"So this is how I die." Guilano González pressed his back against the bullet-riddled Mercedes, blood seeping through his torn Armani suit. The briefcase felt like lead in his lap, his trembling fingers barely maintaining their grip on its handle.
"There he is!" A voice cut through the darkness forty meters away. "Behind the car!"
"End of the line, Belar scum!" another voice shouted, savage with triumph.
Guilano closed his eyes, recognizing the voices of men who had once called him jefe. Men he'd pulled from the gutter and made rich.
"Careful with that grenade, Ramirez," came Theodore Bezio's voice, cold and calculating. "I want to see his face when he dies."
"You sure he's not dead yet, boss?"
"Trust me, Miguel. He's still breathing but there's no walking away this time. Guilano González dies tonight."
The grenade whistled through the air like a promise of death. BOOM! The world exploded in fire and smoke. Guilano's body tumbled across the asphalt, his briefcase splitting open and scattering its contents. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard boots approaching—methodical, patient.
"Spread out," Theodore's voice commanded. "He's wounded but he's still Guilano. Watch for tricks."
"Think he still has that golden pistol of his?" someone asked nervously.
"Doesn't matter. We've got twenty guns to his one."
Guilano tried to laugh but only managed a wet cough. Twenty guns. Once upon a time, all those twenty men would have knelt before him. Now they came to collect his head.
"No way I'm surviving this," he whispered to himself, dragging his broken body across the debris. "But no way I'm dying in the hands of these pendejos."
"I can smell the blood," came Ramirez's voice, closer now. "He's hurt bad."
"Good," Theodore replied. "Let him crawl. Let him feel what desperation tastes like."
The smoke provided cover, but Guilano knew it wouldn't last. His vision blurred as he searched for his weapon, spotting it three meters away—impossible distance with his wounds. "You know what the funny thing is?" Guilano called out, his voice carrying across the wreckage. "I made you all rich. I pulled you from the streets."
"Shut up, old man!" Ramirez snarled. "And you also made us killers. Remember?"
"The people we feed always turn against us," Guilano continued, more to himself than to them. "It's the way of the world."
"Save your philosophy for hell," Theodore's voice was getting closer. "You had your time. Now it's mine."
"At the end of it all, I'm happy," Guilano gasped. "I built an empire."
"And I'm going to build a better one," Theodore replied. "Without your old-world sentimentality."
"Boss," Miguel's voice carried a note of caution, "what if he's got backup coming?"
"He doesn't," Theodore said with certainty. "I made sure of that. The old lion is alone."
Guilano's hand found something warm in the scattered contents of his briefcase—the pendant, pulsing with that impossible purple light. His father's voice echoed in his memory: "Use it when the time is right, Junior."
"Careful now," he heard Theodore say. "The old wolf might still have teeth." How stupid, Guilano thought. Theo thinks I still got myself.
"Don't get cocky, Ramirez." Theodore warned. "This man has survived fourty years in Gulac. He's not dead until you put a bullet in his brain yourself."
With trembling fingers, Guilano grasped the pendant. The ancient Latin words came to him like a prayer: "Entrego mi vida. Vuelve a hallarme."
The pendant grew warm, then hot. Reality began to shift as Guilano felt his essence being drawn out of his dying flesh. Through the metaphysical storm, he heard his father's voice: "Death is not the most tragic thing to happen to man, Junior. The tragedy is living a life void of your purpose." The transfer completed. Guilano's body went limp.
"There," Theodore said, emerging from the smoke with his rifle trained on the corpse. "The great Guilano González. Doesn't look so tough now, does he?"
"Should we check if he's really dead?" Miguel asked.
"Oh, we're going to make sure," Theodore smiled grimly. "Light him up."
The night exploded with gunfire as twenty weapons emptied their magazines into Guilano's lifeless form. When the echoes faded, Ramirez lowered his smoking rifle. "It's done, boss. Gulac is yours now."
Theodore nodded, but his smile was cold. "Yes. Mine." He looked at his surviving men—the twenty who had helped him kill a legend. "You all did well tonight."
"What about the others?" Miguel asked. "The thirty who didn't make it?"
"They served their purpose," Theodore replied. "Just like Guilano did."
The men exchanged nervous glances. They'd helped Theodore kill the biggest name in Galoc. What would stop him from killing them when they became inconvenient?
But in the darkness, unnoticed by the victors, a small purple light pulsed steadily in the ruins of a briefcase.
As Theodore's men disappeared into the night, their taillights fading like dying embers, the pendant's glow intensified. The purple light began to fracture, splitting apart like a cracked mirror until it burst in a silent explosion of ethereal energy.
From the shattered light emerged something impossible—a wisp of consciousness, translucent and shimmering. The very soul of Guilano González, freed from flesh but bound by purpose. He had unfinished business in Gulac, debts to collect, and a throne to reclaim.
But time was his enemy now. Without a physical form, he was nothing more than a ghost with ambitions.
Guilano's essence drifted through the city like smoke, searching. Every person he encountered—businessman, criminal, politician—recoiled instinctively from his presence. Their souls recognized something ancient and dangerous, something that would devour them from within. None were willing hosts. None were strong enough to contain the fury of a murdered king.
"We need to find someone," spoke a voice that wasn't quite a voice—the power that governed such supernatural transactions. It was older than Guilano, older than human civilization itself. "Time grows short."
"I need someone with strength," Guilano's spirit protested, his consciousness flickering like a candle in the wind. "Someone with connections, with power—"
"You need someone with nothing to lose," the ancient power replied coldly. "Someone whose will can be... accommodated."
The search led them beyond Gulac's glittering towers and into the forgotten districts, past the territories where the Belar name still commanded respect, until they reached the outskirts where hope went to die.
Antiok. The name tasted like ash in Guilano's ethereal consciousness. This festering wound of a town had once been Belar territory, until the García family staged their pathetic rebellion twenty years ago. Guilano had crushed them economically, cutting off their trade routes and leaving Antiok to rot. Now the place was a monument to his ruthlessness—crumbling buildings, broken dreams, and people who barely survived on the scraps the bigger cities discarded.
"Perfect match," the power announced with satisfaction.
At the Saint Mary's Orphanage, a brick building that looked ready to collapse from shame alone, seventeen-year-old Marcus Chen stood on the bell tower's edge. The wind whipped through his black hair as he stared down at the concrete courtyard four stories below.
He'd been here since he was eight—nine years of gray walls, watery soup, and the constant reminder that nobody wanted him. The other kids had been adopted or aged out, but Marcus remained, like a stain that wouldn't wash clean.
"No fucking way," Guilano's spirit recoiled. The boy was nobody—worse than nobody. A half-Asian orphan in a town controlled by the García cartel, the very family that had betrayed the Belar empire. "I won't be reduced to this. Find me someone else."
"There is no one else," the power replied with finality. "This vessel is strong enough to contain you, desperate enough to accept you, and positioned exactly where you need to be."
Marcus took another step closer to the edge. His worn sneakers scraped against the stone ledge as he closed his eyes, trying to summon the courage for one final act of rebellion against a world that had never given him anything.
"Choose quickly," the power warned. "The boy dies either way."
Marcus spread his arms wide, feeling the wind try to pull him forward. Just one step. One moment of weightlessness, and then—
An invisible force slammed into him like a freight train, sending him crashing into the massive bell. The bronze surface rang out with a deep, mournful toll that echoed across the sleeping town. But the impact did more than bruise his ribs—it cracked something fundamental inside him.
Marcus felt his consciousness being pulled away, drawn into some dark corner of his own mind where it would wait, perhaps forever, until he found a reason to live again. And in that void, something else took residence.
Guilano González opened eyes that weren't his own. The reflection from the water on the ground was a young face—lean, with high cheekbones and dark eyes that now burned with an old soul's fury. The body was weak, underfed and untrained—but it would have to do.
"Welcome home," he whispered to his reflection, his voice carrying a ghost of its former authority.
The irony was exquisite. The cornerstone of Gulac's criminal empire, reduced to inhabiting the body of a seventeen-year-old orphan in the very town he had condemned to poverty. Now he was trapped here, in this rotting monument to his own ruthlessness.
He had built an empire once before. He could do it again even from the bottom. Even with nothing but teenage hands and a burning desire for revenge. The game had merely changed venues.