The ATM in the fluorescent-lit convenience store beeped a cheerful, synthesized tune that made Shin want to smash the screen.

  He slid forty-five thousand yen into the machine, hit confirm, and watched the transfer process to his mother's account. The relief that washed over him was immediate, but it was quickly replaced by a hollow, gnawing dread. He pulled his transaction receipt and looked at his own reflection in the dark glass of the machine. He looked like a corpse. Dark circles bruised the skin under his eyes, and his knuckles were tightly wrapped in cheap white tape to hide the split, scabbed skin from the night before.

  He had exactly five thousand yen left in his pocket. It wasn't enough for rent, it wasn't enough for food, and it certainly wasn't enough to survive the underground.

  Shin pushed through the glass doors and walked into the neon-drenched chaos of Akihabara. "Electric Town" was packed with tourists and otaku hunting for retro games and maid cafes, bathing the streets in blinding color. But Shin wasn't here for the arcades. He slipped down a narrow, trash-filled alleyway behind a deafening pachinko parlor, pried open a rusted service door, and began the long walk down a spiraling concrete stairwell.

  The air grew heavy. The smell of sweet crepes and exhaust faded, replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone, burning incense, and dried blood.

  He stepped into the Scrapper’s Market.

  It was a sprawling, illegal bazaar set up in the dried-out storm drains beneath the city. Scavengers, low-level thugs, and desperate summoners sat cross-legged on filthy canvas tarps. Spread out before them were the Bind-Plates. Hundreds of them. Jagged slabs of iron, brass, and blackened steel, all etched with crude, unsettling depictions of monsters and curses.

  The underground fighting rings didn't run on brute force alone. It was an economy of blood and strategy. The most lethal fighters didn't just throw massive entities at each other; they built an arsenal. They used weak plates to trigger traps, absorb lethal blows, or serve as the required Tribute to summon something truly horrific.

  Shin walked past a vendor selling a massive, two-handed iron slab depicting a minotaur-like Yokai.

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  "Three hundred thousand yen," the vendor grunted, noticing Shin staring. "Activation cost is a pint of blood and a fractured femur. You don't have the juice for it, kid."

  Shin kept walking. He didn't want a heavy hitter. He already had the Karakuri Marionette sitting heavy in his jacket pocket, a dormant nightmare waiting to eat another one of his memories.

  He needed fodder. He needed a shield.

  He stopped at the very edge of the market, where the flickering overhead lights finally gave out. An old woman with a milky, blind left eye was smoking a thin cigarette over a tarp covered in mostly cracked, useless iron fragments.

  "Looking for trash?" she rasped, tapping ash onto the wet concrete.

  "Looking for utility," Shin corrected, crouching down. "Something with a low activation cost. I don't care if it can't kill a rat, as long as it takes a hit and stays on the board."

  The old woman let out a dry, hacking laugh. She reached into a burlap sack and tossed a small, palm-sized square of blackened iron onto the tarp. It clattered against the stone.

  Shin picked it up. It was freezing, and the edges were sharp enough to cut his thumb. The etching on the surface was chaotic—a writhing, tangled knot of long, segmented bodies and hundreds of needle-like legs.

  "A Mukade swarm," she said, her good eye locking onto him. "Corpse-centipedes. Trash-tier attack power. They won't pierce skin. But they breed rapidly when exposed to kinetic force. You hit them, they split and multiply. Good for clogging up a charge."

  Shin rubbed his thumb over the rusted engraving. "What's the Blood Toll?"

  "No blood," she replied. "They feed on body heat. Activate that plate, and your core temperature drops by three degrees for an hour. You'll shiver so hard your teeth might crack, but it won't kill you. And it won't eat your mind."

  She knew. Shin’s grip tightened on the plate. She could sense the heavy, cursed aura of the Karakuri plate radiating from his jacket.

  "How much?" Shin asked, his voice flat.

  "For the bugs? Four thousand."

  Shin pulled the crumpled yen notes from his pocket and dropped them on the tarp. He shoved the Mukade plate into his pocket opposite the Karakuri. The iron immediately felt like a block of dry ice against his thigh, leaching the warmth right out of his skin.

  He stood up, turning to head back toward the surface. He finally had a starter deck. A cheap shield, and a lethal, memory-eating sword.

  But as he wove through the crowded bazaar, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The survival instinct he had developed in the fighting pits screamed at him. He casually glanced at his reflection in a pool of stagnant water on the floor.

  Two men in dark windbreakers were mirroring his pace, roughly twenty feet back. One of them had a hand tucked deep into his coat, clutching something heavy and metallic.

  The Yakuza pit-boss from yesterday hadn't just run away. He had sent hunters to take the Karakuri plate.

  Shin didn't run. He just adjusted his grip on the freezing iron plate in his pocket and kept walking toward the darkest part of the stairwell.

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