Adrian Voss had never believed in fate.
Fate, he thought, was the language of the powerless — a story told by broken men to make sense of their failure. He learned early that the world owed no one justice, no one kindness. If you wanted meaning, you had to carve it from stone and blood.
And he began carving the day his father died.
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He was eight when the blast tore the sky apart.
It had been a bright morning in the capital — the kind of morning that pretended the world was gentle. He still remembered the smell of his father's cologne, the hum of the motorcade, the rhythmic thump of tires over the paved street.
Then came the flash.
The shockwave threw him against the pavement, the sound folding into a ringing that felt like it would split his skull. He remembered crawling — skin scraped, lungs burning — until he saw what was left of the car. The flames painted everything orange. People screamed, cameras flashed, sirens wailed, but all he could see was the twisted wreckage where his father's face should have been.
Senator Aurelius Voss — the man who had dared to speak against the corruption of his peers — was gone.
The official statement called it a "terrorist incident." A convenient lie. The boy understood even then that it was punishment. His father had refused the pact: an agreement that would have turned the nation's treasury into the private vault of a handful of politicians and foreign investors. He had said no, and the system had answered.
That night, his mother wept until her voice broke. By dawn, her body lay cold beside the bed. The doctors called it a stroke. Adrian called it grief made lethal.
By noon, the family mansion was seized under emergency decrees. Their allies vanished. Their servants fled.
By dusk, he was a boy with no name, no family, and nowhere left to go.
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He learned to survive in the underbelly of the capital, where the air reeked of rot and oil and the sky was hidden by smoke. The slums did not ask questions. They taught him how to fight, how to lie, how to take without being seen. He learned to move through crowds like a whisper and to look men in the eye when he stole from them — because fear was an invitation, and weakness was death.
At night, when the city lights flickered above the rooftops, he would stare at them and imagine the men who had destroyed his life sitting comfortably beneath those lights, sipping wine and laughing. Each light was a face to him — a target.
When he was sixteen, he forged enlistment papers and joined the army. The recruiters didn't look twice. To them, he was another hungry orphan eager to bleed for a uniform.
But he wasn't there to serve. He was there to learn.
The army gave him order — rules, hierarchy, purpose. For the first time since his father's death, his rage had direction. In the barracks, he discovered that discipline was just another form of control, and control was power.
He rose through the ranks with unnatural speed. His charisma made him dangerous — men followed his voice before they understood his words. To the generals, he was the perfect soldier: efficient, loyal, and utterly fearless. They didn't see the way his eyes lingered when he read casualty reports. They didn't hear him whisper the names of dead politicians in his sleep.
At nineteen, he led his first campaign in the northern territories — an insurgency zone filled with rebels and mercenaries. When his superior officers hesitated, he advanced. When they ordered retreat, he held the line. He turned chaos into strategy, and victory followed.
The men beneath him adored him. The generals above him began to fear him.
Fear was good. It meant they were starting to remember what power really was.
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By twenty-nine, Colonel Adrian Voss was more myth than man — a soldier who didn't lose battles, a commander who inspired absolute loyalty. The people began whispering his name with reverence. The press called him the Iron Idealist, the prodigy of a new age.
When the old regime held its final election — another theatre of lies — Voss made his choice.
The coup began at midnight.
It was not loud, not at first. Power rarely is. Orders moved through encrypted channels, convoys rolled quietly, and key stations went dark. By the time the first explosion hit the presidential palace, most of the army had already switched allegiance.
By dawn, the capital was surrounded.
By noon, the national flag was burning on the steps of the parliament.
When the smoke cleared, Adrian Voss appeared on every broadcast, standing in his dark uniform beneath the crimson banners. His speech was short, calm, and unshaken. He spoke of justice, of rebirth, of the end of greed. He promised a new dawn for a wounded nation.
The world believed him.
But behind the cameras, the real purge began.
He hunted them — the senators, the businessmen, the generals, the judges. Every name tied to his father's death. Every hand that had signed those secret decrees. Some were executed quietly; others, publicly. Their families disappeared into the same darkness that had once swallowed him.
When the people demanded blood, he gave them more than they could stomach.
And when the foreign powers protested, he invited them to watch — to see what true purification looked like.
They called him the Liberator.
They built statues.
Children learned his story in school, his portrait framed in every classroom.
They called it salvation.
He called it payment.
They called him a selfless hero.
He knew he was the most selfish person on the planet.
And nothing will stand in the way of what he wants or set out to achieve.
Not man nor gods
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