At eleven, Zerath's mornings began in silence before dawn. The Yamazaki estate still slept when he slipped into the courtyard, its gravel biting cold under bare feet. He did not wait for tutors, nor for instructions. His fists found the wooden posts again and again, each strike measured, each miss analyzed, each bruise a reminder of error. The air burned in his lungs, but he relished the pain—it was proof of progress. Stillness felt like decay; movement, even agony, was survival.
That same year marked his initiation into the clan trials. For generations, Yamazaki heirs were tested through sparring, endurance drills, and tactical exercises meant to weed out weakness. Most entered these trials with fear. Zerath entered them with hunger.
His opponents were older boys, many already in their late teens, confident that they could humble a child. They laughed as they squared off against him—until the bout began. Zerath wasted no motion, no sound, no hesitation. He slipped between strikes like water, every counter aimed with surgical precision. He didn't overwhelm them with force but dismantled them piece by piece, exploiting openings they didn't realize they'd shown. By the end of that week, the laughter had stopped.
At twelve, his reputation hardened. Few spoke to him outside training, not because he sought solitude, but because something in his presence unsettled them. Tutors who once corrected him casually now spoke in measured tones, as though aware that careless words might awaken something dangerous. Zerath noticed, but he didn't mind. Fear was information, and information was power.
By thirteen, that fear turned to unease. During one sparring match, a rival heir sought to humiliate him, taunting, pressing harder than the rules allowed. Zerath's response was immediate and merciless—he broke the boy's arm with a single twist. The elders called it a lesson in caution. But afterward, whispers filled the estate. Others fought for pride or recognition; Zerath fought as if each contest were life and death. He was no longer viewed as a prodigy—he was a threat.
Fourteen brought another change, harder to name but impossible to ignore. His aura grew heavy. Warriors who crossed blades with him described a suffocating pressure, as though their instincts screamed they stood before a predator. Even those who bested him in combat did so with unease, their victories hollow. In the courtyard, silence often fell before he even raised his guard.
His mother, Akane, watched from the veranda with quiet concern. She rarely spoke, only corrected small flaws in his form. But her eyes lingered longer now, not with pride, but with the weight of a mother seeing her child become something unrecognizable. His father, Hiroshi, remained distant, his expression unreadable. Only his sharp gaze betrayed recognition of the storm building in his son.
At fifteen, Zerath clashed not with children but with the clan's veterans. Warriors decades older entered the courtyard at the elders' request, ordered to test him, to put him in his place. Some won bouts, yet none left feeling victorious. He adapted mid-strike, returned fiercer after each fall, and forced them to admit silently that his growth was unnatural. Rumors began to shift from awe to suspicion: perhaps he was too dangerous, too obsessive.
It was then that Hiroshi intervened. The clan head stepped into the courtyard one winter morning, his presence alone silencing the whispers. No announcement was made, no ceremony prepared. He simply faced his son.
The duel was not gentle. Hiroshi's strikes were sharp, honed by decades of combat. Zerath absorbed them all, his body breaking, reforming, recalibrating with each exchange. He was thrown to the ground, forced to his knees, blood dripping into the gravel—but he rose again, eyes steady, refusing to yield. For the first time, he glimpsed the sheer weight of mastery his father carried, yet he also saw something else: a path forward.
The bout ended with Hiroshi standing tall, Zerath beaten but unbroken. No words passed between them. Hiroshi gave only a single nod before walking away. It was acknowledgment—not of victory, but of inevitability. The boy would one day surpass the father.
At sixteen, calamity struck. During an endurance drill in one of the older training halls, the structure collapsed. Beams splintered, stone cracked, and Zerath was buried beneath rubble. For hours, the clan believed him dead. Some whispered it was fate correcting an imbalance, others that his obsession had finally consumed him.
But then, from beneath the wreckage, he emerged. Blood streaked his face, ribs cracked, shoulder hanging out of place. He did not call for help. He braced against the wall, forced his shoulder back into its socket with a sickening crack, and walked out into the courtyard. Silence fell over the estate. The elders whispered of miracles, but to Zerath, it was no miracle at all. It was simple necessity. If the world tried to crush him, he would not break.
That night, while others slept uneasily, Zerath did not close his eyes. He replayed every mistake that had led to his entrapment, every second of wasted motion beneath the rubble. He dissected it, memorized it, and vowed never to repeat it. Pain, exhaustion, even near-death—none of it mattered. What mattered was growth.
By the end of his sixteenth year, the estate no longer regarded him as a boy. Children avoided him. Warriors respected him but did not approach. His parents watched from a distance, shadows at the edge of his path, knowing that whatever he was becoming could no longer be guided, only endured.
The clan whispered behind closed doors, but whispers meant little. Zerath was already stepping beyond their reach. He was no prodigy, no heir, no child. He was obsession given form, a force that would never yield, and a predator learning to see the world itself as his arena.