The slum was alive with smoke. It curled from rusted tin cans, from broken stoves, from the lips of men who had nothing but fire to keep them company. My father was one of them. He smoked until his fingers yellowed, until the flicker of flame became the rhythm of his life. That flicker became my name—Flick. A name born of ash, destined to burn.
I was a brat then, barefoot and hungry, chasing scraps in alleys where rats ruled. But even in the dirt, I understood something most didn't: study was survival. Books were weapons sharper than knives. So I joined the government school, sitting in cracked classrooms where paint peeled like old scabs. Children laughed, played, dreamed. I did none of those things. I studied.
"Flick, come play!" they would call.
I shook my head, eyes buried in economics. Numbers, theories, invisible strings—those were my friends. By graduation, I was one of the best students the school had ever seen. But I walked out alone, without a single companion. Diligence had consumed me whole.
Knowledge, however, could not feed me. I sold my brilliance for a price, a transaction that left me hollow. Selling knowledge is pain, but hunger is sharper. I had a plan: mercenary life. By day, I studied; by night, I worked, building my body into steel. When I joined the military camp, I thought discipline would be my salvation. Instead, it was torment. Three years of brutality, nights spent wishing for death. The camp stripped me bare, carved me into a weapon, and left scars that whispered of despair.
The camp was a crucible. We ran until our lungs burned, crawled through mud until our skin peeled, and fought each other until blood stained the ground. I remember one night, lying on the cold earth, staring at the stars. A fellow recruit whispered, "Do you ever wish you were dead?" I didn't answer. I simply closed my eyes, because the truth was yes. Every day was a battle against the urge to surrender. But I endured. Endurance became my religion.
The military was only a doorway. Beyond it lay the underworld—darker, twisted, alive with shadows. There I forged my own creed: being better is best than nothing. With that, I joined a nameless rogue gang. Guns became familiar, pain became currency, money flowed like blood. Promotions came, connections grew, women offered fleeting satisfaction. I rose, step by step, until I became the shadow of the underworld king. Not the ruler, but the unseen hand, the whisper behind the throne.
The underworld was a theater of cruelty. I saw men betray brothers for a handful of cash, women sold for debts they never owed, children recruited to carry guns heavier than their bodies. I learned to smile while cutting deals, to laugh while spilling blood. Each promotion was bought with someone else's ruin. And yet, I climbed. Because climbing was all I knew.
Time, though, is cruel. The boy I once was—the diligent student, the lonely scholar—would have laughed at the man I had become. And then came the policeman.
He arrived with righteousness burning in his eyes. We played a game, absurd in its simplicity: throw a stone onto one of sixty-four boards, each marked with animals in a strange hierarchy. Cat eats rat. Dog eats cat. Lion eats dog. Elephant eats lion. And of course, the strong will always devour the weak.
He threw first. Rat. We laughed, because rat was weakness.
"Seems fitting," he sneered. "Vermin for vermin."
My turn came. Against all odds, I landed on elephant. The peak. Strength incarnate. For a moment, I believed luck had finally turned.
"Elephant," I said, smirking. "Looks like I win."
But luck is a liar.
The policeman's smile widened. "You forgot the exception," he whispered. "Rat eats elephant." His eyes gleamed with mockery, and in his mind I could see the laughter—laughter not at me alone, but at the irony of it all. He too was dancing in the palm of the government, just another pawn in their theater. Hahaha… the sound echoed in my skull even before he pulled the trigger.
The shot tore through me. As I fell, I saw a faint but dazzling golden ray shining from him. My vision dimmed, and I remembered something I had buried: from the start, I had always carried bad luck. I had hidden it beneath layers of power, but fate never forgets.
The irony was bitter. I had killed his family, but not by choice. The government had ordered me to do it, weaving a narrative that would turn him into a hero. He believed he was avenging his loved ones, but in reality, he was a pawn in the same game I had played all my life. The underworld was not separate from the government—it was controlled by it. I was nothing more than a shadow, disposable in their grand design. My death was not justice, nor vengeance. It was theater. A performance staged to crown him as a hero.
As I lay dying, I thought of the slum, of my father's smoke, of the boy who studied economics with desperate hope. I thought of the mercenary who trained his body, the soldier who endured torment, the gangster who rose in shadows. I thought of the laughter during the game, the absurdity of elephants and rats. And I realized how pathetic it all was. My life had been a climb toward a peak that was never mine to hold. I was a king's shadow, nothing more.
Yet, in that final moment, peace settled over me. Death was not the enemy—it was release. The pain of selling my brilliance, the torment of the camp, the betrayals of the underworld, the hollow victories—all of it dissolved. I had lived a life carved by fire, smoke, and shadows. And though I died as a pawn, I died knowing I had played the game to its bitter end.