Six Years Ago. Somewhere in the Balkans.
The monastery didn't have a name. Not anymore. Whatever priests used to pray here were long gone — replaced by men with hollow eyes and rifles older than they were.
They called themselves The Irregulars.No uniforms. No ranks. No borders. Just one rule:Kill the people who build the cages.
Damien was twenty-five when he found them. Fresh from Zurich. Fresh from failure. Fresh from dragging his sister's coffin into the ground with his own trembling hands.
He didn't come here to fight for a cause.
He came to unlearn mercy.
The one they called Koslov broke his ribs the first week.
"You're too polite," Koslov spat, dragging Damien out of the mud. "Polite men build cemeteries with clean hands."
By the second month, Damien had learned how to rig explosives with nothing but fishing wire, fertilizer, and old copper. By the third, he could make a man disappear into six pieces in under twelve seconds with a kitchen knife.
They didn't fight for flags here.They fought to humiliate empires.
They burned oil convoys. They hacked bank accounts. They kidnapped warlords, not for ransom — but for the satisfaction of mailing their teeth to London.
And every lesson Damien learned carved away pieces of the boy he used to be.
One night, around a broken fire, Koslov finally spoke of them — the ones who kept all wars going, who funded both sides for profit, who built entire nations on the suffering of villages like this one.
"We don't fight the warlords," Koslov said softly, staring into the flames. "We fight the men who invent them."
"Who are they?"
Koslov smiled, half his teeth gone. "They don't have names. They have titles. CEO. Director. Chairman. And they don't send tanks. They send treaties. Loans. Deals."
Then Koslov leaned closer, the scar over his left eye twitching. "But there is a list. Always a list."
"What list?"
"The ones who need to die for the world to breathe again."
Damien stared into the fire and saw Zurich, saw Emil Hartmann's perfect suit, his silk tie, the way his ring gleamed as he handed out aid contracts designed to starve entire nations.
It was that night Damien Voss was reborn.
No flag.No borders.Just the list.
Months later, when the monastery burned and the Irregulars were slaughtered by NATO-sponsored mercenaries, Damien survived. Barely.
He walked away with nothing but a scar on his jaw, a memory of Koslov's last smile…
…and a handwritten note folded in his pocket:
"The Thirteen. Find them. End them."
And now, standing in Zurich years later, that list was almost complete.
Almost.