Chapter 10: Birth of a Legend and Departure
Weeks after the escape, the Siberian complex was a silent cemetery.
The Orphanage no longer existed. Where once stood a brutalist concrete fortress, there was now only a smoldering black crater, a charred and ugly scar in the endless snowy landscape. The snow was falling gently, a futile attempt by nature to cover the stain.
The epicenter of the destruction, where Jonathan had opened the gas valves and placed the main loads, was now a deep pit of molten metal and pulverized concrete. The stench of burning fuel and cooked meat still hung in the icy air.
The silence was broken by the rhythmic and heavy sound of rotors cutting through the wind. A black Mi-8 helicopter, with no national insignia or markings, descended through the lingering smoke. He landed in a controlled whisper on the virgin snow on what had been the outer perimeter.
The side doors slid out, revealing several men dressed in black. They moved with a quiet efficiency that made the Orphanage's guards look like children playing. Their tactical equipment was advanced, non-reflective, and far superior to that of any standard military unit. On his shoulders, barely visible in the gray light, was Yami's emblem.
The last man to go down was their leader. He was tall, with a presence that seemed to absorb the light around him. It was Saiga Fūrinji. He got off the helicopter, his feet barely making a sound in the snow.
He watched the destruction with analytical, not horrified, eyes. This had not been a missile attack. It was not a random demolition. The collapse was too clean, too centered.
"Surgical," he muttered to himself. He could see how key structural footholds had been vaporized, designed to implode the complex in on itself. A professional job. Designed to leave nothing behind.
An agent of Yami's, equipped with a scanner, approached Saiga. "Sir," he said, his voice muffled by the mask. "The main explosion was secondary. There are sections of the underground complex that were sealed before the detonation. We found them."
Saiga nodded. "Guide me."
The agent took him past the main crater into a mound of rubble where reinforced steel doors, deformed by the heat but still intact thanks to Jonathan's emergency lock, blocked access to the inner wings.
Here, the real story would begin.
…..
Yami's team moved with quiet efficiency into the Youth Dormitory Wing, the only section of the complex that seemed structurally intact thanks to the reinforced steel doors Jonathan had sealed. The doors were warped by the heat of the main blast, their edges fused to the frames.
"Plasma cutting," Saiga Fūrinji ordered.
Two Yami agents began working, not with explosives, but with high-energy plasma torches. They cut the hinges with surgical precision, bypassing the main lock. With a deafening groan of tortured metal, the multi-ton door gave way and fell inward, kicking up a cloud of dust and stale air.
Saiga entered first, with the weapon down but ready. The stench of fear, sweat and unrecycled air hit like a wall.
"Clear," an agent shouted from inside.
Saiga moved forward. The hallway was dark, but his thermal vision goggles lit up the scene. In the background, huddled in what had been a common area, was a small group of children.
They were pale, emaciated from weeks of depleted emergency rations, and shivering uncontrollably. They were the children Jonathan had found on the tatami, the ones who had dropped their weapons and surrendered. They were traumatized, hungry, but unmistakably alive.
Yami's agents raised their weapons instinctively. Saiga held up a gloved hand. "Stop."
His voice was calm. "They are victims, not combatants."
He took off his own supply pack. "Water. Emergency rations. Thermal blankets. Carefully."
The children shrank as officers approached, but took the food and water with trembling hands.
Saiga approached the group. His analytical gaze sought the most coherent. He found him: a boy of about nine years old, paler than the others, cradling his right arm. Saiga recognized the signs of trauma; This child was not only scared, he was devastated. It was Subject Fourteen, the boy Borokov had kicked weeks before.
Saiga knelt down, putting his tactical knee brace on the dirty floor to meet the boy's gaze. His voice was calm, devoid of threat. "What happened here?" he asked. "Was it a rival attack? Another organization?"
The boy, Fourteen, shook his head so violently that his matted hair shook. His eyes were wide open, fixed on a horror that only he could see.
"No... it wasn't an attack," the boy whispered, his voice raspy from lack of use. "It was... a cleansing."
"Cleanliness? By whom?"
The boy swallowed hard, the dry sound audible in the silence. "It was him," he whispered. "It was Subject Seven."
Saiga froze. "Seven?"
"He came down the aisle of the tatami," the boy said, his eyes unfocused, reliving the moment. "He was covered... of blood. The 'obedient', sixteen-year-olds, attacked him. He... He didn't stop. He was like a ghost."
The boy was trembling, his knuckles white from grabbing the thermal blanket. "He cut five of them. In... in three seconds. They fell like... like dolls. Then... Then he looked at us. To us. Those of us who do not attack."
Subject Fourteen began to cry, a silent, broken sound. "We dropped the weapons. We were waiting... but his eyes... There was nothing there. They were empty."
The boy took a deep, trembling breath.
"And he... He just left us. He kept walking down the hallway, stepping over the bodies, as if we were... as if we didn't matter."
….
As Saiga processed the boy's testimony, another Yami agent approached, moving with a silent purpose. His uniform was spotless, unlike the charred environment, and held two objects. In one hand, a data tablet; in the other, a sealed bag of evidence.
"Sir," the agent said, his voice low and professional. Saiga rose, his gaze shifting from the traumatized child to the forensic officer.
"What do we have?"
"A problem, sir. Or rather, a contradiction." The agent lifted the bag of evidence. Inside, floating in a preservative gel, was a jagged and deeply rusted piece of metal.
"The forensics are baffled. Shrapnel from the explosion is standard. But the deaths... all the deaths from close combat... Borokov, Volkov, the courtyard squad... they were not caused by firearms. They were caused by this."
Saiga narrowed his eyes. "It's... low-quality steel. A gardening implement."
"Exactly," the agent said, and turned on the tablet. "But now, look at the cuts."
The screen showed a forensic image of a courtyard guard's kevlar vest. He was split in half, shoulder to hip. The cut was perfectly clean, cauterized at the microscopic level by the heat of friction. "Surgical cuts. Through Kevlar Level IIIA. And this..." He moved on to another image: the severed barrel of an assault rifle. "The weapon is garbage, but the skill... is divine. It is a contradiction that we cannot resolve."
A heavy silence fell as Saiga looked at the footage. Surgical cuts. A crude weapon. The story of the child...
He slowly turned to Subject Fourteen, who had huddled next to an agent of Yami's.
"Subject Seven," Saiga asked, his voice now dangerously soft. "Did he use a gun?"
The boy nodded frantically, his eyes wide with the memory. "A ... a machete. He took it out of the gardener's shed. It was rusty. He was old. But... but when he moved..." The boy swallowed hard, searching for the word.
"But what?" pressed Saiga.
"It shone."
Shone.
That was the missing piece. Saiga closed his eyes. It was not a contradiction; it was a confirmation.
A fifteen-year-old boy, with the innate potential of a Grandmaster, able to soak a piece of rusty trash with his own Touki with such concentration that it became a blade capable of cutting steel.
Yami's leader opened his eyes. Now I understood the magnitude of what had happened here.
"Bog Machete," Saiga muttered, using the Russian codename Yami had been tracking in intelligence reports. The nickname that the few survivors of low-level crime in the area had given to a ghost. "The God of the Machete".
He looked at the smoking crater outside the hallway.
"How interesting."
Phase 4: The Flight (The Departure)
Far from the snowy Russian crater and Yami's agents sifting through the ashes of his past, the world was darkness and vibration.
Inside the cavernous cargo hold of a cruise plane, fifteen-year-old Jonathan was huddled between two huge wooden boxes marked "DRILLING EQUIPMENT." He was wearing civilian clothes, stiff jeans and a thick jacket, all stolen from the closet of a cargo airfield worker.
Curled up in his lap was a military backpack. It was remarkably heavy, loaded not with weapons or equipment, but with the wads of US dollars, euros, and rubles that I had "freed" from the Director's personal safe.
He wasn't celebrating. He was not sorry. It was empty. But it was a different void from his previous life. It wasn't cage apathy; it was the spacious calm of a blank canvas.
For the first time in his life, the constant whisper in his head—the incessant calculation of death vectors, of exposed arteries, and brittle bones—was silent. The massacre of the Orphanage, the cathartic liberation from fifteen years of repressed control, had satiated him.
This calm was new. And it was his.
Jonathan rummaged through the pocket of his new jacket. He took two things out. The first, a small keychain flashlight. The second, a worn-out Bleach manga, the same one he had stolen from the student's apartment in St. Petersburg a year earlier.
He turned on the small light, his faint beam illuminating the pages. He opened the book and began to read.
The cargo plane roared and shuddered, a metal monster carrying it across the Atlantic, flying west.
Back there, in the smoldering ruins of Siberia, a legend was being born among spies and assassins: the terrifying story of the "Bog Machete," the God of the Machete.
But here, in the vibrant darkness at sea, that legend was already dead.
Jonathan, the culture enthusiast, turned the page, his face lit up by the faint light of the flashlight, heading for his first stop.
His first destination: the United States.
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