In my old life, everything revolved around a single, inescapable truth: I couldn't stop pushing forward.
What started as a simple desire to be better—to surpass my limits—slowly became something else. An obsession. Not with power for its own sake, but with shaping my will into something untouchable. Something absolute.
While others sought comfort, I trained in silence. Every day became a test of endurance. Pain wasn't an obstacle—it was a gauge. Proof that I was still carving something out of the raw material of who I was.
My body adapted, hardened. I pulled strength from places that should have broken me. I learned to move through exhaustion, to keep going long after everything screamed to stop. And in the end, it paid off.
They made me a commander. Then a general. Eventually, I sat at the top—Supreme Commander of an army built on ambition, strategy, and relentless grind.
But power doesn't make you untouchable. That's a lie people tell themselves when they've forgotten how vulnerable stillness makes you.
I died sitting in a chair. No battlefield. No final stand. Just a report in one hand, a pistol raised behind me, and a moment too slow.
Almost.
In the split second between breath and silence, my body moved on instinct. My hand found the knife I always carried. One throw—clean, fast, precise. It was over before the trigger pulled.
But I had already felt the shift. The weight pressing down on me, trying to take me under.
Only it didn't. Not fully.
Something refused to let go.
In that final moment, I felt it—my will, raw and unfiltered, breaking past whatever barrier had kept it bound to flesh. There was no light. No voice from beyond. Just movement. Transition. A sense of being carried, not by fate, but by force.
My own.
And when I woke up again, I wasn't the same.
Not in body. Not in soul.
The story didn't end in that chair. It began there.