Kael's world had shrunk to the space between the rhythmic beeps of the medical monitor. Each chirp was a nail hammered into the silence, pinning him to the thin mattress, to the sterile white room, to the choice that hung in the air like the smell of antiseptic. Die a victim, or walk through fire. It wasn't much of a choice. It was a sentence.
He stared at the ceiling, but his newly awakened senses saw more than just white panels. He could perceive the faint, shimmering web of power conduits within, the quiet hum of the lights a distinct, individual note in the enclave's wounded symphony. The thrum in his own bones answered it, a discordant harmony that made his teeth ache. The Hound's Echo was a constant presence, an itch deep beneath his skin he could never scratch, a phantom limb with claws.
Jax watched him, his face an unreadable mask of scarred patience. He didn't press for an answer. He'd laid out the facts with the cold precision of a butcher dressing a carcass, and now he was simply waiting for the meat to settle.
Kael thought of Lina's hand, small and pale against the grime-caked ferrocrete. He remembered the terror in her eyes, a terror he had been utterly powerless to prevent. He remembered the feeling of the support beam, its impossible, indifferent weight. That was the feeling of being a victim. Helpless. A cog in a machine that had just been shattered. He'd spent his whole life as a technician, fixing the broken parts of a world he couldn't control. Now, the broken part was him.
"When you… train me," Kael's voice was a dry rasp, the words tasting like rust in his mouth. "What does that mean? What do you do?"
A flicker of something—not surprise, but perhaps professional interest—passed through Jax's eyes. "It means I break you down to your foundations and build you back up into something that won't shatter the first time you take a hit. It means pain. Exhaustion. Pushing your body and your Frame until they either adapt or fail completely." He leaned back on his stool, the legs scraping against the floor. "The first lesson is always the same. I teach you how to control the parasite. You're not its master. Not yet. Right now, you're just the cage. And every time you get angry, or scared, or careless, the beast rattles the bars. My job is to make the cage stronger."
The beast. That's what it felt like. A cold, hungry thing coiled in his soul. He could feel it stirring now, a faint echo of the Hound's predatory instincts tickled by the scent of Jax's power, the scent of an Alpha. He suppressed a shudder.
"And if I fail?"
"You die," Jax said, without a trace of malice. It was a simple statement of fact. "But you die on your feet. It's a better death than the one you'll get in this bed."
Kael closed his eyes. The choice wasn't about living or dying, not really. It was about how he would face the end. He could let the Echo rot him from the inside out, a slow, pathetic decay into madness and memory loss. Or he could face it head-on, grab the live wire that had been thrust into his hands, and see if he could force it to bend to his will before it burned him to ash. He owed it to Lina. He owed it to the boy who had stood uselessly before a monster.
He opened his eyes and met Jax's gaze. "Okay."
It was just one word, quiet and brittle, but it carried the weight of a life sentence accepted.
Jax gave a single, sharp nod, as if a transaction had just been completed. "Good. Get dressed. The infirmary is no place for a Frame User."
As Kael swung his legs over the side of the bed, the world tilted violently. The heightened senses, which had been a low hum of background noise, now flooded him. The beeping of the monitor was a spike in his ear. The hum of the lights was a physical pressure. He could feel the faint Aethel signatures of the medics down the hall, their life-forces like dim, flickering bulbs. He gritted his teeth, fighting back a wave of nausea.
A medic, a tired-looking woman with dark circles under her eyes, entered with a datapad. She stopped when she saw Kael sitting up.
"He's with me," Jax said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
The medic just sighed, too exhausted to protest. "Fine. Just… the official report. For the archives." She looked at Kael with a flicker of pity. "The breach is contained. We lost one hundred and twelve souls, forty-three of them from the Defense Force. Guard-Captain Valerius included. Another two hundred wounded. The enclave… the enclave is in mourning."
The numbers were sterile, abstract. But Kael saw the faces from the mess hall, the running figures in the street. He saw the polished armor of Valerius being tossed through the air like a piece of trash. The man had been arrogant, dismissive. He had also died defending the wall he believed in.
"Get dressed," Jax repeated, his voice a little softer this time.
Kael pulled on the clean, sterile jumpsuit the infirmary provided. It felt strange against his skin, too smooth, too simple. When he followed Jax out into the corridor, the sensory assault hit him full-force. The enclave was no longer just a place of metal and concrete. It was a living, breathing entity of overlapping energies, a tapestry of fear, grief, and grim determination. He could feel the collective sorrow of the enclave as a low, oppressive hum, a bass note beneath the ever-present thrum of the emergency power.
They walked in silence, Jax leading him away from the pristine halls of the medical wing and down into the guts of the enclave. The corridors grew darker, the air thicker with the smell of ozone and hot metal. They passed work crews shoring up cracked walls and medics rushing past with grim, set faces. Kael saw everything with a terrifying new clarity. He saw the stress fractures in a support beam, invisible to the naked eye. He felt the unsteady flicker of a damaged power relay behind a wall. His old world, the world of a technician, was still there, but it was now just one layer in a much more complex and dangerous reality.
Finally, they arrived at a heavy, reinforced door that hissed open to reveal their destination. It was a massive, cavernous chamber that had once been a pre-Fall industrial workshop. The air was cold and smelled of rust and old machinery. The floor was bare, scarred concrete. The walls were lined with battered training equipment, weapon racks, and hulking, deactivated training drones. This was the training yard. The Forge. Jax's domain.
It was a place of brutal functionality. A place designed to break things. People included.
Jax stopped in the center of the room and turned to face him. The grim set of his jaw seemed to soften, just for a moment, into something that might have been respect. Or maybe it was just pity.
"Welcome to your new life, kid," he said, his voice echoing in the vast, empty space. "The first lesson is pain. Let's begin."