The world shrank.
No more city hum. No more neon propaganda pulsing from the skyline. No more encrypted broadcasts from desperate resistance cells.
Just the forest. The cold. The silence.
And the work.
Kirion had found an abandoned military outpost, tucked deep within the Severin Pines—off-grid, half-collapsed, but sturdy enough to shelter a purpose. He sealed it with custom jammers, built solar-fed heating into the walls, and created escape tunnels through the root-thick ground.
He gave it no name.
It wasn't a home.
It was a crucible.
Each day began with drills. Kirion, still bruised and not fully healed, pushed his body until it screamed. He set his broken bones under moonlight and reset his reflexes under the sun.
He retrained his hands—not just to heal, but to break, disarm, and rebuild with intention. Medical precision, now weaponized.
Knives. Traps. Silent weapons. Pressure points. Escape arts.
He hadn't fought to kill before.
But he understood now: mercy in a merciless system was just delay.
He found old manuals from the fractured world—resistance guides, blacklisted paramilitary doctrine, books banned by the government for being "subversive."
He read them all.
Rewrote them in his own code.
He experimented.
Tested limits.
Failed. Recovered.
Repeated.
But the most important training was for his daughter.
He didn't raise her in fear—he raised her in awareness.
By age five, she could spot surveillance drones by sound.
By six, she could assemble a field transmitter from scrap and reprogram a scavenged bot to clean her shoes.
She wasn't just bright.
She absorbed.
She learned how to disappear in the woods.
How to encrypt her words when she played.
How to use silence like a weapon.
And in return, she gave him reason.
The world had taken everything from him. But it hadn't broken him.
Because every night, after the drills and the code and the sparring and the theories, she would curl beside him and whisper:
"Tell me a story."
And he would.
Of heroes who bent steel with their hands. Of daughters who saved kingdoms. Of a world reborn through light, not fire.
She didn't know yet that they were training to fight gods.
He prayed she never would.
But deep in his chest, Kirion knew:
When the shadows called again, he would answer.
And this time, he wouldn't be alone.