

  And with that, he stepped forward, smoke trailing behind him like a shadow with teeth.