I swung my axe at his neck. The blade sang through the air—clean line, perfect angle. He caught it with his palm. Blood ran.

  And then the haymaker he’d thrown earlier—wild, unfinished—completed its arc straight into my stomach.

  My abdomen collapsed inward as if struck by a battering ram. Air detonated from my lungs. The shock traveled through my spine, up into my skull. My vision flashed white for a fraction of a second.

  I don’t think any Grillir was this strong, in our entire history.

  I forced my right leg up and drove my heel into his midsection. He blocked it with a forearm, but the impact still dragged him backward several feet, bare feet grinding. The street cracked further beneath his weight.

  I opened my left palm.

  Lightsteel shimmered into existence.

  Beira, lend me your strength. I won’t use it for long.

  The second axe materialized heavy and cold in my grip. The air around me tightened as I dashed forward. I swung both axes in rapid succession—high, low, cross, reverse. Each edge aimed at arteries, joints, tendons.

  He didn’t retreat.

  His palms struck the blades away one by one, redirecting force through raw strength rather than technique. Each impact rang. Sparks scattered between us.

  I twisted my entire frame upward, drawing power from my legs, hips, spine—every joint unwinding into a single violent descent. My right arm came down with everything I possessed.

  The Experiment leaned back. His eyes lifted toward the sky as if admiring the clouds.

  My axe split only air.

  A right straight blasted into my nose.

  Cartilage cracked. My head snapped backward. Blood exploded from my sinuses and splattered across his chest. I staggered but did not fall. I exhaled hard through my ruined nose. Blood poured freely down my lip.

  If I can’t challenge him in strength, then I shall end you with speed.

  I crossed my arms loosely before my chest. My axes hovered in guarded angles.

  He lunged.

  At the instant his weight shifted forward, I opened my arms.

  The world compressed.

  The next heartbeat, I was behind him.

  Thin red lines appeared across his shoulders, chest, back—surface-level cuts, shallow but numerous. His skin parted in neat strokes, delayed by the speed of my passage.

  It wasn’t enough to write home about.

  But it was a beginning.

  I pivoted and blitzed past him again. This time the blades bit deeper. Lines of red thickened.

  He tried to roundhouse kick to interrupt my vector.

  Mid-kick, I was already past him again. More cuts. Deeper now. His musculature, though absurdly dense, could not fully negate precision delivered at that velocity.

  Stone cracked beneath his planted foot as he attempted to stabilize.

  I shifted for another pass—and saw the corner of his mouth.

  He was smiling.

  That wasn’t possible.

  I hurled my right axe straight at his face. He caught it on his forearm. The blade carved a groove along the bone. He flexed.

  The axe tore free of my grip and shot upward into the sky.

  I leapt after it without hesitation, snatching it mid-arc. Gravity reversed for a brief instant as I descended, rotating my torso and swinging with the same blinding cadence as before.

  His hand closed around my throat.

  He bypassed my speed entirely.

  My boots scraped uselessly across stone as he lifted me. His grip compressed my airway. My trachea protested under crushing pressure.

  How did he adapt?!

  The father laughed softly, adjusting his suit tie. “You look surprised, Ewan. This thing wouldn’t be useful if it couldn’t learn.”

  The grip tightened. Dark spots flickered at the edges of my vision.

  I need to escape now!

  I forced my right arm up and swung at his neck from point-blank range. The blade whistled close enough to shave skin. He recognized the lethal vector and released me instantly, stepping back just far enough for the edge to miss cleanly.

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  The moment my boots touched ground, his fist crashed into my nose again.

  The break worsened. Bone shifted. I flew backward dozens of feet, carving a trench through shattered pavement. Dust and rubble chased me as I skidded to a stop.

  But my axes remained in my hands.

  Overwhelm—my earlier dominance—had collapsed the instant he began reading the pattern. But that was only the surface layer of the technique.

  I stood slowly.

  Lowered my arms.

  Lowered everything except my senses.

  This is the end of your suffering.

  I expanded awareness outward. An invisible perimeter, a living radius. Every displacement of air, every micro-tremor through stone, every flex of muscle within that sphere entered me before it completed.

  He stepped forward.

  The instant his presence crossed the threshold...his neck opened.

  A clean slice appeared just beneath his jawline. Not deep enough to sever. Deep enough to register.

  He froze.

  Confusion flickered.

  He lunged again.

  His heel tendon split before his foot finished planting, severed partially. His massive frame buckled as that leg failed to support him.

  He dropped to one knee, still inside my zone.

  Now there was no escape.

  My axes moved with ease—short arcs, tight pivots, micro-adjusted cuts. Tendons. Triceps insertion. Lat attachments. Groin crease. Inner thigh. Each strike driven only as far as necessary to compromise structural integrity.

  Blood sprayed rhythmically with each heartbeat.

  The boy screamed, “No!”

  The windows above us changed. The scornful gazes vanished. Fear replaced them. Their toy was bleeding.

  Five figures appeared on surrounding rooftops—Sun’s elite. Officers of terrifying pedigree.

  One shouted, “This ends now!”

  They descended.

  They entered my awareness willingly.

  Before a full second elapsed, five bodies were reduced to parted geometry. Limbs separated. Blood misted into the air and rained across the street in crimson arcs.

  Their interruption lasted less than a heartbeat, but that heartbeat was enough.

  The Experiment rolled backward, dragging his wounded leg clear of my zone.

  The kid erupted in cheers. “Win! Win!”

  The Experiment couldn’t reach me. He tried.

  Every forward surge was answered by another slice—forearm here, oblique there, calf, deltoid, ribs. My blades painted him red.

  I shifted weight and committed.

  One decisive arc.

  My axe found his neck.The edge bit deep this time. Not surface. Not muscle only. It struck something vital.

  The Experiment coughed blood.

  

  One month ago..

  “Ugh, how do you keep hitting me?”, Zhen asked.

  I held the toy hammer in my hand, blowing on it like it was emitting smoke, “You can't react to what you can't detect.”

  Zhen bent his fingers, “Detect? I'm quite intelligent when it comes to battle, my dad made sure of tha-”

  I threw the toy hammer at his head, “Not that, fool.”

  There was no softness up here—only rock, altitude, and exposure.

  I picked the hammer up again and stepped closer, boots scraping over fractured lines spidering across the dirt from past training.

  I explained, “Even when someone's a master, they make small movements. A turn of the shoulder. A shift of the foot. Overwhelm exploits this. overwhelm removes every movement in an attack, other than one. This one movement is designed to move around an opponent's perception. If I face an opponent faster than me, they won't be able to react what doesn't even register as movement. It's an automatic defense, you could say. And the best defense is the best offense.”

  I held my axe in his neck, lightsteel buried deep enough that I could feel the heat of his blood running over my knuckles. I looked past him, straight at the boy. “You're next, kid.”

  The words hadn’t even finished echoing off the grand facades when the Experiment flexed.

  Muscle swelled grotesquely beneath torn skin. Veins bulged like cables under strain. The wound around my axe tightened, fibers knitting in violent defiance of what should have been impossible. Flesh constricted around the blade, clamping it in place.

  Then he stood.

  The intent that poured off him was not refined and precise killing intent like Vellin’s, not disciplined power like Caleb's. It was crushing. It flooded the street, pressing against my chest like a collapsing wall. Windows along the buildings rattled. Loose stone chips vibrated against the pavement. Even the nobles lining the balconies leaned back involuntarily.

  It didn’t matter. That cut was fatal. I had felt the depth. Severed structures don’t simply resume function. He had seconds at best.

  The Experiment raised both fists overhead for a double-fisted slam. The motion was crude. Obvious. Telegraphing everything.

  I could dodge this easily.

  Or so I thought.

  Both of his hands crashed into my back.

  There was no gradual pain—only a violent detonation. I heard it before I felt it.

  My spine fractured.

  The impact drove me downward with such force that the street caved beneath me. My chest hit first. The ground exploded outward in a ring of pulverized marble and shattered brick. A crater formed beneath my body, debris blasting against the building walls. Shockwaves rippled down the road, dislodging loose masonry from decorative arches. Dust erupted skyward in a thick column before spilling back down in choking waves.

  For a moment, there was no sound but settling rubble.

  I tasted iron and grit. My fingers twitched around the haft of my axe, but my arms did not respond as they should. My lower body felt distant—misaligned.

  Heavy footsteps approached, each one making the fractured stone tremble.

  The Experiment walked past me.

  I forced my head up an inch. My vision doubled, then steadied enough to see him approaching the boy. The father grabbed at his son’s arm, panic finally cracking through aristocratic composure.

  “Come!” he hissed.

  The boy brushed him off.

  The Experiment reached him and then—unexpectedly—dropped to his knees.

  The movement alone fractured more pavement. Blood streamed down his torso, dark against pale, overdeveloped muscle. The earlier wound at his neck had reopened, no longer held shut by brute flexion. It pulsed weakly.

  He was a grotesque sight—towering, broken, drenched in red.

  Not something a child should witness.

  The boy stood firm.

  The Experiment’s massive frame trembled. His breathing came in ragged pulls, each one spraying more blood onto the stone. The crushing aura from before flickered, unstable, fading.

  Then he spoke.

  “Big... brother... protect you.”

  He was a human.

  He faced away from me, so I could not see his expression. But I saw the boy’s.

  Whatever he saw in that final moment stripped the arrogance from his face. In its place was something fragile. Something breaking.

  The Experiment’s shoulders slackened. The tension in his massive arms dissolved. His head dipped forward, and he died.

  The weight of him settled fully into the street with a final, dull impact that sent a faint tremor through the shattered ground.

  The nobles who had watched with hatred now watched with uncertainty. Their weapon—their “It”—lay still. No flexing could close that wound again. No learning could adapt to a severed lifeline. No experiment could save a dying man.

  I pushed my palms against broken stone and forced myself onto one knee. My back screamed in protest. Fractured vertebrae shifted like misaligned plates grinding against each other. Every breath felt shallow, unstable.

  The boy cried.

  Big brother, huh?

  Whether he was blood-bound or not didn’t matter.

  They had dehumanized him. Tortured him. Experimented on him. Turned him into a deterrent. A spectacle. A shield. A toy. And yet in the end, he died for them.

  He thought of those people... as family.

  Seems we all have stories to tell.

  And I'll never get to hear his.