Cassios moved through the shadows at the edge of the refugee camp.
His footsteps were heavy yet remarkably steady. Each landed precisely on a relatively firm patch between mud and rubble, making almost no unnecessary sound.
His towering body, like a moving fortress, now displayed a keen, almost predatory agility at odds with its appearance.
He avoided the white figures patrolling the main thoroughfares and the gathered crowds, choosing instead the narrow, labyrinthine gaps between tattered tents, heaps of refuse, and makeshift shacks.
He turned sideways to squeeze through passages barely wide enough for a person, ducked beneath clotheslines, and stepped over exhausted bodies curled in corners. His movements flowed as though every inch of this chaotic terrain had long since been etched into his instincts.
He attracted no undue attention, like a vagrant who had truly lost his way, though the bulging muscles beneath his old armor and the knife-sharp gaze he occasionally swept over his surroundings stood starkly apart from the numbness and despair around him.
He had no goal.
No destination.
He simply moved blindly onward, toward the camp's outskirts, where people were fewer and the light was dimmer.
Where should I go? He did not know. He had long since grown accustomed to walking without an answer.
Ever since leaving Terra, leaving the land for which he had shed all his blood, only to have every trace of himself quietly erased, a sense of direction had become a luxury—or perhaps a burden.
Cassios was a survivor. One of the few living footnotes still stumbling through time from that dark history, deliberately concealed and washed away by glorious narratives.
He had once been one of the Thunder Warriors, the Emperor's first blades. To unite a divided Terra and save humanity's homeworld from endless warfare and warlord rule,