A bucket of ice cold water crashed over Atlas, tearing a gasp of surprise and pain from his lungs.
He stood half-naked in the stifling gloom of his cell, his malnourished body wracked with violent shivers. His skin was nothing more than a canvas of raw scrapes and purplish bruises, the result of a merciless treatment. In truth, they were breaking him in like a wild beast. They beat him to toughen him up and train his body to take a hit, or so they claimed.
For now, the conditioning was done exclusively bare-handed. In his past life, Atlas had never thrown a real punch. Why would he have needed to? Life had been, after all, so much easier.
Fear, however, was very much present. It twisted his gut every time the heavy iron door creaked open. He felt the exhaustion, the distress, and the sharp pain of his battered muscles. Yet, despite the humiliation and the bite of the freezing water on his open wounds, Atlas couldn't muster a single ounce of anger.
Not out of the self-sacrifice of a holy martyr, but because the emotion seemed to have been extracted from him. He wanted to hate these men. He knew a murderous rage should be boiling in his veins to help him survive, but instead, there was only a black hole. A missing piece.
It must be linked to whatever broke inside my head, he thought, teeth chattering, eyes locked on the damp floor. Where did my rage go?
At his feet, the dirty water spilled from the bucket flowed in a way that was... abnormal. Instead of naturally following the slope of the flagstones, the thin streams of water seemed to hesitate. They snaked, stopped, retreated, then set off in another direction, sometimes climbing for half a second against the natural angle of the floor before correcting itself, as though something invisible kept testing the water's patience before letting it go. It was as if the water was lost, desperately trying to find its way across the cold stone. It seemed almost alive, caught in the same confusion Atlas himself couldn't put into words.
A chaotic ballet, so minute and imperceptible that no one noticed. The guards never looked at the ground. One of them dropped the empty bucket with a long sigh and rubbed his temples, suddenly looking disoriented, before shaking his head to ward off the strange lethargy.
It had been about almost a week since Atlas was purchased by Isaac. According to the underlings who took turns "training" him, his purchase price had been so high that they refused to let him die before his first fight.
Atlas was now an investment. And in the underground arenas of Rohar, investments had to yield high returns.
Usually, after "cleaning" him their way, the grunts let him rest for a few hours.
Atlas got dressed. He didn't wear the clothes he had when he woke up, but a simple, rough beige tunic, crudely held together by a rope belt. A gift from his jailers, graciously given to remind him of his lowly status. They had also shaved his head. Oddly enough, this military cut suited him much better than his previously unkempt hair, making the persistent glow of his azure eyes stand out even more in the gloom.
He sat on his stone bed, covered only by a thin mattress with metallic reflections, woven from a material resembling cheap polyester. Nothing else. No blanket, no pillow. It was an unsettling contrast, the lingering sensation that humanity had regressed to the Stone Age while looting the corpses of its own future.
Though exhausted, Atlas didn't seek sleep immediately. He lay back on his spartan bunk, closed his eyes, and began to think, a ritual he had meticulously imposed on himself since his awakening.
He analyzed the sudden and shocking upheavals that had just struck reality, but above all, their impact on himself. He knew that something deep and visceral had broken, or rather reconfigured, inside his skull. This moment of respite served to inspect himself from the inside. He strove to piece together the puzzle of this new universe using his meager experience and the snippets of conversation he managed to catch from the lackeys.
He felt it. His consciousness had fundamentally mutated. He couldn't find the exact words to express it, but everything seemed vaster, denser to him. As if, for the very first time in his existence, things made absolute sense.
He recalled the bits of information he had managed to gather.
"The new world is called Odyssey... well, I think that's only for this continent, they only ever talk about Odyssey. Most humans, or rather, the descendants of the ones I knew, have evolved and awakened their Qualia. That must be what's happening to me, but from what I gather, it's not automatic. They call it the 'Selection of the Founding Fathers', but in reality, I think it might come from other factors, even if I don't know more than that.
And finally, last but not least, a hundred years... I still can't wrap my head around it. Does that mean I'm over a hundred years old? How does that work?"
His mind jumped from thought to thought, wavering between the state of this new world and the profound changes taking place within him. But the reality of his physical condition brutally caught up with him, and he slowly drifted off to sleep, exhausted by his "special treatment."
Atlas was jolted awake, as usual, by a bucket of cold water splashed over his head, this time not to wash him, and the sound of a man hammering on the bars of his cage.
"Looks like the dog had a cozy sleep," said Atlas's familiar guard, the one with the burned face.
Another replied, "I think we've pampered him too much. Too much comfort in this cell" he said with a cynical smile.
It was time for Atlas's "training."
The two guards watched him step out, his tunic soaked, wearing sly grins. It was a little pleasure Isaac granted them: educating the new dogs. Although Atlas seemed impassive, they knew deep down he had to be seething with anger, ready to pounce on them at the first opportunity in search of vengeance. The very idea made them shiver with anticipation.
The scarred jailer spat, "Today will be a double session. We're going to give you some special attention, because the old man wants you fighting in ten days. So, we're picking up the pace."
Though he pretended to inform him out of simple necessity, Atlas could discern the sick pleasure in his words and in his eyes. This guard liked making others suffer. It was surely a way to compensate for his own trauma, an outlet for the pain he himself must have endured to end up disfigured like this.
The second guard, shorter, with greasy hair, black eyes, and a bulbous nose retorted: "Uh oh... looks like we don't have much time left with you. We're going to have to prepare you properly." The innuendo was crass, heavy with silent threats.
They dragged Atlas to a more spacious room. Still in the underground, apparently, but much brighter. A few gladiators could be seen training in the corners. Blood littered the floor, and the air was heavy, saturated with the humidity and sweat evaporating in the space.
The room was freezing. It was apparently winter outside, Atlas remembered, mentally picturing that strange, blue-tinted snow, and with the ice water pasting his tunic to his skin, goosebumps broke out across his flesh.
The burn-scarred guard shoved Atlas roughly into the middle of the room. The other fighters were used to this kind of spectacle; most had even lived it. Here, survival was the only priority. So they didn't waste a second of their precious time looking at the newcomer.
Thrown off balance by the surprise, Atlas nearly tripped on the stone. But, in the face of this umpteenth humiliation, still no anger flared up within him.
"Alright, get in position, like I taught you! Center of gravity, legs apart to stay stable, and put your guard up!"
Here, they weren't going to teach him prestigious, refined, or extravagant techniques. Instead, they instilled a primal survival instinct in him. Even if it meant resorting to low blows, survival was all that mattered.
Every time he failed to execute exactly what "Burn-Face", as he had nicknamed him, demanded, or dared to complain, he received a vicious blow from a wooden staff. And often, simply for his own personal pleasure, the guard deliberately targeted the most painful areas, relentlessly going after his shins or bruised ribs.
Burn-Face wasted no time. The first staff strike cleaved the air, slyly aiming for Atlas's ribs. Too weak, his body numbed by the cold, he took it head-on. A muffled grunt escaped his lips as he staggered back two steps, the wind knocked out of him.
But this was where the difference lay.
In his past life, pain would have blinded him. Panic would have blurred his senses and thrown his movements into disarray. Today, his mind was elsewhere, deeply focused. He isolated the pain, filing it away as mere data. What captured all his attention was the movement itself.
He analyzed the scene with an almost abnormal clarity: the guard's weight planted on his left leg, the slight rotation of his right shoulder right before impact, the precise whistling of the wood slicing through the damp air.
"Too slow, dog! Keep your guard up!" the jailer spat, winding up for a second strike almost identical to the first.
This time, Atlas's body reacted differently. His reflexes were only marginally better, still hampered by malnourishment and abuse, but his brain had already perfectly mapped the trajectory. He didn't try to back away, knowing he wouldn't have the time. He pivoted a hair's breadth on his heel and raised his forearm at a precise angle.
The wood cracked harshly against his flesh, but the blow glanced off instead of striking him dead-on. The kinetic energy was deflected, the force of the impact cut in half.
He puts all his weight on his front leg, Atlas noted coldly, his breathing shallow. He's off-balance for a fraction of a second after striking.
The training continued and became a true physical ordeal. Atlas was struck, swept off his feet, and hurled onto the frozen stone multiple times. His lip bled, and his body felt like one massive, throbbing bruise. Yet, with every new fall, his mind stored data at a dizzying speed. A state of hyper-lucidity had awakened within him, a pure byproduct of his Qualia's mutation.
His mind was in a trance. He could dissect his tormentor's biomechanics. He recorded the reach of his extensions, the rhythm of his breathing before a heavy attack, the infinitesimal twitch of his dark eyes before a low blow. He was learning.
Not like an ordinary human who needed to repeat a motion hundreds of times to develop muscle memory, but like an entity directly absorbing the very logic of combat. His slight physical reflexes didn't stem from his muscles, but from his terrifying capacity to anticipate.
When Burn-Face finally called an end to the double session, winded and secretly frustrated that his punching bag hadn't begged for mercy once, Atlas was still standing.
Stumbling, short of breath, he wiped the trail of blood from his chin. His azure eyes, completely unfazed, locked onto the guard with intensity.
Ten days.
The number settled somewhere behind his ribs, heavier than any blow he'd taken that morning. Ten days to turn whatever was left of his starved, battered body into something capable of walking out of an arena alive, rather than being carried out of one.
He had no idea, yet, what waited for him on the other side of that number. He only knew, with a certainty that felt almost foreign to him, that he intended to find out.
The countdown had begun.