The air outside the tent was sharp enough to cut.
Kael walked behind the soldier sent to fetch him. Snow crunched in a steady rhythm under their boots. Kael watched the man ahead, tracking each step, each shift of weight, the set of his shoulders as they moved through the cold.
Stride length: uneven. Fatigue in the left leg. Posture: slouched. Neck exposed between the helm and the collar. Weapon: Standard issue dagger on the belt. Position: too far back.
Kael's eyes traced the line. If he reached out now, he could draw the soldier's own dagger before the man noticed the weight was gone. A single upward thrust under the base of the skull.
With this body, half a breath was enough. Time to terminate: less than a heartbeat. Resistance: negligible.
Back then—inside the body of El Lobo—it had felt unremarkable.
Movements like this had blended into the whole, lost in speed and momentum. There had been no sense of scale, no awareness of how extreme it truly was.
Only now, inside this thinner, human shell, did the difference stand out—clear, measured, and impossible to ignore.
They reached the edge of the camp, near a grove of frozen ironwood trees.
"Wait here," the soldier grunted, glad to be away from the silent boy. He hurried away.
Captain Valen stood by a heavy wooden table set up in the snow. He had removed his plate armor, wearing only a thick black gambeson. Even without the steel, he looked like a fortress.
He held a scroll in one hand.
Kael approached and stood at attention.
Valen read from the scroll in his hand, eyes moving steadily down the page.
"Kael," he said. "Born in a village behind Blackstone's outer lands. No recorded family."
His finger traced the next lines.
"At seven years of age, a barbarian raiding party slipped past the border patrols. The village was put to the torch. Every resident killed."
He paused for a breath.
"Two children survived. You, and another boy named Tom."
Valen continued reading.
"Taken in by the Keep afterward. Assigned to the stables. Shoveled dung for nine years. No disciplinary record. No commendations."
Valen looked up, his grey eyes piercing.
"No combat training. No lineage. No magic awakening."
He rolled up the scroll and tossed it onto the table.
"And yet, today I watched you butcher a squad of berserkers and a Centurion with the efficiency of a veteran killer,"
"Even if part of it relied on an external implement, your performance was sufficient."
Kael met his gaze, his face impassive.
Suddenly, the air around Valen grew heavy.
Kael felt the pressure hit him head-on.
It was the same instinctive terror he'd felt the first time he stood too close to a brown bear—no, worse than that. Colder. Sharper.
His knees softened without permission. Balance wavered. His pupils trembled, shrinking and dilating in quick, involuntary spasms.
Every signal coming up from muscle and nerve carried the same message—submit.
Valen nodded, a faint smile touching his lips.
"Good. You have a spine. Rare for a conscript."
Valen let the pressure withdraw.
Air rushed back into Kael's lungs all at once. He drew a sharp breath, then another, chest lifting too fast before he forced it back under control. The tension drained from his joints in uneven waves, leaving them weak and unsteady.
Cold sweat broke across his brow and slid down his temple, tracing the line of his cheek as his heartbeat slowed.
Valen reached down and lifted the shotgun from the wooden table. He inspected it with the eye of a master. His fingers tested the trigger mechanism, checked the break-action hinge, then traced the smooth bore of the barrel.
Each time he examined it, the same thought returned. Craft like this bordered on the uncanny. Such a simple structure—nothing ornate, nothing excessive—yet it granted an ordinary man the means to contend with the extraordinary.
"Simple," Valen murmured. "Disturbingly simple."
He held out his hand. "The rest of it."
Kael opened his pouch and poured the remaining red shells into Valen's waiting hand, the cartridges clacking softly together as they changed owners.
He turned the barrel toward the ironwood tree ten paces away. The weapon aligned with casual precision.
BOOM.
The bark burst apart. Splinters sprayed across the snow.
Valen walked to the tree and laid a hand against the torn wood, fingers tracing the deep scars where the lead had bitten in.
"A frightening kind of power."
Valen turned, placing the shotgun back into Kael's hands.
The motion carried intent. Courtesy shaped into instruction.
Valen unfastened his collar and drew his upper garments aside, exposing scar-lined skin to the cold air. Old wounds crossed his chest, clean and deliberate.
Shoulders like carved stone, chest thick as layered armor, arms packed with dense muscle that shifted in slow, controlled rolls, veins sunk deep under the skin. Every movement carried weight, like his flesh itself had been forged for war rather than grown.
He raised a finger and pressed it to the center of his chest.
"Aim here."
Silence held.
His finger touched the sternum again, steady and exact.
"I will read your hands."
A final tap.
"Fire."