The sun had dipped behind the western trees when Reik Hans returned.
The camp felt the thunder of his approach before they saw him—hooves pounding earth, iron-shod shields clashing against spear shafts in rhythm, the low growl of men singing victory. Thirty riders crested the low rise, Hans at their head like a moving mountain. His mail shirt—looted Roman rings patched with Suebi iron—clinked with every breath. His beard, iron-gray and braided with boar tusks, caught the dying light. At his hip hung a spatha longer than most men's arms, its hilt wrapped in wolf hide. Behind him trailed pack mules laden with Roman helmets, mail shirts, and bloodied sacks that still dripped.
The warriors already in camp raised a roar. Hans answered with a single bellow that rolled across the trees like distant thunder.
Then the cheering faltered.
Men stepped aside. Women lowered their eyes. Gundar—still spattered with Roman blood—walked forward, shoulders squared but voice low.
"Reik. Your son lives. But… he is different."
Hans swung down from the saddle. The ground seemed to shudder under his boots. At six and a half feet and nearly three hundred pounds of scarred muscle and fat, he looked less like a man and more like a bear that had learned to walk upright and carry weapons. He could snap a grown man's neck with one hand; he had done it more than once when traitors or cowards were found among the warband.
"Different how?" His voice was gravel dragged over iron.
Gundar hesitated. "He speaks like a chieftain. Like a Roman legate giving orders. He asked for numbers, directions, armor types—as though he had fought them before. And when we questioned him…" Gundar's eyes flicked toward the spear where the Roman head had been. "The head… exploded. No hand touched it. No sling. Just… gone. Men say Wodan has touched him. Or perhaps something darker."
Hans said nothing for a long moment. Then he strode toward the central fire where the boy lay.
Seigmer—Colonel Marcus Davis in a child's bruised shell—was stretched out on a pile of wolf pelts near the warmth. Eyes closed. Breathing shallow. Sweat beaded on his pale forehead despite the cooling evening. The telekinetic burst he had used to destroy the head had drained him worse than any PT session back in Bragg. His new body was fragile, unconditioned, still recovering from the hoof strike. Moving anything heavier than a stone felt like lifting a rucksack full of wet sand with his mind alone.
He heard the boots stop beside him. Felt the heat of the big man's presence like standing next to a forge.
"They tell me you talk like a Roman now, boy."
Seigmer did not open his eyes. "God has shown me the future, father. It doesn't go well for us unless we change our ways."
A long silence. Hans crouched—slowly, joints popping like dry branches. He studied the scrawny frame beneath the furs. Thin arms, narrow shoulders, ribs still showing through skin. For years he had wondered, in the dark hours when mead made men honest, whether this boy was truly his seed. Griselda had never given him cause to doubt her, yet the child had always been… quiet. Bookish in a tribe that valued only strength and song. Now this.
"And how do we change, then?" Hans rumbled.
Seigmer's lips curved—just a fraction. "Just do what you've been doing. It's not yet time."
Hans snorted. "Cryptic as a damned sibyl. If Wodan speaks through you, he might have chosen a stronger vessel."
"He did," Seigmer said quietly. "He just had to borrow one that was already broken."
Hans stared a moment longer. Then he stood, massive shadow swallowing the firelight.
"Rest, boy. Tomorrow you prove these words aren't fever dreams." He turned to the watching warriors. "No one disturbs my son tonight. Anyone who tries answers to me."
The camp quieted after that. Hans walked away to drink and hear the full report, but his eyes kept returning to the still form by the fire.
Seigmer waited until the snores began and the sentries changed watch.
Then he opened his eyes.
The first week was hell.
Dawn came cruel and cold. Seigmer rose before the roosters the tribe kept for eggs, before even the watch fires had burned low. He started with push-ups on the hard-packed earth beside his parents' tent—palms flat, body rigid, counting in Latin under his breath because the numbers felt more real that way.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Arms trembled at forty. At fifty his shoulders burned like someone had poured hot pitch over them. He dropped, rolled onto his back, and immediately started sit-ups. The cracked ribs screamed every rep. He ignored them. Pain was data. Pain was progress.
By the end of the first morning he could manage sixty push-ups and eighty sit-ups before vomiting bile into the grass. Acceptable. Not good. Not yet.
Pull-ups came next. He found a thick oak branch that overhung the camp's edge—high enough that no casual passerby would see the boy struggling like a weakling. The first day he could only hang for ten seconds before his grip failed. By day four he could do three strict pull-ups. By day ten, eight. Each rep he visualized the Roman cavalryman whose horse had nearly killed him—imagined crushing the man's windpipe with invisible fingers.
Squats followed. Bodyweight first, then holding stones, then logs. His thighs shook after two hundred. He kept going until they locked and he fell backward into the dirt, gasping.
Running came last in the daylight hours—loops through the camp at first, dodging wagons and children, then out into the forest trails. The Suebi were horsemen and raiders; they did not run for sport. They looked at him strangely when he passed at a steady jog, sweat soaking his tunic, breath coming in measured hisses. He didn't care. Endurance won wars. Logistics won wars. A tired legionary was a dead legionary.
Nights were different.
When the camp slept and only the sentries moved like shadows, Seigmer slipped away to a small clearing half a mile into the trees. There, under moonlight filtered through pine needles, he trained the gift.
At first it was stones—lifting them an inch, holding for ten seconds, lowering without dropping. Then arrows—he would fling one skyward with his hand, catch it mid-flight with his mind, spin it, send it back. The drain was brutal. After twenty minutes his nose bled, his vision tunneled, and he collapsed retching.
But every night he pushed further.
One night he lifted a fallen log the thickness of a man's waist. Held it three heartbeats. Dropped it with a crash that probably woke half the watch. He lay there afterward, staring at stars he had once navigated by GPS, and whispered:
"Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast."
Week three.
He could now do one hundred push-ups unbroken. One hundred fifty sit-ups. Fifteen strict pull-ups. Two hundred bodyweight squats. The runs stretched to five miles through rough terrain—hills, streams, roots that tried to break ankles.
Telekinesis: he could now lift a grown man's shield—twenty pounds of wood and iron—and hold it steady for thirty seconds. He practiced throwing knives without touching them, guiding them into tree trunks with pinpoint accuracy. Once, testing limits, he crushed a fist-sized rock to gravel with a thought. The headache lasted two days.
His body was changing. Shoulders widening. Arms thickening. The scrawny boy was being rebuilt into something harder. Something dangerous.
One evening, as the first frost silvered the grass, Reik Hans found him in the clearing.
The Reik stood at the edge of the trees, arms crossed, watching as his son—eyes closed, face pale with concentration—slowly lifted a Roman spatha from the ground without touching it. The blade rose, turned, point-down, and drove itself three inches into the earth.
Hans stepped forward.
"You've grown stronger, boy."
Seigmer opened his eyes. Sweat ran into them. He didn't blink.
"Not strong enough. Not yet."
Hans studied him for a long moment—the way a bear studies something it hasn't decided whether to kill or keep.
"Then keep training," he said at last. "Because the Romans are coming again. And this time they won't send twenty men."
He turned to leave.
"Father."
Hans paused.
"When they come," Seigmer said quietly, "I want to be there. Not watching from the rear. In the line."
Hans looked back over one massive shoulder.
"You will be," he rumbled. "But if Wodan—or your 'God'—gave you visions of the future… you'd better make sure we win it."
Seigmer watched the bear of a man disappear into the dark.
Then he turned back to the sword still quivering in the earth.
He lifted it again—this time faster.
Smooth.
Fast.
Ready.