Hot City, Rat Street.
Several drunkards walked down the alley with their arms around one another's waists and shoulders. The reek of alcohol covering their bodies masked their sweat, and after working all day, they could only relieve their exhaustion by drinking heavily at night.
Hot City was prosperous—at least, most of it was. Yet even this prosperous city could not avoid having slums. In this technologically backward era, combined with Hot City's fierce local culture, this resulted in an extremely high crime rate in the slums.
Rat Street was the slums' slums. Dozens of gangs, large and small, occupied the area, creating a form of order unlike that of other districts.
After midnight, Rat Street belonged to the gangs and vagrants. Even Hot City's security forces would not easily set foot there.
Rat Street had three inviolable rules. First, human trafficking and businesses related to humans themselves, such as organ trafficking, were forbidden. Second, no one could launch a premeditated attack on Hot City citizens. Third, firearms and other thermal weapons could not be used there.
To civilians and the security forces, Rat Street's gangs were lawless. However, the gangs knew that the truly terrifying force in the Goya Alliance was the military. They could run wild there, but the military only needed to send a battalion to uproot them within twenty-four hours.
Their existence was justified. These gangs could do things that the Goya Alliance government found inconvenient to handle personally, such as controlling vagrants through relatively bloody means. For that reason, the presidential palace in Hot City turned a blind eye to the gangs of Rat Street.
The gangs clearly knew their limits and understood what they could and could not do. If a gang that ignored the rules rose to prominence, the other gangs, large and