Technicians watched from behind glass. One adjusted a panel without urgency. Another recorded values with the detached focus of someone monitoring equipment rather than a child. No one spoke to her. No one reacted to the damage she had done to material that would stop most adults cold.
"Reset."
The girl lowered her arm and stepped back into position. Feet set. Shoulders squared. Body centered over a precise point on the floor. She found her alignment in a single movement, no settling in, no adjustment. As if her body already knew the exact coordinates required.
Lucien looked at her face.
She couldn't have been older than three. Maybe four.
The thought arrived quietly and landed with weight. He had registered her size before, small against the machine, small against the room, but had processed it the way you processed something your mind didn't want to hold fully. Now he held it.
She wasn't fidgeting. Wasn't distracted. A child that age should have been pulled toward something, a sound, a movement, the simple restlessness of a body too young to be still for long. She wasn't. There was nothing on her face. Not suppressed tension. Not blank concentration. Nothing. She was waiting for the next input the way a system waited for a command.
"Strike."
She moved without hesitation. No excess rotation, no telegraphed wind-up. Force transferred along the shortest path from mass to surface. Her fist met the same weakened point in the metal.
This time it gave.
The structure collapsed inward with a clean fracture, complete and almost quiet after the violence that caused it. She held the position for a moment, arm fully extended, posture unchanged, as if her body hadn't registered that the thing it had been hitting no longer existed. Then she withdrew her arm and lowered it to her side.
Her breathing hadn't changed.
Panels updated. Values shifted. A technician made a note with the same energy someone used to log a temperature reading.
"Again."
She stepped back into position.
Lucien didn't move from the window. He watched her reset, the same precise footfall, the same alignment, the same absolute absence of expression, and felt something settle coldly in his chest. Not surprise. Something quieter. Discipline came from somewhere. It came from will, from the repeated decision to hold yourself together under pressure. What he was watching wasn't that. There was no choice in her precision. She hadn't learned to suppress her reaction.
She had been built without one.
She struck again. The machine fractured further. The technicians didn't react. The voice said "again" before the echo had fully died.
Lucien turned away.
The escort returned him to his room without ceremony, the corridors as unmarked and identical as they had been that morning. He walked them without speaking.
He was almost back when he heard the footsteps.
Small. Unhurried.
He turned.
She had stopped a few feet away, looking up at him with an expression he hadn't seen on her face in the testing room. Not empty. Not commanded. Just present. Curious in the careful, contained way of a child who had learned that curiosity was something you kept close to yourself.
She was even smaller out here, without the machine to frame her, without the glass between them. Her eyes moved over him steadily, taking inventory.
The escort stepped forward. "You shouldn't be in this corridor. I'll have someone bring you back to-"
"Go away."
Her voice was small but not uncertain. She said it the way someone said something they had already decided, without looking at the escort at all. Her gaze stayed on Lucien.
A beat of silence.
The escort looked at her, then at Lucien, then back. Whatever calculus he ran, it landed somewhere cautious. He stepped back and said nothing further.
The girl continued to look at Lucien. He looked back. Neither of them moved. The corridor held them both in its flat, even light, the man who had spent the day being measured and the child who had spent it breaking steel, standing in the space between one thing and whatever came next.
"Who are you?" she said.
Lucien was quiet for a moment. Not hesitating. Thinking.
"A test subject," he said. "Same as you."
"We are not the same."
Her voice didn't rise. Didn't sharpen. It remained exactly as level as it had been, which somehow made it land harder than if she had been angry.
"I am Reiju. My father is Vinsmoke Judge."
"Reiju," he said.
She waited.
"Aren't you a little young to be here?"
She considered this with the same focused attention she had given everything else since she appeared in the corridor.
"This is where I am meant to be," she said.
He took that with him.
She turned and walked back the way she had come, no hurry, no backwards glance. Her footsteps were small and even in the corridor. The escort fell in behind her at a careful distance, saying nothing.
Lucien watched her go.
This is where I am meant to be. He turned the sentence over. There were at least three ways to read it, and none of them were better than the others. A child stating a fact. A child repeating something she had been told often enough to believe it completely. A child who had already made her peace with something most adults would have spent years resisting.
Judge built soldiers out of strangers. Apparently, the project didn't stop at the front door.
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Remember 1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones.