The summer after the Achaean raid, the world changed.
Not suddenly. Not with a single battle or a single death. It changed the way a river changes course—slowly at first, then all at once, dragging everything in its path.
Helios watched it happen from the walls of Troy.
He was ten years old now. Taller than most boys his age, with shoulders that had begun to broaden and hands that no longer looked like a child's. His golden eyes had darkened slightly—not less strange, but harder to read. People who met him for the first time often looked away. They couldn't say why.
He spent his mornings training with Androkles. His afternoons on the wall, watching the horizon. His nights on the roof, thinking.
And what he thought about was war.
---
The first signs were small.
Merchants arrived with stories of ships gathering at Aulis. Not Trojan ships—Achaean ships. Dozens of them, then hundreds. Kings who had spent years feuding with each other were suddenly sharing campfires. Men who had never agreed on anything agreed on one thing: Troy needed to burn.
"Why?" Helios asked a merchant one afternoon. The man had just come from the coast, his face gray with exhaustion.
"Why does any king want war?" The merchant spat into the dust. "Glory. Gold. A woman's face."
"Helen," Helios said.
The merchant blinked. "You know of her?"
"I've heard stories."
"Stories don't do her justice. Men have died for less beautiful women. For her, they'll burn the world."
Helios nodded and walked away. He knew the story. He had read it in his past life—the abduction of Helen, the oath of Tyndareus, the thousand ships. But reading about it and living through it were different things.
This is not a story, he told himself. This is supply chains and political alliances and the arithmetic of violence.
He started keeping notes.
---
Not on paper—paper was too precious, too traceable. In his head. He catalogued the Trojan noble houses, their alliances, their rivalries. He mapped the city's defenses: the walls, the gates, the hidden passages. He calculated food stores, water sources, the number of able-bodied men.
It was like building an investment model. Data in. Predictions out.
Troy has eighteen months of grain at current consumption, he calculated one night. Less if refugees flood in. The wells inside the walls will support the population for maybe a year before they start going brackish. The walls themselves are strong, but there are weak points—the eastern section near the Dardanian Gate, where the foundation settled unevenly.
He thought about the Achaeans. Their strengths. Their weaknesses.
Achilles is their best weapon. If the stories are true, he's nearly invincible. But invincible men get careless. They take risks. They can be baited.
Odysseus is smarter. He'll be the real threat. Not on the battlefield—in the council chamber. He'll find the cracks in Troy's alliances and drive a wedge.
Agamemnon is arrogant. Arrogance can be exploited.
He wrote none of this down. He kept it in his chest, behind his ribs, next to the warm pulse of his pendant.
---
Androkles noticed the change.
"You're not just training anymore," the scarred man said one morning. "You're thinking. Planning. What are you seeing?"
Helios lowered his wooden sword. "A storm."
"Tell me."
Helios sat on the courtyard bench. Androkles sat beside him.
"The Achaeans are going to come," Helios said. "Not a raiding party. An army. They'll bring siege engines and archers and men who've been fighting their whole lives. They'll try to starve us out, break our walls, burn our city."
Androkles was quiet for a moment. "You sound certain."
"I am certain."
"How?"
Helios looked at the sky. The sun was climbing toward noon. Warm. Bright. Indifferent.
"Because I've seen it," he said. "Not with my eyes. With my head. The pieces are all there. The abduction of Helen is just an excuse. This war was going to happen anyway. Troy is rich. The Achaeans are hungry. That's all war ever is—resource conflict dressed up as honor."
Androkles stared at him. "You're ten years old."
"In years."
"That doesn't make sense."
"Very little about me makes sense." Helios stood. "Train me harder. I need to be ready."
---
The war buildup accelerated through autumn.
Ships landed on the coast—not invaders, not yet. Scouts. Traders. Men with maps and measuring cords, counting the distance from the beach to the walls, marking the best places to land.
Helios watched them from the wall. He noted their numbers, their patterns, the way they avoided the western gate where the defenses were strongest.
They're gathering intelligence, he thought. Someone organized is leading them. Odysseus, probably. Or Nestor. Someone who thinks before he swings.
He reported his observations to Dorus, the sergeant who had invited him to the campfire. Dorus listened, frowned, and passed the information up the chain.
"The captains are starting to notice you," Dorus said one evening. "They're asking who the golden-eyed boy is."
"What do you tell them?"
"That you're trouble." Dorus grinned. "But useful trouble."
---
Winter came, and the raids stopped.
The sea grew rough. The Achaeans retreated to their camps, huddled around fires, waited for spring. Troy breathed a little easier.
But Helios did not relax.
He knew what spring would bring.
He spent the cold months training in the courtyard, alone, until his breath fogged the air and his fingers went numb around the sword hilt. He practiced dual-blade forms—the ones he remembered from Sword Art Online, adapted for real weight and real balance. He practiced footwork on the icy stones, learning to keep his center low, to pivot without slipping.
Androkles watched from the doorway, wrapped in a wool cloak.
"You're going to kill yourself," the scarred man said.
"I'm going to stay alive."
"There's a difference?"
Helios didn't answer. He kept moving.
---
One night, Lyra found him on the roof.
She was twelve now, her tangled hair longer, her scowl softer. She sat beside him without asking.
"You're always up here," she said.
"It's quiet."
"The city is quiet. You're not." She looked at him. "What are you thinking about?"
Helios stared at the stars. The same stars. The same sky. The same cold indifference.
"I'm thinking about how many people are going to die," he said.
Lyra was silent for a moment. "That's a heavy thought for a boy."
"I'm not a boy."
"You keep saying that. But you eat bread and sleep on a mat and your mother still kisses your forehead. That's a boy."
Helios almost smiled. "Maybe. But I remember things boys shouldn't remember."
"What things?"
He couldn't tell her. Couldn't explain about skyscrapers and smartphones and a life that had ended in a crash he still didn't understand.
"Bad things," he said. "Things that haven't happened yet."
Lyra took his hand. Her fingers were cold.
"Then stop remembering," she said. "Live here. With us."
Helios looked at her. Her face was pale in the starlight, her eyes bright.
"I'm trying," he said.
"Try harder."
She squeezed his hand and climbed down, leaving him alone with the stars.
---
Spring came.
The first ships appeared on the horizon in early April—a hundred of them, then two hundred, then more than Helios could count. They came from every corner of the Achaean world: Mycenae, Sparta, Pylos, Ithaca, Salamis. Their sails blotted the sea.
Troy closed its gates.
The city became a hive of preparation. Men sharpened spears. Women stored grain. Children were sent to the countryside, to relatives with farms behind the walls.
Karya refused to leave.
"If you're staying, I'm staying," she told Helios. Her voice was calm, but her hands were shaking.
"You should go somewhere safe."
"There is no somewhere safe. Not anymore." She touched his face. "I lost your father. I won't lose you."
Helios hugged her. He didn't know what else to do.
---
The Achaean army landed on the beach at dawn.
Helios watched from the western wall. Thousands of men spilled onto the sand—archers, spearmen, charioteers, nobles in gleaming bronze. They formed ranks with practiced efficiency, officers shouting orders, banners snapping in the wind.
Among the banners, Helios saw one that made his blood run cold.
A shield. Red. With a lion on it.
Agamemnon, he thought. The High King. He came himself.
And beside Agamemnon's banner, another. Smaller, simpler. A man in dark armor, standing apart from the others, watching the walls with an intensity that Helios could feel even from a distance.
Who is that?
He didn't know. But something about the figure made his pendant grow warm.
---
The first assault came at noon.
The Achaeans marched toward the Scaean Gate, shields locked, spears raised. They didn't bother with subtlety. They wanted to test the walls, the defenders, the will of Troy.
Helios stood on the wall with a bow in his hands—not Artemis' Verdict, just a standard Trojan recurve. He wasn't supposed to be there. The soldiers had tried to send him back.
"Let him stay," Dorus had said. "He's worth ten of you."
Now, as the Achaeans advanced, Helios nocked an arrow.
He didn't pray. He didn't close his eyes. He just breathed.
The first rank of Achaeans entered range.
Helios fired.
The arrow struck a soldier in the throat. He fell. The man behind him stumbled over the body. The formation wavered.
Helios fired again. And again. And again.
He didn't count. He didn't celebrate. He just kept shooting, kept breathing, kept existing in the small space between heartbeats where the world narrowed to a bow and a target and the whisper of the string.
When the assault finally broke—when the Achaeans retreated, leaving a hundred bodies on the plain—Helios lowered his bow.
His arms ached. His fingers were bleeding from the string. But he felt nothing.
This is only the beginning, he thought.
He looked at the sun. It was past noon, starting its slow descent toward the sea.
The war has begun.
---
That night, the city burned funeral pyres for the fallen.
Helios stood at the edge of the firelight, watching the smoke rise. His mother was somewhere behind him, praying to gods he wasn't sure he believed in.
Androkles appeared at his side.
"You did well today," the scarred man said.
"I killed men."
"That's what soldiers do."
"I'm not a soldier."
Androkles looked at him. "You are now. Whether you like it or not."
Helios stared into the flames. The bodies on the pyres were strangers—men he had never spoken to, whose names he would never know. But they had died defending his home. His city. His mother.
This is what war is, he thought. Not glory. Not honor. Just death, repeated until someone gives up.
He touched his pendant. It was warm, pulsing gently, as if it knew what was coming.
And it's only just begun.
END OF CHAPTER TEN