Relfecting

Wes drifted through the void, hands behind his head, a quiet chuckle slipping from his lips. The vast emptiness stretched in all directions, pressing against him, shifting, pulling. It wanted to take him apart, to thin him into nothingness.

He kept his shape. Kept himself.

His thoughts pulled him backward.

He and Xavier had been the first to reach the table. A few others had followed soon after.

Rachael—red-haired, wiry, barely eleven. Her limbs were all angles, her ribs too sharp beneath her skin. She moved like a cornered animal, light on her feet, never trusting the ground beneath her. Her eyes had the kind of sharpness that wasn't just intelligence—it was survival. She had come from the worst humanity had to offer, and it had left its mark.

Then there was Dexter.

Wes clicked his tongue, the sound vanishing into the emptiness around him.

He exhaled, stretching, the motion meaningless in a place without walls, without weight.

His mind drifted further.

The first chain. The first ink pressed into his skin. A single link, dark against his forearm. The mark of the unproven.

Later, as time passed, the chain would grow, one link after another, stretching up his arm until they encircled it entirely.

But in the beginning, there had only been one.

One bond. One oath.

He had bound himself to Gorrak.

The void shifted around him, pressing, stretching. It had no sky, no ground, no edge, yet he felt it surrounding him, enclosing him.

Two years.

That was how long they trained.

But none of it mattered unless you survived Gra'zuk.

The breaking and reforging. The trial that separated warriors from everyone else.

It had been there long before the orcs had taken in humans. A tradition woven into their history, a trial that had shaped them since the days their clans waged war against each other, long before they had built something greater.

He had been part of the first batch. The first outsiders the orcs had tested.

A thousand of them, taken in at once, thrown into Gra'zuk the same way orc initiates had been for generations. The orcs hadn't known if humans could survive it.

They learned quickly.

More came over the next two years.

Four, maybe five smaller groups. Different ages, different places. Some came with fight in their blood, raised in violence. Others had barely thrown a punch.

By the end, just over two thousand remained.

Most had made it.

Fifteen percent had not.

Not because they weren't strong enough—strength alone had never been the test.

Some had never been meant to be soldiers.

There had been those whose minds worked in ways better suited to command than combat. Others who had hands that built instead of destroyed, who could mend, who could create. Some had the willpower to endure war, but not the instinct to fight it.

The orcs had seen their value.

They were not mindless brutes, thinking only of blades and blood.

Every recruit had been tested. If you had skill, if you had potential, you had a place.

Smiths, medics, engineers, tacticians—every cog in the war machine mattered.

But if you wanted to fight, if you wanted to carve your place in the ranks of the Ruh'Kel, to stand among the warriors that forced even empires to tread carefully—then Gra'zuk was the only way forward.

There was no shortcut. No second chance.

It had existed for centuries, unchanging. A trial that had forged warriors from raw blood and bone, from willpower and fire.

It was not cruelty.

It was not punishment.

It was necessary.

And by god, Gra'zuk had broken him.

It had taken everything from him, torn him down until there was nothing left but the raw shape of survival.

And when they built him back, he had come out something stronger.

As Wes drifted, the void shifting around him, he knew—no matter what lay ahead—nothing would ever compare to those six months.

Gra'zuk was a very interesting point in his life…