THE LAST WAR GENERAL

The roar of fighter jets shook the heavens above Thornfield International Airport.

Thirty F-22 Raptors carved precise formations through the steel-gray sky, their engines screaming a symphony of military might. Below them, ten thousand elite soldiers stood in perfect formation—the Crimson Guard, the nation's most lethal special forces unit. Each man wore full combat gear, assault rifles held at attention, eyes forward and unblinking.

They weren't guarding the airport. They were waiting for one man.

Behind the security perimeter, hundreds of the city's wealthiest and most powerful had gathered. Malcolm Ashford, CEO of Ashford Industries, worth thirty billion. Victoria Chen, the shipping magnate who controlled half the nation's ports. The Governor of Thornfield Province himself stood among them, his designer suit wrinkled from hours of waiting.

None of them dared approach the landing zone.

They were here for Dominic Kane—the only man in the nation's history to hold the title of War God, personally appointed by the President. The legend who had led the Northern Campaign, crushed an army of three million invaders, and personally captured General Volkov of the Eastern Coalition in his own war room. The man who had saved the nation from annihilation.

If the War God smiled upon you, your family would ascend overnight. If he frowned, empires crumbled.

"He should have landed an hour ago," Malcolm Ashford muttered, checking his platinum watch for the hundredth time. "Where is he?"

No one had an answer. The crowd waited, desperate for even a glimpse of the man who shook the world.

But Dominic Kane was not at the airport.

The Greystone Cemetery sprawled across the forgotten outskirts of Thornfield City like a wound that had never healed. Dark clouds pressed low against the earth, swallowing what little light remained of the dying afternoon. Knee-high weeds choked the pathways between tilted gravestones, and the wind howled through the abandoned grounds with the voice of the damned.

A single figure moved through the desolation.

Dominic Kane walked alone, dressed in a simple black coat, his hands empty. At thirty years old, he carried himself with the quiet lethality of a blade sheathed too long. His face was hard angles and old scars, but his eyes—those cold gray eyes, held something deeper than violence. They held memory. They held ghosts.

He had rejected the President's welcome ceremony. Refused the parade, the medals, the speeches. After five years of war, after bathing in the blood of his enemies and standing atop mountains of corpses, Dominic wanted only one thing.

To see his parents.

The cemetery deepened around him as he followed a path only memory could trace. His mother, Eleanor Kane, had died when he was eighteen—or so he'd been told. Then his father, Marcus Kane, patriarch of the most powerful family in Thornfield, had remarried. The woman, Vivienne Blackwell, had brought poison into their home in more ways than one.

Five years ago, when his father fell mysteriously ill, Vivienne and Marcus's brother, Richard Kane, had orchestrated Dominic's destruction with surgical precision. They'd arranged a false wedding, drugged him at the celebration, and thrown him into Vivienne's chambers. The accusation: attempted rape of his stepmother.

Dominic could still remember the feeling of his bones breaking as Richard's men beat him on the family estate's marble floor. Twenty-three fractures. They'd counted them aloud, laughing.

He remembered being dragged to prison, his body shattered, his name destroyed. And he remembered Vivienne's face as she leaned close to whisper the truth: that his father had been poisoned slowly for months, that Marcus would die alone, that she would "generously" bury him beside Eleanor.

Then came the final dagger.

"Your mother?" Vivienne had smiled, her red lips curling with malice. "She discovered our affair, found the evidence. So we killed her too, of course. Did you know she begged for your life as she died? On her knees, sobbing, pleading for her precious son. It was pathetic."

Dominic had sworn, as they threw him into that cell, that he would make them pay a hundredfold.

Then came salvation in the form of a mysterious visitor, a general who saw potential in the broken young man. Dominic had been recruited into the Obsidian Corps, the nation's most classified military division. He'd climbed from nothing to everything, fueled by hatred and an iron will to survive.

Five years. Five years of war. Five years of becoming the weapon that would carve his vengeance from the flesh of his enemies.

And now, finally, he had come home.

Dominic's steps slowed as he reached the coordinates burned into his memory. Plot 247, Section C. Where his parents had been "hastily buried," as the funeral records stated.

His breath caught.

The graves were gone.

Where two modest headstones should have stood, there was only a pit—a crude, careless hole dug into the earth and abandoned. Construction debris littered the site: broken concrete, rusted rebar, shattered tiles. And among the refuse, fragments of ceramic urns lay scattered like worthless trash, covered in mold and mud.

His parents’ remains, desecrated and discarded.

The temperature plummeted. Dominic stood motionless, but the air around him seemed to crystallize with cold fury. His hands, which had strangled enemy commanders and signed the death warrants of thousands, trembled.

Then came the sound of engines.

Three black SUVs roared up the dirt path, their headlights cutting through the gloom. The vehicles skidded to a stop near the destroyed graves, and doors flew open. Fifteen men emerged in tactical black, moving with the arrogance of men who'd never faced real consequence.

At their head walked a man Dominic recognized instantly.

Gregory Holt. Vivienne's head of security. Before Vivienne recruited him, he'd been undefeated in Thornfield's underground fighting circuit—forty-seven brutal victories. After that, six years as a mercenary in war zones most people couldn't find on a map. The same man who had held Dominic down five years ago while others broke his hands. The same man who had smiled while doing it.

Gregory froze mid-step when he saw Dominic. Recognition flashed across his face, followed by shock, then a slow, contemptuous sneer.

"Well, well," Gregory drawled, his voice dripping with mockery. "I didn't expect to see you again, trash. Thought you'd died bleeding in some prison cell like the dog you always were." He took a step closer. "Pity you survived, we'll have to finish the job."

Dominic's voice was glacier-cold. "Did you do this?"

Gregory glanced at the destroyed graves and laughed—a genuine, delighted sound. "Oh, that? Yeah, we just finished on Lady Vivienne's orders. She's building a new access road, needed the space cleared." 

He walked over and deliberately spat on the scattered urn fragments. Then he ground his boot into a piece, crushing it to powder.

"The road was muddy, you know. We were going to use these as wheel chocks, figured your parents could finally be useful instead of just rotting." He picked up another fragment and examined it with theatrical disgust. "Your old man died thinking his son was a rapist. That's the legacy you gave him, trash. And your mother?" He tossed the piece aside. "That bitch wouldn't stop crying even when we—"