Damien was just fourteen but already stood a head taller than most grown men—5'11 and still growing. Broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned, and golden-eyed, he was a storm wrapped in flesh. His knuckles were raw more often than not, his voice deeper than his age allowed, and his temper. Unfiltered.
Think later. Fists first. That was Damien.
He lived in the industrial outskirts of Neo-Britannia with his mother and younger sister, Sera, just eight years old. Their home was modest, cracked by time but held together by laughter, warmth, and the weight of a missing father whose name was never spoken.
Damien didn't need enhancements. No AI-linked neural visor, no fusion serum injections humming under his skin. He was raw, born of nothing but instinct and will. In a world engineered for advantage, he was anomaly and defiance wrapped into one.
At Xyprus Academy, a combat institution founded by the long-dead God King, students came augmented. They flew across arenas with synthetic muscles and fought with predictive AI overlays. Xyprus had branches on every habitable planet—a cathedral of evolution through artificial superiority.
Damien didn't care.
He walked its halls wild and free, a relic of what humanity used to be before science rewrote the definition of strength. They mocked him—until he made them bleed.
Yet for all his savagery in the ring, Damien wasn't cruel. His heart was bigger than his fists. He'd give the last bread to his sister, fight three seniors to defend a friend, and smile like a kid who didn't know the world was burning outside the academy walls.
He was many things: loud, reckless, untamed.
But above all else, he was real.