Chapter 4: The Killer's Lesson.
It had been 9 years, since she came here.
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The first thing Lia remembered about The Order was the cold, eerie place, making m a human afraid. The air felt like it carried the weight of a thousand unspoken rules — a heavy, suffocating presence. The sterile walls, the lack of warmth, the sharp smells of metal and disinfectant. It all crushed her chest, making it hard to breathe.
She had been so young, barely eleven when they took her. The memories of the orphanage were fading — dim and distant. She remembered the warmth of the sun on her face, the soft laughter of the other kids, the feeling of safety that was now, as fragile as a dream.
But then the van had arrived. The men dressed in black with cold eyes. They stuck a needle in her neck. And it got all dark.
When Lia woke up, she was no longer a child. She had no name here, no past. The first thing they taught her was that names didn't matter. The Order didn't care who you were. They cared about what you could do. Who you could kill.
The compound wasn't like a prison. It was worse. It was a machine, made to strip away everything human about you, whether it was the emotion of feeling fear, love, humanity and everything, until all that was left was obedience. Every hallway was lined with cameras, every room monitored. There were no windows, no outside world, just endless training and harsh lessons.
At first, Lia had fought it. She had tried to resist. But the training was relentless, every hour was a beating of her body, every second was a chisel carving away at her soul. They told her she was weak, told her that she wasn't good enough. Every failure was met with punishment. It wasn't long before she learned that to survive, she had to silence everything — the fear, the guilt, the pain. They all had to go, or she wouldn't make it out alive.
But there were moments, too. Moments where she couldn't help but feel the weight of what she was becoming.
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It was her first real mission that broke something inside her.
She had killed before, of course. Training drills, Dummies, Targets. She had learned the way to hold a knife, how to move quickly, how to strike without hesitation. But a real person? Never. The moment she saw the blood spilling from someone's throat, the moment she realized that this wasn't just a survial anymore, she had become a killer, a killer who had taken a human life. It felt like the world had shifted under her feet.
Lia had done it without thinking at first. They told her to, and she did. They always told her to do it in the past, but they weren't real humans. But this time was different. This time, she had seen the man's eyes — wide with shock, with fear, with something she couldn't quite place. His face twisted in pain, and then he went limp.
It had been clean. It had been quick. But that didn't matter.
The guilt hit her all at once. It wasn't like anything she had ever felt before. It was like a weight pressing against her chest, making it harder and harder to breathe. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She had killed someone. A real person. Someone with a family, a family who was waiting for him, a person with a life. Someone who didn't deserve to die. But she killed him.
But she couldn't afford to feel that. Not here.
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Back at the compound, the next few days passed in a blur. Raiden didn't care about her feelings. He didn't care if she felt guilty. He didn't care if she was scared. The only thing he cared about was results.
"You'll learn to stop caring about that," he had told her, his voice cold and detached. "Feelings will get you killed here. You kill or you die."
But Lia wasn't like the others. She wasn't like the kids who had been here longer, the ones who had learned to shut it all down. They were all ruthless. Cold. Empty. They were the ones who had learned how to silence their emotions, how to kill without hesitation.
Ash was one of them. He was quick, precise, and never looked back. He had been at The Order for years. His eyes were always hard, calculating. He didn't hesitate. He didn't feel. He just killed.
Then there was Marrow. She was different, colder even than Ash. Her silence was more than just a lack of words — it was an absence of humanity, a hollow space where a person used to be. She didn't show fear. She didn't show anything. Not even when they sent her out on the missions. Lia had seen her once, right after she had returned from a particularly brutal mission. She was covered in blood, her expression blank. She had simply walked past Lia without a word, as if nothing had happened.
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The training continued, every day a fresh lesson in killing. They were taught how to use every weapon, how to move without being seen, how to anticipate a target's every move. But the lessons weren't just physical. They were psychological. The instructors told them time and time again that emotions were a liability. If you hesitated, if you thought about the person you were killing, you were already dead.
But Lia couldn't help it.
She remembered the look on the man's face when he died, how his eyes widened with fear. How his hands reached out, as if begging for mercy. She remembered how his blood stained her hands, how the weight of his life seemed to cling to her. It was the first time she had felt something that deep, and it wasn't fear. It was guilt. It was regret. The feeling of killing someone could not be washed away. It was haunting her.
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The Order was a place designed to strip away everything that made you human. There was no room for feelings, no room for weakness. The only thing that mattered was obedience. They told you to kill. And you continued to kill.
But in the quiet moments, when she lay in her cot, she was unable to sleep, Lia couldn't escape the nagging feeling in the back of her mind. Who was she becoming?
It didn't matter what Raiden said. It didn't matter what anyone said. The feeling of guilt stayed with her — a shadow she couldn't shake away, no matter what. No matter how much they tried to erase who she was, she couldn't forget.
It wasn't a life she wanted to live for.
In this dark moment, there arose a spark of light. A light for courage, courage to destroy this place.
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End of chapter 4
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