Tears of pure, undiluted joy streamed from Torren’s eyes, carving clean paths through the grime and blood on his face. They were not tears of sadness, but of gratitude. For years, the world had been a numb, silent film. He had hurled himself from skyscrapers just to feel gravity’s whisper, let sledgehammers swing into his chest only to register a dull, disappointing thud. It had all been a pillow fight.

  But this. This was a symphony.

  Another punch from the demon whistled through the air, a killing blow aimed at his temple.

  Torren didn’t dodge. He laughed, raw and ragged, and thrust his head forward to meet it.

  CRACK.

  The world flashed white. A starburst of agony erupted in his skull. A deep gash split his brow, hot crimson blood sheeting into his eye, painting his vision monochrome red. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, grin maniacal, laughter echoing the demon’s roar.

  The demon, for the first time, took a step back. The primal malevolence in its eyes was being overwritten by something newer, more complex. Confusion, edged with fear.

  Torren’s growl was low, a promise of continued violence. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m not done.”

  In the demon’s hellish consciousness, a single bewildered thought formed: I do not recognize this demon. It could not possibly be human.

  Then a new sound cut through their brutal duet.

  A child’s yell. High-pitched, not with terror, but with fierce, desperate effort.

  Torren’s head snapped sideways.

  A lesser demon, a scuttling insectoid horror, had cornered a Pakistani boy no older than ten. The boy fought back, a scavenged machete swinging in small, determined hands. Brave. Stupidly, beautifully brave.

  Torren felt a surge of something he hadn’t felt in a long time. Not the ecstasy of pain, but fierce, protective admiration.

  The goat demon saw its opening. While the giant was distracted, it lowered its head and charged, remaining horn aimed like a spear for Torren’s exposed back.

  Torren didn’t even look.

  His left hand shot out behind him on pure reflex, closing around the base of the demon’s horn. His right hand found the other.

  He didn’t strain. Didn’t grunt.

  He simply twisted his wrists.

  SNAP-CRUNCH.

  The sound was like ancient trees breaking in a storm. The horns came off in his hands like dry twigs.

  The demon’s pained bleat cut short.

  In one brutal motion, Torren drove the broken horns deep into the temples on either side of its head. The beast shuddered, burning eyes going dark, and collapsed in a heap of twitching muscle and fur.

  Torren didn’t spare it a glance. He was already moving, a blur of terrifying speed and intent, focus absolute.

  He rushed the boy. The insectoid demon lunged for the child’s throat.

  Torren leapt.

  Not a jump. The sky falling. He became a meteor of pure vengeance, elbow aimed like a piston from heaven.

  SMASH.

  The impact was not a crack but a wet, explosive pop. The creature vaporized against the pavement, chitin pulverized, foul green blood bursting outward to paint the rubble.

  The boy flinched, shielding his face from the gore. When he lowered his arms, he stared up at the mountain of a man who had just blotted out the hellscape, eyes wide with terror and awe.

  He began speaking rapidly, words flowing in a musical stream Torren couldn’t understand. “Shukriya, bara gora aadmi. Shukriya.”

  “Cut that out,” Torren rumbled, voice like grinding stone. He knelt to the boy’s level. “Where are your parents? Your mom and dad?”

  The question felt hollow the moment it left his lips. He made clumsy gestures. Hand to heart. Sweep to the ruins. A shrug.

  The boy’s brave facade cracked. He understood. “Dead,” he stammered. “Long time. Before war.”

  Torren gave a single sharp nod. The story was as old as time. No name. No family. Just a survivor.

  He reached out. His bloodied, calloused hand enveloped the boy’s small trembling one.

  “Come with me, then,” he said, tone leaving no room for argument. He stood, pulling the boy gently upright. “What’s your name?”

  The boy only shrugged, eyes on the ground.

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  Torren frowned. Of course. Born and abandoned in the streets. A ghost with no one to give him a title. A name was a luxury.

  He studied the kid. Silky black hair. Sharp, intelligent eyes already learning to assess danger. Resilience packed into a small frame.

  “I’ll call you Kip,” Torren declared.

  The boy looked up. Something flickered in his eyes. Recognition. Approval.

  He nodded.

  The air behind them grew cold, then warm, then wrong.

  “Ah, Torren. There you are.”

  Leirbag stood there, materialized from swirling crimson mist. Immaculate. Expensive jacket untouched by carnage. In his arms, a small pretty girl, no older than Kip, with dark curly hair and wide terrified hazel eyes. She clutched his shirt, frozen with fear.

  “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt this touching moment,” Leirbag said, voice silk over steel. “But I find myself in a dreadful bind. I need you to care for this little human. Thank you.”

  He didn’t hand her over.

  He simply let go.

  Leirbag dissolved into red mist and vanished as if he had never existed. Asma now stood where he had been, her blind gaze fixed in their direction, a faint unreadable smirk on her lips.

  Torren looked down at the two small humans now in his charge. The brave nameless boy he had just christened, and the terrified girl dropped into his lap by a demon lord.

  He let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.

  He adjusted his grip, taking each firmly by the hand. Kip held on with surprising strength. The little girl clutched his finger like a lifeline.

  “Right then,” Torren muttered to the burning sky. “Guess I’m a father of two now.”

  The memory of that first bloody night, the goat demon’s horns snapping in his hands, the small sobbing girl against his chest, the weight of a new name settling onto a brave boy, vanished like smoke.

  “You okay, man? You spaced out for a bit.”

  Kip’s voice cut through the past, anchoring Torren in the sterile humming present. The big man blinked, phantom ozone and blood replaced by the clean metallic air of the training chamber. He looked down at the young man beside him, all sharp edges and confident ease.

  “Yes. Of course,” Torren rumbled, British accent clipping the words. He rolled a kink from his neck, vertebrae cracking like firecrackers. “I’ll go check on the Butter girl. Make sure she hasn’t escaped.”

  Kip snorted, falling into step beside him as they passed hive soldiers already back on their feet, bodies fully healed, resuming synchronized silent drills.

  “She’s encased in a magic-nullifying indestructible cocoon. That thing’s designed to hold a goddess.”

  A slow knowing smirk spread across Torren’s scarred face. He tapped a thick finger against his temple.

  “I can feel spirit, kid. That girl’s got a stubborn one. If anybody could escape that, it’d be someone like her.” He glanced sideways. “I bet you.”

  Kip matched the grin. “Oh yeah? Hundred says she’s right where we left her. She’s there, I win. She’s gone, you win.”

  “Deal,” Torren said immediately, boots echoing across polished floor.

  “Be ready to lose your cash, old man,” Kip joked, elbowing his ribs, a gesture that would have shattered another man.

  Torren didn’t break stride. He just looked ahead, predator certainty in his gaze.

  “I’ve been gambling since before you were born,” he said, simple and unshakable. “I’ve never lost. Won’t start now.”

  The statement hung in the air not as a boast but as law.

  As they turned the corner toward the containment chamber, the air grew colder. The only sound was the low ominous hum of the cocoon’s energy field.

  The bet was placed. The stakes were set.

  And for the first time in a very long time, Torren felt genuine anticipation.

  He was about to see if the universe would finally prove him wrong.

  ///

  Torren and Kip walked on, the cocoon’s hum growing louder. As they passed the last of the healed hive soldiers, a thought cut through Torren’s mind, cold and precise.

  Healed in less than a minute. Leirbag’s power is… geometric.

  It pulled him back to the salt flats. To the first day he met the demon. The day Leirbag had looked at him and seen not a soldier, but a symptom of a numb universe, and promised him a cure of endless glorious violence.

  The memory came from a few years before the Sin War. The world was scarred but stable. For Torren, stability was a cage.

  He had been hunting a rogue bio-titan, an incomplete Syndicate experiment that had broken containment, across the radioactive salt flats of a forgotten state. Worthy prey. Something that might actually make him bleed.

  He found it.

  And found it locked in combat with another entity.

  Leirbag stood there, impeccably dressed in a traveling coat untouched by dust or howling wind. He wasn’t fighting the beast.

  He was talking to it.

  His voice was a low resonant hum, a frequency that made the air feel heavy and compliant.

  The bio-titan, a thirty-foot horror of fused flesh and chitin, was slowing. Its roars softened into confused whimpers. Crushing claws lowered. Its monstrous head tilted as if listening to a lullaby.

  Torren watched, stunned not by the power but by its nature.

  This wasn’t strength.

  This was conversion.

  Just as the beast seemed fully pacified, primal programming surged back. With a desperate shriek it lunged, massive claw scything toward Leirbag.

  Leirbag sighed.

  Torren moved.

  He zoomed across the plain, a black and gray missile. He didn’t attack the claw. He drove his shoulder into the titan’s torso like a living battering ram.

  Thunderclap impact. The bio-titan staggered back. Killing blow cut empty air.

  Leirbag turned, bloody red eyes showing not surprise but deep analytical curiosity.

  He watched Torren do what Torren did best.

  Dismantle.

  It wasn’t a fight. It was demolition. Fists like jackhammers. Throws that shattered exoskeleton. Brutal deconstruction of flesh and bone.

  When it was over, Torren stood panting in the carnage, soaked in purple ichor, bones singing with fresh glorious ache.

  Leirbag approached, stepping lightly over twitching carapace.

  “That was… inefficient,” he said calmly. “I had already pacified it. Its will was mine.”

  Torren wiped gore from his face with a grunt. “Pacified is boring. I wanted to feel it break.”

  Leirbag studied him, truly seeing him for the first time. Not a man.

  A phenomenon.

  A creature of pure want.

  A being so numb the only solace was the sensation of his own destructive potential.

  And Leirbag, master of understanding desire, understood.

  “You feel nothing, don’t you?” Leirbag said, not insult but diagnosis. “The world is cotton wool. You are searching for a pinprick.”

  Torren froze.

  No one had ever said it that cleanly.

  They saw his strength.

  Not the void it was meant to fill.

  Leirbag offered a faint knowing smile.

  “I cannot give you feeling. But I can promise you a world with more… interesting pins.” He gestured to the dissolving titan. “The Syndicate is full of fascinating toys. Their enemies are even better. But I have plans. Plans require a scalpel… and a sledgehammer. You would never be bored again.”

  Not a command.

  An invitation to a perpetual banquet of violence.

  Torren grinned, bloody and savage. “Long as I don’t have to dress like you.”

  “A simple request,” Leirbag said. “We understand each other.”

  It wasn’t friendship.

  It was symbiosis.

  Leirbag supplied an endless stream of worthy opponents and total freedom.

  In return, Torren became his ultimate instrument of brute force. Unthinking. Unpredictable. Unstoppable.

  A perfect and terrifying match.

  The being who understood every desire.

  And the being whose only desire was to feel something by breaking it.