Kirion had always believed he'd heal more than he'd hurt.
But on the front lines, with screams behind smoke and blood soaking dust, healing had to come after the fight.
The resistance was no longer scattered.
It was an army.
And Kirion—reluctant, scarred, unyielding—stood at its center.
It began with a convoy ambush.
A medical transport, labeled as humanitarian aid, was a decoy—used to smuggle prisoners between black sites. The Arc Echelon intercepted the path, and Kirion led the mission himself.
He moved like memory and instinct: eyes sharp, heart steady, orders clear.
Sera jammed sensors from a rooftop three blocks down, her voice in his ear like steel laced with lightning.
"Two bogeys, rear lane. Heat signatures—non-lethal. Could be medics."
"Confirm and reroute. We're not them," Kirion said.
The explosion came seconds later, timed with precision.
When the smoke cleared, Kirion pulled three unconscious survivors from the wreckage—one was a journalist gone missing for two years. Another was a young nurse from the southern province, her hands still trembling from what she'd seen.
They whispered his name like a prayer.
Word spread fast.
That night, in an abandoned stadium turned shelter, Kirion stitched wounds under the light of a single lantern. Children watched. Adults asked questions. Fighters took notes.
He wasn't just treating injuries.
He was teaching.
How to splint with scrap metal. How to stop bleeding with tensioned cloth. How to tell a pulse from a fading heartbeat.
They called him Doc Flame—the man who burned lies and bound wounds in the same breath.
But battle brought blood.
Too much.
In one skirmish, a resistance group triggered a government drone fleet early. The fallout scorched an entire village—houses, crops, memories—erased.
Kirion arrived hours after.
His hands were steady.
But his heart cracked with each child he couldn't save.
He didn't cry in public.
He didn't scream.
But that night, Sera found him sitting alone, washing blood from his knuckles until the water ran out.
She didn't speak.
She just sat.
And that silence, for both of them, was everything.
The next morning, Kirion stood before the fighters—new recruits, old rebels, ex-soldiers turned believers.
He held up a stained white coat.
"This isn't armor," he said. "It's a promise. You wear this when you protect, when you repair, when you refuse to become what they are."
Then he threw it to the crowd.
"Who's ready to learn?"
Hands shot up.
The front lines had their fighter.
Now they had a healer too.