By four in the morning, the alarms didn't ring, and they never needed to, because Mess Officer Roberta was already at Cain's bedside.
She looked no older than twenty, yet her eyes carried a century of memory.
Flawless and luminous porcelain skin, framed by silken silver hair that gave off an ethereal glow.
Small pointy nose and rose-petal lips rested in serene balance.
She didn't decorate herself with beauty. It was part of her nature, like a diamond forged by time.
Cain was only a child, just three years old and barely shoulder-height to her waist, but his body was shaped by aggressive DNA augmentation and wasn't ordinary at all. Dreams were compressed, rest efficient, and neural saturation achieved by precision bio-design. His cells processed metabolic signals differently. Two hours of sleep granted him full recovery.
"You've had your fill of sleep?"
Cain gave a small nod, the morning routine began with targeting drills.
Toy launchers shot foam balls into the air, zigzagging in unpredictable arcs.
He aimed a foam-loaded toy gun with surprising accuracy, though his chubby little legs sometimes failed him, sending him tumbling to the ground.
"Oof! Aunt, it hurts. Please kiss my boo-boo."
"There, there."
Roberta lifted him gently and kissed his reddened knees.
"I didn't cry, I'm brave, aren't I?"
"Yes, you are. Can you do it again?"
With a determined nod, he picked up his toy gun and started shooting again. Even some staff at the side clapped and cheered him on.
Then it was time for mathematics. Roberta lined up small, unsalted pretzel sticks in tidy rows across the table.
"Show me seven pretzels."
Roberta turned away while Cain scrambled to count.
"One. Two. Three. Four uhm aunt... Aunt Roberta, what comes after four?"
"Five"
"Five. Six. Seven."
It took a while before Roberta spoke again.
"Are you done?"
"Yes."
She turned back. Cain's cheeks were full, and three pretzels had mysteriously vanished. Only seven were left on the table.
The boy just shrugged. Roberta didn't say a word. She handed him a bottle of water to help wash down the dry bread.
Then she laid out twenty cards across the table, each marked with a matching icon.
Memory training had begun. Cain had to remember which ones went together. But he was more curious about what the pictures meant.
"Aunt, what's this?"
"Snake."
"Snake? Hmmm... What does it do?"
"It eats small animals."
"Where does it live? Can we keep one as a pet?"
She answered every question with patience. Roberta had no children of her own, but she took Cain in and raised him with the steady care of someone who chose to be a mother, not just became one.
After the lesson, she nursed him quietly.
"Aunt, can I drink your milk forever?"
She paused for a moment, then sighed.
"You can't."
She cradled him close, fingers weaving gently through his hair.
"You won't always be a child."
He didn't understand, but he nodded anyway.
By the age of five, his weapon had been upgraded to a rubber-round pistol.
Cain's training had intensified, holding the gun in a two-handed stance, he weaved through foam rounds fired by flying drones and retaliated with bullets of his own.
His mathematics also grew hard to answer as they tackled multiplication and division.
Physics was introduced through levers, pulleys and other real-life applications.
Roberta no longer directed his every move. She stood back, logging his responses, marking strengths and weaknesses, and later talked with him about how to improve.
At nine years of age, Cain had already surpassed the academic demands of a college student from the old world and the training of a standard foot soldier.
Physics wasn't numbers on paper, it was a combat booster as they studied the specifications of recoil, trajectory calculation and how gravity works with every spell and ammunition.
In biology, he studied each tendon and joint, identifying those that relieved pain and those that inflicted the most.
Philosophy taught him when to stand tall, when to humble others in their place, and when to bow down to circumstance.
Plato, Sun Tzu, and Machiavelli were his silent mentors, acting as his moral compass in this time of war.
"What does a modern warrior need?"
"Control, deception, and know when to run."
Moving on, coding had been drilled into him with boxes of automatons.
Using his tablet, he programmed them one by one into machines that pursued targets, cast holograms in his image to deceive under pressure, and launched drones that exploded upon impact.
Roberta had been his teacher for as long as Cain could remember. She was neither warm nor cruel. Her discipline was strict, but her intentions were as pure as an unstained lily.
She never smiled when he got answers right and never frowned when he chose the wrong path.
Her lessons were always unforgiving, because she understood one truth better than most.
Love wouldn't keep Cain alive out there. Praise dulled the blade and softened the heart so she gave him none.
"Too slow."
"Bugged program."
"Too many strings."
Each word was a calculated blow, pressuring Cain exactly where it mattered. Like the steel ruler that once lashed across his hand when he lost focus on his surroundings.
He had been so lost in numbers and letters during a session that he never saw it coming.
It sliced through flesh and fractured three fingers, a bone-deep injury he would not forget.
Roberta would rather hurt him now that cry on his coffin later.
Magic was no different.
Each spell cast, she made Cain treat it as if it was a surgery. If his thoughts were too slow, it could cost him his life. The enemy wasn't going to wait for him to finish casting.
His combat curriculum was worse.
Cain learned to fire from a swaying raft, all while over forty kilograms of weight shifted across his body.
He slipped through the moving fortress, treating it as a mock battleground, vanishing between glass reflections and drainpipes.
If Roberta caught him within five minutes, he had to wash two thousand plates used by the men on board, all by himself.
Even with the help of magic, it still took him twelve hours to finish the job, robbing him of precious training time.
"If you can't even last five minutes in a simple game, there's no point dreaming of school. All you're good for is washing dishes."
Cain was stress-tested like a machine, tuned not to be a mere tool, but an instrument built to make a difference.
As Cain grew older, his training intensified.
The raiding pits were a massive, shifting labyrinth used by magicians to hone their skills.
Paint bullets hissed like hornets as Cain ducked behind a collapsed barricade. Fifteen automatons closed in from every direction.
They fought with no set patterns, each of their movements were strange and some of them were even downright unscrupulous.
Their goal weren't to simply injure, but to kill or cripple.
With a non-magic assault rifle in hand, Cain's mind raced to find a way out.
'I only have seven bullets, the bullet stash is on the left corridor. Should I get it or could I pull it off with a pistol?'
Making up his mind, Cain took a deep breath, he rolled sideways, exposing himself to the machines.
Five of them shifted their stances and fired, he returned five shots of his own, taking all five down.
Cain memorized the rest of the automatons with a single glance.
'Four in the left arm. Three in the head. Three in the right hand.'
He didn't need to take them down completely. A single hit to the hollow points embedded in their frames was enough to shut them down.
Cain jammed the rifle into the cuff of the jacket to sell the illusion, then tossed the clothes into the air without warning.
Seeing this, the automatons didn't hesitate and opened fire.
'Now's my chance!'
In the same instant, Cain slid low with twin pistols drawn. Each shot snapped through the designated weak points.
Nine clean takedowns, but one shot veered just off-center. The paint round bounced off, leaving the final bot standing.
Bang!
A splat hit him between the eyebrows. He caught his reflection in the mirror and felt a stab of shame.
He had gotten cocky, trying to impress his aunt.
"Cain, if there is a stable path during combat, there is no need for you to do a risky all in dive."
Roberta's shout echoed across the training chamber like a judgment bell.
The fallen automatons began to stir once more, they twitched, hissed, and dragged themselves toward one another.
The machines started exchanging parts like soldiers trading weapons. Limbs detached and reattached, their panels folded, twisted, and reshuffled.
The training ground rumbled and shifted with them. What was once an urban warzone had now collapsed, reforming into something new which he hadn't seen before.
The terrain that he had carefully memorized had all became useless.
Cain didn't voice any complaint because he knew this was all preparation for his own future.
For the world didn't care how old he was, only how long he could survive.