REBORN INTO A COMBAT ACADEMY

Chapter 4

"Such a shame. The coward couldn't even go through with it properly."

Trent Wexler said it loud enough to carry across the classroom, not bothering to lower his voice. Beside him, a thick-shouldered Rank 4 named Vance shook his head.

"Nah. One of the night cleaners saw him sitting on his bunk with a bottle of painkillers yesterday. Probably heard somewhere that if you take enough at once, it doesn't even hurt."

"Then he lost his nerve," Trent said, grinning.

"I think so too," said the third one, a wiry kid named Marcus, already digging into his pocket. "Twenty meal tickets says he's still sulking in the infirmary."

"I'll take that," Vance said. "Bet he never even opened the bottle."

"Same," said Trent. "Make it ten each."

They grinned at each other and shook on it. A few of the other students glanced over, their faces souring fast. 

Even at a school built entirely around toughness, betting meal tickets on whether a classmate had actually gone through with killing himself sat badly with almost everyone in the room.

Nobody said a word about it, though. 

It wasn't just that Trent had real skill behind his rank — his family's name was on a plaque bolted to the wall of the main gym, and that kind of money didn't need to raise its voice to be obeyed. 

The students strong enough to say something didn't care enough to bother. Everyone else was just quietly grateful it was Diego drawing his attention instead of them.

The classroom door opened.

Trent's head turned automatically, his expression already arranging itself into something contemptuous, the first line already loaded.

He didn't use it.

The boy who walked in wore Diego Campbell's face — the same faded grey-streaked hair, the same worn jacket — but something about him took Trent a full three seconds to place. 

His back was straight.

The kind of straight that belonged to someone who had simply forgotten how to apologize for existing.

That's Campbell?

"Is that—"

"That's Diego," Marcus said, low, like he was checking a fact he didn't quite trust.

Diego let his eyes travel once around the room before they landed, without any particular urgency, on Trent.

Trent waited for the usual thing — the flinch, the quick drop of the eyes, the shoulders folding in before Diego even opened his mouth.

It didn't come.

Diego's gaze moved past him the way it might move past a chair, and he crossed the room to his usual desk, pulled a battered textbook from his bag, and started reading.

"Hah." The sound came out of Trent before he'd decided to make it.

Vance and Marcus's faces twisted. They'd expected fear, and getting nothing back felt like an insult in itself.

"So?" Marcus said, already peeling tickets out of his pocket. "You win. Here."

"This sucks," Vance muttered, tossing him over too, more irritated about the lost meal tickets than anything Diego had actually done.

Vance shoved up from his seat and crossed the room, sneering already in place. "What's wrong, Campbell? Did you eat something funny last night?" His tone was almost friendly. His eyes weren't.

Diego didn't answer. Didn't even bother to look up.

Vance's jaw tightened. He closed the distance fast and yanked the textbook straight out of Diego's hands.

Only then did Diego look at him.

"What's your problem?" he asked, flat.

Vance opened his mouth to answer — and the words died there.

When did he stand up?

One moment Diego had been sitting. The next he was on his feet, close enough that Vance had to tip his head back to keep looking at him, and the gap between the two hadn't registered as movement at all. It felt like watching someone step out of their own shadow.

Diego just looked at him.

So this is what it felt like for him. Every day.

Inside, Julius let Diego's memories rise without resisting them — the first weeks at Ironclad, when things had actually been decent, when people smiled and Diego had thought he'd finally landed somewhere he belonged. Then the evaluations. The discovery that his reflexes had a lag nobody could train out. The discovery that there was no family name behind him, no sponsor, nothing.

Trash. You don't even deserve the uniform. Do everyone a favor and drop out.

Bruk's crowd, in the fantasy this had once been. Trent's crowd, here. Same shape, different names. They hadn't thrown every punch that had landed on Diego over two years — that honor usually went to older, stronger students — but they'd laughed while it happened, lent their voices to it, held his arms once or twice for a cleaner shot.

Julius felt the leftover tremor still wired into Diego's hands from all of it — an old, automatic flinch response, the body remembering where pain always came from.

He didn't let it show.

Is this worth answering? By any reasonable measure, the gap between what Julius had once been and three teenagers with more money than sense was closer to an adult wandering into a schoolyard argument than an actual fight. He'd genuinely considered walking past it.

But cruelty didn't stop being cruelty just because the people committing it were young. He'd broken men twice this age for less than what these three did to Diego on an ordinary Tuesday.

There had been a name for Julius, once, among the people who used it carefully — The Ghost, for how quietly he moved through a mission zone; The Hammer, for how fast a fight ended once he'd decided it needed to.

 He'd trained recruits, built operators out of raw kids barely older than the ones in this room, and kept most of them alive long enough to go home. He'd never once called himself a good man. He'd also never once forgiven anyone who raised a hand against him or the people under his charge.

Four years locked inside his own skull, fully aware and unable to move a single finger, should have been enough to unmake anyone. It had come close, more times than he liked to count. 

The only thing that had kept the dark from finishing the job was rage — deliberate, cultivated, ugly.

 Every day in that silence, he'd recited names: the man who'd held the needle, the ones who'd signed off on it, the ones who'd profited from his disappearance. He'd made promises to all of them out loud, in a hospital room no one visited, promises that would have unsettled most men just to overhear.

A clear mind and still water were supposed to be what carried a fighter forward. Julius hadn't had that luxury in years. Without the rage to hold onto, there would have been nothing left of him to bring back.

Thwack.

"—Kgh!"

Vance folded around the impact before he could even make a sound, all the air driven out of him at once. His knees buckled and he went down hard, head bouncing once off the classroom floor, eyes rolled back.

"What the—"

"Did anyone see that?"

"How did he even—"

To the rest of the room, Vance had simply dropped. There was no warning and no visible cause.

One second he was standing over Diego with the stolen textbook still swinging from his hand. The next he was on the floor, breathing in short, ugly gasps.

It had been simple, mechanically. Julius had let the strength he'd unlocked in the east yard the night before surge through Diego's untrained muscles for exactly one motion — a straight punch to the solar plexus, thrown and retracted faster than any untrained eye in that room could track. 

Diego flexed his fingers once at his side and let the textbook fall back

into his other hand.

Then his eyes moved, slow and unhurried, from Vance's crumpled shape on the floor to Trent Wexler.