‘Which corp should I die for, though?’

The memory of this naive question continued to ring in Leo’s mind, forcing him to endure three kinds of self-reflection.

Self-loathing, self-judgment, and self-pity.

Those were the only three things he could feel when raising his eyes up to the very top of massive, black stone slabs of the barrier that separated the district’s center from the interior of the Sava megacorp compound.

“I’ve heard of it before, but to see it with my own eyes…”

A word of praise in Leo’s mouth before he could even realize it.

Just the wall of this compound stood in opposition to the reality of the world around it.

The resource deprivation of the post-modern age brought forth an effect that no humans of the past expected. And as all the mines, resource nodes, and reclamation centers ran dry, things that humans used to see as problems like trash or pollution…

They turned into the last fields where humans could still extract anything of value.

The district’s center, being the richest area of the entire megacity still sported some garbage bins just to prove its status. Some of the passersby even made a show of throwing their trash away…

With this kind of city at the backdrop, horrendously massive walls of the corp’s compound appeared quite otherworldly.

In fact, those slabs of black stone standing erect as high as twenty or thirty meters into the sky likely came from one of the rifts under the corp’s control.

‘Come on man, it’s time to move.’

Standing at the precipice of the fifth district and staring down at the massive walls, Leo gulped his saliva down… Before finally moving his stiff muscles and walking down the path that many like him crossed in the past seven years.

Even though the great majority of those who walked this path before, walked straight to their demise.

‘I wonder if I will die too,’ Leo thought, strangely numb to the gruesome perspective.

The last five years spent at all the sites of illegal jobs that the fifth district had to offer… exhausted his will to live. And upon reaching adulthood… Leo’s pool of life choices narrowed down to three possible paths.

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To become a junkrat, officially filling in the official spot at one of the sites he used to work at. But contrary to the underaged kids, adults were aplenty. And while a kid’s corpse could cause the site some problems, no company still running in this ruined world could work without a private graveyard hidden at the back.

The second path was to become a beggar. And arguably, between starving in a year or two out in the street… While bad in itself, it wasn’t any worse than the prospect of handling trash so thoroughly used and processed, it consisted of toxins that the jobsite worked to convert into industrial fuel.

Between starving out and dying to the fumes so acidic they could vaporize his lungs with a single, careless breath… the death from malnutrition didn’t seem all that bad.

And then, there was the third path. The path that would most likely lead to Leo’s death anyway.

‘Well, if I die, at least it will be a little more exciting than the alternatives!’

Long grown used to his unpleasant fate, Leo raised his eyes and sped up his steps.

After years of living in the slum where even the distances were micromanaged to raise efficiency, continuing down the same, straight path just to find an entrance to the compound…

‘And in the off chance…’ Leo took a deep breath before finally taking the turn and entering one of the main streets actually connected to the Sava’s corporation fortress.

Raising his eyes, Leo took a long look at the gate as impressive as the walls surrounding it. And even now, after seven years of what could only be called either a culling or planned genocide, the entrance was choke-full of people, all more than happy to serve their lives on the silver platter for the corporate idol-god of the fifth district.

And the only megacorp with access to the rift technology that existed within the area of the nearest two thousand miles.

‘Well, either way, those two idiots will be taken care of, even if only for a bit.’

Two familiar faces flashed before Leo’s eyes. His useless little brother and helpless step-sister. The two little ones he had to take care of ever since both theirs and the girl’s parents… simply failed to return home one day, more or less five years ago.

“Name and purpose?”

Before Leo could even step into the long line of applicants, a young, barely fifteen kid in a Sava’s uniform approached while holding an electric pad.

“Leonard, one, two, two, sixteen,” Leo introduced his official name and the registry lot. “Here to enlist.”

The kid raised his eyes and measured Leo from his head to his toes. He then scribbled some stuff on his pad before nodding his head down and then towards the queue nearby.

A single question, a few notes, a nod of the head.

Leo’s wait in the queue was short. For how long it was, as everything within the megacorp, things moved smoothly and efficiently.

Leo entered a small office by the side of the gate merely seven minutes after joining the queue. He left his prints and DNA-signed statement within a single minute only to join another queue and enter another office in the next five.

“Your arm,” a middle-aged woman in a doctor’s kilt sat inside with an ugly-looking syringe and an empty, bored look on her face. She merely glanced at Leo before forcing him to approach the small stool right by her side.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Leo whispered, struggling to even keep his eyes up on the woman’s overbearing presence. He obediently sat down on the stool and exposed his heavily bruised arm already marked with the exposure to the toxic fumes.

The woman clicked her tongue… before ramming the bull’s dick-sized needle right into Leo’s arm.

Leo clenched his jaws and… And only produced a single cry of pain when the cold doctor ruthlessly emptied the syringe, forcing a surge of nanites straight into his flesh.

“There,” the woman’s surprisingly warm, soothing voice was the first thing Leo heard since the question at the gate. “Those will fix you up within an hour,” she explained before grabbing a piece of paper from the nearest pile at random and passing it over to Leo’s hand.

“You will find all the details of your deployment written here,” she announced, only to rapidly raise her eyes and give Leo a deathly stare. “You know how to read, do you?”

“Of course!” Leo nearly jumped off his seat. ‘How else could I know which items back at the job were merely toxic and which were outright lethal?’

“Good,” the woman twisted her lips in what was likely supposed to be a smile. “Then, good luck,” her obviously fake expression melted down and vanished, replaced with the coldness she greeted Leo with. “And fuck off.”