Three months in the Null Zone felt like three years.
Every day the same routine. Wake at 0500. Quantum combat training until 0800. Breakfast consisting of nutrient paste that tasted like regret. Intelligence briefings until 1200. Tactical simulations until 1800. Physical conditioning until 2100. Sleep that never quite came because the isolation was suffocating.
X-Three was a relentless instructor. Patient but unyielding. He taught me how to phase-shift without equipment, how to read quantum signatures like tracking footprints, how to fight enemies who could exist in seventeen places simultaneously.
"Again," he would say when I failed. "Faster. More precise. X-One will not give you second chances."
I learned. Adapted. Became something between human and quantum phenomenon. Could hold mys
