He worked in the lower levels first, carrying concrete blocks with another worker, passing them down a line like a human conveyor belt.
The blocks were heavy and rough against his gloves. Each time he lifted one, his arms tightened, shoulders burning. He did no5 complain. Complaining didn't lighten anything. It only shows weakness.
As the sun climbed higher in the sky, the site grew hotter. Sweats formed under his helmet, tickled down the side of his face and soaked into his collar. Dust stuck to his skin. He could taste metal in the air. The world narrowed to tasks: lift, walk, place, repeat. The rhythm became a kind of trance ,the only peace he could afford. When his mind wandered, it wandered into bitterness.
He watched the foreman and the engineers stroll past, talking into phones, laughing as if the air wasn't thick with danger. He watched the project manager arrive in a polished car ,step out wearing glasses and point at the building as like he owned the sky itself.
He watched the architect's renderings posted on a temporary board, images of the future tower, bright and perfect, full of light and luxury. There were people in the renderings too, smiling, walking, sipping coffee. None of them looked like him.
Leonhart had once wanted to be the one drawing those plans, the one deciding how a city should breathe. When he was younger he believed in it: study hard, work harder, climb. But life had been a series of small collapse. Family bills,broken promises. A scholarship that didn't cover what it claimed.
A job that paid just enough to keep him trapped. Eventually, the dream didn't die in a dramatic moment. It simply thinned out, like a flame starving for oxygen, until it became a weak ember he kept hidden in his chest.
Amid midday, he took a short break near a stack of steel rebar. He sat on a wooden pallet, back against a concrete pillar. He drank water slowly, letting it cool his throat. His hands trembled slightly from the strain, not from fear but from the constant tension of muscle pushed beyond comfort.
Nearby, two workers spoke in low voices about an accident that had happened on another site last week. Someone had fallen. Someone had died. The words were spoken like weather reports. Tragedy was so common that it became a routine.
Leonhart listened ane said nothing. He had seen accidents. He had a seen a man's hand crushed under a slab, fingers flattened like paper. He had seen someone slipped from scaffolding and break a leg, the bone bending wrong. He had seen a worker faint from heat and wake up to the supervisor yelling about productivity.
On a construction site, safety is only written on banners. Im reality, it was always negotiable.
After the break, the work shifted. A delivery arrived, more steel beams and large reinforced blocks meant for the higher levels. The supervisor snapped orders. Leonhart was sent to the mid floors, where the wind cut through open sides and the city looks like a map below.
The higher you went, the more dangerous it became. That was where the real building happened, where one mistake wasn't a bruise but an ending.
He climbed the temporary stairs with a load on his shoulders, boots thudding against the metal steps. The air changed as he went higher, thinner, cooler, full of wind and scent of wet concrete. When he reached the designated floor ,he saw the scaffolding network stretched like a web along the open edge. Workers moved across with practiced balance.
Leonhart set his load down, wiped his forehead and looked toward the skyline. From up here, the city looked calm. From up here the traffic lines were thin streams instead of snarling beasts. From up here, the building looked like achievements instead of traps.
He felt the bitterness rise again, sharper than before. All of this… for what? For someone else's penthouse, someone else's profit, someone else's name on a plaque. He could already imagine the future, the tower finished, lights on, people inside living lives that never required them to carry concrete until their shoulders screamed.
He could imagine someone standing by a window, admiring the view, never knowing how close this view had come to being painted with blood.
A foreman shouted for more hands. They were behind schedule. Something had shifted in the schedule because someone above them had promised an investor that build would be ready soon. So the people at the bottom paid the price for a promise they never made.
Leonhart moved again. That was what he always did. He picked up a steel beam with two other workers, coordinated their steps, and carried it toward the edge where it needed to be placed for reinforcement.
The beam was long and awkward, heavy enough that every few meters made his arms burn. The wind pushed against it, trying to twist it out of their grip.
"Careful," one worker muttered.
Leonhart gave a tight nod. He didn't like beinh told to becareful. Not because it was wrong but because it was cruel. As if carefulness could defeat a world designed to discard you.
They reached the scaffolding access point and adjusted their grip. Leonhart stepped on the planks, feeling the light bouncd beneath his boots. The scaffolding was supposed to be secured. It always was. It always looked fine, until it wasn't.
He forced his breathing steady and focused on the beam. Step. Balance. Step. The city below seemed to watch in silence.
They made it halfway across when the foreman shouted again from behind, angry and impatient.
"Faster! We don't have all day."
Leonhart jaw tightened. He felt heat flare behind his eyes. Faster. Always faster. Like they were machines. Like bodies weren't made of bones and tendons. Like gravity could be bullied.
The worker in front of him sped up, and the beam shifted. Leonhart adjusted instinctively, meaning to stabilize it. His boot landed on a plank that felt slightly off, just a fraction less firm than the others. He noticed it the way you noticed a wrong note in a familiar song but he was a second too late.
The plank dipped.
It wasn't dramatic at first. It didn't snap like in movies. It sagged, and the metal frame beneath it groaned. Leonhart's body reacted before his mind fully understood, his muscles tightening, his balance shifting. He tried to step back, but the beam's weight pulled him forward. The worker behind him yelled something. The worker in front stumbled..
Leonhart felt the world tilt.
In that single moment, time stretched the way it did when a body sensed death. Details sharpened. The sound of wind became a roar. The smell of concrete and metal became overwhelming. The sunlight glared off the beam, blinding him for a heartbeat.
He saw the clamp on the scaffolding joint, rusted, slightly bent, something that should have been replaced weeks ago. He saw it with the clarity of an engineer trapped in a laborers body. He saw the failure point. He saw the reason.
Someone had cut corners. Some had save money. Someone had decided a cheaper clamp was "good enough."
And now gravity was collecting its payment.
The joint gave way. The plank dropped. Leonhart's foot slipped. The beam lurched, pulling his hands free. His finger tips scraped metal. He grapped at the air. His helmet strap cut into his chin as his head jerked. A worker scream and another one tried to catch him but failed.
Leonhart fell. For a heartbeat, he was weightless. The wind slammed into him, ripping the breath from his lungs. The open sky spun. The building's edge flashed past. His mind, bitter and exhausted for years, suddenly became terrifyingly quiet.
He did not think of fame. He did not think of revenge. He thought, absurdly, of a small apartment with a window that faced sunlight. He thought of a kitchen where the kettle wasn't dented. He thought of a simple table where he could spread blueprints without worrying someone would tell him to move faster. He thought of buildings that weren't monuments to other people's egos but shelters for ordinary lives.
He thought of all the walls he had raised for strangers. He thought of all the homes he had helped create that he would never stepped inside as anything but a worker.
And the bitterness that had lived in him like a second heartbeat rise one last time, not as anger but as grief.
"I built everything but nothing was mine." His mind screamed. The words felt heavier than any concrete block he had ever carried.
The ground rushed up like a closing door.
Leonhart's eyes widened, not in panic but in the instinctive refusal of the body to accept the end. The sky was still bright above him. The sun was still rising. The city was still alive. And yet he, who had spent his life holding up the world with calloused hands was about to be erased from it with a single impact.
Somewhere far above, voices screamed his name but they sounded distant as if he was already leaving them behind.
The wind tore at his cloak..no..not a cloak. Just his jacket, his cheap, dusty jacket. The irony almost made him laugh.
He fell through a curtain of dust and light.
And then....
Pain, sharp and absolute, like the world finally acknowledging him only to end him.
His vision shattered into white.
Sound disappeared. In the last flicker of consciousness, he felt a strange calm, one that had never belonged to him in life. As if something beyond the city, beyond the building, beyond the cruel arithmetic of survival, had finally opened its hand.
And Leonhart, who had spent his life building dreams for strangers, slipped into darkness without ever seeing a single one completed for himself.