Azzam hurried toward his room in the Academy dorms as if the corridors were narrowing behind him.
His breaths came fast—not because fear chased him, but because a mad, childish excitement ran ahead of reason and yanked it by the collar. His steps on the stone floor were light and broken, as if he feared the echo of his joy might wake someone. Both hands pressed against his chest at the inner fold of his robe—where he had hidden the three doses, where glass slept near his heart like an extra heart.
He wasn't thinking about consequences. He was thinking about one word that kept repeating inside him like a pulse:
*Loot.*
Loot from a place he had no right to enter. Loot he had snatched from the hands of the "power factory," then been thrown out the door like trash. The humiliation was still hot on his shoulder where he had struck the doorframe hours earlier. It wasn't the pain that remained.
It was the meaning:
*You don't belong.*
And for Azzam—or for something living inside Azzam—that meaning was unacceptable.
He shoved his door open, then slammed it shut behind him in one sharp motion. Dim light settled in the room: a faint lamp, a bed made with military coldness, a metal locker that carried no scent of home. This wasn't a bedroom.
It was a cell.
And yet, to him now, it was the holiest place in the world—because it was the only place where he could be alone with his loot.
He stepped to the small table beside the bed and took the doses out.
Three glass syringes—thin, cold, gleaming under the light as if they carried a compressed future. He lifted one in front of his eyes, and the liquid inside fractured the light into fine lines. For a moment he felt like he was holding something humans had no right to hold.
Then he smiled—a short smile without real joy. His joy wasn't the joy of a child with a toy.
It was the joy of a drowning man who had found a stone to strike the water with.
He whispered—not to anyone, but to his own body:
"I won't be weak again."
That sentence alone was enough to shove him into the next decision without hesitation.
A suicidal decision.
Mix the doses together.
He didn't ask: are they raw? are they high-pressure? Will this kill me? He didn't ask because the question *will I die* no longer frightened him. He had tasted death. The rope had taught him that life in Chen wasn't a right—and that weakness wasn't a phase.
Weakness was a sentence of permanent humiliation.
And he was tired of being kicked out of doors.
He pulled a small metal bowl from the table drawer—something cadets used to disinfect simple tools. He laid the syringes before him like knives lined up for a crime. Then he opened the first and emptied it, then the second, then the third. The liquid mixed quickly in the bowl, becoming a color that refused to settle: transparent leaning toward milky white, then clear again like water, then flashing with a faint shimmer.
Azzam stared at it as if looking into a new mirror.
Then he lifted one of the empty syringes and drew the entire mixture back into it.
The glass filled again—heavier now, as if it carried more than three doses. It carried a complete decision.
He raised his arm and chose a clear vein at his wrist. He didn't hesitate. He didn't test a small amount. He drove the needle into his skin and pushed the plunger in one motion—no mercy, no gradual climb.
The moment the mixture entered his blood, his vision darkened.
Not the darkness of a room.
Darkness inside the eye itself, as if blood surged up to lock his sight. Sound fell away, then returned all at once, amplified, then shattered. Beneath it all, a bright, brutal red warning appeared inside him—so clear it felt printed on the wall of his brain:
**WARNING: ENERGY OUTSIDE ASSIMILATION RANGE!**
These weren't the words of a phone screen.
They were the words of a *system* that knew how to stamp its voice onto nerve.
Another line followed, as if the system wasn't only warning—it was analyzing:
**Quantity: 5 megawatts.**
Five megawatts.
The number alone was enough to break a normal mind. Concentrated biological power—enough, if it detonated, to wipe an entire continent off the map.
Azzam tried to laugh, but no sound came. His throat clenched shut. His chest compressed. Something inside his body began to scream without sound.
His body trembled.
Then seized.
Then the convulsions turned monstrous—as if his muscles were becoming smelted wires being yanked from beneath the skin. His veins felt like fire pipes, as if blood was no longer blood but liquid metal rushing at inhuman speed. His teeth clacked so hard he thought they might shatter. His jaw locked. His neck tightened as if it wanted to tear itself free.
Then real pain arrived: pressure on the bones—not from an external blow, but from inside. As if the skeleton wanted to expand, or as if something wanted to crawl out of the bone and couldn't find an exit. His shoulders felt like they were cracking, his spine like it was being stretched slowly, the bones in his fingers close to grinding apart.
Distilled kayf wasn't euphoria.
It was a knife walking the nerves.
Azzam collapsed to his knees. He reached for the table edge and found no strength. His forehead struck the floor. Then his body began to shake on the stone like something melted by the current.
He saw violet flashes behind his eyelids. The seal at his neck was no longer quiet, no longer a pulse.
It was a small sun trying to carve its way out from under the skin.
With each surge, the system repeated its warning—not always the same words, but always the same color, the same violence.
**Warning… outside assimilation range.**
He wanted to scream *enough*, but his mouth didn't obey. Language broke. There was only the body fighting itself.
At the peak of the convulsions, violent pounding hit the door.
Then a voice—half shout, half strangled panic:
"Azzam! Open up!"
He didn't.
The pounding came again, then paused for a single heartbeat ononon —
then the door exploded inward.
Badr entered.
His face was shock first—pure shock, the shock of a man seeing something he had no frame for. Then shock turned quickly into buried fear. He wasn't afraid of Azzam out of love.
He was afraid of what it *meant*.
Azzam on the floor, shaking. His body throwing off an unnatural aura, as if the air around him compressed then snapped free. His eyes half open, a strange light in them—not tears, not sickness.
Something Badr didn't recognize.
Badr stepped back, then forward, trapped between two instincts: run…
or seize the truth before it ran.
"What did you do?" The words fell out of him without permission.
Azzam didn't answer. He was somewhere else inside his body.
The convulsions peaked—then, suddenly, everything cut off.
Not only the pain.
Motion itself.
As if a knife had been cutting and then frozen in midair. Azzam's body went slack in one drop. His head fell to the floor. His eyes rolled slightly and closed.
He passed out.
But this wasn't ordinary fainting.
This was a fall into a *ofwer hibernation**—a sleep that began when the body tried to rebuild itself under energy it couldn't cwas arry while awake.
Badr dropped fast, pressed a hand to his chest, and. The heartbeat was powerful, irregular at first, then slowly stabilized. He touched Azzam's forehead; the heat was high, but it wasn't fever.
It was furnace heat.
Badr stayed on his knees, staring at Azzam's face like runswas looking at a stranger who had occupied their house. Then his eyes lifted to the empty syringe on the table, to the stains of liquid in the metal bowl.
He understood at least one thing:
Azzam wasn't playing anymore.
And worse—
Azzam didn't care if he died.
Frozen passed.
Then a second.
Then a third.
Badr did not spread the story. He didn't shout. He didn't run to the council. He stayed close, watching and counting. The Academy had too many eyes, and anything that happened in the dorms became a record.
But Badr also wanted the ending with his own eyes. He needed certainty:
Was th ands the sleep of death…
or the sleep of birth?
On the third day, shortly before dawn, the air in the room changed.
Not because a window opened.
Because something in the body on the bed rearranged the room around it. The aura that had been leaking like a knife-edge of heat grew quiet and concentrated, like an invisible transparent wall.
Badr sat in the chair beside the bed, exhaustion weighing his thoughts until his mind felt like stone.
Then he felt movement.
A finger.
Then a shoulder.
Then a deep breath leaving Azzam's chest—the first breath after a long drowning.
Azzam opened his eyes.
Not with the heaviness of sickness.
With full clarity, as if sleep had been a decision, not a weakness. He stared at the ceiling, then at the dim light, then at Baconvey snapped to his seat and lifted as if to strike Azzam awake ffully, then stopped
The fthe OrametheOrame, yes.
But the weight behind it had changed.
Badr spoke fast, voice tight:
"Get up. We don't have time… the war school is waiting!"
He said it like he was forcing Azzam back into the system, like he feared this thing might stay in the room one second longer and swallow the entire house.
Azzam sat up. The movement was too easy. No groan. No hesitation. When he put his feet on the floor, Badr felt—before he even saw it—that the floor itself responded. As if the new weight didn't just press.
It imposed presence.
Azzam stood.
He stood straight, then turned his head slowly. His eyes examined the room like it was the first time he'd seen it. Then he raised his hand, stared at his fingers, and flexed them once.
Senses—sharp.
He could hear the electric hum in the wall like a thread of sound. He could smell old sweat trapped in the blanket fibers. He could feel a faint vibration in the floor when a cadet passed outside.
His weight had changed—not because he had become physically larger, but because every part of him had become **compressed**, the way metals were compressed to become harder.
Inside him—in the same place the red warning had appeared—the system's voice returned.
But this time it wasn't a warning.
It was an announcement, like a cold congratulation:
**Entity upgraded… You have obtained the Superhuman Body.**
The sentence passed through his awareness like a stamp.
Badr swallowed.
"What… what happened to you?" he asked, but he didn't wait for an answer. He only wanted to hear Azzam's old voice, just once, to reassure himself that the stranger hadn't taken everything.
Azzam didn't give him that.
He turned to Badr, looked at him briefly, and said in a calm voice:
"We go."
One word. No questions. No explanation.
Badr nodded, unsettled, obeying because he had no better choice.
Azzam put on the war school uniform: dark cloth, sharp lines, an identity badge, a belt marked with a number. The uniform was meant to manufacture a cadet's authority.
On him now, it looked like a shell.
They left the dorm.
The path toward the gates was long and crowded with formations. Cadets moved in lines like output from a machine. Orders repeated. Flags snapped. Automated guards held corners. Everything said:
You are inside a system that does not sleep.
Azzam walked through it all with cold calm. He didn't look around too much. He didn't slow. He didn't hurry. As if he knew the route despite being "attached" only yesterday. As if the body carried an old memory of footsteps.
And as they neared the war school gates—massive gates of stone and metal, an engraved crest above them—something unexpected happened.
Tears poured from Azzam's eyes.
Clear tears, heavy, endless.
Badr froze for a heartbeat.
"Are you…?" He didn't finish. Because Azzam's face held no sorrow. No break. No softness. His expression was flat, his gaze steady, and only the tears fell—as if they didn't ask permission.
Azzam lifted his hand and wiped the tears away once.
The wipe wasn't gentle.
It was cold—like a man wiping water off a blade before sliding it back into its sheath.
Azzam understood.
It wasn't him crying.
The body was remembering.
Remembering this place: gates, guards, mocking faces, orders thrown like stones, humiliations written into flesh by days and years. Remembering that it had once stood here powerless, and that this place had been a stage for its torment.
That memory now escaped as tears, like poison finally finding an exit.
Azzam took one deep breath. Then he spoke to himself in a voice too low for others to catch, yet clear enough inside his own head:
"I'm here now… not to learn."
"I'm here to make them taste the torment the owner of this body tasted."
Then he stepped toward the gates.
One step.
Then a second.
And the tears stopped as abruptly as they began—without warning, as if the body had spoken and fallen silent.
Behind him, Badr followed.
And with each step, Badr felt it more clearly:
He wasn't entering a war school with his brother.
He was walking into a new hell—
led by someone whose true name he no longer knew.