Life began to change in quiet, steady waves.
The government stipend had moved Kael and his mother from their creaking, drafty flat into a cleaner, sturdier home. Fresh food filled their table; his mother no longer woke in the night trembling from hunger.
For Kael, though, the changes ran deeper than comfort.
The weight of locked memories inside his mind still pulsed faintly, but now he could feel fragments leaking out. At first, it was no more than a whisper—a fleeting sense of familiarity when he touched a holo-screen, a strange calm when mechanical locks clicked open in his hands.
By eight years old, the whispers had become sparks.
One afternoon, a delivery drone sputtered mid-air outside their new apartment, its rotors whining as it dipped toward a crash. Before Kael could think, he raised his hand.
The machine listened.
It steadied mid-fall, hovering shakily before landing on the balcony rail as if obeying an unspoken command. His mother gasped, clutching his shoulders.
"How did you—?"
Kael shook his head quickly. "I… I don't know."
That night, he told Darian.
The veteran's face hardened. "Listen to me, rookie. This kind of thing? You don't flaunt it. Not in front of neighbours, not in front of friends. Eyes are everywhere. The stronger you look, the faster the wrong people notice. Power draws predators."
Kael nodded, but deep inside, he felt a thrill he couldn't entirely ignore.
The illegal mecha sims continued, each match sharpening his reflexes. Darian forced him to patch their cracked rigs, replace blown circuits, and even write simple scripts to bypass match restrictions.
By nine, Kael was sliding code into the games themselves—tweaking HUD layouts, rerouting control signals, shaving milliseconds off reaction time.
"Kid's got hands like a soldier, brain like a slicer," Darian muttered after one match where Kael rerouted his mech's arm functions mid-battle. "You keep this up, you'll make half the Academy look like green recruits."
But his praise always carried a shadow.
"And that's exactly why you can't let them know."
Despite the warnings, Kael kept growing stronger—in VR, in repairs, in subtle hacks of real machines. But Darian never let the games remain just games.
When Kael charged blindly, Darian made him watch replays of squads falling because one man broke formation.
When Kael bragged after a win, Darian silenced him with a line he repeated until it etched into Kael's bones:
"A leader bleeds with his soldiers. Not behind them. Not above them. With them."
Kael didn't fully understand it then. But each time he sat in a mecha cockpit—real or virtual—the words echoed, shaping him quietly.
On his tenth birthday, his mother bought him a cheap secondhand toy mech. Its legs were broken, circuitry fried.
She apologized, but Kael only smiled.
That night, while she slept, he stayed awake at the workbench Darian had set up for him. By dawn, the mech walked again—crooked, clumsy, but moving.
When his mother woke, she found him asleep beside it, the mech standing guard at his bedside like a loyal soldier.
She cried softly, whispering thanks to a husband who was no longer there.
Kael, half-dreaming, thought only of the battles to come.
By the time his tenth year closed, Kael had grown into something strange: a boy too young for war, yet already walking its edge.
He could bend drones, locks, and lights with a thought. He could repair machines men twice his age would abandon. And in the shadow of VR battlefields, he fought like a pilot born, guided by the voice of a soldier who refused to let him forget the weight of war.
The Academy waited, closer each day.
And Kael was preparing—quietly, relentlessly.