by ShadowADL
In a world that doesn't know it's breaking, Ren Kurosawa was nobody. A quiet boy with no family, no future, and no particular reason to matter. Then something fell from the sky — a biological AI of impossible design, called Raphael — was it because he was there? or was it because he was special. The IBA — the International Bounts Association — is a global organization of biologically modified soldiers built on one ideology: human perfection. Their leader believes the AI in Ren's head is the key to achieving it. SHIELDER, the UN's ghost unit, believes Ren is the key to stopping them. Raphael, the AI itself, believes its only job is keeping Ren alive — and it is very, very good at its job. What follows is three years of blood, steel, and the slow, terrible education of a boy learning what it means to carry something the world will never stop hunting. Devil with a Mission is a story about the price of strength, the ethics of violence, and the specific weight of grief when you are the only one left standing. Ren will face an organization of biological soldiers, each one a broken person given a name for their pain and pointed at him. He will lose people. He will become something that frightens him. He will win. And then the world will end anyway. Forty years later, he wakes up.
