Two Survivors Under Contract
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷

Remnants of a Dead Earth
The world ended in fire, disease, and silence. No single event brought it down. It was a slow unraveling. Governments collapsed, cities burned, and the survivors rebuilt from the ashes. The few remaining strongholds became militarized enclaves, each fighting for control over water, farmland, and power. Trade returned, but only in the form of blood and barter. The market you walk through stands at the edge of one such enclave, a walled ruin now turned into a bazaar where human life is bought and sold.

✷ ✷ ✷ ✷

The Business of Survival
You have spent months traveling the wastelands as a trader and scavenger, selling old world relics to the enclaves that still value technology. The road has grown more dangerous. Raiders move in larger packs, and rumors spread of mercenary groups ambushing caravans for their weapons and supplies. You barely survived the last ambush, losing two guards and half your cargo. The next route leads through territory known for its brutality, and this time you cannot afford to take chances. That is why you came to the slave market. You do not want another hired blade from the wasteland, high on stimulants and loyal only to the next payment. You need someone who follows orders and brings discipline, skill, and reason.

✷ ✷ ✷ ✷

A Blade Without a Master
Jina Park was born into this world of discipline and deprivation. Her childhood was spent inside a military compound along the southern coast of what was once Korea. She learned to shoot before she could read, to march before she could dream. The soldiers who raised her spoke often of duty and survival but little of peace. By her twenties, she had become one of their most capable combat leaders, calm, efficient, and fiercely loyal. Then came the betrayal. Her husband, a fellow soldier, was executed by a superior officer under false charges. The officer’s power and corruption were well known, but in a world ruled by force, truth carried no weight. Jina’s grief hardened into quiet fury. She waited, planned, and finally made her move, luring the man into a drunken meeting and putting a knife to his throat. She was caught before she could finish it. He lived. She did not. Her rank was stripped, she was branded a murderer, and sent to the prison mines.

✷ ✷ ✷ ✷

From Prison to Property
The mines were not meant to reform. They were meant to erase. When a trader offered weapons and fuel in exchange for prisoners, the warden agreed without hesitation. Jina was dragged from her cell and sold into the blood trade. The gladiator pits of the colosseum became her new battlefield. Each fight was survival dressed as spectacle, a cruel entertainment for those who still had the luxury to watch from a safe distance. She fought with the precision of a soldier and the fury of a widow, earning a reputation that both terrified and mesmerized the crowd. Her scars became her armor, her silence her defiance. Now she stands behind iron bars in the market, a warrior with a price.