Two weeks passed,
One morning,
Your phone buzzes at 2:11 a.m.
Not loudly.
Not urgently.
Just once.
A small vibration against the wooden nightstand.
You open one eye, irritated, and reach for it, expecting a spam message or a wrong number.
Instead, there is a single text from an unknown sender.
> You have 3 months to prepare.
Your breath catches.
You don't need to ask who sent it.
You sit up slowly, staring at the words as if they might rearrange themselves into something less horrifying.
He is already awake.
"I felt it," he says from the corner of the room, where he stands half in shadow. "They have marked the time."
"So they're giving me a deadline now?" you whisper.
"Yes," he replies. "That means they're confident."
Your stomach twists. "About what?"
"That you will not survive what's coming."
You close your eyes.
Three months.
Ninety days.
A small, human number for something so inhuman.
"Then we train harder," you say.
His eyes flick to you. Something unreadable passes through them.
"Yes," he agrees. "We do."
---
The days stop being days.
They become sequences of endurance.
Morning:
Control.
Breath.
Focus.
Afternoon:
Shielding.
Striking.
Sensing.
Night:
Pain.
Collapse.
Healing.
He pushes you far beyond what feels safe.
Sometimes you black out.
Sometimes you wake up on the floor with your muscles shaking violently and your throat raw from screaming.
"Again," he tells you.
And you do it again.
You learn how to reach deeper into the hollow inside your chest, where your fear lives.
You learn how to take that fear and sharpen it.
How to turn it into something that can cut.
"Fear is not weakness," he tells you, watching closely as you hold a shimmering barrier in front of you. "Fear is attention. Use it."
Some days, you feel strong.
Some days, you feel like glass.
Some days, you feel both.
You start to notice his gaze.
At first, you think it's nothing.
Just him watching to correct your form.
To make sure you don't collapse.
To make sure you don't break.
But then it lingers.
Longer than it needs to.
When you breathe.
When you wipe sweat from your neck.
When you stretch aching muscles.
You feel it like heat.
"Stop staring," you snap once, embarrassed.
He looks away immediately. "Apologies."
You tell yourself it's just training.
Just proximity.
Just stress.
After all, he's your guardian.
Not—
Anything else.
One night, after a particularly brutal session, you sit on the edge of the bed, shaking.
"You're pushing me too hard," you mutter.
"No," he replies softly. "I am pushing you enough."
You look up at him.
He's standing too close.
Close enough that you can feel the faint hum of something ancient under his skin.
Close enough that your heartbeat changes.
"You're afraid," you realize suddenly.
His eyes darken. "Of what?"
"Of losing me."
Silence.
That's answer enough.
Three months is not a lot of time.
But it is enough to learn how to become something else.
Something that can fight back.
And somewhere, far away—
Something reads the same countdown.
And smiles.