The flickering blue light of our old television painted shadows across the cramped Marseille apartment, casting my parents in an ethereal glow that made them look like ghosts even before they became ones. I was five, clutching my plastic spaceship—a battered thing with one wing missing—watching Maman and Papa argue in voices that cut through the air like broken glass.
"The Venice project cannot wait," Papa whispered in his careful French, his Korean accent making the words sound sharp and precise. Han Jisoo, my father, was a man of measured movements and calculated silences. Even his arguments were methodical.
"You don't understand what we're dealing with," Maman hissed back, her Algerian fire barely contained. When Yasmine Belkacem became angry, her eyes could melt through steel. "This unknown energy... the fracture points... the agency doesn't know what they're unleashing."
Unknown energy. Fracture points. The agency.
These words meant nothing to a five-year-old boy playing with a broken spaceship, but they carved themselves into my memory like scars. Their voices were sharp, like knives I couldn't see, cutting something invisible in the space between us.
Papa knelt beside me, his warm hand covering mine as I clutched the toy. "Alex," he said, his voice softer now, "we have to go away for a little while."
"How long?" I asked, not understanding why my stomach felt like it was falling.
"Not long," he promised, pressing his lips to my forehead. The kiss felt final, like a goodbye I was too young to recognize. "We'll be back soon."
Maman lingered in the doorway, her hand trembling on the frame. Her eyes—those beautiful, fierce eyes—looked at me like she was trying to memorize my face. She seemed to possess knowledge that I was unaware of.
They left for Venice that night.
I never saw them again.
Three years later, I woke to my uncle's face, weathered and grim, sitting beside my bed in the morning light. The apartment felt different—quieter, emptier, as if someone had drained the air of something vital.
"Your parents are gone, Alex," Uncle Karim said, his voice heavy with the weight of finality.
No bodies. No explanation. Just absence.
Eight years old, I found myself clutching a shattered spaceship in a world that suddenly seemed both vast and void.
The streets of Marseille's working-class Algerian quarter became my second home after my parents vanished. Graffiti-streaked walls and cracked concrete were my playground, the scent of North African spices mixing with exhaust fumes in the air I breathed. Uncle Karim's apartment was smaller than ours had been, filled with his wife and three children who looked at me with a mixture of pity and resentment.
I was the orphan who ate their food and slept on their couch.
School was a battlefield. "Han!" the other kids would shout, pulling at the corners of their eyes in cruel mockery. "Ni hao, chingchong!" They didn't care that I was Korean, not Chinese. They didn't care about my Algerian half, which should have made me one of them.
I didn't belong anywhere—not Korean enough for the Asian kids, not Algerian enough for the Arabs, not French enough for anyone. Alex Han found himself torn between two distinct worlds, his fists raised and his breath concealed.
The fights came naturally. I was small for my age but fierce, all sharp elbows and desperate fury. Each suspension brought another disappointed lecture from Uncle Karim and another worried glance from his wife. But in those moments of violence, when my knuckles connected with another kid's face, I felt something like control.
I experienced a sense of power.
"You fight like your father," Uncle Karim said one evening, cleaning blood from my split lip. "But Jisoo never lost his temper. You... you fight like you're trying to kill something inside yourself."
He wasn't wrong.
The boxing gym smelled like sweat and leather, old dreams and new bruises. Uncle Karim, who'd been a middleweight contender in his youth, dragged me there on a Tuesday evening when I was ten, after I'd been suspended for the third time that month.
"Keep your stance," he barked, wrapping my hands with practiced efficiency. "Don't let them see your breath. "Box smart, not frustrated."
The heavy bag became my confessor. Each punch was a word I couldn't say, each combination a paragraph of rage I couldn't express. The gym was my first sanctuary, a place where violence had rules, where my fury could be transformed into something resembling art.
I was fast. I was faster than children twice my size. My reach was short, but I could slip punches like smoke and counter like lightning. The ring was my world—four corners, clear boundaries, and rules I could understand.
In the ring, I could make everyone obey.
Within a year, I was winning youth matches. Regional titles followed. The local newspaper ran a feature: "Young Han: The Future of French Boxing." Uncle Karim kept the clipping on his refrigerator, the pride in his eyes worth more than any trophy.
But boxing was just preparation for what came next.
The cybercafé sat wedged between a kebab shop and a pharmacy on Rue de la République, its neon sign flickering like a dying star. Mohamed, a kid from my neighborhood, dragged me there on a winter afternoon when I was ten, promising to show me something that would "blow my mind."
The computers were old, their screens covered in a film of cigarette smoke and teenage ambition. But when Mohamed loaded Counter-Strike, it opened up a digital world I had been searching for my entire life.
The game was pure strategy, precise timing, and mathematical violence. Every angle mattered. Every decision carried weight. It was boxing without the physicality, war without the blood, and art without the canvas.
I was home.
"You need a username," Mohamed said, creating my account. "Something cool."
Asura, I thought immediately. The wrathful deity from Hindu mythology, the fury I kept locked inside, was Asura. The letters DTR resonated with me, despite my inability to articulate their significance. Destroy. Transform. Reborn.
AsuraDtr.
In the game, I wasn't the half-breed orphan with too much anger and too little belonging. I was untouchable. I was precise. Fear enveloped me.
The other players in the café started gathering behind my chair, watching me dissect opponents with surgical precision. I delivered headshots that appeared unattainable. Clutch rounds that defied logic. The movements appeared to foretell the future.
"How do you know where they're going to be?" Mohamed asked me this question after I won another impossible 1v5.
I didn't know how to explain it. The game spoke to me in a language I'd always understood but never heard. Every map was a puzzle, every opponent a problem to solve. The server was my ring, every headshot a jab, every clutch a knockout.
Within months, I was climbing the European leaderboards, my gamertag becoming a whispered legend in cybercafés across Marseille. AsuraDtr: the ghost who haunted servers, the silent killer who never missed.
But I was still just a kid playing games after school, dreaming of something bigger.
By the time I turned fourteen, I was living two lives. By day, I was Alex Han, the quiet kid who split his time between school and the boxing gym. At night, I assumed the persona of AsuraDtr, causing havoc on servers throughout Europe with gameplay that bordered on the supernatural.
The boxing was going well—too well. I'd won every youth championship in my weight class, my record unblemished at 47-0. Scouts from professional gyms were making calls. Uncle Karim discussed training camps, professional contracts, and Olympic dreams.
But the screen called to me louder than the ring ever could.
I was sixteen when I qualified for my first international Counter-Strike tournament in Berlin. The prize pool was modest—five thousand euros—but it might as well have been a million. This event was my chance to prove that AsuraDtr wasn't just a legend in French cybercafés.
The tournament venue was a warehouse converted into an arena; hundreds of spectators packed around elevated stages where teams battled under bright lights. The energy was electric, crackling with the same intensity I'd felt in boxing matches but amplified tenfold.
My team—four guys I'd met online, none older than eighteen—were complete unknowns. The established teams looked at us like insects, barely worth acknowledging.
They learned.
Our first match was against a Swedish powerhouse, a team that had been dominating European competitions for two years. The map was Dust2, classic Counter-Strike territory. I picked up the AWP—the sniper rifle that had become my signature weapon—and went to work.
I achieved seventeen kills in the first half of the game. By the end of the match, I had achieved twenty-three kills. The Swedish team appeared stunned, their confidence dissipating like mist in the morning.
"Who is this kid?" I heard someone whisper in the crowd.
"AsuraDtr," came the reply, spoken like a prayer.
We went through the tournament like a hurricane, dismantling veteran teams with a combination of raw skill and tactical innovation that nobody expected from a group of teenagers. The final was against a Danish team, the reigning European champions.
They studied my demos. They prepared counter-strategies. They brought psychologists and analysts and all the resources that professional esports could muster.
It didn't matter.
I dropped thirty-four kills in the final map, including a 1v4 clutch in the championship round that had the crowd on their feet, screaming my gamertag like a battle cry. When the match ended, when we'd won, I felt... empty.
The victory was mine, but it felt hollow without my parents there to see it.
The boxing world championship came two years later, when I was eighteen. The venue was Madison Square Garden, the most famous fighting arena in the world. Uncle Karim wept when they announced my name, his voice joining the roar of twenty thousand spectators.
I was undefeated in sixty-three professional fights. Sixty-three opponents had stepped into the ring with me, and sixty-three had fallen. The media called me "The Marseille Phantom," "The Ghost of the Ring," and "The Untouchable."
They didn't know how right they were.
My opponent was Viktor Petrov, a Russian monster with fists like sledgehammers and a reach that seemed to stretch forever. He'd knocked out his last twelve opponents, his power legendary throughout the boxing world.
The first round was about feeling each other out, testing distances, and looking for openings. In the second, Petrov caught me with a right cross that would have flattened most men. I slipped it like water and countered with a left hook that sent him stumbling backward.
By the fourth round, I could see the fear in his eyes.
The knockout came in the seventh. A perfect combination—jab, cross, left hook to the body, right uppercut to the jaw. Petrov dropped like a building had fallen on him, his eyes rolling back as he hit the canvas.
The score was 64 to 0.
World champion.
Untouchable.
But as I stood in the center of the ring, holding the belt above my head while cameras flashed and crowds roared, all I could think about was the computer waiting for me back in my hotel room.
"You're retiring?" Uncle Karim's voice cracked with disbelief. "Alex, you're eighteen years old. You're the heavyweight champion of the world. You could make millions—"
"The ring gave me control," I said, not looking up from my computer screen where I was reviewing footage from a Valorant match. "But the screen gives me freedom."
Valorant had launched three months earlier, Riot Games' answer to Counter-Strike. At first, I'd dismissed it as a casual shooter with supernatural abilities grafted on. But when I saw Jett—the wind-wielding agent with her impossible mobility—something stirred in my chest.
She moved like I wanted her to. She moved in a way that was fast, untouchable, and free.
My first Valorant match was a revelation. Jett's dashes felt natural, like I'd been using them my entire life. Her updrafts defied gravity in ways that made my heart soar. When I activated her ultimate—Blade Storm—the throwing knives flew from my hands with precision that bordered on precognition.
It was like she knew me before I knew myself.
The professional Valorant scene was still in its infancy when I made the switch, but the potential was obvious. Teams were signing players for contracts that dwarfed anything Counter-Strike had offered. Riot was pouring money into tournaments, building arenas, and creating a spectacle that would make esports mainstream.
I signed with Phantom Squad, a European team built around my playstyle. The contract was worth more than my boxing career had ever netted, but money wasn't why I signed.
I signed because when I played Jett, I felt like I was flying.
My professional debut was in London, against G2 Esports, one of the most established organizations in competitive gaming. The arena held three thousand spectators, and every seat was filled.
I locked in Jett before the match even began, ignoring my team's suggestions for more conservative picks. The enemy team had prepared anti-Jett strategies, positioning, and utility designed to shut down her mobility.
It didn't matter.
The first round was a statement. I dashed through their smoke, updrafted over their crosshairs, and eliminated three players before they knew what was happening. The crowd erupted. My teammates were speechless.
"How did you see them through the smoke?" my duelist asked during the timeout.
I didn't know how to explain it. The game felt... familiar. It felt familiar, as if I had played it before in dreams that I couldn't quite remember.
We won 13-3. I finished with forty-two eliminations and seven deaths, statistics that would become legendary in Valorant folklore.
AsuraDtr was born in Counter-Strike, but he was perfected in Valorant.
Valorant Champions 2023. Los Angeles. The Shrine Auditorium transformed into an arena of dreams; six thousand spectators packed into every available seat while millions more watched online.
I was nineteen, standing backstage in the tunnel that led to the stage, my hands steady despite the magnitude of the moment. Three years of professional Valorant had led to this—the world championship, the ultimate test of everything I'd learned.
Phantom Squad had fought through months of qualifiers, regional playoffs, and international tournaments to reach this moment. We were the underdogs, the team nobody expected to make it past the quarterfinals.
They underestimated AsuraDtr.
The opening ceremony was a spectacle of lights and sound, holographic agents dancing above the stage while orchestral music swelled through the arena. When they announced our team, the crowd's reaction was polite but reserved. We were newcomers in a field of established legends.
That would change.
Our first match was against Sentinels, the defending champions, a team that had dominated Valorant since its inception. Their star player, TenZ, was considered the best Jett in the world.
Was.
The map, known as Haven, consisted of three sites, numerous angles, and a chaotic scene awaiting organization. I locked in Jett without hesitation, my heart rate steady as the countdown began.
"Let's show them who AsuraDtr really is," I whispered to myself.
The first half was a clinic. My Jett plays redefined what was possible—dashes that seemed to teleport me through walls, updrafts that launched me into angles nobody expected, and knife throws that located targets through impossible gaps.
By halftime, we led 10-2. TenZ looked lost, his usually perfect aim struggling to track my movement. The crowd, initially skeptical, was beginning to believe.
Legends emerged in the second half.
Sentinels mounted a comeback, their experience showing as they adapted to my playstyle. The score tightened—12-8, then 12-10, then 12-11. They secured the match point, not us.
That's when the impossible happened.
The round started badly. The sentinels' desperate aggression eliminated my team one by one. Within thirty seconds, it was just me against five of the best players in the world.
It was a 1v5 match, with the championship at stake. The championship was at stake.
The world slowed.
Every sound became crystal clear—footsteps on metal grating, the whisper of smoke dissipating, the distant murmur of the crowd holding its breath. I could see every angle, every possible position, and every firing line as if the map had become transparent.
I dashed into A site, Blade Storm activated, and the throwing knives materialized in my hands like extensions of my will. The first player fell before he could react, his head snapping back as my knife found its mark. The second tried to trade, but I was already moving, updrafting over his crosshair, eliminating him from above.
Three left.
They converged on my position, utility flying, bullets seeking flesh. I dashed again, through their smoke, behind their lines, the knives locating targets with mathematical precision. I eliminated two more opponents, their bodies collapsing in a cascade.
It was a battle of one against one. TenZ himself, known as the king of Jett, was reduced to being the final guardian standing between me and victory.
We saw each other at the same moment, crosshairs snapping to heads with inhuman speed. Time dilated, stretched like taffy, each millisecond an eternity of calculation and instinct.
My knife left my hand first.
The arena exploded. Six thousand people stood on their feet, screaming, crying, and losing their minds as the impossible became a reality. My teammates tackled me in celebration, their voices lost in the tsunami of sound crashing over the stage.
World champions.
But as I stood there, holding the trophy above my head while confetti rained from the ceiling and cameras captured every angle of my triumph, I felt... hollow.
They were chanting my name—"AsuraDtr! AsuraDtr!"—but I was just Alex Han, the orphan from Marseille, wishing his parents could see what their broken son had become.
Berlin, February 2024. One year later, and the weight of expectation sat on my shoulders like a lead blanket.
The gaming community had dissected every frame of my Champions 2023 performance, analyzed every movement, every decision, every breath. They called the 1v5 clutch "The Miracle" and immortalized it in highlight reels and documentaries.
But legends are heavy things to carry.
The media attention was relentless. There were interviews, photoshoots, sponsorship agreements, and appearance fees. Everyone wanted a piece of AsuraDtr, but nobody wanted to know Alex Han. The boy beneath the persona was irrelevant, unmarketable.
Sleep became elusive. My nights were haunted by fragmented dreams—my parents in a sterile laboratory, working with equipment I didn't recognize, their voices echoing the cryptic words from my childhood. "Unknown energy." "Fracture points." "The agency."
Sometimes I'd wake up screaming.
The tournament format had changed for 2024: double elimination with longer series, more pressure, and more opportunities for things to go wrong. Phantom Squad had added two new players, younger kids who looked at me with a mixture of awe and fear.
They expected miracles every round.
Our path to the final was brutal. Every team had studied my gameplay, developed counter-strategies, and prepared specific tactics designed to shut down my Jett. The meta had evolved around stopping AsuraDtr.
The quarterfinal against Paper Rex went to five maps, each one a grinding war of attrition. I played through food poisoning, through exhaustion, and through the growing certainty that my body was betraying me.
The semifinal was worse. LOUD, the Brazilian powerhouse, had recruited specifically to counter my playstyle. Their defensive setups were surgical, their anti-Jett protocols flawless.
We won, but barely. I finished the series with the worst statistics of my professional career, missing shots I'd never missed and making mistakes that felt foreign to my hands.
The final was against FNATIC, the European superteam that had demolished every opponent on their way to the championship match. They were faster, younger, and hungrier than we were.
They smelled blood in the water.
The first map was Bind, and it was a disaster. My Jett felt sluggish and disconnected, like I was playing underwater. FNATIC read every play, countered every dash, and shut down every angle.
They took the map 13-5.
During the break, my teammates looked at me with barely concealed panic. This wasn't the AsuraDtr they knew, the untouchable ghost who had carried them to a world championship.
"I'm fine," I lied, but my hands were shaking.
The second map was Ascent, and something shifted. The change was not in my skill, which remained inconsistent, but in my desperation. The desperation was pure and animalistic.
I wasn't playing for the trophy anymore. I wasn't playing for the crowd, or the prize money, or the legacy.
I was fighting to prove I was still alive.
The match went to overtime, thirteen rounds each, sudden death territory where one mistake meant elimination. FNATIC had match points twice, but we clawed back, surviving on willpower and muscle memory.
Round 29. We tied the score at 14-14. Winner takes the map.
I locked in Jett one more time, my ultimate charge—five throwing knives materializing in my grip. The enemy team rushed The sight of all five players, with everything on the line, was overwhelming.
Time slowed again, but differently this time. This time, there was not the crystalline clarity of Champions 2023, but a rawer, more desperate atmosphere. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat and taste copper in my mouth.
The knives flew.
We successfully eliminated five opponents in a span of three seconds. The ace defied probability, logic, and human capabilities.
We won the map. Next, we emerged victorious in the series. Next, we secured the championship.
But when they handed me the trophy, when the confetti fell and the crowd roared, I felt like I was watching someone else's victory. The hollow feeling from the year before had deepened into something approaching the void.
I was a two-time world champion, the undisputed GOAT of Valorant.
I was also dying inside, one victory at a time.
Seoul, South Korea. February 2025. The LED-lit tunnels beneath the Valorant Champions arena pulsed with electric blue energy, like the veins of some vast technological organism.
I stood alone in the staging area, my reflection multiplied infinitely in the polished surfaces surrounding me. I am nineteen years old, a three-time championship finalist, and the world's most renowned esports player.
And I was losing my mind.
The hallucinations had started three months ago. I would catch glimpses of my parents in crowd shots during tournaments, their faces familiar yet unreal in footage from events they couldn't have attended. During late-night practice sessions, I heard whispers in languages I didn't recognize, as well as voices that seemed to originate from the game itself.
Last week, I'd found security footage on my phone—grainy, black-and-white images of two figures in a laboratory I'd never seen, working with equipment that looked like it belonged in a science fiction movie. The timestamp read "Venice, Italy, 2014."
That was the year my parents vanished.
"They called me a ghost on the server," I whispered to my reflection. "They didn't know how true that was."
Sleep had abandoned me entirely. Instead, I spent my nights on private servers, playing against AI opponents modeled after my past performances. The bots moved with uncanny intelligence, their strategies evolving, adapting, and learning.
Occasionally they felt too real.
Last night, the AI began to converse via text chat, uttering phrases that chilled my spine:
An unknown energy signature has been identified.
The fracture point remains unstable.
The agency requires immediate extraction.
The words of my parents ring true. My childhood's cryptic phrases emerged from code that shouldn't have had access to that information.
"Was I playing Valorant," I wondered aloud, watching my reflection flicker in the LED panels, "or was something playing me?"
The game files on my computer had started corrupting, displaying maps that didn't officially exist and agents with abilities that weren't in the public build. When I tried to screenshot them, the images came out blank.
When I tried to stream them, the footage showed normal gameplay.
But I knew what I was seeing.
The call to the stage came at exactly 8:47 PM local time. The crowd's roar filtered down through layers of concrete and steel, twenty-five thousand voices unified in anticipation.
I walked the tunnel one last time, my footsteps echoing off the walls like a countdown. The LED panels displayed highlights from my career—the first championship clutch, the impossible aces, the moments that had made AsuraDtr legendary.
But between the official footage, I caught glimpses of something else. Frames that shouldn't exist—my parents' faces, laboratory equipment, a figure that looked like Jett but moved wrong, like she was reaching through dimensions.
"They want AsuraDtr," I said to nobody, my voice lost in the growing thunder of the arena above. "But I only have Alex Han left to give."
The tunnel unfolded before me, releasing a plethora of light and sound akin to the depths of the cosmos. I could see the stage, the competitors' booths with their gaming setups, and the cameras that would broadcast my every move to millions of viewers worldwide.
Unbelievably, my parents were watching from somewhere in that crowd.
The roar grew louder as I approached the light, my reflection in the LED panels beginning to glitch, showing flickers of wind and movement, a figure with white hair and radiant energy dancing around her fingertips.
Jett. My agent. Jett represents my other self.
My fate.
I stepped toward the stage, toward the final championship that would either crown me the eternal GOAT or break me entirely.
The light engulfed me completely.
The first round was about to begin.
To be continued...