Zenra punched the wall behind him hard, making the system watching him wince in sympathy.
"Damn, that hurts like hell," Zen winced, shaking his hand which was already red and scraped.
[Does it hurt?]
"What do you think?"
[Seems like it does.]
"You already know, why even ask?!" Zen retorted angrily, then sat back down.
"Does it have to be tomorrow, Dad?" Kara asked quietly.
"Yeah, son. We're heading out tomorrow morning."
"Please, Dad, Mom, don't go. I have a bad feeling about tomorrow."
"It's okay, honey. We're just going for a bit, it won't be long."
"But Mom, Dad—"
"It's fine, don't worry. Now go to sleep, you guys have school tomorrow, right?"
Cruel and Kara locked eyes for three seconds, but immediately looked away from each other.
"But promise me, Abang... you guys will come back, right?"
Luky ruffled Kara and El's hair with a soft smile.
"Of course, Abang. We promise. We're not leaving you guys for long."
"What a joke. People still believe in 'promises' these days? If it were me, I'd trust money more," Zenra muttered, glaring sourly at Luky—though the man was completely unaware he was being watched by the 18-year-old.
[Money isn't everything, you load.]
"Money might not be everything, Tem, but without it, everything is a huge pain in the ass. Saying 'money isn't everything' is easy when your bank account isn't sitting at zero. Don't gaslight us with that crap when the cost of living is rising faster than our careers."
[I'm not even sad anymore, you just won't stop yapping.]
That night, rain fell in a monotonous rhythm, tapping softly against the house windows as if asking for permission to enter. Inside, the house was peaceful. Kara and El had fallen asleep after an exhausting day.
Luky and Framesti stood at the door of their children's room. They looked at their sleeping faces with such love—a love that would soon become a permanent memory.
Framesti stepped closer, stroking El's messy hair, and whispered softly, "El is sleeping so peacefully tonight. He usually talks in his sleep."
Luky smiled faintly, though there was a trace of anxiety on his face. "Maybe he's just tired from playing soccer all day. Come on, hon, let's go now. The road will get slipperier the later it gets."
They walked to the front door in silence. Their old car was parked under the heavy rain.
As Luky turned the key, the engine roared to life—a sound that, to Zen watching from the white void, sounded like a death sentence.
"Mom and Dad will be back, don't be naughty, okay?" Framesti whispered, as if talking to the air, before closing the car door.
Zen tried to scream at the top of his lungs, "DON'T GO! DON'T START THE ENGINE!" but no matter how hard he tried, his voice remained hollow, swallowed by the silence of the white void.
The car moved out of the yard. Its headlights cut through the dark, illuminating the trees on the side of the road that looked like giant hands ready to grab them. Just ten minutes in, the atmosphere inside the car shifted.
The old radio on the dashboard began to screech.
Sreeeet... Bzzzzzt... It didn't sound like ordinary static; it sounded like a long, drawn-out moan.
"Hon, do you hear that?" Luky frowned, trying to turn the knob, but the noise just got shriller.
"What's wrong with the car, Yah? Is there a short circuit?"
"I don't know, Bun. I checked it earlier, and it was perfectly fine."
"I have a really bad feeling about this, Yah. It reminds me of what El said earlier."
"It's okay, honey, just stay calm," Luky tried to soothe his wife, even though he was just as anxious and confused.
After a few minutes of screeching, the radio died. But that just made the couple even more anxious, because at the same time, the car's headlights went dead too. Right in the middle of their confusion—or more accurately, as they hit a sharp turn by a cliff—a black shadow jumped from the darkness of the forest. It was too fast to be an animal, too real to be a shadow. Luky jerked the wheel to the right to avoid it.
Ckiiiiitttt!
The tires lost their grip on the wet asphalt. The car spun 180 degrees, hitting the guardrail with a sickening crunch of metal.
BRAKKK!
The car flipped, rolled over once, and came to a stop upside down on the side of the road.
Silence reclaimed the night, leaving only the sound of raindrops hitting the dented car roof.
In the white void, Zenra froze. He saw it all clearly. He saw Framesti's hand fall from the shattered window, her fingers still reaching out into the air—perhaps trying to reach for her children one last time.
"Th-they...?"
Zenra tried to step into the memory, but just as he moved, the scene in the white void changed again. It wasn't the warm dining room or the tragic road anymore, but a cold police station.
Zen watched little Kara and El sitting on hard wooden chairs. They were called in to see their parents' belongings.
"Is this... Dad's watch?" Kara muttered, his hands trembling. The glass was shattered, and the hands were frozen at the exact time of the accident.
The officer sighed, his voice sounding like a death knell to the two kids.
"Their car slid off the cliff road in the heavy rain. There were no survivors."
Little El standing beside Kara didn't make a sound. He just stared blankly at a pair of his mother's shoes that no longer matched. No tears. Just a void that swallowed them both.
That was when Zen saw the shift in little Kara's eyes. The grief hardened, turning into a fire of hatred directed not at the world, but at his own brother, whom he deemed a "jinx."
"Why did it have to be them?" Kara hissed, glaring straight at Cruel.
"Why wasn't it you who died, El?!"
"Br-brother, I—"
"It should have been you!" Kara snapped, grabbing his brother's shoulder roughly.
"That kid—" Zen tried to step in to break them up, but again, the scene changed. Now he was in the living room. What Zen saw next made him even angrier. How could it not?
Before the soil on Luky and Framesti's graves was even dry, a group of men in black suits came with an execution order. The warm house instantly turned into a battlefield.
"Your father's debt is no joke. If you can't pay cash now, the house and all these assets belong to the company," the man in the suit said coldly.
Kara, who was only 15 at the time, stood in front of them, his face pale.
"Dad never said anything about this debt!"
"Too bad, the signature is real," the man smiled mockingly and threw a brown folder at Kara.
In that second, Kara's world collapsed. The house was seized. Their education savings were gone. All that was left was a shack on the outskirts of town that wasn't even fit for a stray dog.
As they carried their only ragged bag to the shack, little El, still 13, looked at his brother with teary eyes.
"Brother... are we really living here?"
Kara, who had been holding back tears, exploded right then and there. He punched the rotten wall of the shack until his hand bled.
"Because of you!" he hissed, pointing right at his brother's face.
El jolted, stepping back.
"Why... why me, Brother?"
"If you hadn't been born, Dad wouldn't have needed extra money for the hospital. If you didn't exist, Dad wouldn't have borrowed money everywhere for your expensive school fees! You're a burden! You're a jinx!"
El didn't answer. He just went silent, letting the curse soak into his soul like poison. Since that day, the shack was no longer a shelter, but a prison where Kara started planting seeds of hatred, and El learned how to survive through the pain.
"Damn, it feels like someone planned all of this," Zenra grumbled, thinking hard.
[We don't know the truth yet, load. So, let's just keep watching.]
"But Tem—"
Zen's perspective shifted again. He was back at the shack, seeing El at 14. His body was much thinner than now, wearing a yellowed elementary school uniform full of hand-stitched repairs.
A year had passed since their parents died in the tragic accident, leaving two orphans in a dilapidated shack because their house was seized by someone claiming to be a loan shark right after the funeral.
And back then, instead of supporting each other, the "original" Kara used El as a punching bag for his anger over their poverty.
"Don't get close to me at school! Tell everyone you're just a neighbor passing by! I'm embarrassed to have a pathetic brother like you!" Kara yelled, pushing little El into a thorny bush.
El didn't cry. He just bowed his head, clutching his torn bag. At school, things were worse. Because his own brother wouldn't acknowledge him, Cruel's classmates felt free to bully him.
"Hey, orphan! Even your own brother won't claim you, why would we?!" the bullies sneered, pouring gutter water over the boy's head.
"Oi, they're bullying my brother, Tem! I can't let this slide, I have to punch those little bastards!"
[Load, load... how many times do I have to remind you? Anything you do won't change anything.]
"So I'm supposed to just sit here and watch my brother get bullied? I'm not a piece of trash like the original Kara, Tem!"
[Patience, load. Patience is a virtue.]
"What did you say? Patience? Patience isn't a virtue; it's waiting for your turn to have a mental breakdown. We're told to be patient, but the impatient ones get the express lane. The system needs an update, not us being less patient."
[Hah... forget it, load. You're just preaching now. Just keep watching, it's almost over.]
Zenra let out a long sigh and refocused on the screen.
"He's a jinx, you know. My brother said his parents died because of his bad luck," one of the kids teased with a smug face.
"You know nothing, brat," Zen retorted angrily.
"Really? No wonder his brother won't acknowledge him. He's the reason his parents died!! Hahahah, pathetic, no parents!!"
El went silent, glaring at the kids.
"What? You wanna tell your brother? They'd probably praise us instead, right?"
"Yeah, his own brother hates him anyway!"
"Hahahah, pathetic. Here, I have iced tea. You've probably never had this again, right?"
One of the kids reached out with a cup, but instead of giving it to El, he poured it directly over Cruel's head.
"Oops, my bad. Just lick it up, it's a waste."
"Whatever, not fun. He's just standing there, let's go."
"Yeah, boring. Let's bounce," the kids said, walking away and leaving El standing there in silence.
For years, El lived in the dark. There was no light in his life at all. To him, Kara was a real monster. A monster who always hated and hit him for things he never did. Until one day, the "monster" changed. After the 'near-death' incident (when Baskara transmigrated), the brother who used to hit him and say harsh things started giving him hugs and trying to feed him good food every day with the little he had—a brother who finally said the words he had been waiting for all his life.
"Eat up, little bro, so you can grow up fast."
The memory ended, returning to the present where he was in the white void.