Chapter 2: Welcome to the Order
She sill remembers.
The rain had started when they took her that night.
It had fallen been falling continuously, turning the streets into rivers, blurring the streetlights into trembling halos. Lia remembered sitting by the orphanage window, watching the droplets chase each other down the glass. Thinking about a life she never had. There was something peaceful about it — back then, she still believed in peaceful things.
Then came the van. The men in it dress in black. The stuck a needle in her.
And in the cold, endless dark night.
When she woke, everything she knew was gone.
The room she found herself in was bare concrete, no windows, only a dim flickering light overhead that buzzed like an angry wasp. She was still in the clothes she'd worn to bed — a faded gray t-shirt and threadbare pajama pants. They were damp with sweat.
Her wrists ached.
The Order didn't waste much time with introductions. It was a story whispered by frightened children, a ghost story the older orphans passed around in the orphanage. It was a story of the place where kids have vanished and had never came back.
And now she was here.
The days in The Order blurred together, each one feeling heavier than the last. There were no clocks, no passage of time, but Lia felt the passing of days in the aching of her muscles and the silence in her heart. Each lesson, each exercise, was designed to break them — to wear them down until only the strong remained.
And Lia? She didn't know what she was anymore.
She wasn't a child anymore, but she wasn't a killer, either. But, just not yet.
There were times when she caught herself thinking of the orphanage, of the way the rain used to fall softly against the windows, of how she would sit by the glass, lost in thoughts of a life she could never have. The world had been so quiet then, so simple. Back then she atleast wasn't treated like this. She had a place to live, a place to sleep, food to eat. The orphanage was far better than this. But now, it was anything but good.
The first time Raiden approached her, she had been practicing with a wooden sword — clumsy, uncoordinated, terrified of what might happen if she failed. Her hands trembled, but not as much as they had in the beginning. She was learning to hide it, learning to keep the fear deep inside her, buried with her emotions, where no one could see.
The other children didn't speak. They were older, harder. Some had dead eyes, others stared at nothing at all. No one cried. No one asked questions.
Everyone learned quickly that questions earned you pain.
Lia's first meal was a bowl of flavorless porridge. Her first night was a concrete cell with a thin, scratchy blanket. Her first lesson came the next morning.
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The training room was far colder than the rest of the compound, the stone floor slick with a fine layer of dust. It was a place where they turned children into weapons. Raiden stood in front of a row of wooden targets, each one scarred from countless blows.
"Pick up the sword," he ordered.
His voice was sharp, detached. No warmth, no threat. It didn't need it. There was something about him that made her skin crawl. The other kids spoke of him in hushed tones — the one who broke the weak, who made monsters out of frightened things.
"Today, we'll work on precision," he said, his voice calm, methodical. "You'll learn how to kill with one strike. No hesitation. No mercy."
Lia felt a lump in her throat as she looked at the sharpness in his eyes. "I don't want to kill anyone."
Raiden paused. For the first time, he seemed to register her words, though his expression didn't change.
"You don't get to choose, girl. You'll learn this, or you'll die."
His words hung in the air, heavy with the weight of truth. Lia had seen what happened to those who failed. They were discarded, forgotten — like the broken tools they were. She didn't want to be like them.
Still, she hesitated.
Raiden looked at her like she was an insect. A pointless thing.
"Strike the target," he instructed, his voice unyielding.
Lia took the blade in her hand, feeling its coldness seep into her skin. She stood before the target, even in it's stillness the shape of it is hauntingly human. For a moment, she thought about the orphanage again, about the warm, safe world that felt so far away.
But, by now that world wasn't real anymore.
Lia's grip tightened around the blade. She could feel the weight of her decision — this was no longer just training, It was survival. She lifted the blade, took a breath, and struck the wooden target.
The sound of the blade sinking into the wood echoed through the room.
Raiden nodded once, a glint of approval in his cold eyes. "Good. But you need to be faster. More precise."
Lia swallowed hard, her chest tightening. She didn't want to do this, killing someone was something she never thought of, even thinking about it creep her out
"Again," Raiden commanded.
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The hours dragged on, and the training only became more intense.
By the end of the day, she could hardly stand. Her limbs felt like lead, and the weight of the blade in her hand felt like an proof that she had came to a world from which she could never escape.
But Raiden's words echoed in her mind: Softness gets you killed.
Lia couldn't be soft. Not anymore.
She had to be hard.
Day-by-day.
The pain in Lia's body faded, it didn't exactly faded, she just got stronger enduring it, as she pushed herself further, until there was nothing but the cold determination to survive.
And as the dim lights flickered out and she was led back to her cell for the night, something inside her began to change.
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End of chapter 2
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