Underneath the cold and forgiving glare of the moon, a young man sat on a park bench with his head in his hands and his shoulders hunched in a way that told anyone passing by—not that anyone was, because this was Las Vegas at two in the morning and nobody cared about anybody else's problems here—that he was going through something that might just break him completely. On his lap sat what looked to be a contract of some sort, crumpled and ruffled from being clenched in white-knuckled fists and then discarded, then picked back up, then crumpled again in that cyclical dance of desperation that comes right before a person either gives up entirely or does something monumentally stupid.
Goddammit. Goddammit. GODDAMMIT.
The scream lived only in my head, echoing off the inside of my skull like a trapped bird beating itself against the walls of a cage it couldn't escape, and that was probably for the best because if I'd let it out into the open air, I would have just looked like the crazy homeless guy shouting at nothing, and I wasn't quite ready to add involuntary psychiatric hold to the list of things that had gone wrong in the past forty-eight hours.
My name is Kenneth Kingsley. Eighteen years old. Three days ago, I'd been living in a small town in rural Indiana where the biggest crime was Old Man Harrison letting his sheep wander onto the highway, and the most exciting thing that ever happened was the county fair coming through every September. Now I was sitting on a splintered park bench in Las Vegas with exactly zero dollars to my name, a stomach that had been growling so long it had given up and gone silent, and the kind of soul-deep exhaustion that makes you question every decision you've ever made in your entire life.
I, like so many other idiots before me, had dreamed of reaching the top one percent. Foolish as that dream may be, I'd ignored my aunt's advice—she'd raised me since I was twelve after my parents died in a car accident, and she was the kind of woman who'd survived three husbands and a bout with cancer by being aggressively practical about everything—took all my saved money, which came out to about four thousand dollars after years of working odd jobs and saving every penny, and prepared to live it up in Vegas while striking it rich.
Look how that turned out.
Scammed by an attractive escort who pretended to be a guide to the city's hidden gems. I, being a young man who easily got flustered by the opposite sex to the point where a pretty girl saying hello to me was enough to make my face feel like it was on fire, must have looked like an easy target to her and her accomplices. The way she'd smiled at me, all teeth and warmth and promises of things I'd only ever seen in movies, had short-circuited my brain completely. She'd asked for my card to "secure the booking," and I'd handed it over like a trained seal accepting a fish.
And they weren't wrong to see me as easy prey. That was the part that stung the most, the part that made me want to punch myself in the face for being so naive.
I went to the police, of course, because that's what you're supposed to do when someone steals from you, but the desk officer had taken one look at my tear-stained face and my story about an escort and a contract I'd signed without reading and basically laughed in my face. "Son," he'd said, chewing on a donut with the kind of casual cruelty that comes from seeing too much stupidity to care anymore, "you're about the tenth kid this week with the same story. Consider it a lesson and go home."
Go home. To Indiana. With no money. And no phone charger because that had been in my backpack, which was also gone, along with my spare clothes and the framed photo of my parents that I'd carried with me everywhere since I was twelve.
So now I was here, stranded in a different state, penniless, scared absolutely shitless, and trying very hard not to cry because once I started, I wasn't sure I'd be able to stop.
I was about to lose that battle when a weird noise hit my ears.
[ding!]
The sound wasn't coming from outside. It wasn't coming from my phone, either—my phone was dead, had been dead for hours, its cracked screen showing nothing but black. No, this sound was coming from inside my head, and it was accompanied by a flash of light that made me squeeze my eyes shut on instinct.
When I opened them again, there was a golden, translucent panel floating in the air in front of my face.
I stared at it. Then I closed my eyes. Then I opened them again.
It was still there.
[STATUS
(GOD OF WEALTH SYSTEM)
(Kenneth Kingsley) AGE: 18 LEVEL: 1/∞ 0/100 EXP (Until next level) Status: Mortal Equipped Title: Loan Shark Chum :-)
STATS: STRENGTH: 39/100 (Mortal average is 55) INTELLIGENCE: 70/100
(Mortal average for each is 55)
MISSION (FIXED) For every $500,000 donated, the host will receive 10 WP. Max of 4 donations a day.
Current Balance: $1,000 (+$0) Net Worth: $1,000 Real Estate Owned: 0
Prestige: (1: 100 ratio for convenience): 0
ABILITIES: (PERMANENT): INFINITE MONEY (Lvl. 1): Create any sum of money once every hour. (Current Limit: $100,000
SYSTEM SHOP (Lvl. 1): Spend Wealth Points (WP) to Upgrade Abilities and Stats, as well as to purchase rewards not of this world (Futuristic Design Patents, Potions, Black Tech, etc...)
Daily Lotto: 1/1 spins remaining. Today's Daily Jackpot: 49% of shares of a random Fortune 500 company. (0.0087% odds)
Current Wealth Points (WP): 10
IMMORTALITY: Resistance against cellular aging.
HEALING FACTOR (Lvl. 1): heals wounds faster.
I blinked. Then I blinked again, because my brain was refusing to process what I was seeing in any kind of coherent way. This had to be a hallucination, right? Extreme stress and hunger and sleep deprivation working together to give me one final, beautiful lie before my body finally gave out completely. That made sense. That was the logical explanation.
Except then my phone, which I could have sworn was dead, buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out with trembling fingers, and the glow of the screen illuminated my face as my eyes scanned the notification, then widened to the point where I thought they might fall out of my skull entirely.
Your Chase Banking account has just had $1,000 deposited. If this is a mistake, please notify us. To stop these push notifications, text STOP to this number. Thank you!
The golden panel was still floating there, patient and impossible and completely real.
Without even realizing it, a grin had spread across my face—not a small smile, not a dignified curve of the lips, but the kind of wide, manic, slightly-unhinged grin that makes strangers cross to the other side of the street. After not eating in the last thirty-six hours, my stomach had apparently been waiting for good news before reminding me that it existed, because it chose that exact moment to let out a growl so loud it echoed off the buildings around me.
I stood up so fast I nearly fell over, my legs having gone numb from sitting in the cold for so long, and started walking toward the only source of light I could see in the distance—a food truck parked under a flickering streetlamp, its neon sign buzzing cheerfully despite the late hour.
The food truck was called El Come Guero—at least, that's what the painted letters on the side said, though the paint was peeling and the u in Guero looked like it had been partially scraped off by something—and there was a line of about four people waiting, which in this part of Las Vegas at two in the morning counted as a popular spot. I got in line behind a woman who smelled like cigarettes and regret, bouncing slightly on my heels because I couldn't stand still, couldn't stop moving, couldn't quite believe that any of this was happening.
When it was my turn, I stepped up to the window and was greeted by a jovial Hispanic kid about my age with a smile that seemed to take up half his face and a vibe about him that suggested he was going to cause some mischief eventually but would somehow remain everyone's favorite person anyway. He had dark curly hair poking out from under a backwards baseball cap and the kind of easy confidence that comes from growing up comfortable in your own skin, something I'd never quite managed to achieve myself.
"Cash or card, hombre?" he asked, wiping his hands on a towel tucked into his apron strings.
"Uh, card please." I looked behind me and saw an elderly tourist woman trying to corral an energetic young kid who I assumed was her grandson, the kind of kid who had more energy than sense and was currently trying to climb a lamppost like it was a jungle gym. Then I turned back to the food truck worker, a thought forming in my head that felt both impulsive and exactly right. "Hey, uh, if I pay an extra fifty dollars, can I cover that lady's order?"
The kid's grin widened even further, which I hadn't thought was possible, and he shrugged in a way that was somehow both casual and theatrical. "Si, mi hombre, I'll never turn down money. That'll be $79.99."
I handed him my Chase Banking card—the same card the escort had drained, the same card I'd been ready to cut into pieces and throw into a river just hours ago—and watched eagerly as he swiped it, which earned me a weird look from him that he shook off with a smile and a shake of his head. He handed the card back and nodded toward a cluster of picnic tables off to the side, their surfaces covered in graffiti and the ghosts of a thousand spilled meals.
"Alright. It'll be about thirty minutes. Those picnic tables are cool to wait at."
"Alright, thanks," I replied, turning toward the tables, and I hadn't even taken three steps when two sounds struck my ears like a heavenly symphony—one ding in my head from the system panel I'd almost forgotten about, and one ding from my phone that I pulled out so fast I nearly dropped it.
The system notification came first, a flood of information that I absorbed with the kind of desperate greed a starving man brings to a buffet.
[STATUS
(GOD OF WEALTH SYSTEM)
(Kenneth Kingsley) AGE: 18 LEVEL: 1/∞ 45/100 EXP (+45 EXP) (Until next level) Status: Mortal Equipped Title: Loan Shark Chum :-)
STATS: STRENGTH: 39/100 INTELLIGENCE: 70/100 STAMINA: 18/100 APPEARANCE: 45/100 CHARISMA: 5/100
MISSION (FIXED) For every $500,000 donated, the host will receive 10 WP. Max of 4 donations a day. 0/4
Current Balance: $1,160 (+$160) Net Worth: $1,160 Real Estate Owned: 0
Prestige: 0
ABILITIES: INFINITE MONEY (Lvl. 1): Create any sum once every hour. (Limit: $100,000) 2x SPENDATURE CASHBACK (Lvl. 1): Instantly get double what you spend in cash back.
SYSTEM SHOP (Lvl. 1): Spend WP to upgrade abilities and stats, purchase rewards.
Daily Lotto: 1/1 spins remaining. Today's Jackpot: 51% of shares of a random up-and-coming small company. (0.0087% odds)
Current WP: 10
IMMORTALITY: Resistance against cellular aging.
HEALING FACTOR (Lvl. 1): heals wounds faster.]
The phone notification was simpler but no less beautiful: Your Chase Banking account has just had $160 deposited. Thank you for being a valued customer.
Forty-five experience points and a hundred and sixty dollars from a single meal purchase, plus the warm feeling in my chest from having done something nice for someone else, which wasn't quantified anywhere on the system panel but felt like it should have been. I sat down at the nearest picnic table, my legs suddenly shaky again but this time from excitement rather than exhaustion, and pulled up my bank account on my phone just to watch the numbers sit there, real and solid and mine.
One thousand, one hundred and sixty dollars.
An hour ago I'd had nothing. Now I had more money than I'd had in my entire life before I left Indiana, and it was only going to go up from here.
I sat back against the rough wood of the picnic table bench and tried to come up with an efficient method of gaining wealth rapidly. Real estate worked, but my current capital was nowhere near good enough to enter that field yet; same for starting a company, since a startup needed a large amount of money to get off the ground, and giving away shares for investment funds was out of the question when next month I could have more than enough with a system that seemed to operate on its own logic. I sighed and decided to think about that later, because my food was arriving—a massive tray loaded with two Hot Cheeto-dusted burgers, Nashville hot chicken tenders, two Pepsis, and a basket of fries so large it could have fed a small family.
"Must be an Instagram person," I heard a woman behind me mutter to her companion. "They're always doing stuff like this."
Ahhh, I thought, shoving a fry into my mouth and barely tasting it because I was eating too fast to register flavor. That explains why it seems like the locals are used to this.
"Young man? Um, excuse me, young man?"
I turned, my mouth full of burger, and saw the elderly woman whose meal I'd paid for standing behind me with a warm smile on her weathered face. Her grandson was holding her hand now, subdued by the power of a full belly and the lateness of the hour.
"Oh, hi!" I swallowed hastily, nearly choking in the process, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to ignore you, I just... got a lot on my mind."
"Oh, it's no biggie." She waved her free hand dismissively, the gesture somehow elegant despite its casualness. "I just wanted to thank you for the meal. It was mighty decent of ya. Not a lot of folks'll do that type of stuff anymore, y'know?"
Thinking back to literally a few hours ago when I'd been scammed by someone who probably would have stepped over this woman's body to get to a dollar on the ground, I could only agree with her words. "Yeah, I totally agree. But... not a lot isn't no one, right? That's all that matters."
"True!" She beamed at me like I'd just said something profound instead of something obvious, and then turned to the sleepy child at her side. "Hey, little Frankie, say thanks to this here young man! He helped us out big time, y'know!"
"Thank you, mister," Frankie mumbled, his eyes half-closed and his head bobbing slightly.
"No problem," I replied, and I was surprised to find that I meant it. "I hope it was good. I know mine was."
"Sure was. We gotta get little Frankie here off to bed, so we'll head out. God bless ya, son!"
"Have a good one, ma'am," I responded, grinning as we parted ways, and it honestly felt really nice to meet decent people after my initial Las Vegas welcome had been so thoroughly rotten.
After I finished eating—which took longer than I'd expected because I'd ordered enough food for three people and my stomach had shrunk from two days of near-starvation—I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and started searching for somewhere to sleep that wouldn't get me stabbed. The options in my price range were, to put it charitably, grim, but I eventually settled on a motel about a mile away that had three stars on Google Reviews, which in Las Vegas was the equivalent of a five-star resort anywhere else.
The Uber dropped me off in front of a building that looked like it had been standing since the 1970s and hadn't been maintained since the 1980s, with peeling paint, flickering lights, and a general air of desperate decay that made me want to turn around and walk right back out. But I was too tired to care for more than ten seconds, so I stumbled through the front door and into a lobby that smelled like cigarettes, regret, and something else I couldn't quite identify but didn't want to think about too hard.
That's when I saw her.
Behind the shoddy, crumbling reception desk sat the most uniquely gorgeous girl I had ever seen in my entire life. Her hair was bleached pure white on one side and dyed pure black on the other, parted down the middle so the two colors fell on either side of her face like she was some kind of modern-day Cruella De Vil, except Cruella De Vil had never looked like this. Her bright amber eyes, the color of good whiskey caught in firelight, paired with perfectly smooth and glowing skin that looked airbrushed even in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the motel lobby, made her look like she should be walking red carpets and signing autographs instead of working the reception desk at a back-alley Vegas motel.
And her body. I tried not to stare, I really did, but I was an eighteen-year-old virgin from rural Indiana and she had her legs crossed and propped up on the desk, showcasing thighs that were outrageously thick and curved in a way that made my mouth go dry. A tight elastic t-shirt hugged a chest that I'd later be embarrassed to admit I spent too long cataloging, and based on the way she was leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed behind her head, I could only speculate about what had to be a correspondingly generous backside hidden from view by the desk. She was chewing on a toothpick, spinning it lazily between her teeth as I walked in, and she barely looked up as I approached the reception desk.
"Thirty a night," she said in a voice that was somehow both bored and sharp at the same time, like a knife wrapped in velvet. "Cash only. No refunds. No breakfast. No shower. No pool. And obviously no future if you haven't started leaving after my first five sentences. Still here? Welcome to the beginning of your life with no future."
My jaw slackened, my brain short-circuiting in a way that had nothing to do with her looks and everything to do with her introduction. "Uhhhh... y-you said thirty, right? I'll take the best room... if that's even a thing. Doubtful, though."
I finished the last part under my breath, but she heard it anyway—those amber eyes flicked up to meet mine for the first time, and she grinned in a way that made my heart stutter in my chest.
"Now you get it!" She winked at me, and I felt my face flush hot enough to fry an egg on. "But it's a secret, so don't tell anyone."
I laughed, a real laugh that surprised me with how natural it sounded, and a warm, pleasant feeling spread through my chest that I didn't have a name for but wanted to feel again. "I'd like a room for a week, please," I said after a moment of catching my breath. "But I'm fresh out of cash. You wouldn't happen to know a close ATM, would you?"
"About a block over. In front of that Chinese takeout place." Her perfect teeth arranged themselves in a playful grin that suggested she knew exactly what effect she was having on me and was enjoying it thoroughly.
"Thanks. I'll be right back."
I was already walking out the door when I stopped mid-step, a thought hitting me so hard I nearly stumbled. "I'm such an idiot!"
I pulled up my status panel with a thought, my eyes scanning frantically until I found what I was looking for: INFINITE MONEY (Lvl. 1): Create any sum of money once every hour. (Current Limit: $100,000)
Yup. It was official. I was an idiot. A system-provided boon that I'd nearly completely missed because I'd been too distracted by glowing panels and bank account notifications to actually read the full list of what I'd been given. I made a mental note to conduct an extensive, thorough inspection of every single feature my system had to offer, because I absolutely did not want to miss or fail to comprehend any other major advantages.
"I'd like to activate [INFINITE MONEY] and cash out all $100,000 for this hour,"* I said internally, keeping my voice steady even though my heart was pounding. *"I need $97,000 of that to be in my checking account, and the rest in cash."
[Ding! Action executed. $97,000 has been deposited into your Chase Banking checking account. $3,000 has been stored in your Physical Asset System Subspace (P.A.S.S.). You can withdraw any amount from your P.A.S.S. with a thought, though discretion is advisable.]
I withdrew three hundred dollars in cash, feeling the weight of the bills appear in my jacket pocket like magic—which, I supposed, it technically was—and headed back to the motel with a noticeable spring in my step. Pretty soon I'd be making some big boy moves, buying properties and starting companies and doing all the things I'd only ever dreamed about back in Indiana.
But until then? I was going to enjoy the fact that a gorgeous girl with two-toned hair and eyes like whiskey had winked at me, and that I had nowhere to be and nothing to do except figure out what came next.
[3rd Person POV — 54 Minutes Earlier]
"Serena, please! You know me! You know I'm good for it! I have a wife and daughter. I have a family now! Please don't do this!"
Inside a dirty, dingy, dilapidated motel—undeniably the same motel that a certain young man would enter in less than an hour's time—a potbellied middle-aged man with wispy brown hair and a conspicuously hooked nose knelt haphazardly on the dirty ground of his room, his blue eyes wide with terror and glistening with unshed tears that tracked slowly down his stubbled cheeks. Blood ran from a wide gash in his scalp, pouring down his face and over his left eye in thick crimson rivulets before dripping from his chin onto the dusty floor below in a pattern that was almost artistic in its grotesquerie. He was missing about three teeth, and from the blood dripping from his split lip and the way his mouth moved when he tried to speak, one could infer that he had only recently had them bashed out.
That inference would be correct, seeing as a uniquely styled young woman was standing over him holding a pair of bloody brass knuckles, casually rolling them across her knuckles with the practiced ease of someone who had done this a hundred times before. Her hazel eyes—no, wait, they were amber, the color shifting in the dim light of the motel room—locked onto the man's pitiful state as he crawled across a pool of his own blood on the dirty floor and begged, her face remaining completely indifferent, absolute apathy seemingly etched into every line of her expression.
"Please, Serena, you gotta believe me. I didn't want to! They made—"
CRUNCH.
"AAAAARRRRRRGGGH!"
The man howled in pain as he clutched at his now-gouged right eye, having been caught completely by surprise by the right hook that had come out of nowhere from the terrifying girl, who still wore that same apathetic look that somehow made her even more frightening than if she'd been screaming. Like a macabre scene straight out of a horror movie, the bloody eyeball rolled across the cracked and aging linoleum floor, trailing a smear of crimson behind it before coming to an abrupt stop against the aged and peeling white trim framing the bottom of the wall on the far side of the room.
But oddly enough, that wasn't the sight you would focus on if you were there. More likely, you wouldn't be able to look away from the young woman who had thrown that wicked, devastating right cross. Despite her angelic features and the kind of body that made men do stupid things—she knew this, had weaponized it more times than she could count—she more closely resembled the devil himself at that moment. Or rather, herself.
"Shut up, Garrett," she said simply, her voice carrying no heat, no anger, no emotion at all. Just a flat, matter-of-fact command that was somehow more terrifying than any shouted threat. She glanced once more at the whimpering man on the floor, flicked the blood from her spiked brass knuckles with a single casual motion that sent droplets spraying across the already-ruined carpet, and then looked up at the ceiling as if deep in thought about something entirely unrelated to the violence she had just committed.
Serena Dawson considered herself a resourceful person. Born to a prostitute and a high-profile VIP congressman from the U.K. who had been in Vegas on a business trip—her mother had never told her his name, had always called him "my darling MP" with a delusional glint in her eyes that Serena had learned to recognize as madness long before she knew the word for it—she had been raised until the age of seven before being told to get out and never return by the one person who should have stuck by her side and loved her more than anyone else.
Her mother.
Darlene Grace Dawson had made the mistake of believing that an affluent and high-profile man such as Serena's father could ever truly love her, could ever leave his wife and children and political career for a Las Vegas escort with a drug habit and a dream. Serena was the living proof of the love that her mother had imagined was held for her, but as time passed, it became evidently clear that the bargaining chip her mother had seen as a ticket to a life beyond prostitution and poverty was completely ineffective. The affluent congressman from the UK was never going to return, not even for the daughter he had left behind and the mother he had burdened with said daughter.
And the human mind, Serena had learned, was shockingly fragile. Shockingly easy to break. Her mother's mind had been cracking for years, but after Serena's father failed to return, it shattered completely. Any love that Darlene had for her daughter, real or imagined, seemingly vanished overnight. Instead of seeing the girl as her child, as a human being worthy of love and care, Darlene saw only a reminder of everything she wanted most but could never achieve: status, wealth, and an easy life forevermore.
In the eyes of a mentally ill person with the affliction of obsession, anything that failed to help them reach their goals was worthless, and therefore not needed. And what that meant for seven-year-old Serena was that her mother abandoned her, left her on the streets of Las Vegas with nothing but the clothes on her back and a photograph of a father she had never met.
And so, at the tender age of seven, Serena Dawson found herself among the worst of the worst in the crime-ridden and destitute streets of Las Vegas, Nevada.
However, even then she was lucky—though she wouldn't have described it that way at the time. On the fourth night of her abandonment, she was discovered eating out of a dumpster behind an In-N-Out Burger by a young girl her age who looked like an angel herself, with pure unblemished skin, movie-star good looks, and blonde hair so fair it looked white in certain lights. The girl's brown eyes had been full of joy when she found Serena, full of desperate happiness at finally finding someone her own age who didn't run away from her. That girl was Kylie Alianovna, the daughter of Bruce Alianovna, the leader of the biggest crime family in the western United States.
Beyond accepting young Serena as a friend of his daughter, Bruce had adopted her outright, raising her as his second daughter with no less love than he gave Kylie. He had taught her everything she knew about loyalty, about family, about the brutal calculus of the life they lived. Kylie and Serena were and still were inseparable, two halves of a whole, each dangerous in her own way and absolutely lethal together.
But that was then. Now, Serena had a bounty on her head bigger than some billionaires' bank accounts, the result of an incident eight months ago where she had been blamed and framed for something she didn't do. The heartbroken Bruce had had no choice but to adhere to the family rules he himself had founded, ordering his own beloved daughter to be killed even as she pleaded her innocence. But he was not a completely heartless man, and he had let her escape indirectly, giving her a chance to survive.
And survive she had. She had befriended a group of teens her age who called themselves The Runaways, a tight-knit crew of outcasts and orphans and damaged goods who were fiercely loyal to their own. Most of them came from sick and messed-up backgrounds—they had the scars to prove it, physical and otherwise—so they firmly believed in the notion that family was what you made it, not what you were born into.
Tonight, Serena had snuck off to take care of the last dead-end that could be used to track her down. Garrett had been the final loose end, the last person who knew where she was and could be persuaded to share that information for the right price. She had just finished cleaning up—her brass knuckles were still wet, and she'd need to dispose of her clothes before returning to the Runaways' hideout—when the front door of the motel creaked open.
She looked up, her amber eyes narrowing as she assessed the newcomer. A boy her age, maybe a little younger, with messy brown hair and the kind of wide-eyed innocence that screamed fresh meat. He was staring at her like he'd never seen a woman before, his mouth slightly open and his face flushed, and Serena felt something twist in her chest that she immediately crushed down.
She had to kill him. He had seen her face, had walked into this motel at exactly the wrong time, and he was as good as gone. That was the life she lived now. That was the price of survival.
But as she watched him fumble through his words and stare at her like she was something precious instead of something deadly, Serena found herself hesitating for just a fraction of a second.
And in this life, a fraction of a second could get you killed.