Chapter 2: Childhood at Elliot Mansion
Since they were little, Adam and Tessa were inseparable.
She was fire. He was ice.
Tessa devoured books on ninja tactics, forbidden seals, and theories only adults understood. Her ambition was silent, but unstoppable.
Adam preferred to watch. To observe. To wait for the perfect moment to act. He had a quiet irony that drove even his sister to despair.
"Adam, stop staring at the clouds and come train," she would growl. "I'm training my strategic gaze," he would reply. "Is that what you call sleeping with your eyes open?" "Ancient technique. Only for geniuses."
But between jokes and taunts, they shared something no one else knew:
they weren't normal children.
---
Beneath the Surface
Not even their parents knew what they were capable of.
Official training at the mansion included fencing, politics, and financial analysis. But at night, when the house was asleep, the real work began.
Tessa had mastered her chakra for as long as she could remember. She didn't learn it: she awakened it.
Silently, she trained in the backyard, concealing her strength beneath grace.
Her Sharingan was barely a tomoe long, but she already saw more than she should have.
That night, she lifted two tons with the precision of a dancer.
Adan, sitting under the cherry tree, practiced Dismantling.
He held a match. He tried to cut it just below the head, without breaking it.
He visualized. He released the energy.
Crack.
The cut was clean... too clean.
"Tsk... I still don't have the dispersion under control," he muttered.
"Did you fail again?" Tessa appeared with her typical smug smile.
"It's a matter of fine-tuning."
"Or that you stop thinking and start feeling."
"Not everyone lifts giant stones to relax, chakra beast."
She laughed.
"Someday they'll find out."
"That day isn't today," Adam said, with rehearsed calm.
---
Blind
The Elliot siblings' parents were strict, but fair.
Their mother, sweet and protective, urged them to rest every night.
Their father, demanding and cerebral, evaluated them coldly.
"Good work on the analyses, Tessa."
"Adam, you should speak up more in family discussions."
"Don't push yourselves so hard," their mother would say tenderly. "You may still be children."
But Adam and Tessa knew the truth: they weren't.
They were two hidden weapons, growing up in the shadow of a glittering mansion.
---
The Prototype
One morning, everything changed.
"I want you to meet someone," her father announced.
In the main hall, a metal capsule opened with a puff of steam.
From inside emerged a humanoid figure: perfect, elegant, inhuman.
Blue glass eyes, synthetic skin, smooth movements.
"This is an experimental assistant. He'll be staying with us for a while."
"We'll call him… J," Tessa said without thinking.
"Registered name," the machine replied.
Adam didn't smile.
"And what does he do?"
"He learns," his father said.
And though neither of them said it, they both understood immediately:
J wasn't just a robot.
He was a threat.
And now he lived with them.