Damien Thorne wasn't a genius.
He didn't memorize historical timelines. Didn't code neural systems. Didn't graduate with honors.
But when the world threw him into fire—he didn't burn. He tempered.
Vael'Tris – Week Three
No map. No allies. No safety net. The air tasted of metal storms. The ground groaned with things that hunted in silence. His only compass was instinct—honed, stretched, sharpened into something that cut through fear.
He learned the planet's rhythms:
How the wind carried a dry, bitter tang before a dust storm.How to catch the faint, uneven hum of camouflaged drones crouched in the treeline.How to sleep with one eye open—literally—switching brain hemispheres like a dolphin, giving one half of himself to rest while the other remained coiled like a sprung trap.
He catalogued survival in his bones: Which fruit numbed pain. Which water killed with no taste. How to feel the faint thump of a burrowing beast through the soles of his feet—its heart betraying its position.
Damien shaped blades from the bones of dead hunter-beasts, their edges honed with patience and hunger. He stripped a fallen cyber-gladiator for scavenged biotech mesh, weaving it into crude armor. The plating on his forearms wasn't elegant, wasn't advanced—but it turned blades and broke jaws.
"Not because it's advanced," he told the empty air. "Because it works."
He couldn't build technology from scratch. But he could tear it apart, bleed it for its secrets, and reforge it into something meaner.
One night, beneath the hushed canopy, he cracked open the core of a downed recon drone:
The cooling gel preserved meat in the stifling heat.
The chip casing bought shelter from a mercenary outpost.
The shock cell became the heart of a trap that snapped a fusion wolf's neck in half a second.
It was then he noticed the shift.
The predators that once came for him alone began to stalk in pairs… in packs. Even the human hunters changed their tactics.
Some primal chain of command had passed the message: This one is dangerous.
He was no longer an anomaly in Vael'Tris's ecosystem. He was becoming a part of it—the part that other predators feared.
Vault Key Activation
The ruins of a shattered sky station loomed overhead, their skeletal frame humming in the wind.Under its broken shadow, Damien knelt before a door cut into the living rock—its surface etched with symbols that pulsed faintly, like veins of sleeping magma.
From his belt, he drew the bloodstained key. A prize earned in the pit, paid for in screams and splintered bone.
When he pressed it to the door, the world seemed to pause. No sound. No tremor. Just a sudden weight in his spine, like invisible hands pressing him forward.
The key liquefied, its molten light sinking into the stone. The rock split with a slow, terrible groan.
Heat spilled from the opening. And beneath that heat—something older than the war, older than the cities—something watching.
Stairs spiraled downward into a darkness that breathed.
Damien stood on the edge. He didn't know who had built this place. Didn't care.
"If this tells me where I come from…" "…then it tells me what I can become."
And he stepped into the dark.
Damien Thorne might not have been a scholar. But in a world ruled by code, data, and augmentation—he knew the oldest truth.
To survive is to learn. To adapt is to evolve. And to evolve… is to conquer.