Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Predator’s Mark

Word count: ~620

Veldaric Hill didn’t trust quiet nights.

They meant someone was hiding something—or bleeding to death quietly.

He sat in the command chair of the Leviathan-class warship Thornshade, bare-chested, bruised, sweat streaking the curve of his spine. Around him, holo-screens glowed faint blue, flickering with battle reports and logistics he barely read anymore. He didn’t care about balance sheets. He cared about kill ratios.

And now… he cared about a file.

A single civilian profile, flickering in the bottom left corner of his combat feed. He hadn’t meant to open it. It had flashed during a transmission test from the Capital Institute’s arcanet. Random. Accidental. But once he saw it—he couldn’t stop looking.

Julien Deton.

Seventeen. No family. No clan. No record prior to age sixteen except an emergency healing log from a minor border planet explosion.

That alone would’ve made Veldaric suspicious.

But it wasn’t the boy’s blank history that interested him.

It was the arcana sync rate: 98.4%.

Higher than any civilian should’ve had.

Higher than most war mages.

Veldaric tapped the screen. Zoomed in on the boy’s photo. The ID image was poorly lit—flat lighting, cheap uniform—but the features were clear. Soft mouth. Defiant tilt to the jaw. Tired eyes that didn’t belong on a seventeen-year-old.

He didn’t look like a soldier.

But he didn’t look like prey either.

“Hill,” came a voice over comms. “Another riot broke out in Sector Twelve. Shall we dispatch a squad?”

“Let them fight,” Veldaric muttered. “Weak blood should burn itself out.”

The aide hesitated. “Understood, sir.”

He cut the comms and stood. The room tilted slightly—his last fight had cracked two ribs, but he ignored the pain. Pain meant nothing. Only instinct.

And Veldaric's instinct was roaring.

---

He made his way to the ship’s command sanctum, a dark dome where only his private data feed operated. From here, he could watch anyone in the Empire—provided he had access.

And Veldaric always had access.

“Show me Julien Deton,” he ordered.

The feed jumped to life. A grainy cam outside Dorm Hall 4B flickered on. There he was: Julien. Alone. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, fiddling with a burned card template, his hands trembling but determined. The boy had discovered the sabotage—but hadn’t reported it. Interesting.

Smart, Veldaric thought. Paranoid. Good.

He’d expected Julien to cry. Or panic. Or flee.

Instead, the boy carefully scraped away the ruined card matrix and began re-etching the frame by hand, using nothing but a basic wand and a stabilizer barely worth ten credits.

“He’s not supposed to know how to do that,” Veldaric muttered.

No freshman would. No untrained child could.

Unless he’d been something else. Before.

Veldaric leaned back, silver eyes gleaming.

“He’s hiding something.”

---

Later, in the training arena, Veldaric ripped a training drone in half with his bare hands. Metal shrieked as the simulation died. Sparks rained down on him. His men stood back, wisely silent.

“Bring me the registration logs for all Sector 4 initiates,” he said.

“Yes, Marshal,” came the voice. No questions.

He wasn’t going to touch Julien.

Not yet.

But he was going to get close.

And when he did, he’d strip the lies from that soft-looking body and find out what he was.

Because something in Julien Deton didn’t belong in the world of schools and rules.

Something in him belonged to war.

And Veldaric always claimed what belonged on the battlefield.

---

To be continued…

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