Seven years passed.
Helios grew. But unlike the other children of Troy, he did not discover himself. He remembered.
The first memory surfaced when he was three—not a dream, not a fragment, but a crystal-clear recall of a stainless steel kitchen, a smartphone buzzing on a quartz countertop, the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the sound of CNBC squawking about Asian markets. He had been sitting in the courtyard, chewing on a piece of stale bread, when the image hit him like a wall of light.
He dropped the bread. His infant hands trembled.
That was my life. That was real.
By four, he had catalogued over two hundred distinct memories: his name in the past life (he kept it sealed, a private talisman), his penthouse overlooking Central Park, the twelve years he spent as a global investor—moving capital, reading quarterly reports, shorting oil futures, attending board meetings in Geneva and Shanghai. He remembered the anime he had binged on sleepless nights: Sword Art Online, the Prince of Persia film, Fate/stay night, every frame of Kirito's dual-blade sequences and the fluid, wall-running acrobatics of the Prince.
And he remembered the stories—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the myths of Achilles and Hector and Ares and Apollo. He had read them in college. He had watched Troy (2004) in a theater, criticized the historical inaccuracies to a friend over whiskey. He had seen 300: Rise of an Empire on a flight to London, rolling his eyes at the exaggerated slow motion but secretly admiring the brutal choreography.
Now he was living in one of those stories.
Or something like it.
Because the world around him was not exactly the history he remembered. The geography was similar, the names matched, but there were… gaps. Things that did not fit. A soldier who claimed to have seen a man lift a horse. A priestess who spoke of Apollo as though the god actually answered prayers. Helios filed these anomalies away. He was a strategist. He did not jump to conclusions.
Either I am in a mythologically accurate version of the Bronze Age, he thought, or I am in a world where the myths are real. The difference will determine my survival curve.
---
He lived with Karya in a modest house near the western wall. She was a good mother—loving, patient, but haunted. He saw it in the way she watched him, the way her hand would pause mid-reach as if afraid to touch his skin. She knew he was not ordinary. She did not know he carried a thirty-year-old modern mind behind his golden eyes.
He kept that secret locked tighter than any portfolio.
At night, when the oil lamps burned low, Helios would lie on his sleeping mat and run mental simulations. He was no longer an investor allocating capital. He was an investor allocating survival. He assessed the political structure of Troy: a monarchy with advisory councils, a warrior class, a merchant economy heavily dependent on trade routes that were growing unstable. He identified key power players, supply vulnerabilities, military strengths. He calculated the probability of war with the Achaeans—high, given the abduction of Helen (which had not yet happened, but he knew it was coming).
If I am inside the Iliad timeline, he reasoned, then I have roughly ten to fifteen years before the fleet gathers at Aulis. That is my preparation window.
He did not yet know if the gods were real. He did not yet know if he had powers beyond his unnaturally fast learning and his strange resistance to heat. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty: the body he now inhabited was different. It recovered from bruises overnight. It never grew sick. It could run farther and faster than any child his apparent age should.
And his eyes—those unsettling golden irises—seemed to drink in light.
He tested his limits methodically, like an investor stress-testing a model. He held his hand over a candle flame until the skin reddened, then healed within the hour. He jumped from the courtyard wall—twelve feet—landed in a roll, and felt only a mild shock in his knees. He lifted a stone that two grown men would struggle with. His muscles did not strain; they simply complied.
Enhanced physical baseline, he noted. Approximately double peak human for my age, with accelerated healing. Source unknown. Hypothesis: divine lineage. If so, Apollo is the most likely candidate based on the sun imagery in my birth memories.
He did not celebrate. He did not feel chosen. He felt audited—as though some cosmic force had reviewed his past life and decided to reassign him to a higher-risk asset class.
---
When Helios was six, Karya took him to the agora.
The market was a chaos of smells and sounds—roasting lamb, fresh urine, copper coins clinking, merchants shouting in half a dozen dialects. Helios walked with his hand in his mother's, but his eyes moved like a surveillance drone: cataloguing escape routes, identifying pickpockets, noting the quality of the weapons on the guards' hips.
Pre-industrial economy, he thought. No currency standardization. High information asymmetry. This market is a nightmare of inefficiency.
A storyteller called out to them. Old, one-eyed, holding a lyre with only four strings. "Boy! You have the look of a hero. Shall I sing you the song of Achilles?"
Helios stopped. He knew Achilles. He had read the Iliad twice. He had watched Brad Pitt play him on a seventy-inch screen. But he also knew that the real Achilles—if this world had a real one—was likely a brutal warlord inflated by centuries of oral tradition.
"I do not know that name," Helios said. It was a lie, but a useful one. He wanted to hear what this storyteller believed.
The old man laughed. "You will. Every boy in Greece knows it by the time he bleeds. The greatest warrior of our age. Faster than a serpent. Stronger than a bull. His mother dipped him in the river Styx, and now no blade can touch him."
Helios processed this. The Styx. A mythological river that supposedly granted invulnerability. In his past life, he had dismissed it as allegory. Here… he was no longer certain.
"If no blade can touch him," Helios said carefully, "then he has never learned to dodge."
The storyteller's laugh died. He stared at the boy with his one good eye. "That is not a child's answer."
No, Helios thought. It is an investor's answer. Complacency creates vulnerability.
Karya pulled him away before the old man could ask more questions. But Helios felt a cold spark of interest. Achilles. The name was a variable. A potential threat. And Helios had made his fortune by analyzing threats before they materialized.
---
When Helios was seven, Karya hired a sword master.
His name was Dymas, a retired mercenary from Thrace. He had lost two fingers on his left hand and most of his teeth to a Scythian axe. He smelled of old wine and older regret. Helios assessed him in three seconds: competent but broken, skilled but unmotivated. A man who had stopped improving decades ago.
"He is too young," Dymas said, staring at Helios with open skepticism.
"He is ready," Karya said.
Dymas snorted. "He is a twig. I could sneeze and break him."
Helios looked up at the old mercenary. He did not feel insulted. He felt analytical. Dymas was a tool. A resource. A means to an end.
"Then sneeze," Helios said. He kept his voice flat, neutral. No defiance. No fear. Just a calm request for data.
Dymas blinked. Then he laughed—a wet, gap-toothed sound. "All right, little prince. Let's see what you have."
---
They began the next morning.
Dymas started with footwork. Basic stance. Weight distribution. How to step without telegraphing. Helios absorbed it like a machine learning model ingesting training data. He did not just learn the movements—he optimized them. He adjusted the angle of his feet by two degrees to improve lateral stability. He shortened his stride by half a palm to reduce reaction time. He noticed that Dymas's own stance had a flaw—a slight lean to the right, compensating for his missing fingers—and filed it away for future exploitation.
"You learn fast," Dymas said after the first hour. There was suspicion in his voice.
"I observe," Helios replied.
By the end of the first week, Helios had exhausted Dymas's basic curriculum. The old mercenary showed him three standard cuts, two parries, and a shield bash. Helios practiced each one until the motion was autonomic—not because he had natural talent, but because he deconstructed the biomechanics. He had watched hours of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) videos in his past life, though he had never held a real sword. Now he combined that theoretical knowledge with his enhanced body.
The Prince of Persia would flow through these strikes, he thought. Kirito would double the tempo with a second blade.
He asked Dymas for a second training sword.
Dymas raised an eyebrow. "Two? You are not ready for two."
"Teach me anyway."
Dymas refused. For three days. Then, exasperated by the boy's relentless calm, he relented. He handed Helios a second wooden blade—shorter, lighter, meant for parrying.
Helios took it. He closed his eyes.
He remembered Kirito in the Aincrad arc: dual-wielding Elucidator and Dark Repulsor, the fluid spins, the relentless offense that turned defense into counterattack. He remembered the Prince of Persia leaping from walls, twisting in midair, using momentum to turn a single strike into a cascade.
He opened his eyes.
He moved.
The two swords became a blur. Not wild—precise. He wove a figure-eight pattern that covered high and low lines simultaneously. He stepped into a lunge, pivoted, brought the off-hand blade around in a hook that would have disarmed an opponent. He was not copying Dymas's style. He was composing.
Dymas stepped back. His face had lost its cynicism. "Where did you learn that?"
Helios lowered the blades. "I watched. I thought. I moved."
He did not say: I watched a Japanese anime about a boy trapped in a video game. I thought about how his sword logic would translate to real biomechanics. I moved because I have nothing else to do in this primitive hell but train.
Dymas was silent for a long moment. Then he walked to the far end of the courtyard, retrieved a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, and unwrapped it. Inside was a shortsword of bronze—old, unadorned, but sharp.
"Wood is for children," Dymas said. "If you are going to move like a demon, you will bleed like one."
He tossed the sword to Helios.
The boy caught it by the hilt without looking. His fingers wrapped around the grip. The bronze felt alive—warm, humming, as though it recognized him.
Helios raised the blade. The morning sun caught the edge. For a moment, the metal seemed to glow—a faint, golden shimmer that was probably a trick of the light.
Probably.
Dymas stared at the blade, then at Helios. The old mercenary's remaining eye was wide. "You are not normal."
"No," Helios agreed. "But I am efficient."
That night, Dymas packed his belongings and left Troy. He did not say goodbye. He did not take his final payment. He simply walked to the western gate and disappeared into the darkness.
Helios was not surprised. Dymas had been a tool. Tools break or flee. He would find another.
---
Karya found him in the courtyard beneath the pomegranate tree. The bronze sword lay across his knees. He was not looking at it. He was looking at the stars—and comparing them to the constellations he remembered from the 21st century. They were the same. Orion. Cassiopeia. The Pleiades.
Same sky, he thought. Different world. Or maybe the same world, different time. But the gods? The magic? That is new.
"What did you say to him?" Karya asked. She sat beside him, close but not touching.
"The truth," Helios said. "People do not like the truth."
Karya was quiet. Then: "Helios, you are not like other children."
"I know."
"Do you know why?"
He turned to look at her. She was afraid. Not of him—for him. He had seen that look before, on the faces of board members when a high-risk trade went south.
He could not tell her the truth. Not yet. Not ever, perhaps. How could he explain reincarnation? How could he make a Bronze Age noblewoman understand smartphones and anime and derivatives trading?
"I dream of fire," he said instead. It was not a lie. He did dream of fire—but he also dreamed of glass towers and silent keyboards and the smell of jet fuel. "Every night. A field of fire. And I am standing in the middle of it, and it does not burn me. But everyone around me is screaming."
Karya reached out and took his hand. Her palm was warm. Human. Fragile.
"You are my son," she said. "Whatever else you are. Whatever you become. You came from my body. And I will love you until the sun falls from the sky."
Helios felt something twist in his chest. He had not expected that. In his past life, he had no children. He had never wanted them. He had been too focused on accumulation, on winning, on the cold satisfaction of a perfectly executed trade.
Now he had a mother who loved him. A real mother. Not a memory.
This is a complication, he thought. Emotional attachments create irrational risk exposure.
But he did not pull his hand away.
---
The accident happened three days later.
Helios was walking along the western wall—not the top, where the guards paced, but the interior scaffolding used by masons. He often walked there. The height did not frighten him. He had jumped from higher places in his training, calculating the impact force and distributing it across his enhanced skeleton.
He did not see the loose stone.
His foot slipped. The scaffolding—old wood, poorly maintained—gave way beneath him. He fell.
Twenty feet. Thirty. Forty.
He did not scream. He did not close his eyes. In the three seconds of freefall, his mind ran a rapid assessment: Impact velocity approximately 15 meters per second. Body mass 25 kilograms. Kinetic energy roughly 2,800 joules. Unenhanced human would suffer multiple fractures. My enhanced physiology—unknown tolerance.
He hit the ground.
The impact cracked the cobblestones.
He felt a shock wave travel up his spine, rattle his ribs, compress his organs. His vision went white for a fraction of a second. Then—nothing. No pain. No broken bones. His healing factor was already working, knitting microscopic stress fractures before they could become injuries.
He sat up.
A merchant nearby dropped an amphora. It shattered. He did not notice. He was staring at the boy—the small, golden-haired boy sitting in a shallow crater of broken stone, dust rising around him like smoke.
The merchant ran to him. Two soldiers followed. A woman selling figs.
Helios stood. Brushed the dust from his tunic. He was not breathing hard. His heart rate had barely elevated.
Conclusion, he thought. My body can survive falls from at least forty feet with no injury. Further testing required. But not here. Too many witnesses.
The merchant was pale. "That's not possible. You fell from the wall. I saw you. You fell forty feet."
Helios looked at him. He calculated the man's threat level: zero. But his utility was negative—he would talk. Rumors would spread. Helios did not need attention. Attention invited questions. Questions invited exposure.
"The sun was warm," Helios said. "Perhaps it caught me."
No one laughed.
The fig seller began to weep. A soldier crossed himself in the old way. The merchant took a step back.
"You are not natural," the merchant whispered.
Helios held his gaze. For a moment, he considered revealing nothing—just walking away. But these people were already afraid. Fear could be managed. Fear could be directed.
"No," Helios said. "I am not."
He walked away. The crowd parted. He did not look back.
Note to self, he thought as he disappeared into the maze of narrow streets. The body has properties beyond enhanced strength and healing. Possible energy absorption or redistribution. The fact that the cobblestones cracked but my bones did not suggests kinetic energy was transferred into the ground rather than my skeleton. That is not normal biology. That is physics violation.
Either this world has different physical laws, or I have an ability I have not yet quantified.
I need more data.
He looked up at the sun. It was climbing toward noon. Warm. Bright. Familiar.
But something about the light felt different now. As though the sun itself was watching him back.
One variable at a time, he told himself. First: survive childhood. Second: master combat. Third: understand this world's rules. Fourth: find a way home—or learn to win here.
He was an investor. He had turned chaos into profit before.
He would do it again.
---
END OF CHAPTER TWO