As far back as my memory reaches, there has only ever been the smell of ash and iron, the scream of drills, and the low hum of the unending construction along the massive black walls. I was born in Sarus Fortress—the first threshold of civilization at the edge of annihilation. Death has always been my closest neighbor. Not a shadow lurking behind, but a presence ahead, marching step for step beside me. My earliest memories were not of lullabies, but of the thundering alarms when breaches occurred, of blood-mist rising through the air, and of the still silence after a cohort fell.
My name is Zenobia. I was born to soldiers—my mother and father, loyal defenders of the Bullard Empire, who wore their scars like honors and bled until their lungs stopped rising. They were stalwart protectors of the empire, and they raised me—perhaps not gently, but deliberately—to carry on their legacy. In the fortress, love was expressed through the sharpening of blades, and praise was a nod when you managed not to flinch in the face of horror.
Like all children born of Sarus, I was trained in the sacred triads: swordplay, archery, and survival—long before I ever learned my letters. The triads were the backbone of our teachings, and failure in any one of them meant you'd likely die before you saw sixteen. I remember my first task clearly: fitting conscripts with their samalight armor, their chestplates humming faintly with the self-repair metal , their swords notched and eager for blood. I must have been six, maybe seven, but I already knew to lace the plates tightly. Loose armor cost lives.
Nothing in the fortress surprised me—not the twisted limbs of beast-warped soldiers, nor the long shadows cast by men and women who had bound themselves with grafted flesh and alien organs. For those who lacked a natural gift—those without magic, without blessings, without talent —there was only one path forward: the Binding ritual. A slow, irreversible grafting of chimera parts onto one's own flesh and soul, guided by the shamans of the Great Unison. It was brutal, painful, and often fatal. But it was survival.
I had long accepted that I would become a chimera.
While my peers were discovering their talents—one could hit a moving fly with a crossbow bolt,another could cut stone with his saber —I was left behind. "Zenny the Zero," they called me. No magic. No blessing. No prodigious skill. Just grit and a stubborn refusal to die. By the age of fourteen, most of my classmates had either transferred out, been claimed by the fear , or left to serve in outer barracks. I remained.
I wasn't particularly brilliant, or strong, or fast. But I was deliberate. Precise. Obsessed with understanding the Binding. I buried myself in the teachings of the shamans, learning how they matched soldiers to the creatures they took pieces from. Most of my peers simply asked for wings or claws, but I wanted more than raw strength. I wanted harmony. A system that worked, not just a patchwork of power.
When I turned eighteen, I earned the right to serve. Two months into my tour, I underwent my first ritual.
The process was excruciating. I remember the pain with crystalline clarity—the ripping, the fusing, the blinding heat of my nerves being replaced with the sensory web of a lowland crawler. But the result? A heightened perception of motion, a tingling awareness in my limbs that let me anticipate the movement of enemies before they struck. I was no longer a zero. I was something more.
By twenty, I had become unrecognizable. My body was a war hymn sung in flesh. My cardiovascular system was no longer mine—it pumped faster, cleaner, reinforced with the dual hearts of a lesser predator. My arms bore venomous claws, my eyes slit like a panther's and capable of seeing heat. A segmented tail coiled at the base of my spine, tipped with a barbed stinger full of neurotoxin. Every bone in my body had been reinforced. My muscle fibers were tripled in density. I was heavy. Fast. Durable.
But my most important upgrade came when I chose to implant a gland harvested from a Twisted—a creature born from the residual will of the dead gods. It was a gamble. Most soldiers who tried it lost their minds. But it worked for me. The gland enhanced my healing, letting me recover from wounds at a pace even the medics raised eyebrows at. Bruises faded in seconds. Cuts closed within the minutes . I could keep fighting longer than most could breathe.
That was when I stopped being Zenny the Zero.
At twenty-four, I was awarded my first star. The ceremony was short, like all things in Sarus—brief recognition, a clasped shoulder, and a new insignia scorched onto my armor. But it meant everything. One star meant I was worth ten soldiers. It meant I could command. It meant I was no longer an expendable scrap of flesh.
I was chosen to lead a squad of fellow one-star soldiers—each of of them powerful, dangerous, and perhaps just a little inexperienced . They were the kind of people the fortress couldn't quite discard, but couldn't fully trust. And so they sent me to form them into soldiers.
We would go beyond the fortress walls, toward the island heart—toward the dead gods and their ever spreading rot. Toward a place where even stars flicker and go silent.
But I was ready.
I am not special in the traditional sense. I never had a prophecy or a noble name. But I made myself into something that could survive—into something worthy of being feared.
My parents would have been proud.
Even if they would no longer recognize what I've become.