That Night – Outside Moscow
Tatiana's hair smelled of birchwood and winter. The kerosene lamp flickered beside the bed as she sat brushing it, humming a lullaby. Their son, Ivan, lay curled in a cot near the stove, snoring softly under patched blankets.
Nikolai stood in the doorway, still wearing his uniform, his gloves clenched in his hands. His boots were wet with snowmelt, dripping onto the wood.
"You're not here for long," Tatiana said, not turning around.
He didn't reply. Instead, he walked to Ivan and knelt. Ran a hand over his boy's fine hair. The child stirred but didn't wake.
"He'll remember you by your shadow," Tatiana said, finally looking at him through the mirror. "Just like he remembers your medals more than your voice."
Nikolai rose. "It's not a choice."
Her lips trembled—not in grief, but in restraint. "I know. But I'll hate you anyway."
He stepped closer, placing his forehead to hers. She didn't pull away. They stood in silence.
Finally, she whispered: "Come back… different. Or don't come back at all."
Two Days Later – Novosibirsk Transport Train
The train screamed through frostbitten plains under a bruised sky. Nikolai sat alone in the last car, a duffel bag at his feet, the walls plastered with Soviet slogans. Glory through sacrifice. Peace through strength.
Outside, endless snow. Inside, silence.
He opened the bag. Inside lay a bundle of letters: Tatiana's handwriting. He didn't read them. Not now. Maybe never again.
Next to them, a worn photograph of the three of them. Bent at the corners. A coffee stain near the edge. He touched the image—his own face stared back: youthful, before war, before blood.
He tore it in half and dropped it to the floor.
When the train halted, two men in white coats greeted him. One wore thick goggles, the other a clipboard. They didn't speak. Only nodded, then motioned toward a waiting armored truck.
No rank. No medals. No flag.
Only purpose.
Arrival
The elevator hissed downward for nearly three minutes. Each second felt heavier than the last. Nikolai's reflection stared back from the metal doors—jaw sharp, eyes rimmed with exhaustion, uniform stripped of insignia.
He thought of Eric. Of what he saw at the summit. Of that smile—calm, unshaken, inhuman.
And he thought of Boris's voice:
"You won't be remembered. But you'll matter."
The doors opened.
Cold air. Sharp light. Stainless steel. Tubes. Syringes. Monitors.
The woman waiting inside, Leena, smiled faintly. "Are you ready?"
Nikolai stepped forward."I wasn't ready when the bombs fell," he said. "I won't wait for them to fall again."
And then the door closed behind him.
The man he was—stayed outside.
The facility was buried beneath the frozen outskirts of Novosibirsk, a place where even sunlight feared to linger. The procedure room was circular, sterile, humming with machines older than their operators. Karl and Leena—the German scientists captured in the fall of Dresden—watched from the glass-paneled booth above, murmuring to Soviet technicians in clipped, cautious Russian.
Nikolai lay shirtless on a metal table, wrists and ankles bound with titanium shackles. His chest was broad but scarred, his skin still bearing burns from Korea. Sweat glistened on his brow despite the cold.
"Vitals stable," a technician said. "Beginning Phase I."
The first needle went into his arm—long, thick, filled with a crimson serum that shimmered unnaturally.
Biochemistry, they had said. Mixed with synthetic hormones. With neural accelerators. With pain.
Phase II came with the electrodes. They clipped them to his temples, to his spine, to his chest. Then came the pulse. A soundless flash of agony. Nikolai arched off the table, screaming through gritted teeth.
Tatiana's face swam before him.
"Family is warmth," she had said the night he left. "But too much warmth softens steel."
Now, fire replaced warmth.
He remembered the bombs he dropped over Kyoto. The faces below.
"Phase III," Leena said above, voice flat. "Begin psychological mirror exposure."
The screens around the table lit up. Flash images. War. Bodies. Children. Fire. Tatiana. His son. Then the burning villages from the file on Eric. Then Eric himself.
And then… Nikolai. But monstrous. Bleeding. Unrecognizable.
"No!" Nikolai screamed, trying to twist free, but the restraints held.
His body began to change. The serum coursed through his veins like liquid iron. Muscles convulsed. Bones cracked and reformed, thicker. Veins pulsed red. His heartbeat sounded like a war drum.
His screams became roars.
The pain didn't break him. It refined him.
Boris watched from the shadows. A wraith in a trench coat.
"He won't survive Phase IV," Karl muttered nervously.
"He must," Boris replied, eyes fixed. "Or we have nothing."
With the final dose, Nikolai's eyes snapped open, glowing crimson. He ripped free of the restraints. Not in rage. In silence. In absolute control.
He stood, shivering slightly. Taller now. Denser. As if gravity bowed differently around him.
"What is your name?" Boris asked through the speaker.
Nikolai looked up.
"My name is Red Guardian."
The doors opened slowly. Outside, the snow still fell.
But inside the chamber, a weapon had been born. Not a god. Not a tyrant.
A man. Hardened in guilt, reborn in fire.
Not because he wanted to lead.
Because someone had to stop Eric. And someone had to remind the world that power without conscience was no victory at all.