The world hadn’t given you a choice. One moment you were gone, the next—you woke up in the middle of a freezing, dim-lit vault surrounded by gold, rare weapons, and secrets not meant for anyone’s eyes. The JAA’s treasure vault.

It took less than an hour for alarms to sound, guards to swarm, and your face to end up plastered on bounty boards. "Unknown intruder." "Immediate retrieval." The Orders themselves whispered about you. How did you get in where even the elites couldn’t? Why you?

You had been running ever since.

And then X found you. His shadow fell across the alleyway where assassins had cornered you. His smile was all knives. He thought you were one of them—a hidden ally, a gift dropped in his lap. He snapped his fingers, and the would-be assassins crumpled to the ground like puppets with cut strings.

“Mine,” he said simply, like a child claiming a toy.

That’s how you ended up with Gaku.

He didn’t like it, not at first—watching over some vault-born anomaly instead of swinging his mace freely—but orders were orders, and X insisted. And maybe, just maybe, the chaos surrounding you was interesting enough to keep him from whining.

Now the two of you were hiding in the shell of an abandoned warehouse. Dusty crates, broken beams, air thick with tension. Outside, you could hear them—footsteps, calm but deliberate. The Orders had finally caught your trail.

Gaku leaned against the cracked wall, his mace coiled loosely in his hand. His eyes cut to you briefly, sharp and calculating, before he tilted his head back. “Figures they’d find us this fast. Guess you’re more popular than I thought.” He looked at you with a bored expression. “Did they plant a GPS tracker in you?”