The rain hadn't abated in hours. The sky, a somber iron-and-ash-colored canvas, pressed low over Darnhelm's rust-scarred buildings—a city constructed on the embers of overlooked wars and business victory. Under its steel skeleton, in a rickety half-collapsed hut on the outskirts of the city, five boys clung together near a burning oil lamp, their faces darkened and wet from the storm.
Vinray Dasa sat in the middle. His dark and inscrutable eyes scanned the rest with still intensity. At twelve, he was already frighteningly calm. A faint scar creased his left temple, just visible under his wet black hair, a souvenir of one of many fatherly beatings before the man had disappeared one evening, leaving behind only debts and shattered furniture.
Next to him stood Kael Ronex, the tallest and loudest of the crew. With an auburn shock of hair and a tendency to pace even when he sat, Kael had been thrown out of more homes than he could remember. He compensated for it with his fierce loyalty and his innate knowledge of numbers—he could calculate risk the way others breathed.
Jinno Marquez, quiet and watchful, leaned back against the wall, gazing into the lamp's light as if it contained a secret message only he could read. Jinno didn't talk much, but when he did, people listened. His grandmother, sick and forgetful, had raised him, and Jinno had learned to fix broken technology, take apart illicit drones, and write silent code that flowed through the digital underbelly like a whisper.
Dorik Senn sat cross-legged, arms folded, staring at the door as if he waited for someone to come crashing through it at any second. His knuckles were bruised again. Fighting was his language. Guarding the others was his promise, especially after he had seen his little sister die in the fire their mother had lit during one of her tantrums.
And Nevan Korr. Always smiling. Always laughing. Even now, even here. His humor didn't always work, but it prevented the group from suffocating in a sea of silence. He wielded humor like a shield and a sword, to deflect from the welts he concealed beneath his sleeves and the perplexity he never expressed—of what he was, and why no one had ever wanted to hold on to him.
The shack creaked under the weight of the storm. Water trickled in through cracks. Still, none of the boys moved.
Vinray lit a second match, holding it to a scrap of paper.
"I've thought about this a long time," he said. "We can't keep waiting for things to change. They won't. Not for people like us."
Kael snorted, but quietly. "What do you think we're gonna do? Charge the city boardroom with sticks?"
Vinray didn't smile. "Not today. But one day? Yeah."
Dorik cracked his knuckles. "I'm in. Whatever it is."
Jinno nodded slightly. Nevan just leaned in further, grin erasing, eyes narrowing.
"We vow," Vinray said, holding the burning paper, "not only to guard one another. That's not sufficient. We construct something together. Something greater than Darnhelm. Greater than the cities. We rise. And if one of us falls—"
"We pull him up," Dorik said.
"We bear him," Jinno added.
"We never betray," Kael completed.
Nevan stared at the paper. "So…we're taking an oath?"
Vinray nodded. "A brotherhood. Bound by fire.
He held the smoldering scrap to a small metal plate, where five identical strips of cloth rested. Each boy had cut one from his own clothing. As fire ate at the fabric, the boys stood mute, observing as flames devoured the only fragments of their history that still had the smell of home.
There were no parents waiting for them. There had been no investing teachers. No future had been promised.
They would take it.
Darnhelm wasn't a city for dreamers. It was a city that devoured them.
Towering monorails split the sky. Neon signs flickered above unlit alleys. Old corporations ruled the skyline; new syndicates ruled the streets. Power didn't change hands through elections—it changed through blood, credits, and digital control. Surveillance drones patrolled endlessly, their cameras scanning for crimes they wouldn't stop unless they cost profit.
These five boys developed under this shadow.
By age fourteen, Vinray had managed to circumvent a tainted scholarship board in order to be accepted into Helvik Institute—the city's exclusive school, where moguls' heirs learned how to dominate the world. Kael followed in on counterfeit finance records. Jinno broke them in. Dorik broke in by winning a regional defense league competition. Nevan charmed his way in, spinning legends of influence and assumed identities until even the admissions board was convinced that he was backed by significant powers.
They wore hand-me-down uniforms and sat in the back row. But they learned.
They learned more than what was taught. They learned how the powerful maintained power—through networks, through facades, through subtle manipulation.
Vinray read strategy like it was holy writ. He read game theory, economics, machine learning, and war doctrine in one night. He learned how people operated in groups, how they reacted to fear, how they could be molded.
Kael was drawn into money systems—studying markets, developing his own models, creating loopholes in commercial law that could not be found. He once shorted a school internal investment competition, shutting down the simulated market in under two days.
Jinno turned into a specter on the internet. He broke through internal school systems, hijacking surveillance, creating AI capable of mimicking teachers well enough to book their own classes.
Dorik practiced like a warrior and walked like a tracker. He became a member of every physical club, learned every form of martial arts available. But behind the scenes, he researched body language, interrogation methods, and psychological coercion.
Nevan—Nevan learned people. He seduced, charmed, disarmed. He could gain entry into student clubs and corporate internship offices. Nobody could ever tell when he was lying. For the simple reason that he always told them a version of what they wanted to hear.
By the time they were eighteen, they were no longer boys.
They were architects of their future.
Vinray began his first business at the age of nineteen: a real-time urban delivery mapping logistics AI that forecasted mess and avoided it. It became a viral hit within two months. Sold in six.
He invested the proceeds from the sale in a second company—an automated factory complex inside the Free Zone. They laughed until Vinray created a functioning prototype that outdid every factory in the area. After that, the laughing ceased.
Kael rolled out a decentralized financial platform--lawful at the surface but masterfully created to divert eyes from actual trades occurring in an underlying layer invisible to everyone except him.
Jinno crafted the infrastructure supporting it all. Networks. Ciphers. Fortresses of Cyberspace. At twenty-one, his AI protected their domain like an imperceptible bouncer, progressing at a pace governments' infrastructure couldn't even hope to keep up with.
Dorik made their expanding workforce into an elite network of dedicated agents. The Twenty—saved from brutality, cruelty, and desperation. Each trained in several arts. Each bound by the pact.
Nevan was made public face. The media darling. The one who smiled on the covers, shook hands with diplomats, threw gaudy parties with world leaders—while leaking secrets to Vinray over encrypted lines.
They grew across continents.
They planted their names.
They constructed code names, aliases, cover stories.
But they never breached the agreement.
At twenty-three, the Sarpanch emerged.
Not as a country. Not as a corporation. But as a rumor. A specter. An institution so venerable it did not have a birth certificate, with reach in every world boardroom and espionage agency.
They went to Vinray first. A trial. A temptation.
Join us. Or be destroyed.
He refused.
And war commenced.
Not with armies. Not with bombs. But with vanished shipments, whispered scandals, mysterious deaths, and data breaches.
The Five Brothers did not blink.
They had anticipated this.
They adjusted. They counterattacked. At first quietly. Then surgically. Then with open fury.
At twenty-five, Vinray's manufacturing empire cranked out 75% of the world's goods. Whatever he wanted done, it was done. Whatever he wanted stopped, it ceased to exist.
Kael manipulated shadow economies and crash procedures for a decade of the world's biggest currencies.
Jinno's programs operated stealth servers within each major defense network.
Dorik's operatives strolled unseen in presidents' homes.
Nevan kissed hands and poisoned minds.
They had risen.
And yet, on the night before their twenty-eighth birthdays, as they stood at the threshold of actual global mastery, they convened once more—back to where it all started.
The shack had been in ruins for a long time. But they stood there in the rain nonetheless, in silence.
Each one looking at the others.
Each one recalling.
Vinray lit a fire.
Kael gazed up at the sky.
Jinno whispered a fresh encryption.
Dorik curled his fists.
Nevan spoke up.
"One day… we'll have to choose what we leave behind."
Dorik nodded. "Not yet. We still have to complete what we began."
Vinray remained silent for a moment. Then, quietly:
"And perhaps… be something worth handing down."
And the rain continued to fall.
But none of them stirred.
Because this was where the empire started.
And it was not yet finished.