REBORN INTO A COMBAT ACADEMY

Chapter 2

Sorting through Diego's memories left a sharp ache behind Julius's eyes, a slow throb that beat against his skull like something trying to get out. Every memory he touched felt like pressing a thumb into a bruise that hadn't finished forming.

Diego Campbell. Born into a world where worth was measured in a number chalked on a board — Rank 1 through Rank 9 — and where the only currency that mattered besides that number was whose name your family carried. It made no difference to Julius whether the body he was wearing had come from money or from nothing. A body was a vessel. A tool to be sharpened. What mattered was what it could do.

The problem was that this one couldn't do much.

His reflexes are wrong.

Not slow, exactly — Julius had felt slow bodies before, weak ones, untrained ones, and they could all be fixed with enough hours on a mat.

 This was different. There was a lag buried somewhere between Diego's eyes and his hands, a half-second of static every time a strike came at him, like his nervous system had been wired by someone who'd never actually seen a fight. 

Some fighters were simply born with it — the ability to read a shifting shoulder before the punch behind it ever left the ground. 

Others spent a lifetime chasing that instinct and never quite caught it. Diego was the second kind, and no number of hours in the gym had been enough to file it away completely.

"You had it rough, kid," Julius muttered, and meant it.

Two years at Ironclad had given Diego nothing but the bottom rung of the board and a reputation to match it.

 His dorm-mates — two other scholarship kids who'd come in with him on the same underfunded intake — had turned out to have exactly what Diego didn't: real speed, real power, the kind of raw gift that made coaches stop mid-sentence to watch.

 If Diego was a chipped stone rattling around at the bottom of a bag, they were polished steel.

 They should have looked out for him. Instead, once their own rankings started climbing, they fed him to the older students as a sparring dummy and laughed about it in the hallway loud enough for him to hear.

Julius's jaw tightened as the memory settled. Cruelty from strangers was easy to shrug off. Cruelty from the people who were supposed to be on your side left a different kind of mark.

His attention moved to the floor by the bunk, where a scattering of white tablets lay next to an open bottle.

Painkillers.

Not many left in the bottle. Enough gone, and gathered carefully enough over what looked like weeks, that there was only one explanation for it. Diego hadn't planned this in a moment of panic. He'd planned it the way a man plans anything he's finally decided on — patiently, quietly, one saved tablet at a time.

That's how I got in.

Diego's grip on this life had already been loosening before Julius arrived — not torn away, just let go of, the way a hand finally opens after holding on too long. There had been no fight for the body. Just one consciousness stepping back as another poured into the space it left.

That didn't mean they were separate now. Julius had taken everything — the humiliation, the exhaustion, the small stubborn hope that had kept Diego training long after it should have died. He was Julius Reid, but Diego's memories sat inside him now too, folded in like a second set of scars.

He closed his eyes and kept digging, past the pills, past the humiliation, looking for something more useful: the shape of the world he'd woken up into.

What he found made him go still.

Four years. Only four years had passed, and yet the combat world Diego had grown up watching bore almost no resemblance to the one Julius had left behind. Real close-quarters skill — the kind that kept a man alive in a hallway with no rules — had been replaced almost everywhere by point-scoring, camera-friendly striking built for sponsors and highlight reels. 

The private contractor circuits Diego's feed, occasionally picking it up and looking soft, padded, and safe. Four years ago, Julius could have named a dozen operators whose skill would have made the current "elite" look like children playing dress-up. Now, sorting through Diego's fragmented awareness of the wider world, he couldn't find one.

"Four years," he said aloud, low and disbelieving. "Only four years, and this is what's left."

There was no use being angry at a wall. He let the breath out slowly and turned to what actually mattered.

Priorities. Rebuilding this body's conditioning came first — not for pride, but because a weak body was a body that could still be killed by something small and stupid. And before any of that, there was tomorrow. Trent Wexler. He needed to survive that first.

A knock landed against the door, sharp and unhurried.

Visitors were rare for Diego. Julius crossed the room and opened it to find a broad-shouldered man in his fifties, grey at the temples, wearing a plain Ironclad tracksuit with no rank patch — the kind of man who didn't need one to be recognized. Diego's memory supplied the name easily: Coach Elias Graham. The students called him "the Wall," not for his size but because in nine years at the academy, no rumor of favoritism had ever managed to get past him.

Julius's old habits clocked him without being asked to — the balance in his stance, the loose readiness of his hands. Whatever this man had done before he started coaching, he'd been good at it.

"Didn't expect you to answer," Graham said, and his eyes went straight past Julius to the floor by the bunk. His jaw tightened. "Those are—"

"Painkillers," Julius said, before he could finish. "Five wouldn't do much more than upset your stomach. Twelve puts you in the infirmary overnight if someone finds you in time. Past twenty, depending on your weight, there's a real chance you don't wake up at all. I know what you came here to ask, Coach."

Graham went quiet for a moment. The Diego he knew didn't talk like that. Didn't cut anyone off, least of all a coach standing in his doorway.

"It's not going to happen," Julius added. "You can take them."

He gathered the tablets himself and handed them over. Graham pocketed them without looking away from Julius's face.

"Something's different about you tonight," he said finally.

"Something is," Julius agreed, offering nothing more.

Graham studied him a moment longer, the way a man looks at a puzzle he's decided not to solve out loud. Sometimes a fighter got pushed right up to the edge and came back changed — not stronger exactly, just cleared out, the fear burned off. It happened. He nodded slowly, as if that explanation would do for tonight.

"I heard about tomorrow," he said. "The arena. Wexler's little arrangement."

"I know about it."

"Then you know I'm telling you not to show up." His voice didn't rise, but something underneath it did. "Trent's a Rank 6. Real coaching behind him, real fights on record. You step in that ring and it isn't a lesson, it's a beating with an audience. I'll talk to the board. Tell them the match is off."

"I appreciate it," Julius said. "But I'm not skipping it."

Graham looked at him a long moment, the way he'd probably looked at a hundred stubborn kids before this one. "Then get some sleep," he said, and turned to go. At the door, he paused without turning back. "Whatever shifts in you tonight — don't waste it."

He left. Julius stood in the quiet after the door clicked shut.

Trent's face rose easily out of Diego's memory — the vending machines, the crowd of students who'd stopped to watch, the wide grin of someone who already knew nobody would stop him.

"I'm going to break both your legs tomorrow, Campbell. Right in front of everybody."

"Rank 1 trash."

For a moment, sweat prickled against Julius's palms — a leftover reflex, something that belonged to Diego and not to him. It didn't last. Julius had walked into rooms that made this one look like a classroom. A rich kid with a good right hook wasn't going to be the thing that put fear back into this body.

He wasn't worried about Trent Wexler. There was a mountain of real work ahead of him, and a spoiled sixteen-year-old wasn't even a foothill on it. But he wouldn't hide from the fight, either. This body needed to be tested before it could be trusted, and there was no faster way to announce that the academy's punching bag was gone than to put Trent on the mat in front of everyone who'd laughed at Diego for two years.

Julius pulled a jacket off the back of the chair and stepped out into the corridor.

The air outside smelled like chalk dust and old sweat and, faintly, disinfectant from the infirmary two floors down. After four years shut inside his own skull in a hos

pital bed nobody visited, even that felt clean.

He started walking. Tomorrow will come soon enough.