Once a Dog, Now a God

Chapter 002

On the outskirts of Valor City, behind the flaking signboard of a run-down private psychiatric clinic, the back wall of the facility had a gap in its wire fence—just wide enough for a man to slip through.

In the thick night, a dark figure swung over, landing without a sound.

Matthew Powell kept his body low, back to the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the dim glow of the yard lights as he quickly got his bearings.

“Target confirmed,” a voice buzzed faintly in his earpiece, buried under a layer of static. “This place—Alexander Care Center—is one of their holding sites.”

The voice paused, then corrected itself with a faint, almost amused emphasis.

“War Dog—no, Mr. Powell. Your current cover: a ‘mentally unstable patient’ sent here for treatment.”

“Understood,” Matthew replied under his breath. “What about the contact on the inside?”

“Already in place. All you need to do is play your role, get yourself admitted, and stay in character until the insider delivers the list. Then you walk out with it.”

On paper, the mission sounded simple.

Infiltrate. Wait for the contact. Receive the list. Exfiltrate.

In practice, none of that was ever easy.

Especially not under this particular identity—once you’re labeled “mentally ill” in a place like this, one wrong move and you don’t stay a patient. You become a test subject.

Matthew moved quickly, ghosting along the shadowed wall, scaling two low barriers in succession, cutting across a narrow courtyard, and circling to the rear entrance.

The back door was slightly ajar. A middle-aged man in a white coat was peering nervously into the darkness. The moment he saw Matthew, he yanked the door open wider.

“Hurry. Get in.”

“You’re… Mr. Powell?” The man’s composure wavered as their eyes met. “There are a lot of eyes on this place. We don’t have much time.”

…

An hour later.

“Name: Matthew Powell, male, twenty-seven. Possible post-combat stress reaction with visual and auditory hallucinations.”

“Family background unknown. No fixed employment. Exhibits violent tendencies.”

The attending physician muttered the profile as he scribbled rapidly across the intake form, then stamped it with the clinic’s seal.

Matthew had already changed into the hospital’s striped patient uniform. Two burly orderlies “supported” him down the corridor, big hands locked around his elbows a little too tightly to be called gentle.

The hallway lighting was dull and yellow, throwing long, warped shadows onto the walls. The air reeked of disinfectant and damp concrete. Iron doors lined both sides, each one sealed, each one with a small square window. From behind the reinforced glass, eyes stared out—vacant, frenzied, or completely numb.

“You need to remember this,” the doctor murmured, voice so low it barely reached Matthew’s ears. “From this moment on, you’re one of them. If you forget that, you won’t last long enough to see the list.”

Matthew lowered his gaze. The light seemed to flick off behind his eyes. The muscles in his face relaxed, and his expression emptied out in an instant.

The orderlies shoved him into a single-occupancy room.

“From today on, this is home for you,” one of them said with a too-cheerful grin, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Take your meds like a good boy, don’t scream at night, and we’ll get along just fine, yeah?”

The room contained only a narrow iron bed, a scuffed wooden table, and a single metal chair. The window was latticed with thick bars, the glass sheets bolted in place from the outside as if someone had decided that not even the wind should go in or out without permission.

The door slammed shut with a hollow bang, followed by the double click of two separate locks sliding into place.

Matthew sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, listening to the faint hum of the building, the distant cries, the echo of footsteps on tile floors.

Then he slowly lifted his hand and pulled a tiny chip from beneath the thin blanket.

The insider’s mark.

If the contact came close—within about six feet—the chip would emit a subtle, rhythmic vibration, just enough for him to feel through his skin.

From the first night, it hadn’t shivered even once.

…

On the third night.

Medication round.

A nurse pushed a metal cart down the corridor, stopping at each door in turn, distributing pills with mechanical efficiency. White tablets dropped one by one into open palms like hailstones falling into open bowls.

When it was Matthew’s turn, she flicked an extra pill into his hand without looking up.

“New guy,” she said blandly. “Take more. Helps you not think too much.”

Matthew glanced at her, then tossed all the pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry.

If you’re going to play the role, you play it all the way.

He closed his eyes and leaned against the cold wall, counting his own heartbeat.

The drugs kicked in gradually. His thoughts turned sluggish, like they were sinking into mud. His limbs grew heavy. His eyelids felt as if someone had hooked small weights onto them.

He didn’t know how much time passed before he heard raised voices at the end of the corridor.

“You can’t do this! Do you hear me? This is illegal! There’s nothing wrong with me—I’m not sick!”

A woman’s voice—shaking, frantic, filled with anger and panic in equal measure.

His brow creased instinctively.

At once, a sharp burst of static crackled through his earpiece—a warning ping from the failsafe system installed by The Obsidian Circle. Whenever his emotional indicators spiked beyond a safe threshold, the device would trigger a reminder.

Mission first. Stay calm.

Matthew inhaled slow and deep, pressing himself back into the chill of the wall.

He couldn’t intervene.

Couldn’t step in.

In this place, people were dragged in every day. Some were sedated, some restrained, some screamed until their throats were raw, some sobbed until they no longer had strength to cry. If he tried to fix every injustice, he’d burn out long before the contact ever showed up.

But that voice…

That voice didn’t fade into the background like the others. It was forced down, choked off, until only broken sobs remained.

“I’m not… please… just let me go…”

Footsteps drew closer.

Not far from his door, another room opened, then slammed shut.

“Do exactly what Mr. Gilligan ordered,” a man muttered outside. “Lock her in for tonight. We’ll come up with a different line for the morning.”

“Isn’t that Mr. Gilligan’s fiancée?”

“So what? You’ve seen what happens to people who cross him.”

There was a ripple of low laughter, the sound of it ugly in the narrow hall.

Then quiet.

The corridor swallowed the noise and went still again.

Matthew couldn’t catch every word through the haze in his head and the thickness of the door, but a few fragments stood out like splinters—“Mr. Gilligan,” “fiancée,” “tonight.”

His fingertips tapped lightly against the sheet. The chip in his hand remained inert, cold and silent.

Which meant the woman they had just brought in… was not his contact.

He let his eyes drift shut again.

The drugs pressed down on him like a heavy blanket, smothering his awareness, weighing his mind toward the dark. Images flickered past his inner eye in a blur, and he had no idea how much longer he’d be able to stay conscious.

Somewhere, farther down the corridor, he heard footsteps again. Men’s voices. The jangle of keys against iron bars.

“Up the dosage.”

“Mr. Gilligan was very clear. No mistakes tonight.”

…

The rest of that night existed only in fragments.

Shredded sound. Torn images.

In the cramped room, there were cries that clawed at the walls, desperate and raw. There were struggles cut short by restraints. Muffled curses. The sting of a needle forcing its way beneath skin. Waves of numbness that surged and receded, stripping away his ability to think, to move, to even fully understand what he was witnessing.

Then, finally, a clean, suffocating blackout.

The next thing he remembered was light—harsh, clinical daylight stabbing straight into his eyes.

And faces. Unfamiliar faces, impassive and cold, looking down at him as though he were not a person, but a piece of equipment someone had left lying around.

“That him?”

“Yeah. That’s the psych case.”

“Perfect. He’ll do. Easy enough to use as a decoy.”

Before his mind could catch up, hands grabbed him, dragging him upright. His legs were still unsteady from the drugs; he couldn’t resist even if he’d wanted to blow the cover right there.

They hauled him out of the room, down the corridor, through the same back door he’d slipped in from days ago, and shoved him into a waiting car.

The door slammed. The vehicle surged forward, tearing away from Alexander Care Center and the rotten quiet it hid.

Across from him sat a woman with hollow eyes and an expression carved from exhaustion and rage.

Her skin was pale, lips pressed into a hard line. Her gaze was a blade as she studied him—cold, sharp, cutting into his face inch by inch without leaving a visible mark.

That was the first time Sarah Lacy saw Matthew Powell clearly, with her mind not fogged by sedatives and fear.

“From today on,” the elder from the Lacy family said from the front seat, voice icy and distant, “the two of you are husband and wife.”

“Once the marriage certificate is signed, if either of you utters a single word of refusal, you can get out of the Lacy house and never come back.”

Outside the window, the streets of Valor City flashed by—a blur of neon, traffic lights, and indifferent buildings, moving too fast to hold onto.

Matthew slumped against the seatback, the last traces of medication still clinging to his veins. His thoughts came slow and jagged. His throat tasted bitter.

He turned his head, meeting Sarah Lacy’s eyes.

She looked back at him.

In that single, suspended second, he had no idea—

That this woman would carry the weight of his absence for six years, paying for his choices with humiliation and cold shoulders in the Lacy family’s gilded halls.

He didn’t know that soon, there would be a small heartbeat under her ribs, a child who would one day look up at him and call him—

Dad.

…

That same night, after the papers were signed and the red booklet stamped and handed over with mechanical smiles and empty congratulations, Matthew Powell disappeared.

A new mission order came through. He was recalled in the dead of night, pulled out of Valor City and thrown back into the invisible battlefield where his name did not exist and only his codename—War Dog, and one day War God—mattered.

The marriage certificate went into a side compartment of his gear bag.

Later, he slipped the small red booklet into the pocket of his notebook. It followed him across borders and continents, through safe houses and war zones, soaked in rain, sweat, and the smell of g*n oil.

He never tossed it away.

But he never went back.

Didn’t dare look back.

It wasn’t until six years later that he finally learned—

That the night he walked away without a word had left a woman alone in the Lacy family, bearing every accusing glance and whispered insult in his place.