REBORN INTO A COMBAT ACADEMY

Chapter 3

Julius stepped outside and let the cold night air fill his lungs. It carried a rough edge to it — old grease drifting from the cafeteria vents, damp concrete, and underneath all of it, the sour tang of the dumpsters lined along the maintenance road. Diego's memory placed the location for him before he even had to think about it.

The east yard.

The worst patch of ground Ironclad had to offer. Wedged between the maintenance depot and the waste bins, a twenty-minute walk from the main dorms unless you cut through the loading road, which most students weren't cleared to use anyway. Gym time ran on a point-credit system tied straight to rank, and Rank 1 didn't buy much of it. So the east yard — empty, unwanted, forgotten — was the only stretch of concrete Diego had ever really been able to call his own.

Julius looked the space over the way a man looks at a room he's just been handed the keys to.

Not much. But it's quiet, and no one's watching. That's enough.

He'd trained in worse. Considerably worse — checkpoints in the Hindu Kush where the altitude alone tried to kill you before the enemy got the chance.

He walked to the far corner, past a security light nobody had bothered to fix, and lowered himself into a stance he hadn't used in what felt like several lifetimes.

Patience.

It wasn't just a virtue, it was a rule.

Rush this body and it would break before it was worth anything. 

He closed his eyes and let his breathing settle into a slow, even four-count, and let the cold anger that had been sitting in his chest since he woke up on that locker room floor bank itself down into something steadier.

What he was running through his body wasn't complicated — no equipment, no partner, nothing but breath and stillness held far longer than any untrained mind could stand to hold it. 

His old combat medic, Vasquez — steady hands, a laugh he could still hear clearly even now — had built this method for him years ago, back when missions left men's nervous systems so fried they couldn't hold a rifle steady the next morning. She'd called it the null count, and told him it worked exactly as well as the discipline behind it, not one inch better.

Diego had never had that discipline. Julius had spent a career building nothing else.

He held the stance as the sky over the depot roof crept from black to grey.

For a long while, nothing happened. Then everything did.

Heat rolled outward from somewhere behind his sternum, fast and total, and for one clean second his body did exactly what he told it to — no lag, no static between the thought and the motion, the same gap that had cost Diego every fight he'd ever lost, simply gone.

Then his stomach turned over and he was on his knees.

"Ugh—"

Sweat broke out across his skin in the same instant, dark and greasy, soaking through his shirt in patches.

 It kept coming for the better part of ten minutes, his body emptying out something that had clearly been sitting in him a long time.

When it finally stopped, Julius knelt there a moment, breathing hard, and felt something close to relief settle into muscles that hadn't been this loose in years — not his years. Diego's.

He looked at the mess on the ground and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Cheap supplements and no sleep.

Whatever was in those pills he kept saving up." He shook his head slowly. "This kid's whole system was clogged solid. That's not normal for someone his age."

Something about the scale of it didn't sit right with him, though. 

Bad habits could do real damage, but not usually this thoroughly, this evenly — more like something had been laid down deliberately than accumulated by accident. 

He turned the thought over once and set it beside the one other detail that had bothered him while sorting through Diego's memories earlier that night: a gap. Months, unaccounted for, sometime before the orphanage found him. Diego had never been able to explain it. Neither, for now, could Julius.

Later. There was too much else that needed his attention first.

He got to his feet, tested his weight, and threw one clean strike at the dented maintenance shed a few feet away — no windup, just intent. 

The steel buckled inward with a hard, ringing pop, a fist-sized dent where there hadn't been one a minute before.

Nowhere close to what he used to carry. A fraction of it, at best. But it was a fraction of something real now, not nothing, and that was the difference that mattered.

That's the ceiling for tonight. Push further and this body would tear something it couldn't afford to lose this early. 

He kicked a spray of loose gravel over the mess at his feet, scattering it thin until it just looked like more of the same stains that had probably been there for years. Nobody would look twice next to a row of dumpsters.

He headed back to the dorm to clean up while the halls were still empty.

Standing at the sink afterward, toweling off, he caught his reflection in the cracked mirror above the basin and stopped.

"Huh," he said, mostly to himself. "You clean up better than they gave you credit for."

It wasn't subtle. With years of sludge purged out of him in one night, Diego's skin had lost the sallow, tired look it usually carried, and his eyes — still Diego's brown, but steadier now. 

Julius didn't linger on it. A face didn't win fights. He'd worry about the rest of it later.

His stomach picked that moment to remind him it existed, a hollow ache sharp enough to demand his full attention. He couldn't remember his last real meal before the needle — four years of hospital tubing didn't count as eating, by any definition worth using.

Mess hall.

It was early enough that only a handful of people were scattered through the room — a couple of upper-rank early risers, two coaches nursing coffee, a maintenance worker eating alone by the window. The low clatter of trays and the hiss of the kitchen vents filled the quiet in a way that, after four years of nothing but monitor beeps, sounded almost like music.

He took a tray without much interest in what was on it — grey scrambled eggs, toast a day past fresh, a bowl of watery oatmeal — and ate every bite of it like it mattered, because right now, it did.

First real meal in four years. He'd have felt the same gratitude chewing on gravel. It didn't matter what it was. It was food, and he was alive to eat it, and for a few minutes that was enough.

When the tray was empty, he sat with it a moment longer than he needed to, then made himself get up. There wasn't time to sit in it.

Diego's knowledge of this world is thin. The kid read more than most Rank 1s bothered to, which put him half a step ahead of nobody.

 Julius needed to know how Ironclad actually worked — who ran it, where its graduates ended up, what had happened to the old private contractor networks in the four years he'd been gone, and whether anyone out there still remembered the name Wraith Company, or the man who'd worn it.

 A combat academy full of instructors who'd actually served and coaches who talked shop between drills was as good a place as any to start pulling that thread without announcing himself while he did it.

Live as Diego. For now.

Today wasn't a day to waste, either way. Right after last period — this afternoon — Trent Wexler was expecting him in the main arena, in front of an audience, for a lesson everyone assumed Diego had no way of surviving.

Julius picked up the worn bag from the end of the bunk, slung it over one shoulder, and headed for the academic block, where the first class of the day was al

ready filling up.

He opened the door and stepped through — not as Julius Reid.

As Diego Campbell.