The air in the ruins tasted of ash and endings. A small figure moved in the shadows, a ghost in a city of ghosts. His hands, too delicate for their grime, sifted through the debris of what was once a street café. They closed around a sodden mass of paper, pulling it from beneath a skeletal beam. A newspaper.

He was a six-year-old Arkhandian. Homelessness had been gifted to him by the divine, a consequence of gods competing over domains he could not comprehend. His family, a bloodline of innovators and thinkers, was now a footnote, a story of a line thought to be completely perished. He was the sole, forgotten remainder. The world had once called him a prodigy, a jewel of the technological industry. Now, he lived in the rubble that industry had become.

He crouched, his back against a crumbling wall, and began the meticulous process of opening the ruined paper. It was an act of archaeology. He peeled the pages apart with a tenderness one might reserve for a holy text, wiping away the grime and the distinct, bitter dust of gunpowder with the frayed cuff of his jacket.

Finally, the front sheet was legible.

The headline was a stark, black slash across the grey page: ‘New Colonel Candidate at Only 19 Years Old, Ordovia States.’

Beneath it was a photograph of a young woman, her face all sharp angles and resolve, her eyes holding a hardness that belied her years. Her uniform was impeccable.

The little boy’s eyes lingered on the image. Then, slowly, he tilted his head back until it met the cold stone behind him. His gaze lifted to the sky—a perpetual, bruised twilight, stained by the smoke of a forever war.

A sound escaped him, not quite a laugh, not quite a cough. It was the dry rustle of dead leaves.

“Isn’t she a genius?” he whispered to the uncaring darkness. The words hung in the frozen air, a cloud of condensation that quickly vanished. “Obtaining the first page of a newspaper. At a young age, too.”

He sighed then, a long, weary exhalation that seemed to carry the weight of everything he had lost. In the quiet that followed, the rustle of the newspaper was the only sound as his small hand crumpled the page, the image of the young colonel twisting into a shapeless ball in his fist.

Step by labored step, he navigated the skeletal remains of his old neighborhood. His destination was not a home, but a memory of one, the hollowed-out shell of his family’s abode, now just a crumbling annex behind a still-functioning worksmith’s shop. The forge’s heat provided a cruel mockery of the warmth that once lived within those walls.

Under the cloak of the perpetual, smoke-stained twilight, he became a ghost. With movements honed by desperation, he performed his nightly ritual: a furtive tap into the worksmith’s main power line. A spider’s web of stolen wires, almost invisible against the soot-blackened brick, carried the precious current into his ruin.

The familiar, low hum of his welding machine coming to life was a sound of rebellion. Its electric blue light flickered against the broken walls, illuminating his focused, grime-streaked face. There would be no more waiting, no more planning. Tonight, with the stolen energy coursing through his tools, he would complete it. He would finish his one great idea, his only weapon.

The light finally died, plunging his world back into the deep blue of night. A metallic click echoed in the silence as the gauntlet, still glowing faintly with trapped heat, settled into its final form. It was crude, scarred by imperfect welds and hammer strikes, but it was complete. It was functional.

A shudder wracked his small frame. “I can’t feel my hands…” he muttered into the encroaching dark.

The cold was a physical presence, a biting entity that stole the warmth from his breath and the sensation from his limbs. At just six years old, Daniel Renghod had long since stopped sweating; his body had nothing left to give. The only thing that had held the freezing void at bay was the searing heat of the welding machine—a torture in itself that had seeped through his skin, deadening nerves and leaving a phantom scorch deep in his bones.

He stared at the creation resting on the anvil. The silence stretched, broken only by the faint tink of cooling metal.

And then, he laughed.

It began as a low, disbelieving chuckle and erupted into a full, manic crescendo that echoed off the ruined walls. It was the sound of shattered nerves and triumph wrung from despair.

“My greatest creation…!” he cried out to the uncaring stars. “I’ve finally done it! Hahahaha~!”

It was, he estimated with a prodigy’s unforgiving eye, perhaps two-thirds the quality of the military’s standard issue. But at that moment, it was more than a piece of equipment. It was an act of defiance. It was the most meaningful thing left in the world.

The Sun rose again, casting a harsh, brilliant light over the ruins—a stark, almost cruel kind of beauty. Frost glistened on broken stone and twisted metal, and the air bit with every breath. Daniel stirred, his small body stiff and aching from a night spent on cold ground, huddled near the fading warmth of his tools.

He rose slowly, every movement deliberate. A faint, weary smile touched his lips as he brushed dust from his worn clothing. “Hah…” he murmured, his voice still rough with exhaustion. “I really feel like Tonio Spark from Metal Hero.”

For a moment, he stood there in the entrance of his broken home, the morning sun catching the crude but solid form of the gauntlet now secured to his arm. Its surface, though rough and uneven, gleamed with a promise of power. Of return.

Then, drawing a deep breath—as though filling his lungs not just with air, but with resolve—he stepped fully into the light. Back straight, head high, he stood gracefully amid the devastation, a figure of defiant pride against the backdrop of loss.

And he shouted, his voice clear and carrying in the morning stillness, a declaration to the sky and to the world that had tried to erase him:

“Now! I, Daniel Renghod—last son of the Renghod line, once-in-a-century genius—shall rise again!”

The words hung in the frozen air, not just a promise, but a warning. The genius had not perished. He had been forged anew in fire and solitude. And now, he was ready.

The rhythmic, brain-dead crunch of boots on frost was like a drumbeat leading to his ambush. A patrol. Five soldiers. Green parkas, standard-issue rifles, the same monotonous chant—"1… 2… 3… 4…"—that had once filled him with awe. Now, it just sounded lazy.

Danny waited, a shadow in the rubble, a predator’s patience overriding the six-year-old’s impulse to rush. He watched the last man in line, a lanky soldier whose focus was on the back of the helmet in front of him.

Perfect.

As the man passed his hiding spot, a metal-clad fist shot out. The gauntlet’s clawed fingers clamped over the soldier’s mouth, yanking him off his feet with a brutal, mechanical whir. There was a brief, muffled scuffle in the dirt, a dull thud, and then silence. The chanting ahead continued, unwavering, too loud and too disciplined for anyone to notice a single missing note in their monotonous song.

Daniel emerged from the shadows, dragging the unconscious soldier by the collar. He looked down at his catch, then at the gauntlet on his arm, a smirk playing on his lips.

“Hmph,” he muttered, giving the soldier a little nudge with his boot. “What a nice catch. Your form was atrocious, by the way. All that marching and no situational awareness. It’s almost embarrassing.”

For a moment, he stood there—a small boy in oversized, scavenged clothes, overshadowed by the armored bulk of his victim. But in that moment, he wasn't the smaller one. He was the apex predator. His outstanding intellect had planned this; his shocking, desperation-forged physical strength had executed it; and his greatest creation, the Renghod Reclamation Gauntlet, had made it effortless.

Daniel Renghod, last of his line, was no longer just a survivor hiding in ruins. He had become a quite terrifying force.

Well, at least equal to that of an average, barely-armed soldier. Which, in his professional opinion, was a pathetically low bar to clear.

“Pft. What is this rusty barrel?” Danny sneered, kicking the soldier’s discarded rifle. It skittered across the frozen ground. “I can tell you’re nothing but a meat shield for the front line. They didn’t even bother giving you decent maintenance, let alone decent training.”

The soldier’s eyes, wide with a mixture of terror and fury, bulged above the iron grip of the gauntlet clamped over his mouth. He struggled, a muffled shout dying in his throat.

“Hush…” Danny’s voice was a chilling mockery of comfort. “Don’t waste your energy. I’ll release you soon. I promise.”

Suddenly, a sharp crack echoed from further down the street—another soldier firing a warning shot at a stray dog or a trick of the light. The sound was a trigger.

Danny’s own reaction was instantaneous, a reflex honed by paranoia. His finger, small but steady, squeezed the trigger of the pistol he’d already lifted from the soldier’s own holster.

BANG.

The shot was deafening at close range. The soldier’s body jerked once, then went still.

In the ringing silence that followed, Danny let the body slump to the ground. He dropped the pistol beside it with a look of faint distaste, as if he’d just handled something unclean.

“There,” he said calmly, wiping his gauntlet on his pants. “I released you.”

The echo of the gunshot faded, replaced by the distant, unchanging rhythm of the other patrol. They hadn't heard. Or they didn't care. Danny’s attention was already off the corpse, his prodigy’s mind dissecting the tools left behind.

He nudged the soldier’s rifle again with his boot. “A meat shield with a meat-shield’s weapon,” he muttered, his nose scrunched in disdain. “A glorified hammer. No finesse.”

His eyes, sharp and calculating, scanned the rest of the kit. The sidearm was marginally more interesting, but still a blunt instrument. Then his gaze landed on the soldier’s belt: a standard-issue grenade, its pin gleaming dully in the cold light.

A slow, wide smirk spread across his face. “Oh, hello there…”

He scooped it up, turning the explosive over in his hands with the reverence of an artist finding a new pigment.

“Now,” he whispered to himself, his earlier arrogance melting into pure, unadulterated scientific curiosity. “How can I modify this…?”

He was already walking back towards his workshop, the dead soldier forgotten. His mind raced, schematics overlaying his vision.

“The fragmentation pattern is hopelessly inefficient. A simple expansion of the casing’s scoring could increase yield by… twenty-three percent? No, thirty. More shrapnel, less wasted energy.” He glanced down at the gauntlet on his arm, its power cell humming softly. “And the trigger mechanism… archaic. A simple piezoelectric igniter, synced to my actuator’s kinetic pulse… I could arm it, throw it, and detonate it on impact. No fuse, no time to react.”

He ducked back into the shadows of his ruined abode, the grenade held up like a precious gem.

“They want to hand out simple toys to simple soldiers,” he said, his voice dripping with contempt. “But a Renghod… we improve upon everything we touch.”