This happened during my recovery.

  That’s the easiest place to start.

  Not because it was poetic. Not because the timing meant anything grand. Just because being forced to lie still in a half-finished new ship while workers swarmed over my future gave me entirely too much time to think, and when I think too long, I start remembering things I normally keep chained up where they belong.

  Tōkaidō and the northern fleet were gone at the time.

  The base felt wrong without some of its bigger teeth. Quieter in odd places. Too loud in others. Horizon does this thing when people leave on dangerous work—everyone starts pretending the routine matters more than it does, like if you keep moving crates and sorting shells and eating breakfast at proper hours, the sea might mistake you for ordinary and leave you alone.

  It never works.

  Still, everyone tries.

  I was stuck outside the repair bay in my new Worcester hull, half-linked, half-healed, and fully irritated. Vestal called it recovery. I called it captivity with better blankets.

  What no one tells you about being rebuilt is that there are stretches of time where you’re too tired to move and too angry to sleep. You lie there with your thoughts and your pain and the strange sensation of not being entirely sure where your body ends and your hull begins, and if you’ve lived long enough, memory starts scratching at the walls.

  Mine scratched hard.

  So this is me remembering.

  Me, Fairplay.

  And yes, before you ask, I know I’m dramatic. That isn’t the point.

  The point is that I wasn’t born the way most KANSEN are.

  I wasn’t awakened into a role and handed a flag and a list of expectations and told to smile pretty while some commander decided whether I was useful.

  I was made in a facility where they didn’t believe in “awakening.”

  They believed in manufacture.

  That’s different.

  A normal KANSEN emergence, if you can call any of this normal, has a soul-shape to it. History, myth, memory, hull identity, all of that stirred into something coherent enough to stand up and call itself a person.

  The Prototype Division thought that was inefficient.

  They thought humanity was in too much danger to rely on natural resonance, national legacy, doctrinal stability, or whatever else the old uniforms liked to call it when they wanted to sound civilized about making girls and boys into weapons.

  So they built another pipeline.

  They called it Prototype KANSEN Development, as if that made it sound clean.

  It wasn’t clean.

  It was a butcher’s theory with a laboratory budget.

  The official line—what the officers and scientists said when they thought the walls were loyal—was that normal KANSEN and KANSAI had limits. Psychological limits. Structural limits. Doctrinal inertia. Too much reliance on historical identity. Too much obedience to the shape of their original ship and its cultural baggage. Too much vulnerability to command frameworks, national politics, or—my favorite—“undesirable emotional persistence.”

  In plain language?

  They wanted something stronger.

  Something less predictable.

  Something they could push past the point where sane people called a halt.

  Something that would survive damage that should have killed a standard unit, kill harder than a standard unit, and if possible, refuse to fit inside the control systems that had already begun failing elsewhere.

  That was the irony of it.

  They made us because they feared loss of control.

  And then they made the one kind of KANSEN they couldn’t truly rewrite.

  I was one of the last products of that idea.

  Not last ship in class.

  Last of the actual class of Prototypes.

  That was the internal term. Not Atlanta-class derivative, not cruiser subtype, not experimental anti-air line. A broader classification above ship class and below “what the hell have you done.”

  Prototype.

  The kind of thing built when the people signing budgets have stopped believing ethics matter if the front keeps moving.

  They took known hull identities and pushed them.

  Twisted them.

  Overfed the resonance. Layered in combat stress patterns. Introduced unstable mythic anchors and Siren-adjacent theory they swore wasn’t Siren-derived because the paperwork said “parallel research” instead.

  They chased thresholds.

  How much pain can a soul take before it breaks?

  How much can a hull-spirit bend before it becomes something new?

  How far can you push a weapons identity before it stops being naval and starts becoming… other?

  I was one answer.

  Not the only one.

  Just the one who survived long enough to remember.

  I don’t know exactly when I became aware.

  That’s not unusual, I’m told. A lot of us don’t “wake” in one clean cinematic moment with dramatic lighting and a purpose speech. Sometimes awareness comes in pieces. A sound. A smell. The knowledge that you are being observed. The realization that the body you’re in belongs to you and also doesn’t.

  My first clear memory is light through reinforced glass.

  Not sunlight.

  Facility light.

  That bright, sterile white they use in places where they want everything to look controlled. The kind that flattens skin tone and makes blood look darker when it hits the floor.

  I remember being cold.

  I remember hearing voices before I understood language. Male, mostly. Some female. Technical voices. Bored voices. The kind of people who only ever become cruel because their jobs teach them that detachment is professionalism.

  Then I remember the glass.

  I was behind it.

  Or maybe they were. It depends how you think about containment.

  Someone was making notes.

  Someone else was saying my numbers.

  Not my name.

  Numbers.

  Asset tag. Development batch. Trial stability index. Response variance. Emotional compliance score.

  I didn’t know what any of it meant yet, but I knew one thing instantly:

  They were talking about me like I wasn’t listening.

  You’d be amazed how many people do that to children and weapons.

  I was both.

  For a while—days? weeks? longer?—my world was the chamber.

  Observation room.

  Resonance bay.

  Test room.

  Training cell.

  They used different names depending on what they wanted from me, but the walls were the same.

  Reinforced glass.

  Drainage channels in the floor.

  Ceilings too high to touch.

  A hidden speaker system.

  Sometimes they brought food.

  Sometimes they forgot and then “corrected the oversight” when my readings dipped.

  Sometimes they came in wearing insulated gear or carrying tools. Sometimes they didn’t come in at all and just watched from outside while asking me to do things.

  At first the things were simple.

  Walk.

  Turn.

  Summon.

  Dismiss.

  Repeat.

  They were testing basic manifestation and control.

  I learned early that I wasn’t like the standard girls in the neighboring blocks.

  Yes, I knew there were others. You learn to hear differently in places like that. A cough through a vent. Boots stopping outside the wrong door. Someone crying in the room two corridors down. A scream cut off too fast. Metal dragged where it shouldn’t be.

  There were normal KANSEN in the facility too, though “normal” is a generous word for anyone locked in research containment.

  Some were there because they had compatibility traits the Prototype Division wanted to study.

  Some were there because they were “behaviorally noncompliant.”

  Some were there because command wanted them “adjusted.”

  That was another favorite word of theirs.

  Adjusted.

  Refined.

  Stabilized.

  Everything sounded so polite when cowards needed a cleaner vocabulary.

  I learned later that some ordinary KANSEN and KANSAI could be rewritten if a commander or institution pushed hard enough—conditioned, restructured, made more obedient, their identities bent until they fit the desired slot.

  Not all.

  Never all.

  But enough that the practice existed and enough that fear of it hung over everyone who knew.

  Prototype units, though?

  We were different.

  That was one of the reasons they wanted us.

  The modifications that made us stronger also made us more resistant to that kind of overwrite. Too many internal contradictions. Too many reinforcement loops. Too much self-generated identity under stress.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  They didn’t know how much of that was design and how much was accident.

  I think they pretended not to care as long as the output numbers looked good.

  My output numbers looked very good.

  That’s why they kept me.

  The first time I did something they didn’t expect, I was still small enough that they underestimated how much I understood.

  They wanted a weapons test.

  One of the technicians—young, ambitious, cruel in the way people become when they decide they’re smarter than conscience—was explaining that the Prototype line had “potential for quasi-ritualized response channels.”

  A ridiculous phrase.

  What it meant, in practice, was this:

  Under enough pressure, my rigging didn’t just act like rigging.

  It acted like a spell focus.

  You can call it “resonance manipulation,” or “abnormal energy expression,” or whatever sanitized nonsense they put in reports.

  I call it what it is.

  Magic.

  Ugly, naval, destructive magic born from forcing a shipgirl past the point where ordinary categories still fit.

  They wanted me to summon weapons under stress and direct force through them in ways not entirely explainable by the known rigging principles.

  So they put me in a room with moving targets, compression sirens, and enough sensory overload to make even a normal adult vomit.

  Then they watched.

  When I panicked, the room answered me.

  That’s the easiest way to describe it.

  The air changed.

  The floor trembled.

  And instead of simply calling rigging, I pulled something stranger through myself—like my fear had found shape and velocity and decided to listen.

  The targets didn’t just break.

  They were erased.

  One dissolved into black fire. Another imploded inward, metal twisting like it had been grabbed by invisible fingers. The third I don’t actually remember hitting, but they showed me the footage later, proud as priests.

  I’d opened my hand and something like a noose made of light and sea-smoke had wrapped around the target’s center mass and crushed it until the supports snapped.

  The room alarms went off.

  Not because they thought I was in danger.

  Because they were thrilled.

  That was when I understood the first terrible thing about the facility:

  Success did not make them kinder.

  It made them greedier.

  They started calling me “viable.”

  I still hate that word.

  Viable means the thing can be used.

  Viable means the experiment can continue.

  Viable means no one is asking whether it should.

  They increased the test intensity after that.

  Longer sessions.

  Harder scenarios.

  Live-fire drills with more complex variables.

  Then came the psychological testing, because of course it did.

  They wanted to know not just what I could do—but what made me do it better.

  Pain?

  Fear?

  Isolation?

  Anger?

  Loss?

  They tested all of them.

  No, I’m not going to give you every detail. There are places memory still bites too hard, and this is me remembering, not performing my trauma for strangers.

  You can live without the exact sequence of rooms and restraints and how many times they tried to map my emotional thresholds by manufacturing situations they thought would trigger stronger output.

  What matters is this:

  They discovered quickly that anger made me more dangerous than fear.

  Fear made me reactive.

  Anger made me inventive.

  That was when they started making mistakes.

  If you want to control a weapon, the last thing you should do is teach it that hatred sharpens it.

  But they weren’t thinking about me as a person.

  They were thinking about me as a platform.

  A chassis.

  A unit that happened to scream.

  There were others in Prototype.

  Not many by the end.

  Some died in testing.

  Some broke in ways that left them alive enough to write off and shelve.

  Some disappeared into “transfer.” In facilities like that, transfer often meant a different kind of death.

  I remember one boy from a different batch. Not because I knew him well—we barely spoke—but because he had this habit of tapping rhythm against the wall between rooms. Three taps. Pause. Two taps. Pause. Three again.

  At first I thought it was a stress tic.

  Later I realized it was communication. Not language exactly. Just proof. I’m here. You’re there. We’re still real.

  One day the tapping stopped.

  No one said why.

  The scientist with the polished shoes wrote something on a clipboard and called the batch “unstable beyond deployment viability.”

  I bit through the inside of my cheek so hard that day I tasted blood for hours, and when they put me in the range room later, I shattered six reinforced target columns instead of the required three.

  They called that progress.

  I called it the beginning.

  Because that was when I started deciding, very quietly, that if I ever got loose, I was going to burn the place down.

  Not escape.

  Burn.

  There’s a difference.

  Escape is about survival.

  Burning is about judgment.

  The Prototype Division loved to talk about thresholds.

  They should have paid more attention to their own.

  The facility itself sat in a place I never learned the proper name of. I know the sea there was cold and the foundations were deep. I know the exterior docks handled freight too large to move through ordinary chains, and I know the lower levels smelled like salt, bleach, oil, ozone, and old concrete.

  I know they’d built redundancies into everything except morality.

  Eventually they started trying more direct command interface work with me. Not because they thought I could be fully overwritten—they already knew that pathway was unreliable in Prototypes—but because they believed they could build workarounds.

  Pain association.

  Punishment loops.

  Command-key triggers.

  Keyword obedience under certain states.

  That sort of thing.

  Some of it worked for a while.

  I won’t pretend I was immune to suffering. No one is. If you hurt something enough and cleverly enough, you can make behavior bend.

  But here’s what they never understood:

  Compliance under torture is not loyalty.

  It’s timing.

  I learned timing beautifully.

  I learned when to obey so they’d lower their guard.

  I learned which technicians got lazy during fourth-shift observations.

  I learned which maintenance hatches opened manually and which needed authorization.

  I learned the sound of fuel being moved below deck.

  I learned the layout by listening to feet above and below me.

  I learned the faces.

  That part mattered.

  If you’re going to remember a fire properly, you should remember the people inside it.

  There was the polished-shoes scientist. He smelled like expensive soap and contempt.

  There was the woman with the tired eyes who never hit me but never stopped the others either.

  There was the handler who liked proving he wasn’t afraid of me by standing too close.

  There was the administrator who visited twice a month, looked at me through the glass, and talked about “strategic necessity” as if that absolved everyone in the building.

  There was a young mechanic who once slipped extra food through the service hatch and never looked me in the eye while doing it. I remember him because he wasn’t cruel, just cowardly. Which is its own category of sin.

  They all died or nearly did.

  I don’t regret most of that.

  The night the facility burned wasn’t special when it started.

  That’s important.

  No thunder. No prophecy. No “it was as if the air knew.” Life is usually uglier than literature.

  It started with routine.

  Transport movement on the lower levels.

  A reduced security complement because an inspection team had left that morning and they wanted the shift budget lean.

  Two Prototype-adjacent test units were being moved.

  One standard KANSEN in behavioral containment had lashed out earlier in the day, which meant attention was distributed and tempers were short.

  They scheduled my range cycle later than usual.

  Mistake.

  Late hours made people tired.

  Tired people stopped checking the things they thought were beneath them.

  By then I had already learned how my “magic” worked when I wasn’t under direct command pressure.

  I couldn’t fling miracles around for free. That’s not how any of this works. Every abnormal expression had a cost—fatigue, internal strain, pain, the sensation that my own rigging wanted to tear out through my ribs if I overused it.

  But I had enough.

  And more importantly, I had hate sharpened into purpose.

  I feigned instability during the first half of the session.

  Missed targets.

  Delayed response.

  Just enough to annoy the technician team into sending one of them inside with a correction rod and a short temper.

  He wasn’t the worst one.

  That didn’t save him.

  I still remember the look on his face when I moved before he finished the first sentence.

  Surprise, mostly.

  Then fear.

  Then nothing useful.

  Once it started, it went quickly.

  The first blood hit the floor.

  The alarms did not go off immediately because the system was built to recognize certain thresholds, and what I did happened too fast and too close for the software to categorize.

  I got the door.

  I got the corridor.

  I got my hands on a live maintenance key and a sidearm I didn’t need but took anyway because it made them afraid.

  Then I opened rooms.

  That part matters too.

  I could have run straight for the dock levels. Maybe I would have made it. Maybe not.

  Instead I opened rooms.

  Not all of them. I wasn’t a saint. I was moving fast and angry and half-feral and some doors wouldn’t cycle without codes I didn’t have.

  But enough.

  I remember glass shattering.

  I remember a boy blinking at me from a chamber floor like he couldn’t understand why the wall had become a door.

  I remember dragging one girl by the wrist because she was too drugged to run.

  I remember someone setting off a localized suppression field and me blowing the emitter apart with a pulse of black-lit force that cracked my own vision at the edges.

  The facility alarms went live after that.

  Then the lockdown.

  Then the fuel fire.

  That part wasn’t an accident.

  You understand?

  I want that clear.

  They like to call places like that “lost to containment failure” or “structural compromise under hostile asset response.”

  No.

  I burned it.

  The lower freight transfer ran fuel lines too close to a service spine. I’d known that for weeks because of the smell and the vibration. I broke containment routing, triggered a cascade, then put the fire where it would hurt them most.

  It spread beautifully.

  Fire loves institutions built on lies.

  The polished-shoes scientist died screaming my designation.

  That felt appropriate.

  The woman with the tired eyes tried to reach one of the control rooms and got caught behind a jammed blast door with smoke pouring in. I saw her through a viewing slit. I remember that she looked… disappointed more than scared.

  I kept moving.

  Maybe that condemns me.

  I’ve had years to make peace with the fact I don’t much care.

  Some of the ones I freed ran.

  Some froze.

  Some didn’t make it out.

  That’s the part I’ll carry, if I carry anything.

  Not the dead scientists.

  The others.

  The ones too broken, too sedated, too conditioned, too late.

  I can still smell burned wiring if I think too hard about that corridor.

  I can still hear one of them asking me if we were “allowed” to leave.

  That question has never really left me.

  Allowed.

  What a horrible word.

  We reached the outer levels during full panic. Security teams were everywhere. Fire suppression failed in sections. The automated announcements switched languages twice and then gave up entirely when the central system started cooking from the inside.

  I killed three guards on Dock Two.

  One I remember because he was barely older than me and so terrified I almost told him to drop the rifle and go.

  He didn’t.

  That’s on him.

  After that, the night becomes patchwork.

  Smoke.

  Rain outside.

  Salt air crashing into fire-heated corridors.

  Sirens.

  Spotlights over black water.

  Someone shouting that the Prototype had breached.

  Prototype.

  Like I wasn’t standing there covered in blood and soot and fury and therefore very obviously a person they had made a career out of not recognizing.

  I reached the dock edge with two others and lost one to gunfire before we hit the water.

  The other—I think it was the tapping boy, or maybe I’ve merged memories because I wanted him to survive. I’ve never been fully sure. Trauma does that. Rearranges your dead into shapes you can bear.

  We got out.

  That’s the part that matters to history.

  The facility burned behind us.

  Not completely at first. Big places die in pieces. But enough of it went up that the division lost its clean continuity. Records vanished. budget lines disappeared into emergency audits. Personnel were scattered, reassigned, quietly retired, or fed to whatever political machinery exists when black projects become embarrassing.

  And me?

  Too valuable to scrap.

  That was the conclusion.

  The irony is almost funny.

  They couldn’t rewrite me.

  Couldn’t reliably destroy me without losing the data they still wanted.

  Couldn’t publicly admit what I was or how I’d been made.

  So they took the only route institutions ever take with dangerous mistakes that still produce useful outputs:

  They reclassified me.

  They wrapped chains in paperwork and called it deployment.

  They changed facilities, changed handlers, changed the language around me, but the truth stayed the same underneath: I was a Prototype KANSEN designed to go beyond what standard lines could endure.

  That’s why I can do what I can do.

  Why my “magic” exists.

  Why I can weaponize nooses and binding force and that cold-black resonance they accidentally taught me to channel.

  Why I can smile while doing it.

  Why they never managed to make me neat.

  I became valuable in the field precisely because I frightened the people who were supposed to own me.

  The Prototype Division died in fire, but the logic behind it didn’t die immediately. It leaked into procurement philosophies, doctrinal arguments, command fears. There are always people in war who look at suffering and think, could this be scalable?

  I was proof of concept and warning label all at once.

  I spent years after that drifting through postings that didn’t know quite what to do with me.

  Too dangerous for some commanders.

  Too useful for others.

  Too hard to bully cleanly.

  Too unpredictable to trust without leverage.

  Which is partly why I ended up where I did and why I was still alive long enough to land at Horizon, half-mad and mean-mouthed and ready to assume every superior would eventually show me who they really were.

  Then Kade arrived.

  I know, I know. Very dramatic. “And then the commander came.”

  Shut up.

  I’m not saying he fixed me. People aren’t leaky pipes. You don’t wrench them back into place.

  But he changed the environment enough that all the old fractures had to find new ways to behave.

  He didn’t look at me like a project.

  Didn’t look at my output tables with hunger.

  Didn’t flinch from what I could do, but also didn’t seem impressed by it in the way mad scientists were impressed by the useful cruelty of a sharpened tool.

  He treated me like a person who happened to be armed and difficult.

  Which, frankly, is one of the more respectful categories I’ve ever been placed in.

  And Horizon…

  Horizon does something to people.

  Maybe because it was broken first.

  Maybe because everyone there had been discarded by someone with rank.

  Maybe because Kade and Vestal and the rest of the old guard built the place backward—starting with “you’re alive, so act like it matters” instead of “prove why we should keep you.”

  Whatever the reason, I recovered there differently than I had anywhere else.

  Even now.

  Even in this new Worcester body while workers finished setting my future into bolts and plates.

  Lying outside the repair bay during Tōkaidō’s northern mission, I found myself thinking about the fire because the base around me smelled like welding, wet steel, and purpose.

  And because for the first time in years, when I remembered that old facility burning, I didn’t just feel satisfaction.

  I felt distance.

  Like maybe the girl who crawled out through smoke and decided the world deserved teeth had not vanished—but had finally found a place where being a monster wasn’t the only available survival shape.

  Don’t misunderstand me.

  I’m still me.

  Still capable of ugly things.

  Still very willing to do them when necessary.

  But Horizon rebuilt me.

  Literally this time, yes. Worcester hull and all that.

  But more than that.

  It gave me a reason to exist outside of punishment, performance, and revenge.

  That doesn’t erase the Prototype Division.

  Doesn’t absolve the dead.

  Doesn’t make the flames less real.

  It just means the last one of that class—the last actual Prototype line survivor they ever made—didn’t end where they intended.

  I wasn’t scrapped.

  I wasn’t rewritten.

  I wasn’t contained.

  And I wasn’t left behind.

  I burned their facility.

  And then, years later, someone built me a new ship because they thought I was worth keeping alive.

  Do you understand how obscene that is?

  How beautiful?

  That’s why this memory surfaced when it did—while I was recovering, while Tōkaidō was gone north, while the base held its breath around Amagi, while everyone kept pretending routine would save us.

  Because my beginning was built on people trying to decide what kind of weapon I could become.

  And my present?

  My present is a base where a mess hall girl will scold me into eating, Marines bring me bad whiskey and stay until I fall asleep, and a commander would rather build me a future than file me as loss.

  If that isn’t enough to make a monster sentimental, nothing is.

  So yes.

  That’s how I came into existence.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  The Prototype KANSEN Division made me to push a soul past what it should survive.

  They succeeded.

  Then I burned their house down.

  And now I’m here.

  On Horizon.

  Still alive.

  Still dangerous.

  Still mine.