(Red Lake — Month Two, Day One)
Two months.
That's how long Jeanyx Romanov had been breathing the stale, frozen air of Red Lake. Time didn't move here so much as it settled, like ash in an urn. The days blurred together, each one a carbon copy of the last—cold, quiet, and lined with steel.
This morning was no different.
The mess hall buzzed with a dull hum of trays sliding, boots shuffling, and prisoners muttering in six different languages. Jeanyx sat in his usual corner, alone at a long bench table near the window slit that let in a blade of morning light. His tray held hard bread, gray eggs, and a lukewarm tin cup of something that claimed to be tea. He ate quietly, like he did every day, as though the act itself was just another form of meditation.
But today would not be the same.
A shadow loomed over him. Heavy. Tall. Purposeful.
"Du sitzt auf meinem Platz."
(You're sitting in my seat.)
The voice was German. Deep, gravelly, thick with command. Jeanyx didn't look up.
He tore a bite of bread with his teeth, chewed slowly, and reached for his tin cup.
Across the room, conversations fell silent.
The man towering over Jeanyx was Lt. General Wilhelm Krüger, once a decorated beast of the Kaiser's elite Alpine units. A slab of muscle and violence wrapped in a shaved head and jagged nose. His hands had broken necks on three continents. Rumors said he killed a man with a soup spoon once. Others said he crushed a horse's windpipe bare-handed during a failed cavalry retreat.
Krüger wasn't just respected. He was feared.
And he'd just told Jeanyx to move.
Jeanyx sipped his tea.
Krüger's eye twitched.
"I said—"
But he didn't finish.
His hand reached forward, fingers aiming for Jeanyx's shoulder like a claw—
And in the span of three seconds, the world shifted.
One.
Jeanyx moved with the silence of a surgeon.
He twisted slightly in his seat and brought his hand up—not with a punch, but a flat, open-handed slap delivered with precise force across Krüger's right ear. A perfect angle, perfect rotation.
The sound echoed like a gunshot.
The impact collapsed the general's middle ear. The tympanic membrane ruptured instantly, followed by a pop of blood and stunned agony.
Krüger staggered.
Two.
Jeanyx rose calmly, like a man rising from a prayer mat.
With his free hand, he reached to his own temple and pulled two thin strands of inky black hair—slow, deliberate.
By the time Krüger reached for his sidearm out of instinct, Jeanyx was already in front of him.
The hairs, slightly moist, were twisted between his fingers like surgical threads.
With movements too fast to follow, Jeanyx inserted the hair into Krüger's bleeding ear canal, sliding it with terrifying precision into the traumatized eardrum, then deeper, toward the vestibular nerve.
Three.
A quick unfurl—the hairs opened like serpents—and Jeanyx gave a deft tug.
The German's eyes bulged. His spine stiffened.
Every nerve in his balance center screamed. The semicircular canals were torn. The cochlea flared in agony.
A moment later, Krüger hit the floor—hard—gripping his skull with both hands, blood pouring from both ears, eyes wild with disorientation and pain. His body thrashed like a man underwater, unable to tell where the floor was.
Jeanyx stood still, brushing crumbs from his sleeve.
Gasps filled the room. Guards rushed in—batons raised—but froze at the sight of Krüger writhing like a fish on hot stone. No weapons drawn. Just confusion. Fear. Awe.
The head warden himself appeared, boots thudding against the concrete.
"What the hell happened here?"
No one spoke.
Jeanyx, still calm, turned and picked up his tray. He moved one seat down the bench and resumed eating, unfazed. A moment later, he even dipped his bread in the tea.
A medic tried to stabilize Krüger. The man was alive—but his ears were ruined, his balance gone, coordination shattered.
He would never fight again.
He would never walk straight again.
Jeanyx didn't look at him.
The warden stared for a long time. Then—against all logic—he waved off the guards.
"Leave him."
And they did.
Krüger was dragged away, groaning and twitching.
From that day forward, no one ever sat at Jeanyx Romanov's table again.
That night, in the isolated quiet of Cell 42A, Jeanyx stared at his reflection in the warped metal mirror. He studied his own fingers—the same ones that had once held medals… and lives.
He whispered to himself in Russian.
"Война заканчивается… но я никогда не закончу быть оружием."
("The war ends… but I never stop being a weapon.")
Outside, the wind howled across the ice like a mourning wolf.
(Red Lake — Month Two, Day Three)
The iron sky watched as Jeanyx Romanov pulled his chin over the frost-laced bar for the seventieth time. His muscles flexed and coiled with each rise and fall, his breath steady in the cold. Around him, the prison yard whispered with quiet motion—footsteps crunching on hard-packed snow, breath turning to steam, the occasional barked order from a guard above.
But today, something was off.
The wind wasn't blowing right. The rhythm of the yard—the silent, brutal heartbeat of Red Lake—had shifted.
And Jeanyx felt it.
It wasn't one thing. It never was.
It was the way the guards—usually bored and over-watchful—were glancing away from the yard more than they should. It was the wide arc the other prisoners were giving him—wider than fear alone dictated. And it was the dozen or so inmates clustered near the far wall, pretending to exercise, but giving too many glances. Whispering too often. Moving too tightly.
Predators in motion.
Jeanyx dropped from the pull-up bar in a silent crouch. Snow crunched beneath his boots.
His fingers worked fast. He stripped off his black prison coat, wrapped it around the iron grip of a nearby hundred-pound barbell, and tied it tight with old laces from his boots.
He lifted the makeshift weapon—half hammer, half flail—and turned, already in motion.
And just in time.
The first figure was lunging from behind, makeshift shiv in hand.
CRACK.
Jeanyx swung the barbell like a reaper's scythe. It caught the attacker across the chest with a dull, wet thud. Ribs shattered. The man folded backward mid-air, breath bursting from his lungs in a scream that died before it left his mouth.
Snow kicked up as the body hit the ground, limp and twitching.
Then the rest moved.
Eight men in total, all hardened criminals from different parts of the world. One held a sharpened spoon, another had chain-wrapped fists. A tall man in a fur vest drew a piece of sharpened wire from his boot. Their eyes were empty. Paid, promised, or desperate—it didn't matter.
Jeanyx Romanov was the mark.
He dropped into stance—knees bent, weapon loose in his hands like a pendulum.
One charged first.
Jeanyx sidestepped. The attacker threw a punch with brass knuckles. Jeanyx ducked, then slammed the barbell down onto the man's foot, breaking every bone beneath the ankle. As the man screamed and dropped, Jeanyx knee-struck his jaw, shattering it with a crunch.
Another came from the side with a plastic shiv.
Jeanyx let the barbell swing wide and then released it, sending it spinning through the air like a comet.
CLANG. It smashed into the side of the attacker's skull, sending him spinning mid-step and collapsing to the snow.
Two more approached from opposite angles.
Jeanyx grabbed a nearby rake used to clean the snow—snapped the wooden handle across his knee, twirled one half in his grip, and jammed it straight into the first man's throat. The attacker staggered, clutching his neck, blood spurting between his fingers.
The other man threw a punch. Jeanyx caught his wrist mid-air and dislocated his elbow with a violent twist. The scream hadn't even finished before Jeanyx spun behind him and used the broken rake handle to sweep out his legs, then kicked him across the temple.
Three left.
They hesitated.
Mistake.
Jeanyx darted toward them—not running, but flowing, like a shadow breaking loose. He picked up the spoon-shiv from the first attacker and used it to slice open the Achilles tendon of one man mid-lunge. The man dropped with a howl, legs no longer obeying gravity.
One of the remaining two, wide and tattooed, charged with a pipe.
Jeanyx dodged left, grabbed the man's own momentum, and redirected him into the pull-up bar post. The pipe dropped. Jeanyx caught it mid-fall and used it to crack the man's kneecap, followed by an uppercut under the jaw.
The last attacker stood there, shaking, eyes darting between his fallen comrades and the blood-streaked snow.
He tried to run.
Jeanyx didn't chase.
He picked up a broken fragment of metal rake, spun, and hurled it like a spear.
It lodged deep in the runner's lower back. He dropped face-first into the snow, unmoving.
The yard was silent.
Even the guards above—who had purposefully looked away during the ambush—stood frozen now. Rifles half-raised. Unsure what to do. Unsure who had won.
Jeanyx stood in the center of a battlefield, surrounded by groaning bodies, blood steaming on snow.
He was breathing hard, but not from exhaustion—from control.
Then he looked up at the towers—right at the guards.
"Next time," he said aloud, voice sharp as a blade, "you might want to send more."
No one replied.
The siren didn't sound for another full minute.
That night, the warden visited Cell 42A personally.
He stood in the doorway for a long time before speaking.
"Seventeen seconds," he said. "Eight men. Seventeen seconds."
Jeanyx didn't look up from the desk. He was polishing a gear assembly for a trench lighter.
"You watched?"
"I ordered it," the warden said, quietly. "I needed to see if the rumors were true."
"And now?" Jeanyx asked without emotion.
The warden swallowed.
"Now I'm not sure you belong in this prison."
Jeanyx finally looked up, eyes gleaming with something colder than steel.
"I don't."
The warden paused, studying him.
Then he placed a sealed letter on the table and left without another word.
Jeanyx stared at the envelope. No name. Just a red wax seal. Strange emblem.
He didn't open it.
Not yet.
Because deep inside, he knew…
The game was changing.