The rain came down in sheets, cold and heavy, turning the fields of northern Arcadia into a mire of blood and mud. The sky roared like a wounded beast, gray, brutal, relentless.

  Seventeen-year-old Damon stood at the front of a formation of one hundred Spartans, shield in hand, helmet tucked beneath his arm. His crimson cloak fluttered behind him, soaked but unmoved.

  He wasn’t supposed to be here.

  This was meant to be a support maneuver. A test. His first time riding alongside a real commander.

  But that commander lay dead now, an Athenian arrow buried in his throat. The rest of the line had fractured. Orders were lost in the storm, and fear had started to set in.

  Except in Damon.

  He turned to face the other warriors, some older than him, veterans with grizzled beards and half-healed scars. He looked them dead in the eyes, as if daring them to question the words he was about to say.

  “We hold.” His voice was not loud. It was sharp, precise, cutting through the chaos like a spear through flesh.

  “The Athenians are baiting us into the low ground. They want to drown us in their numbers.”

  A soldier scoffed. “And what would you have us do, pup? Let them circle us like wolves?”

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  Damon stepped forward, spear raised. “No. We circle them.”

  He dragged his foot through the mud, sketching a quick formation into the earth. He didn’t ask for their approval. He expected obedience, not because of rank, but because he knew. And they felt it.

  The plan was madness. He split his hundred into three pods: two dozen to each side, pulling wide flanks through the tree lines, silent, hidden. The main fifty held position, forming a narrow crescent.

  The Athenians, thinking they saw hesitation, charged the center.

  Exactly as Damon wanted.

  When they reached the shield line, the sides collapsed inward like a jaw snapping shut. Spears struck from angles they didn’t expect, and in the slippery, chaotic mess of mud, they couldn’t retreat in time.

  What should’ve been a slaughter of young Spartans became a rout of the enemy.

  Damon stood over the body of the Athenian commander, chest heaving, blood dripping from his spear. His helmet was dented, his lip torn, but his eyes burned like coals under a storm.

  The men gathered around him in silence.

  One by one, they dropped to a knee.

  He had not asked for their loyalty.

  But it was given all the same.

  Later that night, by a dwindling campfire, Instructor Thyrios rode in with the reinforcements, his eyes widening at the carnage left in the young wolf’s wake.

  He dismounted slowly, boots squelching in mud.

  “You disobeyed your orders.”

  “Yes,” Damon replied, his voice quiet but firm.

  “And what do you call this then?”

  Damon looked around. At the shields stacked high, at the dead counted and buried with honor. At the men who looked at him like something more than mortal.

  “The beginning.”

  Thyrios said nothing. He simply turned, and for the first time since Damon had met him, he bowed his head.

  Damon Falkides was no longer a trainee. No longer a wolf cub gnashing his teeth in practice.

  He was Sparta’s future.

  And the world was beginning to realize it.