On a summer day when the sky was unusually covered in clouds, I turned fifteen for the second time in my life.
Back on Earth, my mother made me a small homemade cake that year, and I still remember the uneven frosting and the way she tried to smile like everything was normal.
But that was also the year my father died.
So we didn't celebrate.
Sometimes those memories still come back, and maybe it's because they feel too far removed from what I've become, or maybe because some part of me refuses to let them go.
"Happy birthday, you miserable bastard."
Kang's shout and the heavy slap of his hand pulled me back to the present.
"Try to stay alive long enough to make the Empire notice you, and maybe one day you'll be worth as much as Conquest or Kreg."
"Is that your idea of a heartfelt blessing?"
"It's a realistic one, and I learned that from you since you aren't the type to let yourself lose anyway."
That was Kang for you. After training under me every day in the arena his skills had improved, but his personality grew more irritating with every passing sunrise. Still, he was the only one who remembered.
I didn't even know when his own birthday was, yet somehow he had tracked mine.
I let out a quiet breath.
After living here for fifteen years, I had learned enough about my new life to know my family in this world was nothing special.
They were frontline fodder and Viltrumite soldiers sent to die so the elites wouldn't have to, and they weren't even lost in a grand battle.
They were weaklings killed by a superior over some insignificant mistake.
'When I think about it, Kang isn't strong either, yet his name feels familiar, like something I should remember but can't quite reach.'
Regardless, a friend was a friend.
Today was also the day I received notice of my graduation, though calling it a ceremony feels like a joke.
They simply throw children against merciless guardians, and if you survive, you earn the right to live until you turn sixteen.
Since I had no parents, the empire assigned a guardian to me to complete the ritual.
"Glenn, do you think I'll actually survive my graduation when the time comes?"
I looked at him for a few seconds before answering honestly.
"If you stay exactly as you are now, you will be dead before the sun sets on that day."
In his current state, even after all that training, he was barely above the line that decided whether someone lived or died, and saying it out loud was the only way to keep him from slipping back.
"Bastard… you really have a gift for killing a man's spirit."
"In this world, the only thing that guarantees your spirit is your strength."
Finally the ceremony was in three days.
I wasn't worried.
First, I won't die. Second, I won't lose.
I have that much confidence in myself, and I haven't even used the Sharingan properly yet, so perhaps it was time to burn someone out of existence.
Then again, crushing them with nothing but my own physical strength sounded just as satisfying, this wasn't a life-and-death duel.
We didn't speak much after that. Kang eventually left as the light faded, dragging his tired body away while I remained behind, watching the sky grow darker.
I spent the next three days in a stillness that had nothing to do with the frantic preparation of the other graduates.
I didn't touch a single piece of training equipment or enter the gravity chambers once, choosing instead to let my body rest in a way it hadn't since the moment I first woke up in this world.
Three days passed in the blink of an eye, and I met the commander for the second time, the man I held responsible for my misery.
"Commander Kraevus."
"Spare me the empty respect, boy, the Empire didn't drag you out of a glass tube just to watch you hesitate, so show me if you are a true warrior or if Halvar simply manufactured a more durable grade of trash."
"PIT YOUR PATHETIC WILL AGAINST MINE AND SHOW ME EVERYTHING YOU ARE."
Kraevus demanded it as if the victory were already written in the stars, but his arrogance didn't provoke me in the slightest.
"If I truly show you everything I am, you will be dead before you realize the fight has begun."
Thus the battle began.
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Kraevus was a man who worshipped perfection because it was the only state where existence no longer required justification.
To be born within the high-blood echelons of the Viltrum Empire, the absolute apex of the Zenith Star Cluster, was to be born at the finish line of evolution.
But perfection was not a stagnant trophy to be held since Viltrum was an empire forged in the fires of attrition and strength demanded an eternal, grinding effort.
To him, strength was synonymous with certainty, a state where nothing outside of his own will could ever dictate the result of a conflict.
If something weaker could interfere or disrupt what should have been an absolute outcome, then it was never true strength to begin with.
That was why he despised the weak, viewing them as biological vermin that multiplied without purpose while offering the empire nothing but their own fragility.
The only exception in his entire life had been his son, a being he considered truly flawless and far closer to the Viltrumite ideal than the rest of the stagnant population.
And then that perfection died.
Not in a battle of equals.
Not against something greater.
But while throwing his life away to protect the very vermin Kraevus loathed.
Perfection failed in the most pathetic way imaginable and it was a disgrace that Kraevus never taught him.
The survivors had the audacity to call the boy weak, which in a culture like Viltrum's was the only conclusion that mattered, because only the capable have the right to breathe.
Kraevus could not process the stinging shame of hearing his own bloodline slandered by the survivors of his son's mercy.
So he erased them, every last one of those ungrateful wretches silenced without a hint of hesitation or a single shred of regret.
Because if something weaker could affect the fate of something greater, then it never deserved the right to exist in the same reality.
For that reason, throughout the years, he killed countless weaklings, uprooting anything that could one day become a burden to the empire.
All of it was done in service to His Majesty's vision, a Viltrum where only the strongest were allowed to exist.
Now, as he looked at the boy standing before him, those piercing blue eyes and that shock of red hair, he saw that same inherent flaw staring back at him.
It was nothing more than weakness pretending to be something greater, a lab-grown rat that convinced itself it was superior to the steel it was built from.
Then a distant memory surfaced faintly in his mind.
It was nothing more than a passing thought of red hair and a Viltrumite who had been among the many that died that day.
Was this boy connected to them?
Kraevus didn't know, and more importantly, he didn't care, because a dead man's legacy was just more dirt for the empire to tread upon.
"If I truly show you everything I am, you will be dead before you realize the fight has begun."
The words came from the boy, spoken with arrogance that didn't belong to a subject standing beneath his rank.
Those eyes looked down on him as if he were not the commander who had conquered seventeen planets across twelve hundred years of service.
"You have the same composure as a few of the cattle I slaughtered years ago, though there was no satisfaction in it since they died without even the instinct to resist."
"I don't care which ghosts you're remembering, because the only thing that matters is that you won't survive to see the sun set."
Kraevus didn't wait for a second as he ignited his internal propulsion, the force of his departure cracking the arena floor and sending a wall of displaced air rushing through the center.
The fight took to the skies in a high-speed pursuit that turned the atmosphere into a canvas of sonic booms and white-hot friction.
Kraevus dominated every exchange with the savage efficiency of a veteran, his movements a masterclass of aerial combat refined over a millennium of planetary conquest.
"Is this the 'everything' you promised?"
"Where is your arrogance now, you insect, because what stands in front of you is a soldier who has perfected every single scrap of combat that exists in this universe."
"You are looking at a perfect being, the very ideal a Viltrumite is supposed to be, and yet you cannot even keep your eyes focused on my fist."
He caught the boy's throat in mid-air, dragging him through the cloud layer until the friction began to singe the very air around them, before throwing him toward the land.
"You talk of perfection, commander, but all I see is a man desperately trying to convince himself—"
"Shut up!"
"My pride is built on the broken corpses of seventeen worlds, boy, and I didn't spend my life fighting weak species in a sterile lab like you!"
The impact carved a deep crater into the earth, and Kraevus rained down blows that should have shattered tectonic plates, striking with a certainty of victory that left the boy a broken, unrecognizable heap in the center of the wasteland.
But as he hovered above the wreckage to declare his win, the world around him fractured like a mirror struck by a heavy hammer, the shards of the sky and the crater falling away into a void of black and red.
The triumphant roar in his throat died instantly as his brain suffered a sickening jolt, the sensation of being high in the air replaced by the solid, unmoving ground beneath his boots.
He realized, with a cold, paralyzing horror, that he was standing in the exact same spot where the fight had started, his feet still locked into the same cracks in the pavement he had stood on hours ago.
"...?"
The high-speed pursuit, the clouds, the massacre—none of it had happened outside of his own skull.
The sudden weight of reality returned as a sharp, hot pressure in his chest, and Kraevus looked down to see a pale hand buried deep within his sternum, the fingers locked firmly around his spine.
"...No."
Finally, his eyes locked with the boy's red eyes, and within them, a spinning pinwheel pattern mocked the twelve hundred years of combat experience he thought he possessed.
"You... this... this is some trick, some mental trick to catch me off guard!"
The commander spoke through a mouthful of blood, his thousand-year composure dissolving into the desperate confusion of a man who couldn't trust his own eyes.
Even knowing his words made no sense and were nothing more than excuses, his worldview was already shattered beyond the point where he could bring himself to think about it anymore.
"It doesn't matter... a fluke of the mind doesn't change the reality of the fist."
To reply, the boy simply channeled a surge of mana through the commander's mangled chest, and Kraevus watched in silent horror as his own shattered ribs and torn skin healed on the spot, the boy literally forcing his body back together just to kill him again.
"Try again."
The boy's red eyes returned to their natural blue, and the mental weight of the illusion vanished, leaving Kraevus certain that now, in a real physical struggle, his veteran instincts would prevail.
But a second later, his chest was impaled once again, the pale hand returning to its place around his spine before Kraevus could even register a single movement in the air.
It was the start of a cycle of infinite, grounding violence where Kraevus used every trick and every ounce of speed in his arsenal, only to end up with that same hand around his spine every single time.
There was no more illusion, no more mental cages, just the terrifying reality that the boy was simply faster, stronger, and more absolute than anything the empire had ever produced.
"Puff... geeuk."
"Is this your thousand-year veteran instinct, or is your body just finally admitting that it's tired of being wrong?"
By the tenth time the boy's hand found his spine, the commander simply stood still, his spirit shattered under the weight of a perfection he could no longer deny.
"It wasn't a fluke... I'm weak."
He was dying at the hands of a being that truly embodied the absolute, unyielding perfection of the Viltrumite ideal, a strength so total that it controlled the very concept of existence.
"No shame... there is no shame in this... I am dying at the hands of something truly perfect."
The boy raised his hand and chopped through the commander's neck with a single, blurred motion that ended twelve hundred years of service in a heartbeat.
"Rest in peace, Kraevus."
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(End of the chapter)