By four in the morning, the alarms didn't ring. They never needed to. Mess Officer Roberta was already at Cain's bedside.
She looked no older than twenty, yet her eyes carried a century of memory.
Porcelain skin, flawless and luminous, framed by silken silver hair, gave her an ethereal glow.
A small, pointed nose and rose-petal lips rested in serene balance, delicate yet composed.
She didn't wear beauty like ornamentation — it was woven into her, timeless and exact.
Cain stirred. He was only a child — three years old, barely shoulder-height to her waist.
But his body, shaped by aggressive DNA augmentation, was not ordinary.
His cells processed metabolic signals differently. Two hours of sleep granted him full recovery.
Dreams were compressed, rest efficient, neural saturation achieved by precision bio-design.
"You've had your fill of sleep?"
Cain nodded. The floor was cold. The air tighter. But Roberta's presence carried with it a stability — strict, constant, unwavering.
Today's morning regimen began with targeting drills.
Toy launchers fired soft projectiles into the air — left, right, randomized.
"Cain."
"Right."
"Cain."
"Left."
"Cain."
He hesitated. A loud snap from a clapper cannon popped beside him.
"React faster."
Roberta said, unblinking.
"Sensory noise doesn't mean sensory failure."
Next, came mathematics. Flashcards, abacus drills, vocal recitation.
"One to one hundred. Set theory. Visual grouping. Go."
He worked quickly, counting pieces of colored foam, marking symmetrical rows.
Science, too, wasn't spared — observation-based physics.
Balls rolled down slopes, pulleys shifted weights.
"What makes it move?"
"Force."
"What slows it down?"
"Friction."
Memory training followed.
Roberta placed nine objects on the table. She held up three flashcards with matching icons. He had to recall order, pairings, and orientation.
Between rotations, she held him gently to her side.
Roberta had no children. She hadn't nursed orphans — only Cain, a motherless boy she raised as if he were her own.
She had milk. Cain, in his innocence, knew its comfort. Her body was firm but warm, scentless but safe.
"Can I drink forever?"
She paused, then sighed.
"You can't."
She cradled Cain against her side, softly nursing him as her fingers threaded gently through his hair.
"You won't always be a child."
He didn't understand, but nodded.
By the age of five, his training intensified. Cain advanced to moving targets, soft foam pop-ups that reacted to laser sensors.
He gripped rubber-round pistols with a two-handed stance — centered, elbows tucked, focusing on control over fire rate.
Math grew sharper — multiplication, division, fractions.
Physics introduced levers, work, mechanical advantage.
Programming began — visual loops, simple conditionals, drag-and-drop logic blocks.
Roberta no longer guided each action. She watched, monitored, logged responses, errors, and delays.
By nine, Cain had already covered more than most soldiers did by enlistment.
Physics wasn't numbers on paper — it was recoil, drop-off, shatter points.
Kinematics taught him how bodies moved and ballistics, how to stop them.
He studied structural mechanics not to build — but to break.
In biology, he traced every tendon, every bone-lock.
Not only for medicine — for targeting.
His philosophy module ran the gamut — Plato, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli — idealism, deception, control.
All with a calm, clinical detachment.
Stalingrad taught him how cities die.
Game theory showed him how to keep them breathing.
Coding had been drilled into him with boxes of automatons — some chased targets with relentless precision, others projected holograms to mislead, and a few simply exploded.
Roberta had been his teacher for as long as Cain could remember.
She wasn't warm, nor was she cruel — just precise.
Cold only in discipline, not in intent.
She never smiled when he got answers right, never frowned when he bled.
Her lessons were unflinching, because she knew one truth better than most.
Love wouldn't keep Cain alive out there.
Praise dulled the blade. So she gave him none. Her feedback came like gunfire — short, exact, final.
"Too slow."
"Bugged program."
"Too many strings."
No lectures. No wasted breath.
Each word cut where it needed to, stripped down to survival — just like the steel ruler that whipped down when he hesitated, sharp and unforgiving.
Once, lost in numbers and letters, he missed the strike
It sliced through flesh and fractured three fingers, a bone-deep injury.
Magic was no different.
One wrong line, and it could kill him out there — the enemy wasn't going to wait for him to finish casting.
His combat curriculum was worse.
He learned to fire from a prone raft, soaked to the ribs.
Swim with a weighted dummy rifle, strip it, clean it — underwater.
Corner checks at reaction speed.
Room breaches in full gear.
Hand-to-hand grappling with pistol disarms mid-roll.
Wall climbs, rappels, vertical leaps — everything tested with a loaded weapon aimed and steady.
He learned to descend ziplines while shooting.
To vanish between glass reflections and drainpipes.
Silenced SMGs, lightweight optics, hybrid pistol loadouts — fired in motion, reloaded on instinct.
Despite the accurate movements nor the perfections of his forms. Roberta didn't train Cain to just survive the battlefield. He trained him to own it.
So came the next stage — the raiding pits.
Paint bullets hissed past him like hornets.
Cain ducked low behind a collapsed barricade, fifteen automatons closing in from every angle. Each fired on a strict combat script — lethal and relentless.
The rifle clicked in his hand. Fifteen bullets. Fifteen enemies. No room for error.
With a breath, Cain rolled sideways, exposing his flank to draw their attention.
Five of them shifted their stances to intercept, and that was his cue.
He fired five sharp and controlled shouts — five takedowns.
Cain memorized the automatons with a single glance. No hesitation, only a flash of calculation.
He didn't need to bring them down completely — just strike the hollow points embedded in their frames, weak spots designed to shut them down.
'Four in the left arm. Three in the head. Three in the right hand.'
Without warning, he tossed his jacket into the air. It fluttered, drawing fire, and in the same instant, the automatons began pelting him with paintball rounds. Cain slid low, twisting mid-roll, his pistols already drawn.
He fired.
Each shot snapped clean through the designated weak points — ten down in a blink.
One bullet clipped slightly off-center, shaving paint instead of disabling the joint, but the rest hit with surgical precision. Sparks flew. The line of automatons crumpled into silence.
Then came the voice.
"Again."
Roberta's shout echoed across the chamber like a judgment bell.
The fallen automatons began to stir — twitching, hissing, dragging themselves toward one another. Limbs detached and reattached. Panels folded, twisted, reshuffled. Machines exchanged parts like soldiers trading weapons.
The training ground shifted with them. What was once an urban warzone collapsed into chaos, reforming into something new — something Cain hadn't seen before.
His earlier memorization was useless now. He exhaled sharply. No time to rest. They were coming again.
Cain didn't feel complain. He knew this was all preparation.
For a world that didn't care how old he was — only how long he could survive.