Victor

We call ourselves the Night Kids. We live in the slums, trapped behind a massive wall guarded by soldiers and sealed gates that only open for the chosen few. On the other side is a better world we only catch glimpses of when the gate shifts. We’re the ones kids left behind in group home women take care of us kids. Haru, Ethan, Kenta, Naoki, and me we move together through the night, slipping across rooftops, crawling through broken streets, surviving in a place built to keep us down. But even here, I have something they can’t take from me books. My parents gave me that love before the war took them. Before they died, they left me a powerful book and begged Victor to keep me alive. I never fully understood what they left behind, but I feel it calling to me every time I open it. Victor is the reason everything in my world feels connected. He came from the same slums but escaped using knowledge instead of strength. Now he lives above everyone in a penthouse with a cat calm and untouchable, with a public library full of copied books anyone can read but the real ones is hidden underneath. A sealed place filled with ancient, dangerous knowledge, reached through riddles, unknown languages, and an old elevator only most can open. He speaks languages most people don’t even know exist, moves across walls and rooftops like it’s nothing, and fights with a katana like it’s part of him. Cold, precise, powerful. He watched my parents die in the war after they begged him to keep me alive and he didn’t save them. But he never stopped watching me either. He hates them, and because of that, he’s always hated me too. Still, there’s something strange between us like he sees himself in me even if he would never admit it. Same roots, same climb, same hunger to understand the hidden truth of the world. And now, as I start to understand pieces of the knowledge he protects, it feels like I’m no longer just surviving the slums I’m walking the same path he once carved out of them.