REBORN INTO A COMBAT ACADEMY

Diego's mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood before his eyes even snapped into place.

Cold water slammed into his face — not a splash, a full bucket of it — and his lungs seized as he gasped without meaning to. 

His cheek hit the tiled floor with a hard, ugly thud, the grout scraping raw against his skin.

Something was wrong and it burned into the center of his soul.

He was on the floor of the lower-level locker room at Ironclad Combat Academy, the air thick with the smell of chalk dust, sweat, and cheap antiseptic.

 Somewhere above him, through the vents, the gym was still running its evening drills — bare feet slapping mats, a coach's whistle cutting the air, shouts rising and falling in rhythm.

Down here, it was different. Cold laughter ran through the walls of the cage.

The scrape of a bucket being tossed aside. 

And then boots walking off like nothing had happened.

His body wouldn't move the way he told it to like he had lost control of his own being.

Every joint felt stiff, wrong, like it had been folded away somewhere for far longer than made sense. 

Memories tore through his mind in jagged pieces, sharp enough to hurt — a convoy on fire, a name radioed through static, a syringe sinking into his neck instead of a bullet, then nothing. Darkness with no bottom to it.

"I am..." His own voice scraped out of him, hoarse, barely recognizable.

"Diego Campbell. Rank 1. The academy's worst joke of a student." He drew one long, unsteady breath, and something old and heavy rose up inside him, filling a body far too small to hold it. "And at the same time... Julius Reid."

If any of the boys who had just walked away laughing had heard that second name, it wouldn't have meant anything to them. 

They were too young, too far removed from it to know what it means.

But there had been a time when that name alone could clear a room — Julius Reid, commander of Wraith Company, the ghost soldiers that entire governments denied ever existed.

 A man feared by people who feared nothing else. Presumed dead for four years, ever since his own second-in-command decided a bullet would make him a martyr and a needle would just make him disappear.

"Finally," Julius breathed, and something like a smile touched his mouth, though there was no warmth in it. "Free."

It didn't last.

Awareness kept pouring in, and with it, the shape of the boy whose body he was now wearing.

"Diego Campbell." He said it again, slower, letting the memories settle where they belonged. 

The owner of this body was an orphan. With no family name, no sponsor, nothing paying his way except a scholarship he'd fought like hell to keep. At Ironclad, that made him nothing before he'd even set foot on the mats.

Here, worth was measured in Rank. 

The academy ran its own ladder, one through nine, chalked onto a board in the main hall for everyone to see — a public accounting of who mattered and who didn't. 

Those at Rank 9 walked straight into private security contracts and championship purses. Rank 1 carried their gear and cleaned up after them.

Diego had trained harder than almost anyone in his year. 

But none of that mattered.

Bad footwork, slow hands, a body that never quite did what his mind screamed at it to do. Two years of effort had bought him exactly one thing: the bottom of the board, and a reputation as the punching bag every upper-rank kept in reserve.

While others could get private tutors and supplements to help their training. He only had scraps to go by each day.

Julius pressed his fingers into his temple as a fresh stab of pain cut through his skull. He didn't feel contempt looking through these memories — if anything, it was closer to respect. Diego had kept showing up. Kept training after the lights went out in the gym, long after everyone else had stopped believing it would ever amount to anything. He'd had everything except the one thing that couldn't be trained into a body — talent.

A sharper memory surfaced, fresh enough to still sting.

Tomorrow, the main arena, right after the last period. Trent Wexler — Rank 6, whose family's name was stamped on half the equipment in this building — had cornered Diego by the vending machines and told him, loud enough for an audience, exactly what was going to happen to his legs in front of the whole school.

The instructors would look away. Trent's father had paid for the new mats.

Tomorrow, Julius thought. That's not much time.

Worse than the fight itself — the last thing Diego had done before Julius surfaced in his place was empty half a bottle of painkillers into his palm, sitting alone on the edge of his bunk with the lights off, doing the arithmetic on how much would be enough.

The bucket of water had landed on him only minutes after he'd put the bottle away, unfinished. Whoever had dumped it thought they were humiliating a boy who was already beaten. They had no idea how close they'd come to finding nothing behind that locker room door at all.

Julius's jaw tightened.

He pushed himself up off the tiles slowly, testing muscles that had no idea yet what he intended to make of them. 

It was weak, untrained and soft in places that should have been iron. If he was being honest with himself, pathetic.

But muscle remembered, eventually. It always did.

"Four years," he murmured, and the number settled in his chest like a stone.

He turned his hands over in front of his face — unmarked, uncalloused, none of the scars he'd earned a hundred times over written anywhere on his skin. This body had nothing he needed. 

Not yet. 

Down the hall, another round of laughter rolled past the door. Somewhere out there, someone already had a story ready about the Rank 1 washout who'd been found facedown in the locker room again.

Julius Reid let his eyes fall shut for one long moment, and let whatever was left of Diego's fear — the shame, the exhaustion, the quiet decision he'd almost gone through with — drain out of him completely.

When he opened his eyes again, none of it remained.

"This body is mine now," he said quietly, to no one. "Whoever put their hands on it before me — I'll be settling

that myself. Starting tomorrow."

No one would touch it again.

No one would dare.