I have always fallen.
From bad to worse. From one pit into a deeper one. From one world built on filth and blood into another.
Fourteen years ago — in that other life, that other skin — I was the kind of man whose name people lowered their voices to say. The head of the most powerful criminal organization in the world. The one everyone feared and no one loved and no one was supposed to love.
But even then, I was falling. Differently. Inward. The kind of falling that doesn't make a sound until the very end.
They called me human. Everyone knew I was something else.
I still remember her eyes.
The last girl. The one whose father I killed before —
Her eyes were beautiful. Luminous. The kind of eyes that make you think of something sacred, something untouched.
I imagine they're different now. Dark. Closed off. The light behind them gone or buried so deep it might as well be.
But I did nothing wrong. I did what I wanted. She wasn't strong enough to stop me. That's not my fault — that's hers. Weakness is not something I'm responsible for.
I remember, as I was dying — as the thing her mother drove into me from behind was ending everything — I heard crying. Loud, broken, desperate crying.
Why was she crying while she was killing me?
Was she grieving for me?
Is there anyone, in either world, who cried when they heard I was dead?
Or was she crying because she was falling too — her hands shaking, her body giving out, the thing she'd just done landing on her all at once?
I never found out.
I'm still falling now.
But this time — this time it's literal.
The cold air of the Demon Prison screams past my face as the mountain shrinks above me and the ground rushes up from below with the patient, indifferent certainty of something that has never needed to hurry.
Falling from a mountain to my death.
Is this how it ends? Again?
There's something strange about falling. Something almost beautiful, underneath the terror. Your body becomes weightless. No one is holding you. No one is controlling you. For these few seconds, you belong entirely to yourself — to gravity and motion and the rushing air — and there is a freedom in that which I have spent two lifetimes looking for in all the wrong places.
But beautiful things always end the same way.
The collision with something hard and ugly and real.
There is never any escape from that.
That treacherous girl is the reason I'm falling right now. I don't know why she did it. I don't particularly care why she did it.
What I care about is that I'm going to die again, and I refuse to do it in front of her.
Falling has never been kind to me.
The first time I fell — truly fell, as a child, in that first life — I was small enough that the ground seemed very far away before it arrived very fast. I'd been playing. Running. The ordinary recklessness of a child who doesn't yet know that the world punishes carelessness.
I cut my hand. Nothing serious. I cried, the way children cry — loudly, without shame, because pain is new and the body hasn't learned yet to be quiet about it.
My mother saw me.
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she smiled.
That was the first time I ever saw my mother smile. Something in my child's heart lifted toward it instinctively, the way plants turn toward light before they've learned that some light burns.
She carried me into the kitchen. She lit the fire. She held a knife in the flame until the metal glowed.
"I don't want to hear you scream," she said.
And she pressed it against my hand.
When I screamed — because I was a child and I couldn't help it — she pressed harder. So I learned. I closed my mouth. I swallowed the sound whole and sat in silence with my teeth locked together, because silence was the only thing that made it stop.
That was the day I learned to hate falling.
That was also the day I learned that silence is armor.
This world is strange to me — even now, even after fourteen years of living inside it. It tells different stories than the world I came from, but underneath the different words, the same things keep happening. The same people making the same choices. The same cycle of hope offered and hope withdrawn and pain handed over in its place, as though pain is the only currency anyone actually has enough of.
Hope is the worst thing you can give someone.
It is worse than cruelty because cruelty at least is honest about what it is.
I learned this early. I held it close through two lifetimes. Trust no one. Love nothing. The world is populated entirely by people who will disappoint you the moment you give them the opportunity — so be worse than all of them before they get the chance.
Free fall.
What's new about it?
I have been in free fall since the moment I was born. Everything I was raised on, everything I loved before I understood what love cost, every dream I had in the years before dreams became a liability — it all eroded. Slowly, then all at once. Piece by piece until there was nothing left but the final impact.
Death.
The ground is close now.
I can feel the air thickening, the distance compressing. The math of this situation has become very clear and very simple.
She's still up there. Standing at the edge of the summit, watching.
That infuriating, impossible girl.
I looked at the approaching ground, then back up at the distant figure standing at the peak —
I will not die in front of her.
I refuse.
And beneath that — beneath the refusal, beneath the stubbornness — something else. Something quieter.
Do I want to fly?
Do I actually want to know what it feels like — genuinely, physically, with my own body — to rise instead of fall? To be without weight, without walls, without the gravity of everything I've done and everything that's been done to me?
Or do I just want the dark ending?
The ground. The silence. The stop.
I looked up at her again.
Not in front of her.
Not today.
Her words came back to me — not as a memory but as something more immediate, rising through the noise of the wind and the rushing air with the clarity of something I had never actually stopped hearing:
"Control your Mana — and Shape. Like I showed you."
The ground was seconds away.
I reached.
Not outward — inward. Deep into the place where I'd learned to hold the Mana, the reservoir I'd spent fourteen years building and refining. I gathered everything I could reach — pulled it to the surface of my body, felt it respond to the shape I was holding in my mind.
A shape I had always loved.
A shape I had never been able to become until now.
▶ Shapeshifter— Specialization Acquired ◀
I opened the skill panel mid-fall — the absurdity of doing paperwork while plummeting to my death not lost on me — found the first ability under the Shapeshifter path, and pushed every available point into it without hesitation.
▶ First Shapeshifter Skill — Lv.4 ◀
The Mana surged. The shape locked into place. My body began to answer.
I closed my eyes.
The wind screamed.
And I whispered into it, quiet enough that only I could hear:
"Transform."