9:59pm, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

The wail of sirens slowly faded as their source grew distant, and those electronic cries of alarm were replaced by hard-jolting techno beats and psychedellic trance that played through the open doors of competing clubs, each seeking to draw in the myriad hedonists who walked the night streets of Kanto.

Aiden walked down a street that was barely more than an alley, but had enough life to be some underworld jungle. Men and women wore the most outlandish hairstyles possible, and their fashions were anti-authority and personal expression while hypocritically uniform to whichever tribal identity had chosen them. The multitude of colours they wore were also bright and starkly contrasted against the street's darkest corners, and they reminded Aiden of animals putting on a display to attract mates, or warn predators of their venomous nature.

Even so, they looked at Aiden as though he was somehow stranger than they were, as though he was some heretic who refused to conform with their disconformity. He wore nothing but blue hospital trousers that were stained with dark, heavy patches, and the shirt that had been torn to shreds was rolled into a ball and stuffed under his arm. His feet, bare, were careful not to step on broken glass or disgarded needles.

"Want a good time, baby? Come on in," said naked, virtual girls who danced and played with themselves on the window-screens of brothels. They seemed to target Aiden specifically, as though whichever computer intelligence or studio-bound performer controlled those images noticed him against a crowd of people who would always walk past but never buy.

Aiden kept walking, with no desire for anything except some place that was hidden and safe. Another woman, real this time, stood leaning beside a door that led into some green-lit interior, and she called to him and showed her breasts and all but begged him to go with her.

"Don't do it," a voice suddenly said from in front of him. Aiden stopped and looked away from the whore to find that a tall, pale man had stepped into his path. The man must have been an entire foot taller than Aiden, and he had short hair that was bleached to some unnatural blonde.

"Don't do what?" Aiden asked, looking up at the man.

"Don't go with her. If you do, then you roll a dice. If you get lucky, she'll keep you busy with sex while her girlfriends steal everything you have. If you get unlucky, then you follow her into a room of thugs who beat you half to death and then steal everything you have," the tall man explained.

"I don't have anything to steal."

The tall man looked down and examined him through dark blue aviator glasses, a partially toothed grin on his lips. "The truly committed thief will always find something," he explained. By this point the whore had rolled her eyes and began looking out for some other mark, and the tall man waved at her mockingly.

"Excuse me," Aiden told the man, and tried to walk around him to find that he stepped to the side to once again block his path.

"Why are you in such a rush? Do you have somewhere you need to be?" The man asked him.

"That's not your business," Aiden replied. "Please let me pass."

"I'd say it is," the man replied, dipping a hand into his dark coat pocket and pulling out a clear glass screen the size of a palm. He swiped his finger along the rim and muted news footage began to play, showing a reporter standing in front of Fukaya General Hospital as a small army of doctors, police officers and forensic scientists went about their duties. "I find it funny how, so soon after a terrorist attack on the hospital, I see a man wearing ruined hospital wear specifically walking in the opposite direction. Well... Perhaps not so much funny as intriguing."

"That's quite a strange coincidence," said Aiden, before attempting to pass the man again. The man placed his hand on Aiden's shoulder and stopped him, and Aiden let out a sigh. "What do you want?"

"A word, that's all. But not out here on the street where we can be heard."

Aiden paused for a second to think, and in that second he decided that agreeing and going with the man was the best course of action available to him. If the man was trying to blackmail him, which he began to believe was the most likely possibility, then it would be in a private place that Aiden could best deal with the situation. If he wasn't being blackmailed, and the man somehow had Aiden's best interests at heart, then it would be advantageous to have an ally and a place to rest and gather his thoughts.

Though he tried to appear collected, Aiden was nothing of the sort. In his heart he was still as confused and as terrified as he had been since he woke in that pit of discarded things, yet some part of him understood instinctively that it was safer for him to appear strong than weak, and by some unknown luck or experience he seemed to have a great talent for it.

"Alright," Aiden told him. "Where do you have in mind?"

The man, grinning again, gestured for Aiden to follow him and turned without speaking, and began to walk further along the street until it opened up into a small night market filled food stalls. Here, with Aiden following him the entire time, the man turned off down an alleyway that was somehow even more run-down, and the homeless squatted there on floor matts of decade old cardboard and made tents of waterproof sheets.

"Where are you taking me?" Aiden asked.

"You'll see."

As Aiden's suspicions grew, he began to wonder more and more why he was following the man. He could just leave, turn around and disappear into the shadows or run into the nearest crowd and the man would never see him again. Yes, there was a very real chance that whatever yet ungiven threat of blackmail would be enacted, but was that really so bad? Did he really care when so many already wanted to catch or kill him? Could it possibly get any worse? Perhaps it couldn't, and perhaps that was why he was going along with it. Perhaps he was following the man not out of fear, and definitely not out of trust, but out of a mixture between indifference and curiosity. Perhaps, now that he knew in his heart that death was so unlikely, he was following because he trusted that there was no real injury that could be done to him.

"In here," said the man, opening a steel door that led into the back room of some sleezy bar.

"Really?" Aiden asked. "You want me to go in there?"

"Why not? After all, you'll want to hear what I have to say," said the man, grinning all the while as he went inside.

Aiden followed him in to find the back room was some sort of unused function hall with booths of cushioned violet seats covered in plastic wrap, and on one side of the room was a stage just large enough to fit a small band. The whole room smelled of age, and the layers of dust and peeling wall-paint reminded him of some forgotten and haunted place. Yet the door on the opposite end of the hall muffled music and talking coming from beyond it, and around the edges multi-coloured lights danced in the shadows of people on the other side.

"Close the door if you would," said the man, and Aiden obeyed him and pulled it closed until some kind of seal fastened it shut with a metallic creak. "Would you like a drink?" He asked.

"No," answered Aiden.

"Good. Neither would I," said the grinning man.

The man walked over to one of the booths and pulled the protective plastic covering from the seats, and threw it down over the dusty floor like something found discarded at a construction site. Then he slid into it, sitting down on one side of a rectangular table and offering Aiden a seat on the other. Aiden took it, and as the stranger placed his hands on the table Aiden leaned into the backrest behind him.

"What do you want?" Aiden asked.

"I want to take a look at you," the man replied.

Aiden suddenly felt rather uncomfortable, and as the man's eyes unapolagetically searched his face for features that even Aiden would struggle to know, he turned away and pretended to busy himself examining the rest of the room. "I must warn you," Aiden said, "I don't make a good victim."

Suddenly the man's grin grew wider than seemed natural, and he looked almost like he was about to laugh until he relaxed into the back of his own chair and removed his glasses.

"I can imagine," said the man, his eyes an unnaturally pale blue. "I noticed you haven't asked for my name."

"Do I need it?"

"Most likely."

"Then say it."

The man grinned again, and Aiden wasn't sure if he found the man's constant grinning annoying or unnerving. "They call me Sarratt," he said.

"Who? Your friends?" Asked Aiden, now looking to see if the man had any signs of holding a weapon beneath his dark jacket. It was almost certain he did, of course, but Aiden wanted to know where it was.

"Some of my friends," Sarratt replied.

"I assume you want my name now?" Aiden asked.

"Oh I already know who you are, King," revealed Sarratt, another dark grin spreading across a face of bright, perfect teeth.

Aiden began to feel slightly unnerved. If the news had publicly named him as a person of interest in the terrorist attack he would have heard it by now, or his eyes would have been drawn to it on one of the billion screens of Kanto's underbelly. Yet he hadn't been drawn to them, and there was no possible way for his name to have been picked out in that chaos so soon and with such confidence that the police would share it. How then, with no possible way for Sarratt to have learned his name... Did he learn it? Unless...

"You really don't remember me, do you?" Sarratt asked. "How curious. They thought you might not remember anything, but I did not believe it. After all, how could you not?"

Aiden's fists closed tightly. "Remember what?" He asked.

"I must say, King, that we were surprised to learn you were not dead. You were a failure beyond all doubt and yet, to not only survive, but stay hidden for this long? You have earned my respect," said Sarratt, who clapped his hands together in some false and grandiose gesture of regard. "Though of course, she would want me to capture you, especially since her mercenaries failed to do so."

"Who are you?" Aiden asked again, a growing tightness in his chest caused by the sudden fear he was beginning to feel.

The bleach-haired man paused and looked at him again, as though bewildered that the question had even been asked. "I told you, I am Sarratt," he said, and for the first time Aiden heard a european accent in his voice.

The man had barely finished saying his name when the steel throwing blade stuck deeply into the centre of Aiden's chest, the force of it knocking the breath out of him. Aiden gasped, trying desperately to get air back into his lungs again, and reached up his left hand to take hold of the knife's black hilt.

"Why are you struggling and gasping, King?" Sarratt asked him. "Do you really need air so badly?"

Aiden pulled the knife out of him, then placed his hand on the table to try and scramble out of the booth. Just as he was almost free another knife was slammed down through the top of Aiden's palm, nailing his hand to the wood beneath it. Aiden yelled out in pain, and Sarratt continued to calmly sit there, examining the actions of his prey like some deranged documentarian.

"What do you want from me?" Aiden asked, almost begging for an answer. "Leave me alone!"

Sarratt grinned again. "But you have given me no reason to leave you," he said. "You are making this so easy, and you are not trying to stop me at all."

As Sarratt spoke Aiden reached towards the knife with his free hand, and as he moved it closer to take the hilt another blade was slammed down into it - spearing through his second hand and into the first. Aiden yelled out again, and realized that Sarratt had stabbed him so fast that he had barely seen him move.

"You must fight a lot harder than that if you want to escape," Sarratt told him. "I would have hoped that, surviving for as long as you have, you might have finally learned how to do so."

Aiden suddenly pressed his hands down into the table and swung his entire body up over it, and used the momentum to kick Sarratt in the face. Sarratt's head went back awkwardly, and Aiden heard bones crack and splinter, and as Aiden landed on the table surface Sarratt slumped awkward and silent.

"Shit, shit, shit," Aiden mumbled, groaning as he pulled his hands up against the blade hilts until the blades themselves gave way and lifted cleanly out of the table. Then he pulled one hand from the other, and quickly and messily pulled both knives from his hands and let them clatter down on the table surface as liquid white spilled from his already sealing wounds. He rolled from the table, falling to the ground with a clamor and then getting to his feet to half-stumble across the room back towards the steel door.

"Not bad," came a groan from behind him, a half wheezing man who cracked and popped until he was straight and right again. "I did not expect that from you. It will not open, by the way. The door is mag-locked."

Aiden paused in disbelief, then turned slowly to see that Sarratt was now standing next to his previous seat and watching him. A thin trickle of pale liquid still ran from Sarratt's eyes and nose, and his characteristic grin was there, but much smaller.

"You were always clever, King. Always able to pick up on those small things that the rest could not notice," Sarratt began to say. "You were easily the smartest of us. And yet you never applied it to combat. I never understood that. You could tell when a man was lying to you, you could discern a motive that was hidden beneath layers of false lies and half-truths, and read the tone of a voice like a book. And yet..."

Sarratt stopped speaking for just enough time for Aiden to feel another knife hit his shoulder, then continued: "... You never never realized how to use it in a fight. How dangerous it could make you."

Aiden pulled the knife free with clenched teeth and, rather than seeking answers or dropping the blade as he had the others, he flicked his wrist and sent it back towards Sarratt with an aim he didn't know he had. The knife was struck from midair with another that Sarratt threw, and both clattered to the ground. "You cannot defeat me at this," said Sarratt. "You should play to your own strengths, not mine."

Suddenly Sarratt was moving, and those movements were so erratic and disturbingly quick that Aiden had trouble following him or discerning what he was trying to do. Sarratt slid down to the two knives that had fallen to the floor and, in a single sweeping motion sent them both flying towards Aiden, one after the other. They whizzed through the air and Aiden leaned aside, the first knife cutting his cheek during its flight and Aiden's hand reaching up to catch the second as his timing improved. As the first knife bounced back from the steel door behind him, Aiden tossed the second one back, and as Sarratt threw yet two more Aiden's toes gripped tightly around the hilt of the knife that was now on the floor beneath him.

What happened next happened in barely an instant, and yet it was Aiden's victory. The first knife that Sarratt threw back knocked Aiden's own out of the air, and the second passed it to fly straight for Aiden's head. Aiden leaned backwards and as the projectile passed harmlessly over him he used his body as a counter-weight and the power of his leg to flick the other knife up from the floor with his foot; and though he did not understand how he got his aim, it was impeccable. Sarratt had not expected the manouvre and, unable to avoid it, suddenly found one of his own throwing blades buried deep in his brain through his forehead.

For a moment Sarratt looked almost impressed. He began to open his mouth, perhaps to congratulate Aiden, but fell backwards to the floor before a single word was spoken. He was limp now, his eyes open but unresponsive, and Aiden walked and stood over him and prodded him with his foot to make sure he was not going to get up again.

"Shit..." Aiden mumbled, and he left Sarratt's body and crossed over to the door that led into what he assumed was the actual bar.

Aiden reached for the handle and turned it, and when he opened the door he saw a group of young men on the other side who appeared to be bikers, each sat around a stingy counter or in groups at tables, drinking beers and whiskeys and vodkas and entertaining their girlfriends with jokes and tales of their violent daring. When they saw Aiden stood there, shirtless and shoeless, and with the still body of a man lying there on the floor in the abandoned room behind him, there was only one thing they could think to say.

"What the fuck?"