These four are the main characters we will follow in the story. If you click on each image, you can find a super short introduction to each of them.                    It's been years since the war ended. Long enough that the memories started to fade, but the scars never really went away. And still, it felt like everyone; humans, ability-users, and mutants were only pretending to coexist, tolerating each other with this unspoken truth that nothing had really changed.                    Stark grew up slipping through crowds and narrow alleys like a ghost, never really seen unless he wanted to be. With steel skin, a healing factor, and the kind of quiet that made it easy for people to overlook him. He survived by stealing, by staying out of the way, by doing whatever he had to do to just keep going. And then there was Dice. A walking disaster. Loud, brash, angry. He always wore a wolfish grin and carried himself like the world owed him something. A gang leader with frost in his veins and rage burning behind his eyes.
                    They met as kids. Too young for the weight they carried, too stubborn to be broken by it. From the moment they became friends, staying alive turned into a two-man job. It wasn’t so much about surviving anymore as it was about surviving together. With each other, life didn’t feel like drowning, it felt like having someone else in the trenches, fighting beside you.
                    Between them, loyalty became something violent. It wasn’t some soft, warm thing. They’d tear each other apart if it meant keeping the other from slipping too far off the edge. They understood each other in ways no one else ever could. Their friendship wasn’t gentle or safe. It was cruel. Born from scars and sleepless nights, bound by the quiet understanding that hurting together was still better than hurting alone.                    Stark, on one side, just wanted to disappear. Every day, he felt the ache of wanting to fade away, to not exist at all. Dice was the opposite. He didn't want to die, not yet. He was running on borrowed time, but he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. He was the type of boy who gripped his life with bloody fists, knowing it could all end sooner than anyone thought, but until it did, he was going to live fast, hit harder, and make sure no one else got the chance to take him out first.
                    They were contradictions from the start. One trying to vanish, the other refusing to fade. But together, they were like two halves of the same broken coin, a brutal equation that somehow balanced out.                    They left a trail of chaos everywhere they went. Petty thefts and street fights grew into something bigger. The more trouble they caused, the more attention they drew. Their names slipped through alleyways in quiet murmurs, carried on bloodied lips and broken teeth. And eventually, the wrong kind of people started listening.
                    The Syndicate had been watching. It wasn’t just another crime ring, it was the crime ring. A force that puppeteered the underworld. And once the Syndicate set its sights on something, it collects.
                    They sent Ever to gather info. She wasn’t some brutal enforcer or slick spy. She wasn’t even there to make deals or manipulate anyone. She was just someone who could sit quietly at the edges of a room, and listen. People always gave themselves away in the spaces between their words. And she followed the rumors, the wreckage left behind by the boys. A thief who wouldn’t stay dead. A gang leader with ice in his blood. It didn’t take much to see why the Syndicate was interested.
                    But Ever didn’t make the calls. She only laid out the evidence. Daniel Montgomery was the one who set the board. And Stark and Dice were the pieces he had been waiting for.
                    He was a former military doctor turned black-market butcher with a knack for finding potential in people and turning it into something...useful. Stark’s regenerative ability, tied directly to fear. Dice, a biological contradiction: Ice fairies don’t produce male heirs with abilities.
                    Dice shouldn’t even exist.
                    A genetic anomaly like that made him valuable. They were walking experiments. Weapons waiting to be refined. Stark could be pushed, rewritten, maybe. Dice was a mutation begging to be dissected. All Daniel needed was time. Control. And the right kind of pressure.
                    So Daniel made them an offer. Not a threat. Not an ultimatum. Just a contract, laid out in desperation. The Syndicate held open a door that reeked of blood and chains. Stark needed money for his grandmother’s treatment, and Dice needed an out or he’d rot in a cell. In the end, it wasn’t really a choice. When survival means making a deal with the devil, you don’t ask questions.
                    They joined the Syndicate. For survival. For money. For protection. For the illusion of control. The Syndicate didn’t have to force them into violence, they were already products of it. Life had already done that.
                    Now they’re buried deep in the underworld with blood on their hands and chains wrapped around their throats. The only thing keeping them sane is the fact that they still have each other.
                    Under Daniel’s watch, they became something else. Weapons. Cold, sharp, efficient. Killing stopped being a line they crossed and became just another part of the job.
                     No more messy street fights or clumsy thefts. Contracts demanded precision, deception, and the ability to become anyone but themselves. Daniel made sure they didn't forget that anything less than sharp was useless. And he never let his weapons dull.                    When survival means being owned by someone else, how much of yourself do you have left before there’s nothing real to hold onto?
                    And the deeper they sink, the harder it is to remember who they were before they became weapons.

                    Stark was never meant to be born. Katherine had tried, in secret, to erase him before he ever took his first breath, but his healing ability, an anomaly even in the womb, kept him alive. He was born premature, a birth that should have left him weak and fragile, but was instead infuriatingly resilient. He was a survivor. His body clung stubbornly to life in a world that didn’t want him. It was his first great mistake.
                    Stark was an inconvenience. He was the walking, breathing proof of her infidelity. The living scandal that cost her a powerful husband, a gilded life. He was the inconvenient stain no amount of money or press manipulation could fully bleach. Harrison, the CEO, washed his hands of them both. And Katherine was left with nothing but the seething, sharp-edged residue of her ruin—and the son who embodied it.
                    Even Charlie, Harrison’s adopted golden boy, couldn’t bridge the gap. He never despised Stark, not outright. But Stark, even as a child, could feel the quiet tension. He could see it in Charlie’s eyes, the unspoken thought that if only Stark had never existed, this family wouldn’t be broken. Their relationship was a hesitant kindness, never closeness. Never brotherhood.
                    Then, three years later, a miracle child. Against all odds, Katherine bore Harry a daughter. A delicate, sickly girl. Katherine’s second chance. Her ticket back.
                    And Stark? He became the ghost in the attic, a burden she had to drag behind her like a chain. Introduced to his own sister as a “distant cousin,” a lie to preserve the family’s pristine reputation. Harry tolerated him for appearance’s sake, but behind closed doors, he was less than nothing to them.
                    Katherine’s resentment curdled into creativity. She hurt him in ways no mother ever should. She was waiting to see if his body would finally give in. It never did. He just wouldn't disappear. A cockroach.
                    His salvation came in the form of a frail, sickly old woman who saw a child, not a mistake. His grandmother. She took him and ran. Far away from that house, far away from the wealth, the expectations, the cruelty. They fled to another country when he was nine. For the first time, Stark could breathe.                    But love, as it turns out, doesn’t pay the rent. It doesn’t buy medicine. So the boy learned new skills. Small jobs for smaller coins. It wasn’t enough. He learned to steal. First food here and there, then a few bills from careless pockets. He graduated to riskier things. Sneaking into places, picking pockets, learning how to slip in and out without being seen. He tried to hide it, but his grandmother knew. She chose, in her gentle wisdom, to look the other way.
                    It was around that time he met Dice. Another lost boy, a gang leader, but still only just a kid like him. They fought, they stole, they got into trouble. But they had each other's backs. For the first time, Stark had a friend. Dice, in his own way, taught Stark how to survive in the streets, how to throw a punch that mattered, how to stand as more than just a shadow in the background.
                    When his grandmother’s health worsened. The medicine costs soared. Desperation has a certain scent, and predators smell it. Daniel Montgomery offered him a contract: a name, a face, a kill. Stark didn’t hesitate. What was his soul, anyway? A tattered thing, long since scarred. Selling himself to a syndicate didn’t seem to matter. Not if it meant saving her.                    He signed his life away.
                    He’d stolen before. Wallets, cash, phones. Never a life. The first time, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He vomited afterwards, his whole body revolting, curled up in a filthy alley for hours. The man’s face wouldn’t leave him. It haunted the space behind his eyelids. That was the moment something in him cracked, and a cold, silent thing began to seep into the space where his conscience used to be. And he did it again. And again. And again.
                    Three and a half months later, his grandmother died anyway.
                    The life he’d built, the stolen scraps of peace, the fragile belonging, had been held together by a single, steady hand. When that hand went still, the entire structure collapsed into dust. He didn’t go home. The apartment was just walls now, empty of the warmth that made it a sanctuary.                    He began to drift. A ghost once more, but now by choice. Nights spent in gang fights, in alleys, in places he had no business being. He stopped eating, stopped sleeping.It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just that nothing really mattered anymore.                    Dice started noticing it before anyone else. The way Stark wouldn’t flinch if a knife was at his throat. How he’d take a beating not with gritted teeth, but with a terrifying, vacant acceptance. The sharp, quiet wit was gone, his usual sharp retorts and quiet humor fading into silence. It wasn’t just depression, it was like he had stopped being human. Like he was waiting for something to finally kill him. But thanks to his body, his damned god-given gift of regenerating, nothing ever did. Bones set. Wounds sealed. He was trapped in a prison of perpetual survival. For what?                    So he became what was left: a weapon. Killing didn’t matter. Surviving didn’t matter. When Dice shoved him, trying to spark a fight, to spark anything, Stark just took it. He was no fun anymore. Because Stark wasn’t anything anymore. He was nothing but a tool. A thing to be used.
                    And Stark was fine with that. A weapon has a purpose. A tool has a reason to exist. And if he was very, very lucky, maybe one day his purpose would be to break against something stronger, and finally, finally, be allowed to stop.

                    Dice’s bravado wasn’t for show. It was survival. If he didn't bare his fangs and grin through the pain, maybe he would have been broken a long time ago.
                    He learned early that showing fear only made things worse. His father was a violent man who fed off weakness. If Dice flinched or cried, the beatings lasted longer. But a grin, a laugh, a flicker of defiance, and his father paused. Just for a second. Enough for Dice to breathe. Even if only a little.
                    Fear was a weakness. So he laughed. Not the kind of laugh that came from joy, the kind that turned pain into a challenge. It gave him a sense of control. His father called him a little shit for it, but the beatings didn’t last as long. That was the first lesson: Life is a joke and pain was the punchline.
                    School was no different. Dice ran his mouth, picked fights with kids twice his size, threw the first punch just to show he wasn’t scared. When he got knocked down, he got back up grinning, blood on his teeth like it was a game. Teachers called him reckless. Kids called him fearless. But it was all armor. No one could hurt him if they believed he couldn’t be hurt.
                    His older brother, Kenny, was the only one who saw through it. Tried to protect him, cleaned him up after their dad was through with him. But Kenny was barely hanging on himself. Dice saw it in the way his hands shook when he thought no one was looking. In the way he flinched when their father so much as looked at him.
                    Then Kenny left. Signed up for the military at eighteen, ran as far as he could from that house. He told Dice he’d come back for him, but Dice knew that was a lie. Nobody comes back for things they want to forget.
                    And then came the neighbor.
                    Officer Briggs was a friend of Dice’s father. He had always been around, but Dice never thought much of him. Not until one day, Briggs put a hand on his shoulder and called him “Kenny.”
                    That was the first time Dice truly felt fear that he could not mask.
                    He didn’t understand at first. Not until Briggs started treating him differently. Uncomfortably kind. Touches that lingered too long. Comments that made his skin crawl. Doors that didn’t open. By the time he understood what was happening, it was already too late. And it kept happening. Again. And again. And Again.
          Dice knew he couldn’t go to his father. The bastard would probably laugh. So he went to the only person he trusted. He went to his mother.
                    And she didn’t believe him.
                    She held his face, wiped his tears, and told him not to make up such ugly lies. Surely, he must have misunderstood. Officer Briggs was a good man, a family friend.                    That night, he ran. He slept anywhere but at home. Sometimes he'd sneak into Stark’s apartment and they'd let him stay as long as he needed. He stole food, got into fights, drank cheap booze with Buck behind corner stores just to forget for a while.
                    His mother’s voice had drilled into him since childhood: Abilities are unnatural. Wrong. Dangerous. So he never used his ice at home. But on the streets, where rules didn’t exist, where power meant survival, he let it out. He’d freeze knives out of sewer water and piss, send shards of ice into the knees of men who thought they could mess with him. He got a reputation. No one knew exactly what he could do, but they knew not to fuck with him.
                    And that was what he needed. Power. Because without it, people like his father, like Briggs, like every bastard who ever looked at him like he was less, they would keep winning.The Breaking Point
                    He should have never returned. He should have run away and never looked back. Like Kenny. Like a coward. But he couldn’t. He couldn't leave his mom alone with that monster.
                    Dice walked back in there one night. His father had his mother in a chokehold. Her face was turning purple, her hands clawing at his wrists, her voice barely a rasp. And Dice snapped.
                    There was no thought. Just instinct. Cold rage. Ice rushed up his arms, into his hands, and when he struck, he felt the crunch of bone, the way his father’s arm twisted unnaturally, the scream.                    It was the first time his father witnessed it, the ice surging from his own son’s hands. He hadn’t even known it was possible. That power belonged to the daughters of their bloodline, never the sons. What forces had conspired to create such an... abomination. A freak of fate. Something must have had gone terribly wrong in the order of things, in the laws of nature itself to create this monster.
                    The cops came fast. His father’s status as a police chief meant the whole department got involved. They had to pry him off, drag him away seething, hands dripping with ice and blood, his mother sobbing not for him, but for her poor, beloved husband.
                    He was thrown into juvie. His record sealed, but his life effectively over. The anomaly in his ability exposed to the world. And his mother? The last time he saw her, she couldn’t even look at him.                    Dice realized then that there was no one left to fight for him. So he had to fight for himself. And if that meant becoming something untouchable, something larger than life, so be it.
                    By the time Daniel Montgomery came knocking, Dice had already decided: if the world wanted a monster, he’d give them one.

                    Daniel wasn’t always known as the Black Market Butcher. He was once a young man with fire in his heart, determined to be a force of good in a world that seemed endlessly cruel.
                    Born into a lower-middle-class family, Daniel grew up watching his parents work themselves to exhaustion, only to be crushed under medical debt and an indifferent healthcare system. His mother died of an easily treatable illness because they couldn’t afford early intervention, and his father, a man who once believed in hard work, turned bitter, drinking himself to death in quiet resentment.                    Fueled by personal loss, Daniel excelled in medical school, determined to become the kind of doctor who wouldn’t turn away the poor just because they didn’t have money. He was brilliant, dedicated, and deeply empathetic, so much so that it was his greatest weakness. He couldn't separate himself from the suffering around him, taking on too much responsibility, losing sleep over patients he couldn't save.
                    To pay for medical school, Daniel enlisted in the military as a medic. He told himself he wasn’t a soldier. He was there to patch people up, to keep them breathing.The Breaking Point
                    War changes people, but Daniel was still clinging to his ideals when he made the decision that cost him everything.
                    A high-ranking government official was wounded in a firefight alongside an ordinary foot soldier. The soldier was young, barely out of training, eyes filled with terror as he bled out.
                    Daniel knew who he was supposed to save. The orders were clear. The VIP came first.
                    But Daniel refused. Maybe the government official was the reason they were in this hellhole to begin with. Maybe the soldier reminded him of himself, young and desperate, full of potential. Maybe Daniel just couldn’t stomach the idea of letting another innocent die while the powerful continued to live without consequence.
                    He prioritized the soldier. The officer died. That should have been the end of it.The Consequences:
                    He was stripped of his medical license, dishonorably discharged, and blacklisted from practicing medicine anywhere reputable. The system he had once believed in, his fellow doctors, his commanders, the government, turned on him in an instant. It didn’t matter that he had saved a life. It mattered that he had disobeyed, that he had disrupted the hierarchy where the powerful always survived and the expendable stayed expendable.
                    Betrayed and discarded, he realized something terrifying: he was never a healer. He was just a tool. And tools can be replaced.From Healer to Butcher
                    With nowhere to go, Daniel found himself drawn into the black market, a world where morality was a joke and life was a currency.
                    He started off patching up wounded criminals for cash, sewing up gunshot wounds in back rooms, no questions asked. But the same rage that had burned in him since the military never faded. He resented the system, the government, the people who dictated who lived and who died based on status.
                    He stopped seeing human bodies as sacred. He had spent years studying the mechanics of life, memorizing every organ, every system, he knew exactly how much of a person could be removed before they stopped functioning.
                    He saw the 12% of the population with their abilities, their mutations, their unnatural advantages, and he wondered: What makes them special? What makes them superior? How do their bodies work differently? And how can their abilities be better controlled, extracted, and repurposed?
                    The curiosity turned into something more sinister. He began targeting criminals. At first because he could justify it, but later because they were just the easiest prey. He experimented on them, dissected them, studied their anatomy not as a doctor but as something else entirely.
                    He wasn’t doing this for profit. He wasn’t selling enhanced organs to the highest bidder. He was learning. Understanding. In his mind, he was still saving the world—just not in the way he originally intended.The Butcher of the Unworthy
                    His victims weren’t people to him anymore. They were subjects. The elite played god with life and death, and now, so would he.
                    Daniel is no longer just a man in the black market. He has become something far worse, a myth, a horror story whispered among criminals and mutants alike.
                    At some point, he stopped targeting criminals entirely. He now hunts anyone he deems "wasteful." A mutant who squanders their ability? A gifted telepath who chooses to live an ordinary life? A healer who refuses to push the limits of their gift? They are resources being wasted. And Daniel does not waste resources.
                    He does not kill out of anger, or revenge, or hatred. He kills because he sees people as ingredients, as materials, as tools.
He still speaks like a doctor. His voice is calm, measured, clinical. When he cuts you open, he tells you it’s for the greater good.
He believes in efficiency above all else. There is no such thing as unnecessary suffering, because suffering itself is just another function of biology, something to be measured, studied, and controlled.An Invitation Written in Blood
                    When you carve out a reputation in the dark, the real monsters come knocking.
                    The Syndicate saw his underground ring as a threat. So they decided to send him an invitation. Why make an enemy out a demon when you can offer him a deal instead.
                    And Daniel was already thinking about all the things he would get to dissect.

                    Ever was born into the Syndicate’s shadow long before she ever understood what it meant. Her childhood wasn’t one of poverty or desperation, it was structured, curated, shaped like a blade. The Syndicate didn’t adopt children; they cultivated them. And Ever was one of their brightest successes.
                    Her two fathers had once believed they could raise her separately from that world, but the Syndicate had deeper roots than love, and the family had debts older than Ever herself. By the time she reached adolescence, the Syndicate had become her school, her home, her future. She wasn’t trained to be a killer at first. She was groomed to be an asset. Charming. Persuasive. Clean. The kind of person who could slip into polite society and make ripples without leaving fingerprints. They taught her that power didn’t come from violence alone, it came from leverage, from information, from knowing exactly where to push.
                    She was taught to think in shadows, to obey without question, to believe that the world outside was too corrupt and incompetent to save itself. Inside the Syndicate, she was told, justice was real. Justice was efficient. Justice did not wait for courts or petitions.                    By her teens, Ever already believed it. By her early twenties, she was one of their most promising assets. And it was during those years that she met Daniel. He was older, bitter, and frighteningly pragmatic. He saw things in her that the others didn’t. He saw the cracks, the heart that refused to die, the pieces of humanity she tucked away where no one could reach them. He never tried to fix her. He simply warned her. If she stayed long enough, the Syndicate would take everything from her. One day, she would look in the mirror and realize there was no line left to cross.                    She ignored him. She believed she could make the Syndicate better from the inside. She believed she was doing good. And the contracts, at first, made sense. Corrupt officials. Abusers. Traffickers. Monsters who hid behind power. She told herself that the blood on her hands was necessary. That she was balancing the scales.                    But then Stark entered the system. A quiet thief with burdens too heavy for someone his age. And then Dice followed, volatile and already half broken by the world. They were young. Too young. They were both brought in because of her, because she had spoken their names in the wrong room. The Syndicate would have taken them anyway, but she was the reason it happened so quickly.
                    After that, something in her shifted.
                    She watched Stark hold on to hope long past reason. She watched Dice laugh at his own misery just to keep going. These two kids who had every reason to turn cruel refused to let the world make them something ugly. And in that refusal, Ever began to unravel. She started questioning why the Syndicate needed children as weapons. Why the contracts she received were becoming less about justice and more about control. Why mercy was forbidden, even when someone deserved a chance.                    Daniel noticed before anyone else. He saw the way Ever hesitated during briefings. The way her hands shook after missions. The nightmares she hid behind sarcasm. The guilt she carried, quiet and suffocating. He was the only one she trusted enough to speak honestly to, the only one who knew she was beginning to doubt everything she had been raised to believe.                    Now in her late twenties, Ever is caught between two worlds. To the Syndicate, she is loyal. To the boys, she is a protector. To herself, she is a growing contradiction. She hides her doubts from Stark and Dice because they deserve someone stable, not someone falling apart. She shields them from the darkest parts of the organization, even as she tries to hide how close she is to breaking.                    Ever still wants to believe she can save something. Not the world. Not herself. But maybe she can keep Stark and Dice from becoming what she became. Maybe she can keep them from turning into Daniel. Maybe she can stop them from becoming monsters.                    But in the Syndicate, nothing stays hidden for long. And Ever is running out of time.

These are supporting characters that will pop in the story from time to time. If you click on each image, you can find a super short introduction to each of them.

These are characters that are not owned by me. They are relevant to the story and will undoubtedly shape how things will turn, for better or worse.If you click on each image, you can find a super short introduction to each of them.