The city has a sound when you know what to listen for.
In the morning it's deliveries and arguments. Midday is vendors and tired footsteps. At night, when the orphanage windows go dark and the younger kids finally stop whining, there's a different layer: distant engines, muffled music, shouting that doesn't want to be heard by everyone.
Ryu lies on his back and listens to all of it.
The orphanage never really gets quiet. Someone coughs, someone turns, someone mutters in their sleep. But through the cracks in that, through the thin walls and rattling windows, he can hear the city breathing.
That's how he first notices the fights.
Not the ones in the street. The ones under it.
It starts as a low thud, on a night when the wind happens to be wrong and sound carries strange.
He frowns into the dark.
Thud.
Pause.
Thud-thud.
A faint, distorted roar of voices, like someone wrapped a crowd in cotton and buried it.
He turns his head toward the window, as if that will help.
Basement somewhere, he thinks. Packed full of people who think punching each other is worth the entrance fee.
He's seen flyers. He's read charity pamphlets pretending not to know what "unlicensed Fighters" means. This just confirms it with sound.
He doesn't get up. He doesn't press to the glass like some drama addict.
He just listens until the noises fade, files the timing away, and eventually sleeps.
The city repeats this every few nights. Never exactly the same. Sometimes the crowd sounds angrier. Sometimes there's a high, sharp yell that makes his shoulders tense before it cuts off.
He builds a mental note around it: somewhere within earshot of the orphanage, there's a pit.
A week later, he hears people talking about it.
Not adults. Kids.
He's in the yard, sitting on the low wall near the back door, pretending to be focused on a piece of stale bread. Two older boys sit a few meters away, thinking the younger ones aren't listening.
"—told you, he made real money," one says. "Enough to buy meat and everything."
"He also lost two teeth," the other replies. "And he couldn't walk straight for a week."
"Teeth grow back."
"That's not how teeth work."
Ryu takes a bite of his bread and doesn't look at them.
"Anyway, the guy said they give bonuses if you last three rounds," the first boy insists. "You don't even have to win."
"Yeah, because then they don't have to hire new idiots so often."
"Coward."
"You say that now, but you won't go either."
Silence. Then a muttered, "Not yet."
The nun's voice cuts the air. "You two. Inside. If I hear one more word about that place, I'll lock you in the chapel with the leaks."
They flinch and go.
Ryu finishes the bread, dusts crumbs off his hands, and adds that to the file.
So: kids know about it. Sister knows about it. Everyone pretends they don't.
He doesn't care about the fights for the spectacle. His old world had streaming for that. What matters is what they represent: another way the city chews through people. Another place where someone might show something He's only seen animated before.
Nen still sits in the back of his thoughts like a ghost he can't summon. For now, this is just another angle on how power and desperation meet.
He doesn't plan on going near the pit.
Then the city helps him out.
One late afternoon, Sister sends him with a small pouch of coins and a precise instruction.
"You go to the lower market," she says. "Not the station. Jano's stall. You tell him if he tries to give us bruised fruit again, I'll know. Understand?"
"Threat delivery. Got it," Ryu says.
The lower market is closer to the orphanage, tucked into a trio of streets that intersect like someone dropped a basket and left it. It's smaller than the station market, more chaotic, and significantly less hygienic.
He slips into the crowd: housewives with worn bags, men with hands stained from factory work, kids running errands. Stalls lean into each other, piled with whatever people could drag there this morning.
He finds Jano by his voice. The man sounds like he swallows gravel for breakfast.
"You either pay this or you go somewhere else!" Jano is yelling at a skinny woman. "Prices go up for me, they go up for you, that's how it works!"
The woman glares but hands over coins anyway. Jano drops a smaller bag of produce on the counter and moves on.
Ryu waits for the end of the line, then steps up.
"I'm from the orphanage," he says. "Sister sent this."
He slides the pouch over. Jano opens it, counts faster than he looks capable of. His mouth presses into a line.
"She still thinks she can threaten me with that look of hers?" he mutters. "Fine."
He bags fruit and vegetables with sharp, efficient movements. They actually look… decent. Not luxury, but not rotting, either.
"She said," Ryu adds casually, "if you give us bruised fruit again, she'll know."
Jano snorts. "She always knows. Tell her this is the best I can do unless she wants to start paying in organs."
"I'll pass on the poetry," Ryu says.
He takes the bag and turns to leave.
The lower market sits closer to the part of the city he doesn't like: tighter streets, more blind corners, more faces that watch without pretending to smile. He takes his usual path at first, then hits a bottleneck where a cart is blocking most of the street.
People curse. Someone tries to push around it. A wheel is stuck in a broken patch of stone and the cart owner is loudly insisting it's everyone else's fault.
Ryu shifts to the side, scanning for a gap.
There's an alley to the right. Narrow, dark, the air coming out of it warmer than it should be.
He hesitates. The bag is heavy. Sister expects him back.
The alley breathes out a muffled roar of voices.
His hand tightens on the strap.
There it is.
He could ignore it. Stick to the main street, push past the cart, get home, peel potatoes, sleep.
He steps into the alley.
Not deep. Just enough that he isn't obviously blocking the entrance.
The smell hits first: sweat, old beer, dust. The walls are close, damp near the bottom. About ten meters in, a staircase leads down under one of the buildings, concrete steps worn in the middle.
A man sits on an upturned crate near the top, arms folded, eyes flat. He's not huge, but there's a density to him that says "used to hitting things and being hit." His gaze slides to Ryu, notes the bag, the size, the face.
"Wrong way," the man says.
His voice is calm. Not threatening. Just stating a fact.
Ryu doesn't pretend innocence. He doesn't step closer either.
"Cart jammed up the street," he says. "I'm waiting till it clears."
The man grunts. "Then wait out there."
Ryu considers pushing it. Just one more sentence, one more angle. Curiosity claws at him.
He shoves it down.
"Yeah," he says. "Makes sense."
He steps back to the mouth of the alley.
From there, he can't see the stairwell anymore, but the sound is clearer now that he's closer.
Thud.
A rush of voices.
Someone shouting something unintelligible.
A dull impact that feels heavy even through stone.
He stands there for maybe thirty seconds, bag hanging off his shoulder, face carefully neutral. Then the cart in the main street finally budges. The crowd starts moving again.
He merges back into the flow and lets the city carry him away.
He doesn't go back the next day. Or the one after. Partly because the nun doesn't send him that way again yet. Partly because even he can recognise when poking the beast is a bit too early.
But the existence of that staircase burns in his memory now.
Basement. Guard. Fights. Money. Injury. Desperation.
And something else.
He keeps turning it over in his head at night.
If there are regular Fighters there, if some keep coming back, some of them might be stronger than normal. Not Nen users, necessarily, but people whose bodies have been trained under real pressure. People whose instincts might look like the early, crude form of something more.
He's seen enough shounen to know that a lot of "I was born strong" is just "I suffered earlier than you."
Nen teachers aren't growing on trees, he thinks. But people who move in the same direction might.
He's realistic enough not to start fantasizing about marching down the stairs and demanding training. They'd laugh, or kick him out, or throw him in the ring and see if he cries.
But as a data source? As a window into how this world actually handles violence when there are no exam proctors watching?
That's valuable.
For now, he takes a different kind of step.
He starts watching people in the lower market more closely.
Not all of them. Just the ones who look like they've been dipped in the pit and pulled back out.
The man with a crooked nose and knuckles that never quite heal. A woman with tight, efficient movements and shoulders scarred from something that wasn't an accident. A teenager with fresh bruises under makeup, a wad of cash folded too tightly in her fist.
They don't move like civilians. They move like they expect hits, even when they're buying onions.
He doesn't follow them. That would be stupid.
He watches for patterns instead.
What time of day they appear. Which direction they come from. Whether they walk lighter or heavier after certain nights.
The picture forms slowly.
Each piece is small. None of it is cinematic. But it's a start.
The city has layers. Streets on top, basements below, Hunters passing through the upper lines, Fighters grinding away at the bottom. And in between: kids like him, trying not to slide down or get crushed by someone climbing up.
That night, lying on his bed, he goes back through it all in his head.
The Hunter leaving the liaison office with a cigarette and a weight in the air. The station announcements and the flash of a license at the door. The charity office map with red pins in certain districts. The pamphlet talking around underground matches. The man on the crate above the stairs.
He's still nowhere near Nen. He's nowhere near the Exam. He's barely at "sturdy child."
But he has something now that he didn't when he woke up here.
Context.
This is what the world looks like when you're not on center stage, he thinks. This is what the edges are doing while the opening plays somewhere else.
If he wants to walk across this world, really walk it, he has to understand those edges. Hunters are one side. Pits are another.
Neither is safe.
He folds an arm over his eyes, the ceiling a patchy blur through his elbow.
Explore, survive, then power, he reminds himself. Even if sometimes the order blurs.
He's not in a hurry to drop into some basement cage match. But he's also not going to pretend it isn't there.