In the ruins of Manhattan, the only currency that mattered was calories.

Jax was fourteen, but his eyes belonged to a man who had seen three wars and lost every single one. He ruled a four-block radius of the Upper East Side, a concrete fortress bounded by rusted taxis and piles of wind-blown trash. He didn't call himself a president or a king; he was simply 'The Provider.'

The hierarchy was brutal and efficient. At the top were the Enforcers—the biggest kids, armed with sharpened rebar and heavy chains. Below them were the Scavengers, the nimble ones who could slip through the ventilation shafts of the luxury apartments to find forgotten tins of tuna. At the bottom were the Mouths—the younger children, the weak, the ones who did the cleaning and the hauling.

"Equality is a fairy tale told by people who have full stomachs," Jax told a shivering ten-year-old who had been caught stealing a handful of dried apricots.

Jax didn't believe in the 'Good World' the other children talked about. He didn't care about rebuilding civilization. He cared about the perimeter. He cared about the water filtration system he'd rigged up in the basement of a former Prada store. He cared about the absolute, unwavering loyalty of his Enforcers.

The conflict peaked when a rival gang from the Mid-town sector, led by a girl named Sora, attempted to annex the water system. They didn't come with diplomacy; they came with a swarm of stolen motorcycles and a barrage of Molotov cocktails.

The battle for the block was short and savage. Jax didn't lead from the back; he was in the thick of it, his face smeared with grease and blood. He fought not for an ideal, but for the ownership of the concrete. When he finally pinned Sora against a brick wall, his knife pressed against her throat, he didn't see a fellow child. He saw a competitor.

"You thought you could just walk in here and take my water?" Jax hissed, his voice a low, dangerous growl.

"We're all just kids, Jax!" Sora screamed, her eyes wide with terror. "Why are we doing this?"

Jax looked around at the burning street, at the children screaming and fighting in the ruins of a city built by giants. He felt a sudden, sharp flicker of something—disgust, perhaps, or a distant memory of a time when he liked the taste of apricots.

But then he felt the weight of the knife in his hand and the absolute silence of the adults who had left them this mess.

"Because the adults aren't coming back to tell us to stop," Jax replied.

He didn't kill her. He didn't have to. He forced her to sign a treaty in blood, ceding the Mid-town water rights to him in exchange for her life. As he watched her retreat, Jax sat on a pile of rubble and ate a single, dried apricot. It tasted like ash.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [V-06]-[T6-02]-[M5:9.0,M1:6.0,N1:0.8,K2:0.6,theta:180]