One hundred and five million, one hundred and twenty thousand.
Exactly four years.
Kaiser Warborn was fourteen years old. He had spent one thousand, four hundred and sixty days without seeing the sun, feeling the wind, or hearing a human voice.
He stood in the center of the Nullification Chamber, his body a testament to extreme, isolated evolution. The meager, utilitarian rations had offered no excess fat to soften his frame. His shoulders had broadened dramatically, his chest expanding to house a cardiovascular system that had been forced to operate under terrifying, self-imposed strain. The muscles of his arms and back were deeply striated, thick with dense, utilitarian power.
He had outgrown his woolen trousers entirely; they were now torn off at the knees, functioning as ragged shorts. His pale skin, draped in the heavy shadows of the pitch-black room, was slick with cold sweat.
He was not practicing the frictionless strike today.
He had learned to slip through the spatial vacuum without triggering the Nullification Runes. But to hold the Abyssal Edge—the localized tear in reality that he could manifest along the side of his hand—he needed to drastically increase his bone density and muscular mass to withstand the violent physical backlash of the Void.
He could not build that necessary mass by slipping through the air. He needed resistance. He needed weight.
He needed to fight the room.
Kaiser dropped into a low, wide stance. He took a deep breath, expanding his massive lung capacity, and deliberately erased the perfect, aerodynamic geometry he had spent two years mastering.
He threw a sloppy, excessively forceful horizontal punch.
The kinetic displacement was massive. The air in the chamber violently tore.
Instantly, the Nullification Runes carved into the lead-stone walls shrieked into existence. The spatial vacuum detected the violent shockwave and clamped down with crushing, absolute force. The air around Kaiser's arm solidified into an invisible, gelatinous concrete.
His fist stopped dead, suspended in the air.
This was the exact phenomenon that had dislocated his shoulder over a year ago.
But this time, Kaiser did not recoil from the pain. He did not try to correct his posture to slip the magical drag.
He leaned into it.
He engaged his core, locked his spine, and pushed.
He was treating the foundational spatial magic of the Northern Marches as a resistance weight. He drove his legs into the floor, using the immense friction of his calloused feet against the stone, and forced his arm forward through the magical concrete.
The physical toll was agonizing. His biceps and pectorals bulged, the muscle fibers screaming under a strain that defied natural physics. He was effectively trying to bench-press a localized black hole.
Push, his thirty-two-year-old intellect commanded, ignoring the burning accumulation of lactic acid. Thicken the bone. Harden the tendon.
He moved his fist forward by a single, agonizing inch.
The runes pushed back, a heavy, dead weight that threatened to crush his skeleton. His internal hearing was deafened by the violent grinding of his own joints and the frantic, high-pressure rushing of blood through his arteries. His heart rate skyrocketed to one hundred and sixty beats per minute.
He managed one more inch before his muscles completely failed.
The moment his forward momentum ceased, the runes absorbed the remaining kinetic energy, and the resistance vanished. Kaiser collapsed forward, catching himself on his hands and knees, gasping for oxygen in the stagnant air.
His right arm was trembling so violently he could barely hold himself up.
He stayed on the floor for ten thousand heartbeats, commanding his biology to accelerate the repair of the micro-tears in his muscle fibers. He visualized the protein from his bleak rations breaking down, flooding the damaged tissue, rebuilding it denser and thicker than before.
He was sculpting a vessel capable of housing a god of entropy.
When the trembling finally subsided, Kaiser did not stand up. He remained on his hands and knees, pressing his right ear flat against the freezing lead-stone floor.
It was time for his anchor.
He pushed his absolute hearing upward, filtering through a mile of solid granite, bypassing the dungeons, bypassing the servant levels, reaching for the family wing.
Aric was four years old.
The chaotic, frantic pat-pat-pat of the toddler's footsteps had grown heavier, more defined. He was no longer a stumbling infant; he was a boy learning the architecture of his own body.
But the rhythm today was not the joyous running of a child playing in the halls. It was the frantic, desperate scuffling of a child trying to keep his balance.
Scuff. Pat. Slide... THUD.
Kaiser winced. Aric had fallen hard.
He mapped the localized acoustics. They were not in the carpeted hallways. The sound was flat and hard. They were in the upper sparring ring—a small, enclosed courtyard reserved for private instruction.
Crunch. Crunch.
Duke Arthur Warborn stepped forward.
"Get up," the Duke's baritone voice vibrated down the mountain, muffled but carrying the distinct, heavy weight of absolute command.
Aric was crying. It was a high-pitched, ragged sound, thick with physical pain and the profound emotional betrayal of a child who does not understand why his father is hurting him.
"I... I can't," Aric sobbed, his tiny voice barely penetrating the bedrock. "It's too heavy, Papa."
Kaiser felt the vibration of a wooden practice sword resting on the stone floor next to Aric. The Duke had likely upgraded the boy from light pine to dense oak. For a four-year-old, an oak practice sword was a monumental burden.
"A Warborn does not say 'cannot'," the Duke rumbled, stepping closer. The sheer density of his crimson mana was pressing down on the boy, not to crush him, but to temper him. "The oak is heavy. The steel you will carry at ten will be heavier. The crown of the North you will wear at thirty will be the heaviest of all. Pick it up."
Aric continued to cry, his small hands slapping against the cold stone as he tried to push himself up.
Kaiser's jaw clenched in the dark. He remembered the ironwood rod. He remembered the casual, brutal velocity with which his father had swung at his three-year-old head.
The Duke was holding back with Aric. He was not swinging to shatter bones. He was swinging to build endurance. He was treating Aric like a normal human boy.
But to Aric, the cruelty felt absolute.
Suddenly, the heavy, double doors of the sparring ring burst open.
A wave of blazing, localized heat rippled down through the stone. Duchess Eleanor had arrived.
"Arthur Warborn, you step away from him this instant!" Eleanor's voice was a clarion call of maternal fury. Her fire mana exploded, significantly raising the ambient temperature of the bedrock above.
"We are training, Eleanor," the Duke replied calmly, though his heavy boots shifted to brace against her magical pressure.
"He is four years old!" Eleanor screamed, her footsteps clicking rapidly across the stone as she rushed to Aric, scooping the crying boy into her arms. Kaiser felt the sudden, soothing rush of her healing mana washing over Aric's bruised arms and legs. "He is not a Vanguard recruit! He is a baby!"
"He is the heir," the Duke corrected, his tone dropping into a dark, unyielding register.
"Kaiser is the heir!" Eleanor snapped back, the name vibrating down into the tomb with a painful, tragic irony.
Silence fell over the sparring ring.
Down in the Great Silence, Kaiser stopped breathing.
"Kaiser is gone, Eleanor," the Duke said softly. The Warlord of the North sounded unimaginably tired. "He has locked himself in the dark. He is mastering the absolute depths of his own mind, but he will not stand in the Imperial Court. He will not lead the Vanguard on a horse. Aric must be ready."
"You drove him into the dark," Eleanor hissed, her voice trembling with suppressed sobs. "You beat him until he thought a tomb was safer than his own home. I will not let you do the same to Aric."
Kaiser pressed his face hard against the cold stone floor, shutting his eyes tightly beneath the blindfold.
No, Mother, he thought, a desperate, silent plea. He didn't drive me down here. I came down here to protect Aric from me.
"I did what was necessary for his survival," the Duke stated, his voice regaining its iron edge. "And I am doing what is necessary for Aric's. The capital grows restless. The Emperor is sick. When the throne changes hands, the North must be a fortress of iron, not a nursery of glass. Put the boy down. He must finish his forms."
"If you raise that wooden sword against him again today," Eleanor threatened, her voice dropping to a terrifying, lethal whisper, "you will sleep in the barracks with your men. Because if you come to my chambers, I will burn the flesh from your bones."
She turned sharply, her heavy velvet dress swishing violently, and carried the sobbing Aric out of the sparring ring.
The heavy doors slammed shut.
The Duke was left alone in the courtyard. Kaiser listened as his father stood perfectly still for ten long minutes. The crimson mana in the Duke's chest pulsed with a heavy, solitary burden. He was the villain of his own family, bearing the hatred of his wife to ensure the survival of his sons.
Crunch. Crunch.
The Duke finally walked away, his heavy boots dragging slightly.
Kaiser slowly pushed himself up from the floor of the Nullification Chamber.
His muscles ached with a profound, agonizing burn. His body was battered from fighting the spatial runes. But his mind was cold, sharp, and utterly resolved.
Aric was soft. He cried when he fell. He sought the comfort of his mother's arms. He was everything a four-year-old child should be.
And because Aric was soft, Kaiser had to become infinitely hard.
"I cannot just have the edge," Kaiser whispered into the vacuum, pacing back toward the center of the room. "I must have the strength to swing it."
He didn't wait for his muscles to fully recover. He didn't wait for the lactic acid to flush.
He dropped back into the wide, unrefined stance. He took a deep breath, visualizing the invisible concrete of the spatial vacuum.
He threw another sloppy, violent punch.
The runes flared. The air solidified. The magical resistance slammed into his knuckles.
Kaiser screamed—a raw, feral sound of pure exertion that was instantly eaten by the silence—and pushed.
He drove his fist into the magic, tearing his own muscle fibers, fracturing the microscopic structure of his own bones so they would heal denser, heavier, stronger.