The rain fell like shrapnel over the steel rooftops, a chorus of cold percussion echoing through the concrete jungle. Max Kade crouched on the edge of a rooftop, his breath steady, the red glow of his retinal interface highlighting enemy movement below.
"Target acquired," came the soft whisper of his earpiece.
He didn't respond.
He didn't need to.
They all knew he would finish it.
Max wasn't just an agent. He was the agent. Built by Aegis, the world's most secretive and advanced black-ops organization, he was the result of nearly two decades of the most rigorous training, scientific enhancement, psychological profiling, and controlled combat exposure humanity could offer. An elite beyond elites. A human weapon, sharpened to an edge that frightened even those who made him.
Aegis trained orphans. Broke them. Rebuilt them. He was plucked from a nameless orphanage as a child—just another discarded life in a world too cruel to care—and molded into a weapon. The food he ate from the age of six was nutritionally engineered to optimize his neurology. The exercises designed not just for strength or endurance, but for neural feedback, instinctual control, and micro-muscle manipulation. By age ten, Max could handle over fifty weapons with expert proficiency. By thirteen, he could simulate death and slow his heart rate to one beat per minute. By sixteen, he was infiltrating nations under thirty-seven aliases.
No one could match him.
But perfection breeds paranoia.
Aegis saw Max as both proof of concept and potential liability. When he began questioning orders—subtle at first, calculated—they decided it was time.
"Come home, Max," they told him.
He should have known. The signs were all there. The mission was too clean, the extraction too simple, the reunion too warm. Still, a part of him wanted to believe that after everything, he had earned rest.
They called it "Project Transcendence."
He didn't remember the pain, only the silence that followed. His body broke, atom by atom, as the machine tore through his nervous system. They wanted to see what came after humanity. And they used him as the first test.
When his heart finally stopped, there were no last words.
Only darkness.
Then, warmth.
Softness.
A strange, muffled rhythm—thump, thump… thump, thump—like a heartbeat surrounding him.
Light.
So blinding it hurt. He squinted instinctively, then realized something was wrong. His arms didn't move. His body felt… small. Weak.
A sound—a voice—melodic, gentle, alien.
He opened his eyes for the first time.
The world was not steel and fire anymore. It was… wood. Thatched ceilings. Candlelight. And a woman's face hovering above his, eyes wide and watery.
"He's… he's awake! Look, darling—our little boy's awake!"
Max tried to speak, but only a gurgle escaped.
He had been reborn.
Even as an infant, his mind—still sharp, still whole—raced.
Magic. That's what it had to be. This world pulsed with it. He could feel it in the air, in the people, in the way nature seemed to hum with energy. It was nothing like Earth, nothing like the black steel corridors of Aegis' underground labs. There were no machines, no surveillance. No endless cycle of control and manipulation.
And yet…
The instincts never left him. Even in a baby's body, his senses were tuned. He noticed the man—his new "father"—move with a soldier's gait. A veteran, perhaps. The house was poor but fortified. Hidden runes marked the doorframe. Subtle, but protective.
They were no ordinary peasants.
He stored everything. Every word. Every movement. Every unfamiliar term. Max had learned dozens of languages in his past life. This one would be no different.
He quickly came to understand that he had been left at the doorstep of an orphanage before being adopted. A humble institution tucked deep in the heart of a small village, the orphanage took in the lost, the unwanted. The woman who took him in—kind, firm, watchful—was a caretaker who treated every child as her own. But she too had a past. The runes on the doors, the way she moved, the way she observed him… she had known danger once.
But the question loomed, heavy as a tombstone:
Why here?
Why now?
And who—or what—brought him back?
As days turned to weeks, the answers remained elusive. But one truth carved itself deep into his soul:
They killed him once.
They won't get the chance again.