Chapter 2

Life began to feel like a meaningless attrition, like wearing boots two sizes too small—every step wore the skin off my ankles.

It was a strange sensation. If this were on the battlefield, I would instantly categorize it as some sort of targeted "psychological suppression tactic." But here, in this fortress I’d built with my own hands—a place called "Home"—it was just a long, silent hunt.

Sloane’s change began that morning. She completely dismantled my old, stable encrypted communication channel, claiming "it makes me look like an obsolete hermit on social networks." I watched as she, in a tone of near-innocence, forcibly cut my satellite link, funneling all outreach signals into a firewall of her own design. I knew then: my defensive line had crumbled.

I sat in my study, my phone now a useless block of iron. I tried to send an encrypted intelligence packet over a wired network, only to have a red warning pop up on the screen: [Access Denied. Contact System Administrator: Sloane Kastor.]

I pushed the door open to find her reading in the living room rocking chair. The flowers Greg had sent were still on the table, petals wilting, radiating a stench of stale decay in the overly quiet apartment.

"My outward connection has been severed," I stated calmly.

She looked up from her book, her young but pale face sharp in the sunlight. "It’s for your own protection, Jack. You’ve always been too alert. That defensive psyche only makes you look like an outsider in modern society."

"I’ve always been that outsider, Sloane."

"But things are different now." She stood up and walked over, patting my chest with a soft yet forced, boundary-setting motion. "For my sake, try living like a normal person, okay? If your father were still here, he’d want you to stop thinking every day about how to survive behind a sniper scope."

She brought up her father’s name with a deliberate, trembling probe.

I remained silent. A shadow flickered in her eyes when she mentioned Kastor. It was the script Greg had fed her: that her father died by my hand, or at least due to my arrogance. Over these eight years, I had tried a thousand times to explain the retreat strategy of that year, but every time I brought up "tactical errors" or "calculation offsets," she would trigger a stress response—screaming or locking herself in her room to numb herself with cheap sleeping pills.

At night, this "torture" escalated.

Greg had managed to smuggle in a pile of lethal defensive gear: modified stun guns, even a specially sharpened ceramic tactical knife. These items were openly displayed on the living room coffee table as if they were some provocative sacrifice.

Sloane made me dismantle these things in front of her, forcing me to take apart every precision chip. Every time I dismantled one, she stared at me with that judgmental gaze, as if observing a criminal dissecting his own crime.

"You know how to use these, right?" she whispered. "On the battlefield, you used these to 'deal with' people, including... including him."

She pushed the ceramic knife toward me, the blade glinting with a ghostly, cold light. In Syria, this knife would have slit any throat in seconds. But I merely picked up a pair of tweezers, removed the lithium battery, and rendered it useless trash.

I didn't scold her. I didn't even say, "Don't kid yourself."

I simply dropped the battery into a metal box, snapped it shut, and gently pushed it back to her. "This is too dangerous to keep at home. If you want self-defense gear in the future, I’ll build you a non-lethal, logically sound defensive system."

She watched my actions, her clear eyes filled with a bafflement I couldn't grasp. She was probably thinking: Why? Why, even when I’ve handed you the knife to confess your sins, are you still acting so pathetically weak?

My tolerance was like water dropped into sulfuric acid; instead of cooling it down, it only caused more violent bubbling.

She grew increasingly impatient. She wanted to see my rage, to see me reveal the darkness I surely harbored for the sake of self-preservation, so she could comfortably categorize me as a "villain." But I maintained a numbness that was almost restraint.

This restraint pushed her toward the edge of insanity.

During lunch, she suddenly splashed her hot soup toward me. The liquid splattered across my arm, the burning sensation real and searing, yet I didn't move. I simply picked up a napkin and wiped the spill from the table in silence.

"Do you find me interesting?" she suddenly laughed, her voice trembling with hysteria. "You say nothing, you endure everything... are you waiting for me to slip up, so you can erase a traitor like a commander again?"

I looked up at her, watching her pain-etched face, and felt my heart stop for a beat.

"I’m not waiting for you to make a mistake," I said quietly. "I’m just waiting for the day you realize that the person in this world who wanted to protect you from harm the most... was really only me."

She froze, the spoon dropping into the porcelain bowl with a sharp clatter. She said nothing more and rushed back to her room. All that remained was the bowl of cold, fishy-smelling soup.

I suspect I will be swallowed by this mire soon. But that’s fine. If this is the process she needs to confirm her own existence, then I will stay and play my part to the end.

But the price of this play is far higher than anyone could imagine.