Axiros withdrew from the soul realm, his awareness slipping back into the physical world like a hand pulling free from still water.
Not even a fraction of a second had passed outside.
He opened his eyes and let out a quiet breath.
"Looks like this life is going to be interesting," he murmured. "A strange world." He glanced toward the tent entrance. "I'll ask that person during breakfast." A pause. "No matter what happens… I will not reincarnate again."
Simple words. But nothing about them was light.
He had lived too long. Seen too much. Too many lives stacked on top of each other until the memories stopped feeling like his own and started feeling like a weight he'd forgotten how to put down. Most people would've broken under something like that. A lot of them would've just… given up. Stopped caring. Stopped wanting anything at all.
Axiros wasn't built that way.
If anything, all that time had just made him harder. Sharper. Where others begged for an ending, he kept walking, partly out of stubbornness, partly because he still wanted to see where it all led.
He leaned back against the bedding and finally took a proper look around.
The air was stale. Recycled past the point of comfort, carrying that flat, sterile smell of somewhere sealed off from the outside world. He was in a bunker, a settlement deliberately hidden from the surface. His tent was one of dozens, maybe more, all lined up with the kind of careful order that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with staying alive and undetected.
He reached his senses outward.
Thousands of lives brushed against his awareness. Heartbeats, footsteps, the soft rhythm of breathing, all of it coming to him without effort. Gary's presence surfaced almost immediately, along with the others from earlier. They were grouped together somewhere nearby, their energy tight and restless.
A meeting. Not a friendly one either, judging by the way they were moving.
He kept scanning. A thick dome of dense material wrapped over the entire settlement, shield and ceiling both. Then the depth of it sank in. They were buried well underground, far enough down that anything scanning from above would find nothing. This wasn't just a hideout. It was the kind of place people built when they had nowhere else left to go.
He noted it and moved on.
No one here could feel him doing any of this. His awareness slipped through walls and bodies without so much as a ripple. To even catch a hint of him, someone would need a mind refined to the same degree as his, or a natural connection to the deeper layers of existence he passed through without thinking.
Neither of those was happening here.
---
The meeting room had a particular kind of quiet that came from people trying very hard not to raise their voices.
"I've never seen a kid with that kind of potential," Gary said, both hands resting on the table. "And I genuinely don't think he was showing everything he had out there."
A general across from him didn't look convinced. "That's what worries me. Could be a plant. Thirteen Families, Old Ones, or a Nihilborn slave. Take your pick. No mortal goes toe to toe with an Aeon Flow Realm fighter. That's not just rare. That doesn't happen."
"He's not tied to any of them." Kael's voice was calm and flat. He was the youngest one in the room, but he said it like it wasn't even a debate. "I checked. No family mark. No slave binding from the Old Ones or the Nihilborns. He's clean."
The others looked at each other. Then nodded. They didn't question Kael on this kind of thing. His awakening gave him something no one else had — the ability to read people beneath the surface. Allegiances, hidden marks, the kind of ties that didn't show up anywhere visible. If Kael said he was clean, he was clean.
What they didn't know was where that ability stopped working.
It stopped working on Axiros.
It stopped working on Axiros completely.
His nature sat outside the range those kinds of gifts were built for. Something in what he was, one of his own perfections, bent every attempt at observation back on itself. Anyone who tried to get a read on him would walk away with contradictions. A presence that never sat still. Something that kept shifting in ways that made no sense and couldn't be pinned down.
The Axiros they thought they were talking about wasn't real. He was just the version their own limits had put together.
---
Another hour went by.
For everyone else in the bunker, it was full, arguments, hushed planning, the low hum of people carrying too much uncertainty.
For Axiros, it was barely anything.
Time hadn't felt linear in a very long time. It didn't really move for him anymore. It just sat there, waiting to be stepped through.
'They'll question me,' he thought, without much feeling about it. 'A stranger with no record here. Of course they will.'
The tent flap opened. Kael stepped in, relaxed, hands tucked in his pockets.
"Gary wants you for breakfast. Let's go."
"Alright." Axiros got up and followed.
They moved through the base together. When they reached the main hall, the low noise of morning chatter dropped off almost immediately. Every pair of eyes that found him stayed there, guarded, unwelcoming. Strangers weren't exactly a good sign here. Not with everything that had happened with Marcus still fresh.
Axiros didn't react. He read the room, understood it, and kept walking.
The next hall was different. Warmer. The smell of actual food hit before they were even through the entrance, something cooked, something real. This was the space reserved for the fighters and the generals. A step above the rest.
"Hey, over here!" Gary called out, waving from a table that already had food laid out.
Axiros sat down. Kael dropped into the seat beside him.
He looked over the food first, old habit, checking for anything wrong with it. There was nothing. No poison. Nothing off at all. He was astonished. No paralyzing poison, no crippling herbs etc. of that sort.
He picked up his utensil and started eating.
His body took over almost immediately. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until the first bite, and then there was no slowing down. He cleared his plate fast, reached for another serving without ceremony, then a third. Gary watched the whole thing from nearby, quietly amused, not saying a word.
Eventually Axiros set down his utensil and looked across the table.
"So what did you actually want?"
Gary leaned in a little. "Do you know what's really going on here? The inn, this city, any of it?" He tilted his head. "Actually, forget all that for now. Let's start with something easy. What's your name?"
"I don't remember," Axiros said, his tone carrying just the right edge of vagueness. "All I remember is a few men smashing my head before I lost consciousness. They were exceptionally strong, far beyond me. Since then, I can't remember a single thing about myself. My past, my name, everything's just… gone."
A clean lie. He delivered it without blinking.
It didn't matter. Truth and lies were both just tools, and right now this one served his purposes perfectly. All that mattered was convenience, and that his goals moved forward. Everything else was ornamental.
Gary studied his face carefully, searching for the crack that every liar eventually leaves somewhere. He found nothing. Axiros's expression was a blank wall, no tension, no tells, no flicker behind the eyes. Nothing to grab onto.
"He's telling the truth," Kael confirmed quietly, his eyes briefly shining a colour that had no business existing.
Axiros caught it through his awareness the moment it appeared. He turned it over in his mind. That someone with an ability like this had ended up in a place like this said something about the standards of this world. Genuinely interesting.
Not that it reached him. His perfections folded his true nature inward, well beyond anything like that could touch. Whatever Kael thought he had just confirmed was only the version Axiros had chosen to show him.
'An ability to detect lies and intentions,' he noted internally, letting nothing show on his face. 'Useful. Very useful. He could make a decent pawn here, though it clearly has its limits. And a few blind spots too, I'd wager.'
He filed it away. The colour in Kael's eyes flickered out.
"Alright then." Gary leaned forward slightly, something moving behind his eyes that wasn't quite kindness and wasn't quite calculation but sat somewhere between the two. "A child as gifted as you deserves to know the truth. I'll tell you about this world, this city, and the plans of the Old Ones."
'And I'm sure that comes with a price, maybe a favour in the future. Men tend to stress on things they want long before they mention it,' Axiros thought.
"Oh, I didn't even introduce myself." Gary straightened. "Gary. Supreme Lieutenant of this settlement." A brief pause, then the smile that followed it was a little too settled, a little too comfortable. "Now. I'll tell you everything you want to know. But I want something in return first. Your word that you'll owe me a favour down the line."
He said it with the easy confidence of someone who already considered the matter closed. Axiros was a child, after all.
Even the kindest men have their angles. No one in this world, in any world, was truly without motive. Everyone was predator and prey at different hours of the same day.
"Hmm." Axiros let a small, faintly uncertain smile settle on his face, purely manipulative. Soft. Agreeable. The expression of a child accepting a trade he only half understands. "Alright."
He made sure Gary thought he had accepted a deal Gary could easily manipulate. Well, it won't go his way no matter what. Axiros would twist the deal for his benefit.
Inside, he was already elsewhere. The mention of the Old Ones had caught on something and wasn't letting go.
Gary glanced at Kael, who nodded once.
"Good. Then let's start at the foundation." Gary folded his hands on the table. "This world is called Cinderveil. Heavenly for a handful of people, and hell for everyone else. There are many powers at play here, but the one that sits above all of them is the Aetherion Empire — the empire we belong to. The one you're now, in some sense, a guest of."
Something stirred.
A thread of recognition moving quietly through the back of Axiros's mind, faint but distinct.
'Cinderveil. Aetherion Empire.'
He knew those names.
His eyes widened, just slightly, just for a moment, before he caught it and pressed it back down.
'That combination. There's only one place I've ever come across both of those names together. And that place wasn't real.'
'The Final Cessation.'
A novel. One he had read in his very first life, long before the reincarnations, before the void, before any of it. He'd read it once, moved on, and never given it another thought.
'Too early. Don't jump. Listen first.'
He held the smile on his face and kept listening.
But something had already quietly ignited beneath the surface.
Because if he had truly reincarnated inside that novel, if this world was the one from those pages, with its factions and its future and its secrets fully mapped somewhere in the back of his memory, then this wasn't just a new life.
It was a chessboard. And it's residents were his pawns.
Author's notes: Well then, guys, the mass release is over. Will be back from Friday.