Chapter 3: A Weapon's First Cut
The days blend together in The Order. There was no telling night from day — the compound was always lit by harsh fluorescent lights, always the same sterile smell of metal and antiseptic. The floors were cold, smooth concrete. The walls were smooth steel, watching. Silence was a weapon here, and every sound had its purpose — footsteps echoes in empty halls, everything was under the observation of the surveillance cameras, the occasional scream which were muted in the distance.
Lia had stopped counting the days a long time ago. It didn't matter how many hours, or even how many years, she could survive. Here, time wasn't measured in anything as trivial as the sun or the clock. It was measured in pain, in the cold bite of a weapon, in the hollowed-out spaces left where your heart used to be.
Every morning began the same. Forced to wake-up at 5 AM, the clang of a steel door. A harsh voice over a loudspeaker telling them to get up, to get ready. There were no breakfasts, just two meal in the entire day, barely enough food for a person to live. There was just training. Training until your limbs were numb, until your body screamed for rest, until you could no longer tell the difference between exhaustion and your own shattered will. Until you could no longer feel your body.
No one cared if you cried. No one cared if you begged.
If you showed weakness, it was a countdown to your death. You learned to hide it — to make it disappear, the way you made fear disappear.
Lia wasn't the strongest, but she wasn't the weakest either. She had learned to move with efficiency, silence, and precision. She was quick, but not reckless. There was no room for recklessness in The Order.
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Raiden was their instructor, and everyone knew to fear him. His skin was pale, almost ghostly, and his eyes were colder than the steel walls they trained in. He didn't need to raise his voice. His presence was enough to freeze you in place.
Today, he had them in the combat room — a wide, open space with no windows. Just walls of steel and the scent of sweat and blood. The floor was marked with the outline of bodies, shapes from drills and executions alike. Training here wasn't a game. It was a lesson in survival.
They didn't teach her how to fight. They taught her how to kill.
Precision. Efficiency. No hesitation.
That was the first rule.
Raiden showed them how to hold the blade, how to move, how to strike at the throat, the heart, the spine. Places that ended a life in seconds.
"This is how you kill someone, you must learn to end lives," he said, motioning to the row of wooden training dummies shaped like human figures. Scarred, hacked, marked with countless cuts from others who had come before her.
Lia's chest tightened.
"Fear keeps you sharp," he'd said during one of their first drills. "But only if you control it. If you let it control you, you're dead."
"Your knife isn't your weapon," Raiden said, pacing in front of them. "Your mind is. The blade's just a tool."
"If you hesitate, you lose. If you hesitate, you die."
Raiden looked at them like they were an insect. A pointless thing.
"You don't get to choose. You only have two option either do what you are told or die."
His voice was flat, final. And Lia understood something then: there was no room for defiance here. No space for softness.
Those who hesitated disappeared.
Raiden handed her a real blade this time. Short, wickedly sharp. The weight of it settled in her palm like a promise.
"Strike."
Lia stared at the dummy. It wasn't alive. It wasn't a person. But her hands still trembled. The cold steel bit into her skin as she tightened her grip.
She swung.
The sound of the blade sinking into wood was dull, unremarkable. But in her ears, it was deafening.
Raiden's cold eyes watched them.
"Again."
And again. And again.
Until her hands blistered, her arms trembled, and her stomach churned. Until she moved on instinct alone.
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That night, she couldn't sleep.
The thin blanket did nothing against the chill. The walls pressed in closer. She lay awake, staring at the ceiling, at the bruises on her knuckles. Laying all tired.
She felt it — the emotion, the fear, the sick, hollow ache of what she was becoming.
But if she didn't, she'd die.
The Order didn't care if she broke. They didn't care if she wept, if she bled. They would discard her like the others. The halls were empty of those who had been "too soft."
Raiden's words echoed in her head.
"Softness gets you killed."
Lia turned on her side, pulling the thin blanket tighter around herself.
It was not the first time, she wondered how long she could survive this place. How long could she withstand it.
She didn't want to do this, she miss her days in orphanage. But it was of no use. She didn't have any option, this was the only way to survive.
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End of chapter 3
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