Barron stood in the middle of a hotel suite so expensive it felt unreal, the kind of room where everything shone too brightly to be comforting. Golden sheets were wrapped around the windows, and the furniture had a futuristic polish that made the place look less like somewhere people lived and more like somewhere they were being observed. Even the silence in the room felt expensive, cold, and clean in a way that made Barron feel more worn out by contrast. He looked frail beneath the light, his face drawn, his eyes tired in a way that no amount of rest seemed to touch. Every movement he made was slow, almost reluctant, like his body already knew what was waiting for him in the next room.
He walked there with the stiff caution of someone approaching a ritual he had repeated too many times to count.
The room beyond was stripped of comfort. There was nothing there except medical devices and a large human tube, built with the same unnatural shape as Virus's, except this one was filled with red liquid that caught the light like something alive. Barron stopped in front of it for only a moment before he began removing his clothes. He did not hesitate. There was no embarrassment in his motions, no shame, only the mechanical calm of a man who had long ago stopped thinking of his body as something sacred. He stepped toward the tube and opened it, the seal breaking with a soft hiss.
Then he climbed in.
His body shivered the moment the red liquid closed around him. The oxygen mask settled over his face, and for a second his eyes closed as if he were bracing for pain he already understood too well. The tube sealed shut automatically. A beat later, needles pierced him—into his back, his fingers, his toes, and down along his cervical spine—each one finding flesh with a precision that would have made someone else scream. Barron did not. His face only tightened slightly, and then, strangely, he smiled.
Beside him, an unusual circular heart rate monitor blinked yellow in a steady rhythm, as if even the machine could not decide whether he was alive, dying, or something in between.
Barron had been born in 1975 in Pustozyorsk, a place that had once mattered to the world and later almost disappeared from it. Founded in 1499, it had been a trading post, then an exile site, and by the 1960s it had been abandoned to decline, harsh weather, and empty silence. That was where his story began, but it was not a story anyone would have called a childhood.
His father, known as bezlikiy Zmey, had been a ruthlessly trained assassin who had become a soldier for the Russian government. He had impressed them enough to be rewarded in grotesque fashion: harems of beautiful virgins and a ghost town to himself. He had lived there like a king in a dead land, killing nearly all of his wives until only one remained, the one who knew how to keep quiet and obey.
Barron was born into that house, into that silence, into that cruelty.
He did not have a childhood. Not really.
When he was three, his father began training him like an adult. The lessons were brutal at first, then worse, then inhuman. Barron learned pain before he learned kindness. He learned fear before he learned rest. His father did not believe in giving a boy a name until the boy had earned one. To him, names were for the strong, and Barron was not allowed to be strong unless he suffered enough to prove it.
His mother wanted to give him a name anyway.
It cost her her tongue.
Barron remembered the day with a clarity that still burned years later. His father had been furious at the thought of softness entering the boy's life. He called her weak, called her a crybaby for trying to protect him, and promised that he would raise Barron into his potential with or without her. After that, the woman who had tried to become a mother to him could no longer speak. She could only watch.
And when she tried to escape with seven-year-old Barron, they were caught.
She was locked in an iron dorm with no food for three days. On the fourth day, she was given water. The day after that, Barron was made to watch while his father killed her.
"THIS is how the weak die," bezlikiy Zmey had shouted in Russian, his voice sharp enough to cut. "This is what becomes of the soft! Death. Pain. Suffering! LOOK AT ME, USELESS CREATION! Watch your mother suffer to death for being pathetic!"
Barron remembered the sound of her crying around the missing tongue. He remembered his father twisting her arms back. He remembered the twelve hot metal rods driven into her flesh one after another, each one turning the room into a furnace of agony. He remembered tears covering her face until they washed over her suffering like a final layer of helplessness. By the time she died, her body looked emptied out by pain.
Barron's father did not see trauma in that. He saw instruction.
As punishment whenever Barron misbehaved, his mother's decayed body was dragged out of its resting place and thrown into a tiny room with him, a cramped place with no ventilation where he was forced to sit with the corpse until obedience returned to him. It was the sort of thing that did not merely scar a child. It rewired him.
Then came September 13th, 1987.
Barron had been jogging for six hours straight, wearing shorts in the cold while winter wind tore through the exposed skin of his chest. His father drove behind him like a hunter keeping pace with prey. If Barron stopped, he would be shot in the ear. So he kept running, long after his legs went numb and his lungs felt lined with fire.
And then everything changed.
The world around him stopped.
Not slowed—stopped.
The rain, the wind, the breath in his throat, all of it froze as if time itself had forgotten what to do. A massive portal opened in the sky and spread over the area like a seventy-five-foot gate. From it came a formation of soldiers in futuristic clothing and black masks, moving with synchronized precision. Their boots hit the ground in a circle around him. Their presence made the air feel dense, almost pressurized.
Then a man emerged wearing a large bear coat, dressed in similar futuristic clothing.
He moved toward Barron, and the atmosphere around him grew so heavy that Barron felt his stomach turn. Nausea hit him hard. The weight of the moment flattened him before he could even understand what was happening.
He blacked out.
When he woke, he gasped for air as though he had just been dragged back from underwater. He was standing in front of the man in the bear coat. The stranger reached out a hand and helped him to his feet. Then he removed his mask and smiled.
The expression on his face was strange—not warm, exactly, but not cruel either. It carried an almost painful familiarity.
"Gentle, yet mysterious. Filled with trauma," the man said, studying Barron as though he were looking at a reflection from another life. "Just like yesterday. That feeling was agony… but we learned to enjoy it, didn't we?"
Barron stared at him, shaking, trying to make sense of the impossible.
"Who are you?" he asked. "What do you mean by we? And what was that light?"
Then his eyes caught something that made his breath snag. A scar.
An accurate one.
The same kind he had gotten years before fighting two bulls.
His voice lowered with stunned disbelief.
"What are you?"
The man smiled, almost proudly.
"I didn't think you'd learn English in this reality," he said. "I am you. From an alternate reality. One where things happened faster than yours."
Barron's mind refused to accept the words, even while his body trembled under their weight.
The man kept speaking, his confidence growing with every sentence.
"We discovered the cure to coronavirus and cancer in 1852 and 1901. If I'm not mistaken, coronavirus is supposed to happen in your reality by 2019." His grin widened. "We've done many marvelous things. But this…" He spread his arms slightly as if presenting the whole world to Barron. "This is, and will be, the greatest discovery we've ever made. What I have achieved is glorious. I am amazing. Brilliant."
Barron stared at him, half furious and half stunned.
"How is that possible?" he said. "That's highly impossible. Scientifically impossible."
The man straightened, and for the first time Barron saw honesty in his eyes, mixed with something like awe.
"Like it or not," he said, "God is real. He hid this beautiful part of the universe from us. I'm a scientist. I didn't believe it at first either. But then the revelation…"
"What revelation?" Barron interrupted. "And how did you go into an alternate reality without any side effects?"
The man's expression shifted, regret flickering through it.
"You don't have to worry about that," he said. Then, as if he wanted to cut the weight of the subject, he added, "How about we go have fun?"
Barron had too many questions. But the questions could wait. For once in his life, someone was not hurting him. So he went with it.
They spent time together after that, in a way Barron had never known before. Fun, actual fun, the kind he had never been allowed to have as a child. The kind of thing that made his chest feel strange and light and wrong in equal measure. The man from the other reality was about to leave when he turned back and looked at Barron again.
"You don't have a name, do you?"
Barron lowered his eyes.
"Yes," he admitted, disappointed by the truth.
The man nodded once, then smiled.
"How about Barron? That's the name we use in about seventy percent of realities."
Barron's face changed before he could hide it. Joy, sharp and sudden, hit him so hard it nearly hurt. A name. His own name. Something given, not withheld. Something that made him feel, for the first time, like a person.
The urge to make the man proud took root in him almost immediately.
After that, the man ordered his soldiers to bring books—futuristic books, heavy with knowledge Barron could barely imagine. He told him they would help him become smart enough to join the B constellation. Then they brought out a large case, and inside it was SKYFALL, a rare mineral resource found across all universes, paired with a device that could stop human movement for thirteen minutes.
Use it when you are finally worthy of fighting your father, the man told him.
Then, almost kindly, he gave Barron ten minutes to do whatever he wanted, except run away. He suggested he rest.
Then the man and his soldiers stepped back into the portal and vanished.
The air loosened immediately. The pressure lifted. Barron stood there in silence, staring after them until the empty place they had left behind felt more real than the people who had filled it.
Ten minutes later, he made his choice.
He stopped sleeping and started studying.
He traded rest for knowledge. He studied everything he could find. Three hundred languages, spoken fluently. Quantum physics. Advanced chemistry. Engineering. Science. Religion. He wanted to understand what his variant had meant by revelation, what he had seen, why he had looked at Barron as if something sacred had finally been found.
Then he found a hint in the Bible.
And for the first time in his life, he prayed—not for mercy, but for forgiveness for what he was planning to do to his father.
Six years passed.
Barron became smarter than many people could hope to become in three generations. He became a young adult with a mind sharpened like a blade. Then, at last, his father decided he was worthy of battle.
It was dusk when the invitation came.
Barron's father stood in the doorway of his room and looked at him with the same cold authority he had used on him all his life. Barron remembered every humiliation, every beating, every moment he had been taught that pain was love. Those memories flashed before his eyes all at once, making the room seem smaller.
"Zastav' menya gordit'sya," his father said, then walked away.
Barron stood perfectly still, his heart pounding so hard it made his ribs ache. He stared at the shadow of the man who had built him through cruelty and smiled like someone standing at the edge of freedom.
By dusk, the sky looked almost alive, weeping with color.
Barron wore a thick fur jacket and carried two spare weapons, a gun, and a wrapped object hidden in his pocket. Rain touched his face as he looked up at the sky and laughed—low at first, then harder, like something inside him had broken loose.
"Bozhe, yesli ty slyshish' menya, moy otets stanet svidetelem sily, chto ty sozdal — i ona budet krovavoy," he said to the sky, his voice trembling with delight and madness.
Somewhere ahead, bezlikiy Zmey sat in a tree with a hatchet and a hunter gun, waiting for him like an executioner waiting for a clock. He aimed directly at Barron's right leg and fired. The shot took both his leg and his gun in the same violent instant. Barron went down screaming, pain ripping through him so hard that his vision sparkled white around the edges.
But even as he fell, he ripped the bulletproof shin guards from his left leg and ran deeper into the forest, leaving the gun behind.
His father smiled and dropped from the tree, hunting him on foot.
The rain made everything slick, the leaves and ground glistening under the darkness. Barron led him into the deepest part of the forest, past traps he had set in advance, each one carefully planned and designed to slow the man who had raised him. But his father moved through them like a predator reading signs in the earth.
Then Barron struck.
He jumped down with a spare weapon and drove it into his father's ribcage and shoulder.
For a moment, it looked as though the blow might matter.
Then his father hit back.
He brought Barron down like he weighed nothing at all and drove a brutal punch into his mouth, knocking out his left tooth with a sharp crack. Before Barron could recover, he locked his legs around his father's arms. His father, with monstrous strength, simply lifted him up while the arms were trapped and slammed him to the ground.
The impact tore agony through Barron's shoulder blades.
He should have stayed down.
He didn't.
He got up and dashed forward, biting off his father's left ear with savage desperation. But then the old man changed. His movements became unnatural, fast and fluid, like a boneless snake with perfect instinct. He beat Barron back with blow after blow, each punch feeling like a metal dumbbell smashing into him. Barron fought through it, fast and strong and furious, until a kick to the head sent him sprawling like a dead animal.
Blood stained the ground.
Rain mixed with it.
Barron lay there, unable to move for a moment, while his father twisted his arms back the same way he had once done to his mother. Then he drove a spare into Barron's flesh. Barron laughed through the pain. Not because it didn't hurt, but because something in him had started to enjoy the act of surviving it.
His father reached for the hatchet and raised it high, preparing to finish him.
Then a beep sounded from Barron's pocket.
The old man paused.
Curiosity won.
He reached down and unwrapped the device Barron had hidden. The instant it was exposed, light flashed out from it and his body locked. He could not move. Could not speak. Could not blink. He stood there, trapped in place as if time itself had finally decided to punish him.
Barron rose slowly to his feet.
Then he dragged his father into a bunker.
What followed lasted a week.
A week of torture.
A week of retribution.
A week where Barron finally learned what it felt like to hold power over the man who had spent his whole life making him feel small.
By the end of it, he had killed his father without even noticing the exact moment when it happened.
Then he left the hidden town.
Soon after, he gained the trust of the government even after committing mass genocide. They saw intelligence in him, usefulness in him, something they wanted close and under control. Barron became an intelligentsia of the state, the kind of man whose genius was too valuable to question and too dangerous to ignore.
And from that foundation, he built the Black Skull Organization.
A machine of advanced, futuristic, illegal technology.
An organization that would stop at nothing to destroy anyone it chose.