Free Web NovelChapter 3: Chapter 3: Modern Hierarchy
"G-Gaban! Why this alleyway of all places?"
Gayan’s voice came out in a desperate whisper, his eyes darting left and right as he clutched the bottles of alcohol tightly against his chest, the hidden wrap of marijuana pressing uncomfortably against his ribs.
"For the thrill, Gayan."
Gaban laughed openly and carelessly, the kind of laugh that had absolutely no business echoing through an alleyway where they absolutely should not have been. He tossed one of the bottles into the air and caught it without so much as glancing at it, the motion so fluid it seemed less like a trick and more like something he had simply been born doing. freeweɓnøvel.com
"There’s something intoxicating about walking through a place like this, knowing full well you could get caught at any second. Don’t you feel it?"
Gayan’s throat went dry.
"Thrill my ass," he hissed. "I don’t care if the police catch us—we can bail out of that. But what happens if the Boss catches us with marijuana? You remember what happened last time. I still feel it in my spine."
"Since when did you become such a coward?" Gaban shook his head in theatrical disappointment. "You used to pick fights with guys twice our age without blinking. Now you’re trembling over one kid?"
He waved a dismissive hand, though if he was being completely honest with himself, that same kid had handed him his ass once upon a time too. He simply didn’t see the point in dwelling on it.
"Relax. You know his schedule. He’s at the arcade right now, buried in that VRMMO he’s obsessed with. And even if he does show up..." Gaban’s grin slowly widened. "I’ll just shove the marijuana straight down his throat and blame the whole thing on him. Kukukuku."
"That is completely delusional," Gayan muttered. "You have no idea. He could just spawn out of.... "
The word died in his throat.
His body reacted before his mind did. Both bottles, the marijuana, everything—he frantically shoved them beneath his shirt, into his waistband, anywhere that would hold them. In less than three seconds, every trace of their evening had vanished into the folds of his clothing.
Gaban watched his twin brother’s composure collapse in real time and raised a single eyebrow.
"...Don’t tell me," he said slowly. "Just hearing his name did that to you? Come on, Gayan. That little pony isn’t even here. He won’t just suddenly... "
A precise strike landed at the back of his neck.
Clean. Efficient. Without warning.
Gaban’s eyes rolled back before he dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut, the unfinished sentence still lingering somewhere on his lips.
Silence reclaimed the alleyway.
***
The great technological revolution had done many things to the world, but perhaps nowhere was that change more visible than in the sky.
As Virtual Reality reshaped culture and advancing technology transformed industry, humanity’s ancient instinct to build upward found new purpose. Towers rose taller with every passing decade, piercing the clouds and reaching heights previous generations could scarcely imagine. Then came the Void Null Establishments—entire factories, residential complexes, and commercial structures that no longer merely reached into the sky, but floated within it, anchored by technology rather than the earth itself.
Flying cars replaced conventional ones. Motoflies replaced motorcycles. The Hologrid replaced personal computers. Holo lenses replaced cameras. Every technology that had once defined modern life was upgraded, refined, and elevated—sometimes quite literally.
And as the world rose, it quietly left people behind.
The gap between wealth and poverty, once measured in bank accounts and postcodes, was now measured by altitude. A new hierarchy had quietly replaced the old one. No longer simply poor, middle class, and rich. Now there were two worlds sharing the same planet.
The Lower Echelon—the ground. The streets, the alleys, the aging district blocks where motoflies were a luxury and the glittering towers above belonged to someone else. Where most people lived beneath the long shadow of a world that had continued moving on without them.
The Upper Echelon—the sky. Tower cities, floating establishments, Flytes, androids, and prestigious academies. A world where the fortunate were born, and where the exceptionally gifted occasionally clawed their way up through scholarships.
And already, whispers had begun of a third.
Scientists had recently completed humanity’s first permanent residential settlement on Mars—functional, pressurized, and inhabited. The implications were still settling over the world like dust after an explosion. People of Mars. A new echelon above even the sky itself, reserved for those with the means to reach it.
The world kept rising.
Most people stayed exactly where they were.
***
Gaban slowly lifted his head, feeling the ache settle deep into the base of his neck as a heavy drowsiness lingered behind his eyes.
He blinked.
Sitting opposite him was his brother, perfectly still, hands folded neatly in his lap, his back straight, radiating the kind of absolute submission that only genuine fear could produce.
Spread neatly across the alley floor between them, arranged with almost insulting precision, were every bottle of alcohol, the marijuana, and the cocaine Gayan had so desperately tried to hide barely four minutes earlier.
And sitting cross-legged behind the neatly arranged collection, calm as a man with nowhere better to be, was a kid Gaban knew all too well.
---
Two years ago, this kid had appeared in the Behemoth District of the Lower Echelon without explanation or announcement. Young, clearly an outsider, and enrolled at the most prestigious academy in the country, he pointed to one obvious conclusion.
Money.
Gaban and Gayan had tracked his movements for a week, mapped out his schedule, and waited patiently for the right moment.
When it finally came, they cornered him and kept their demands simple—hand over whatever he had, or things would get unpleasant.
The kid had gone quiet for a few seconds.
Scared, they’d thought. Too frightened to even speak.
Then he had moved.
What followed lasted no more than forty-five seconds. By the time it was over, both brothers were on the ground staring blankly at the sky while the kid stood over them, looking down with an expression that wasn’t anger or satisfaction, but a mild, weary blankness, like a man whose day had been interrupted by something mildly inconvenient.
They had called him Boss ever since.
It had seemed like the only sensible arrangement.
---
"B-Boss," Gaban managed, his voice carefully calibrated to sound as harmless as possible. "Weren’t you supposed to be at the arcade? The VRMMO..."
"I didn’t feel like going today," Roman replied flatly. Something flickered briefly across his face—not quite irritation, not quite exhaustion, but something caught somewhere between the two. "I also heard someone was planning to force-feed me marijuana."
The silence that followed was the loudest silence Gaban had ever personally experienced.
Gayan’s hand shot up immediately, his finger pointing straight at his brother.
"It was him, Boss. I want that clearly on the record. I would never even conceive of something so deeply disrespectful—"
"I was just showing off in front of my little brother!" Gaban hurriedly interrupted, sweat already forming on his forehead. "You know how I get. Just running my mouth. Absolutely no real intention behind any of it whatsoever."
"Idiots," Roman muttered with a quiet sigh.
His gaze drifted down to the neatly arranged contraband spread out before him. He studied it for a moment with the unhurried attention of someone browsing through a menu.
"Which one is the strongest?"
The twins blinked in unison.
"...Boss?" Gaban asked cautiously. "Are you... getting into dealing as well, or..."
"I’m going to drink it."
The twins stared at him.
"But..." Gayan hesitated. "You always said you don’t drink."
Roman reached forward, picked up a bottle at random, glanced briefly at the label, then took a long, unhurried swig.
"I turned eighteen recently."
He said it as though that explained everything.
Perhaps, in the peculiar logic of Roman Orphanat, it did.
Gaban and Gayan exchanged puzzled glances before looking back at their Boss, watching him calmly empty the bottle without much difficulty, as though he could keep drinking all day if he wanted to.
An hour and a half later, Roman left the alleyway and made his way back to his apartment, a little unsteady on his feet as the strong liquor finally began making its presence known somewhere behind his eyes.
The room was neither lavish nor particularly tidy.
It was a simple place, furnished with little more than a study table, a bed that offered reasonable comfort if one didn’t expect too much from it, and an old computer that, by modern standards, was practically a relic. The kind of machine people in the Upper Echelon kept around as nostalgic decorations. Here, it was simply the only computer Roman owned.
He tossed his backpack onto the table before collapsing face-first onto the bed.
It would have been dishonest to pretend the synchronization ceremony hadn’t affected him.
The entire reason he had spent years studying with single-minded determination, the reason he had fought so hard to enter the academy, had been for this one opportunity. The academy provided a free synchronization, and successful candidates received a complete Godcraft set at no cost. For someone who had nothing, it had been the only door that mattered.
And Roman had been certain he would walk through it.
He was a professional virtual gamer. Across every VRMMO capsule he had ever used, his synchronization rate had consistently remained at ninety-two percent, a figure high enough to place him among the very best. The thought that he might fail to synchronize with SR equipment had genuinely never crossed his mind.
I should have reached at least fifty percent. But zero? How is that even possible when I literally make a living playing virtual games?
It made no sense.
Yet the capsule had been very clear.
Roman lay staring at the ceiling while the alcohol softened the edges of his thoughts without doing anything useful about the thoughts themselves.
This was his life now. Graduate alongside the other failures. Rot in the Lower Echelon, or, if fortune finally decided to smile at him for once, scrape together some empty job in the Upper Echelon that he neither wanted nor would ever care about. Meanwhile Olive—the same person who had spent two years quietly making Roman’s life miserable—was about to enter the God’s District and play God over a world he had done nothing to deserve.
Roman slowly sat up.
"Why is it always me?"
The words escaped in a rough whisper, carrying eighteen years of accumulated weight.
"Born in a dumpster. Grew up alone. Tried harder than anyone I know... and still. Still."
The frustration had nowhere to go.
So he stood.
And he moved.
He practiced every fighting style he knew against the empty air of his room, throwing combinations at invisible opponents and working through every form he had painstakingly taught himself over years of solitary, stubborn effort, imagining Olive’s face with a clarity that surprised even him. He moved until the anger finally burned itself out, until his arms grew heavy and his breathing turned ragged, until there was simply nothing left to be furious with.
Then he collapsed onto the floor, utterly drained.
Drained of energy. Drained of strength. Drained of the quiet resolve it took to keep being Roman Orphanat every single day.
Silence settled over the room like a held breath.
And then he heard it.
A clock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Roman’s eyes opened slowly.
He didn’t own a clock. There was no clock in this room. There never had been.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
[00:00]
The sound stopped.
Then, from nowhere and everywhere at once, words bloomed into existence above him, luminous and unhurried, as though they had always been there and were only now allowing themselves to be seen.
[Attempting to synchronize the soul of User 07.]
[Loading... 1%... 30%... 65%... 90%... 100%]
[Loading Complete.]
[Synchronization Rate: 100%]
Roman stared at the glowing words in complete silence.
The alcohol clouding his mind vanished almost instantly.
His breathing slowed.
His pupils trembled.
For a long moment, he simply watched the screen hovering above him, unable to decide whether he had finally lost his mind or whether reality itself had quietly decided to change.
Then the final line appeared.
[Welcome, Master.]
[Welcome to Godcraft Genesis—Where Everyone Is a God.]
