Samye did not ask immediately.

  After what he had seen in the square, questions felt pointless—like poking a wound that had never been allowed to heal. Instead, he listened. He worked. He watched.

  And slowly, the truth revealed itself.

  The Breakers had been here for fifteen years.

  Not as conquerors.

  Not as rulers.

  As a disease.

  They didn’t announce themselves. They didn’t burn towns to the ground. They took people quietly—one by one, family by family—until resistance became a memory.

  At first, it was only men.

  Strong hands for farms.

  Strong backs for factories.

  Then it became women.

  Then parents.

  Then anyone who could still breathe.

  Age stopped mattering.

  The work never ended.

  Farms that fed unseen mouths.

  Factories hidden deep in abandoned government zones.

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  Workshops where weapons were assembled piece by piece—guns, ammunition, parts Samye didn’t even recognize.

  Everything was sold on the black market.

  Demand had exploded over the last twenty years—wars, conflicts, private armies, power struggles. Weapons were always needed. And the Breakers supplied them cheaply.

  With human lives.

  Those taken never returned.

  Not men.

  Not women.

  Not mothers or fathers.

  Being taken was a sentence—just one without a grave.

  Sometimes, the Breakers sent bodies back.

  Not out of mercy.

  Out of purpose.

  Corpses were displayed in village centers—hung, seated, or laid out where everyone could see them. A warning carved into flesh.

  This is what happens when you resist.

  This is what happens when you hope.

  Some bodies stayed for days.

  No one dared remove them until the Breakers allowed it.

  Children learned early not to cry.

  The family from the square had waited six months.

  Six months since their father was taken.

  Six months of waiting for footsteps that never came.

  And now the children lay dead—not because they chose to die, but because they were chosen to be seen.

  A message.

  A final punctuation mark.

  For the town, it was nothing new.

  People lowered their eyes and continued walking. Pain had become routine. Horror had become background noise. Survival meant acceptance.

  No one spoke of God anymore—not seriously.

  No one believed heroes would come.

  No one prayed for salvation.

  Hope was dangerous.

  Hope got people killed.

  Samye felt like he was standing in a world that shouldn’t exist.

  This place didn’t resemble the life he had lived with his parents. The rules were different here. The values his father believed in—duty, protection, justice—meant nothing.

  Here, power decided truth.

  Here, silence was safety.

  Here, life had a price—and it was always cheap.

  As Samye walked through the town, past faces stripped of expectation, he realized something unsettling.

  These people weren’t weak.

  They were broken.

  Broken slowly, carefully, over years—until resistance no longer felt possible.

  That night, Samye sat alone in the hut outside town, staring into the darkness.

  Everything he had witnessed—from the burning of his parents to the bodies in the square—felt like pieces of a larger nightmare.

  It was as if he had stepped into a different world.

  A world his parents had tried to protect him from.

  A world that had existed all along.

  And now, it had noticed him.