The days don’t blur—they cut. Each one slices deeper than the last.

  Hooks doesn’t teach with lectures. He teaches with trials. He doesn’t give lessons. He gives missions.

  And he beats the weakness out of me.

  Before the real jobs begin, I train. Pushups until my arms fail. Sprints with sandbags on my back until my lungs feel like they’re full of glass. Hooks makes me fight the older boys he pays in bread and coin—boys who’ve been in the alleys longer, tougher, meaner.

  I lose. Often.

  Then I run drills. Fight with sticks. Learn to take a punch without flinching. Learn how to fall without breaking. Learn to bite, to claw, to survive.

  Hooks watches me hang from a rusted pipe with nothing but my fingertips.

  "You don’t get fireballs or wings," he says. "You got a trick that can be useful if you're smart, but only if your body doesn’t betray you. So we make sure it won’t."

  He makes me hang there for minutes. When I drop, I start again.

  "You’re going to be the kind of killer who lives in walls," he tells me. "In floors. Under beds. You can’t afford to slip. Not once."

  Sometimes I black out while training. Wake up with blood in my mouth and bruises the color of old coal. And I think—this is nothing. I’ve already survived worse. I’ve already been thrown out like trash. I won’t die here. I’ll become something more.

  And when I’m not bleeding, I’m watching.

  Hooks sends me into taverns to eavesdrop, into backrooms to clean bloodstains while I listen to traders talk. He gives me fake errands that cross territories. "Walk this path. Don’t look up. Count the doors. Listen to who guards the gates."

  He gives no praise. Only more weight.

  Weeks pass. Then months.

  He says nothing when my 14th birthday comes. I don't either.

  But the work changes.

  The missions begin.

  Track a smuggler through the Ashlan Quarter. I get caught halfway through. Chased. Cornered. I jump off a roof, land wrong, and twist my ankle. Hooks says nothing the next morning. Just hands me a sack of bricks and makes me run laps until I puke.

  Then comes a new task. Collect payment from a fence lord named Tork. No introductions. No warning. Just a name and a corner shop in the Meatlane. Tork doesn’t like surprises. Shoves my face into a barrel of rats and doesn’t let me up until I scream the name of their supplier. I remember it. Every syllable.

  Later, Hooks points to a wall map. "Now go mark the routes."

  I sneak into the scrap yards, tail traders to the auction pits, shadow a meat baron’s son to a basement where gold changes hands. I memorize the faces. The schedules. The dead ends that lead to locked doors.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  One night, he sends me into a Blessed-controlled block with nothing but chalk and a knife. "See if you can walk out with both."

  I learn which places pay tribute to Bishop. What crates go missing and who turns their eyes the other way when they do. I learn which names open gates, and which ones close them with iron and gunpowder.

  Bishop isn’t just a name whispered in fear—he’s a ghost stitched into the stone of Deadreach. Some say he walks without footsteps. Others claim he can see the intent behind your eyes. They say he used to be nobility—an Answered cast down, just like me. But instead of dying in the gutters, he became something else.

  Hooks is the blade Bishop sends when whispers stop working. Bishop might be myth. Hooks is fact. Flesh and bone and punishment.

  When people say Bishop’s name, they glance over their shoulder. When they see Hooks, they shut up fast.

  I learn Deadreach by walking it. Three rings—like a throat waiting to choke you. The outer ring’s for the filth, the dying, the drug dens. The middle ring handles the trades—meat, metal, messages. The inner ring? That one’s gated, guarded, ruled by the Blessed. Bishop’s Circle runs it from the shadows—if the rumors are true.

  Zenith pretends it doesn't exist. But the caravans still come. Meat goes up. Wine comes down. Power flows both ways, just never cleanly.

  Each job twists me a little more.

  Each bruise is a lesson I don’t forget.

  But not everything in Deadreach is made of bruises.

  There’s a girl—dirty apron, cracked hands, maybe fifteen. She washes floors in one of the butcher alleys I pass through on errands. Doesn’t talk. Doesn’t look anyone in the eye.

  Once, I drop a crate near her and mutter an apology. She glances up. Just for a second. There’s a scar down one side of her face, faded but deep.

  A few days later, I see a man grab her behind one of the smokehouses. Drunk. Loud. No one else moves.

  Neither do I.

  Until I do.

  I shove him off her. Swing once. Maybe twice.

  He breaks my nose. Slams me against the wall. Kicks me until I’m coughing blood.

  But she gets away.

  I don’t tell Hooks. I’m ashamed. It wasn’t a mission. Wasn’t ordered. I just… did it.

  Hooks notices the bruises, of course. Raises an eyebrow while I try to hide the swelling. He grunts something under his breath and throws me an extra shirt.

  "You're not dead," he says. "Get moving."

  And the next day, training is twice as hard.

  Maybe that’s the reward.

  And through it all, he talks.

  "Zenith raises cowards on velvet pillows," he says while wrapping my wrist. "They pray to glowing idols and call it strength. But the real gods? The ones who answer people like you? They live in bone. In shadow. In pain."

  He tells me my mark is raw. Hungry. Unshaped.

  "But it grows through real struggle," he says. "Pain feeds it. Fear feeds it. Starvation. Betrayal. Fire in the lungs and blood in the mouth. That’s how it wakes up."

  I ask what it becomes.

  He tosses a blade at my feet without looking.

  "You'll find out when you're ready. Now again."

  So I pick it up.

  And I keep going.

  ***

  Some nights, the pain doesn’t let me sleep. My ribs still hum from the last fight. My nose is crooked. My skin burns from old bruises stretched too thin.

  But I’ve felt worse. Worse is being forgotten. Being thrown away. Pain means I’m still here.

  I lie there and remember the sound of clove tea being poured into a glass cup. The way it steamed in the cold mornings back home. I don’t miss the taste. I miss the stillness. I miss the quiet.

  But quiet doesn’t last in Deadreach.

  Hooks kicks the door open before dawn. "Up. You’re late."

  No ceremony. No stare. Just barked orders and fresh weights to carry.

  I follow him out into the cold and move through drills until the stones beneath me are slick with sweat and spit. When I fall, he tells me I’m wasting his time. When I limp, he calls me pathetic. If I bleed, he throws me a rag.

  I remind myself: this is nothing. This is fuel.

  Later, he sends me back into the Blessed block. Chalk and knife again. But this time, I mark someone on purpose—just to hear what they say.

  I listen from rooftops as they threaten a rival. Something about territory. Tribute. Blood.

  "If Bishop doesn’t get his due, someone else dies. Maybe two. Maybe three."

  The voice carries. My mark lets me catch it all.

  I don’t know if Hooks planned that. But I report everything.

  When I return, he jerks his chin toward the training circle.

  "Again," he says.

  So I go.