The hallway stank of iron and ozone.
Not the clean scent of machinery, but the wet, stinging rot of blood cooked on metal on old wounds turned industrial. Yang dragged the polymer mop across the impact flooring for the third time, watching the fibers soak up rust-colored streaks left behind by someone else's glory.
They didn't even try to wash it off anymore. The Trainees bled in drills, puked after neural syncing attempts, and shattered bone during training. After all that, someone like Yang was assigned to mop it up before morning inspections.
His knees and arms trembled as the ambient pressure in the chamber—the low hum of a thousand power conduits and reactor cores above and below—made everything feel heavier.
Another squad passed by him without looking.
Twelve boys and girls in high-collar sync suits, spines wired into portable conduits. Most of them were his age—eighteen, maybe nineteen. But they moved like gods-in-waiting, talking about their scores, simulations, their upcoming Godseed Awakening Ceremony.
They didn't see Yang.
Why would they?
He was in maintenance grey. He had no command stripe. He had no neural jack. Just the synthetic boots issued to maintenance guys which were scuffed and separating at the heel. The only emblem he did have was on his sleeve: a rusted gear etched into an open palm.
"Unawakened."
The word stuck to him like mold. Everyone used it. Even the children.
Another squad passed. A tall cadet with bright silver eyes glanced at him, then muttered under his breath-
"Waste of air."
His name was Kale, Yang remembered him. His Godseed Awakening had been scheduled since he was thirteen. He was born to an elite bloodline. His parents came from the Ardent Core program. Both had awakened their Godseed before they were twenty.
Kale had never touched a mop in his life.
Yang bit his tongue and kept scrubbing thinking the thought.
The floor sensor blinked green.
Clean. Enough.
He stood, slowly, knees popping, back hunched like he was sixty. His arms were lean, strong—but not in the way that mattered here. Godseed Warriors were carved, engineered, or tweaked from birth. Yang had the body of a laborer. He was functional, but forgettable.
He dragged the bucket to the waste chute and emptied it with a hiss of sterilizing gas.
Somewhere overhead, the sync bells rang out in triple chime. 0200 hours. Sim chamber lockdown. Yang's shift was over.
The bunk room was as sterile as the rest of Sublevel 9—just one of dozens of underground trenches beneath Citadel Vatra. There were no windows or lights, but the yellow glow of flickering panels. There were ten cots, all bolted into the steel floor. The air was dry, recycled, and always faintly warm, like someone had tried to heat silence and give it flavor.
Yang's bunk was in the corner. Nearest the utility ducts. No one else had chosen it, not since the last guy assigned to it had failed out and vanished.
He didn't turn on the light. He sat on the edge of the mattress, unlaced his boots, and stared down at the floor.
His hands still shook. Not from fear. From restraint and frustration. He wanted to scream. To hit something. To shout that he wasn't nothing. That he wasn't some failed scrap kid from Sublevel 9. That he had dreams. That—
No one cared. No one listened.
So he stood, crossed to the panel by the sink, and typed in a maintenance override.
The keypad hissed.
"ACCESS DENIED."
He waited. Then typed it again. A different code. One he wasn't supposed to have.
This time, the door unlocked.
Storage Hall A-4 wasn't listed on the official maps. It wasn't secret, not exactly—just forgotten. A structural holdover from before Vatra expanded into a full Citadel. Most of the walls were still raw steel, half-wired. But the real reason Yang came here?
The old training room.
A collapsed sublevel, sealed off, deep enough underground that it didn't show up on the blueprints. It was abandoned since the Rift-Quake three years ago. The training dummies were broken and the sync pads were offline. But the floor still held impact, the mirrors still worked, and the room still had space.
And silence.
Here, Yang could pretend.
He pulled off his grey shirt and stood in the cold. Pale scars covered his torso. It was nothing dramatic, just old fractures from childhood fights and one bad fall from a maintenance scaffold. His arms were long and wiry. Not like the bulked-out Godseed Warriors from above.
But his body moved like it knew and began the drill. It wasn't a real sequence—he hadn't been taught those. But he'd watched. Hundreds of hours, hiding behind sealed doors, pretending to scrub while the elites ran through their paces.
He mimicked it all. The five-point stance. The pivot-kick sequence. The strike-knee-push evasive slide. It was sloppy, but it flowed decently well.
He slipped once and landed on his side. He swore, but he got back up. He tried again and again. The mirror showed a boy out of place. Too thin. Too slow and breathing too hard.
But it also showed something else.
A boy who hadn't given up.
By the time he stopped, sweat drenched his hair. His arms were trembling harder now and his legs ached. He collapsed against the wall and let the air settle in his lungs like smoke. He didn't train to prove anyone wrong. He trained because something inside him refused to stop.
Every time he heard the sync bells chime and saw the others walk into their future, some deep, gnawing part of him whispered:
That should have been you.
But it wasn't. It never would be. It was difficult to awaken your Godseed. No matter how hard you bled for it.
The corridor outside then echoed. There were footsteps. Not many. Just one, and Yang froze. He hadn't tripped any alarms and there most definitely were no cameras.
Who the hell was—
A figure then stepped into the half-light.
Commander Holt. A war veteran. A legend who took down countless Kaijus to protect Citadel Vatra from collapsing and saving thousands of lives in the process.
Yang's heart fell into his spine. He straightened instinctively, still half-breathless. Holt said nothing at first. He just looked around the room with his one good eye. The other was covered by a cracked black ocular plate. His jaw was crooked, like it had once been broken and never fully healed. He carried no rank insignia except the deep Vatra command sigil branded into his forearm.
He smelled like gun oil and tired bones. His voice was low.
"You break protocol every third night."
Yang's throat tightened.
"I—"
"You fail every test, and you weren't even selected for pre-screening. You're also listed as a 'maintenance-tier lifer'."
Holt stepped forward until he stopped three feet away.
"So why do you train like you've got something to lose?"
Yang didn't answer right away.
The air between him and Holt had thickened—turned to weight, to judgment. The Commander didn't blink. Didn't shift. His eye just held Yang's like a scalpel pressed against glass.
"Well?" Holt said.
"Because if I don't," Yang replied, swallowing hard, "They'll keep thinking that those like me are nothing. And that we'll never stand next to them!"
The words fell out of him before he could stop them. Raw. Too honest. Yang waited for laughter, mockery, or maybe a reprimand.
But, Commander Holt only grunted.
He stepped past Yang and walked the perimeter of the old training room like he was taking inventory of ghosts. His boots echoed on steel, and when he passed the old strike posts, he ran a gloved hand across the surface and flaked off a layer of dust.
"This room was built for the first Gen-Two Godseed Warriors," Holt said, voice distant, as if speaking to the walls more than to Yang. "Before Vatra expanded. Before the architects buried the bones under chrome and lights."
He stopped beside a sparring pillar. Turned back to Yang.
"You're sloppy. You're too slow in the knees and your hip positioning's a disaster. You favor your right side like it's your only arm."
Yang's face burned.
"But," Holt said, "you don't wait to be told what to do. You move. Even when no one's watching."
A pause.
"And that's worth something."
Yang blinked.
"...I'm not trying to disrespect Citadel training protocols sir—"
"Yes, you are," Holt cut in. "But good. They deserve disrespect."
Yang blinked again as the Commander leaned against the pillar and scratched his jaw.
"You ever seen the inside of an Awakening Chamber?"
"Only in VR sim files."
"Then you've never seen one!" Holt said as he spat saliva onto the ground next to him.
"The real ones stink. Your Aura clings to the metal. You can feel it. It's like the chamber remembers every scream it ever swallowed. Just like it did to me!"
Yang's throat tightened. He didn't know why the esteemed Commander Holt was still talking to him. Or why his legs hadn't collapsed yet.
"Every Godseed Candidate in the upper levels thinks awakening is about aptitude, latency, or genetics." Holt leaned forward. "But your Godseed doesn't care about your bloodline or your test scores. It cares about who you are."
He stepped into Yang's space.
"So, who are you?"
Yang didn't answer. Not because he couldn't or because it was probably a rhetorical question, but because he really wasn't sure who he was. Holt's eye studied him and then—without warning—he swung his arm.
Yang ducked, though just barely. But the follow-up elbow caught his shoulder causing him to stumble back. He pivoted, trying to plant his foot the way he'd practiced—
And slipped, but Commander Holt didn't press further and just stood over him.
"You think drills are enough? You think mimicking form makes you ready?"
Yang coughed. "No."
"Then get up and prove it!"
They sparred for twenty-three minutes. And during those minutes, Holt didn't hold back. Not in the ways that mattered. He didn't break Yang's ribs. He didn't tear ligaments. But every strike bruised and every block stung. Holt's movements were compact, brutal, and efficient—refined through decades of real war, not academy-point sparring.
Yang bled. But that didn't stop him.
He managed to land two blows. Neither were clean, but one of them made Holt's shoulder twitch just a flicker. The other however struck armor plating at Holt's side causing it to ring.
Holt didn't smile. But he nodded.
"You've got fight in you."
Yang spat blood and stayed silent. Thinking to himself. They didn't talk after, but Holt handed him a protein patch and walked out without another word.
There were no promises made. There was no formal training schedule. No acknowledgment in the records. Just that moment. Just that night.
When three days passed, a note appeared on Yang's cot.
"Sublevel-B4. 0200. Don't be late."
It wasn't signed. Didn't need to be. That's how it began. Not a mentorship. Not officially at least. There was no "program" for people like Yang. He still mopped blood off training floors by day. Still slept on a cot too small, next to men who forgot his name after one shift rotation.
But at night, beneath Vatra's endless steel, he trained with Commander Holt in secret. The old commander didn't lecture. He showed. He struck. He corrected through pain and repetition. When Yang's stance was off, he knocked him down. When his breathing staggered, he made him run laps in the steam ducts until he puked.
"You're not being trained to pass a test," Holt said one night. "You're being trained to survive."
One session, Holt had him repeat the same movement a hundred times: deflect, pivot, sweep, strike.
"Why this one?" Yang asked, panting.
Holt didn't answer immediately. He was staring into the dark.
"Because it saved my life. Once. Barely."
A pause.
"Then got six of my mates killed the next time I used it."
Yang hesitated.
"I don't understand."
"Good. Keep not understanding. The moment you think you've mastered something, you stop growing. That's when the Kaijus rip you in half."
Holt never talked about his past. Not in whole pieces. But Yang gathered fragments.
Holt had awakened a Godseed at age twenty. One of the earliest at the time. He'd killed 213 Kaijus, led thirty-eight missions, but lost seventy-two bright individuals under his command.
"The armor lets you live longer," he said once. "Long enough to hate what you become."
One night, Yang asked him something stupid.
"Do you think I'll ever awaken?"
Holt looked at him for a long time.
"No."
The answer was hard. But it was honest.
"If you're asking if the Godseed will choose you—no. It won't. Remember, all it cares about is who you are."
Yang nodded, trying to hide the crack in his chest.
"But that doesn't mean you're worthless."
"So what am I, then?"
Holt crossed the room and stopped in front of him and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"You're awake. That's already more than most are."