They told him not to scream. Not because it was brave. Because screaming wasted oxygen. Kurogane Rei was thirteen years old when they broke his ribs for the first time. The room was white. Not clean—just empty. White walls, white floor, white light that never flickered. The kind of place where time didn't move unless someone decided it should.
Rei was strapped to a metal frame that held his arms wide like a crucifix made by engineers instead of gods. Cold bit through his back. Every breath rattled wrong inside his chest.
"Again," a voice said from behind the glass.
The hammer fell.
The pain didn't arrive all at once. It tunneled. It spread. It dug. Something inside him folded the wrong way and didn't unfold again. His mouth opened. No sound came out. Good, Rei thought weakly. I did it right.
Thirteen years old, and already measuring success by silence. Blood slid from the corner of his lips and traced down his chin in a thin, trembling line. It dropped onto the white floor and looked too bright, like someone had spilled paint by accident. Behind the glass, men in black coats watched without expression. One of them checked a monitor. "Heart rate stable." Another nodded. "No Relic rejection."
Rei didn't know what a Relic was. He just knew that if his body failed, they would replace him. They always did. The hammer rose again. This time, something inside him cracked that wasn't bone.
Children were cheaper than machines. They healed faster. Suffered quieter. And when they broke, the blame could be folded into paperwork and buried under phrases like necessary loss and acceptable failure rate. The man behind the glass watched the boy's vitals scroll across the display. Name: Kurogane Rei. Age: 13. Status: Compatible. Compatible. Such a gentle word for such a violent truth.
The Relic inside the containment chamber behind the next door had already devoured three hosts. Their nervous systems cooked. Their organs misfired. One had clawed his own eyes out screaming about voices that weren't there. This one didn't scream. Which was why the man was interested.
"Prep the implantation," he said calmly. A technician hesitated. "Sir… his ribs—" "He'll heal," the man replied. "If he doesn't, we'll learn something either way." Science advanced fastest when innocence was available in bulk.
They rolled him through a corridor that smelled like metal and antiseptic and something burned that never went away. The ceiling lights passed overhead like slow, blinking stars. He heard another child crying somewhere far away. A younger voice. Rei turned his head weakly, trying to see him—but a mask dropped over his face. Darkness folded in. Just before unconsciousness took him, Rei remembered something small. A river. Warm sunlight. And a voice saying his name like it mattered.
The first time a Relic bonds properly, the world always flinches. She felt it before the alarms screamed. A pressure. Like a god inhaling. "Brace," she whispered. Then the facility shook. Not from explosion. From acceptance.
Something entered him. It was not metal. It was not light. It was thought. A foreign will poured through his veins, rewriting distance, weight, resistance. His heart stuttered. His spine arched. His mouth finally opened—still no scream. Inside his skull, a presence unfolded like wings made of equations and hunger.
"Are you afraid?"
Rei couldn't speak. But somehow, something inside him answered. "I don't know how to be anything else." The presence paused. And for the first time in its long, starving existence—it laughed.
Across the city, across the borders, across the future itself, every war that would ever exist had just found its heart. And it was thirteen years old.