In the village of Oakhaven, Philischus was a local anomaly.
He was built like a mountain range squeezed into human skin, a sprawling landscape of dense, corded muscle that seemed almost burdensome. Yet, Philischus was famously, impressively lazy. He didn't train. He didn't lift rocks for sport. He mostly napped under the great ancestral oak, occasionally shifting position with a groan that sounded like tectonic plates grinding.
When the village smith's anvil sank into the mud during a spring thaw, four men couldn't budge it. Kaelen, sighing while finishing a pear, walked over, gripped the iron hunk with one hand, and nonchalantly placed it back on its stump before returning to his nap. He didn't break a sweat. It wasn't a flex; it was just easier than listening to them argue.
His body was a divine mistake—a repository of boundless kinetic potential given to a guy whose highest ambition was finding a perfectly shaded patch of grass.
Then the Imperial Conscription Auxiliaries arrived.
The Celestial Empire was rotting from the inside out. The Divine Right of the Golden Chrysanthemum Throne had evaporated, leaving behind a paranoid, inbred family clinging to power through sheer, brutal inertia. Heroes were rising in the provinces, warlords were carving out fiefdoms, and the Empire needed meat for the grinder.
They took one look at Philischus and saw a siege engine made of meat. He didn't resist. Resisting seemed like a whole lot of effort. He was issued a rusted spear and ill-fitting leather armor that burst at the seams when he shrugged. He was labeled a 'Soldier'—the bottom rung of the glorious imperial ladder.
His first deployment was to the rain-soaked plains of the Western Reach, against the 'Iron Torrent' rebel faction. It was a disaster.
The Imperial strategy was standard: send the Soldiers in as a meat-shield to tire the enemy, while the elite 'Armor Bearers' in their glowing magigear cataphracts advanced behind them, led by a soaring, arrogant 'Warrior' mounted on a levitating brass wyvern.
Philischus was bored.
Then, the sky started screaming.
The Iron Torrent had their own sorcery. A barrage of alchemical fire rained down, obliterating the front ranks. Philischus was thrown fifty feet, landing in a crater filled with churning mud and broken pikes. Before he could stand, a dead cavalry horse landed on top of him, followed by a collapsing section of the palisade wall.
He was buried alive in darkness, crushed under tons of wood, soil, and equine carrion.
He couldn't breathe. The pressure was immense. For the first time in his life, his body couldn't just casually shrug something off. He felt his ribs creak. He felt genuine distress.
And then, something deep inside his chest, something dormant since birth, clicked.
It wasn't fear. It was a sudden, terrifying rush of adrenaline-fueled joy. His heart hammered against his ribs like a prisoner realizing the cell door was unlocked. His muscles didn't just tense; they ignited.
Finally, his nervous system seemed to sing. Something heavy enough.
Above ground, the battle raged. The Imperial line was buckling. Suddenly, the mound of debris in the center of the field exploded upward. A dead horse was launched twenty feet into the air, cartwheeling grotesquely before crashing into an enemy pike square.
Philischus stood up in the crater. He was covered in muck, blood not his own, and splinters. He took a deep breath of the acrid, smoke-filled air, and a grin split his face—a wide, unsettling display of happiness.
An elite enemy shock trooper, clad in expensive dwarven plate, charged the lone survivor. The trooper swung a massive warhammer meant to crack magigear.
Philischus didn't dodge. He caught the hammer head with his left hand. The impact made a sound like a muffled gong. The trooper froze, staring at the impossible sight of a base-level soldier palming a thunder-hammer.
With his right hand, Philischus grabbed the trooper by his breastplate. He didn't punch him. He just... squeezed. The expensive dwarven steel folded like wet cardboard. The trooper gasped, then went limp. Kaelen tossed the armored body aside like an empty sack and looked around at the chaos.
The screaming, the clashing steel, the magical explosions—it was beautiful. It was the only lullaby that had ever woken him up.
Six months later, the legend of the "Bare-Handed Siegebreaker" was a whispered rumor across three contested provinces.
Philischus remained a 'Soldier'. He refused promotions. When offered the enchanted magigear cataphract of an 'Armor Bearer' after saving a platoon, he tried it on, found it "stuffy and fragile," and accidentally ripped the hydraulic pauldrons off while scratching his back.
He didn't fit the hierarchy. He didn't have the money or lineage to be a 'Warrior', and he was too destructive for the disciplined ranks of the 'Armor Bearers'. He was an outlier, a glitch in the Empire's rigid system.
He wandered from warzone to warzone, attaching himself to whatever Imperial unit seemed destined for the heaviest fighting. He didn't care who won. He didn't care about the Rotten Throne or the rising "heroes" with their shining manifestos. He just wanted the noise to continue.
At the Siege of Highrock, the rebel forces deployed a "Wall-Breaker"—a massive, magically accelerated battering ram capping a fifty-ton iron carriage, moving at the speed of a galloping horse. It was designed to shatter fortress gates.
It was heading straight for a breach in the Imperial lines where a terrified cohort of conscripts was huddled.
Philischus emerged from the ranks, dropping his issued spear—he'd never actually used one anyway. He walked toward the oncoming metal monstrosity.
"Move, you idiot grunt!" an Imperial Knight screamed from atop the wall.
Kaelen ignored him. He planted his feet. He didn't assume a martial arts stance; he just stood like a man waiting for a bus, albeit one made of dense, immovable bedrock.
The Wall-Breaker hit him.
The collision sounded like a meteorite strike. Dust plumed outward, obscuring everything. The rebel army cheered, expecting red mist.
When the dust settled, the iron carriage had stopped dead. The magical engine propelling it was whining fiercely, gears grinding against resistance they weren't designed for.
Kaelen was dug into the earth up to his knees, plowed backward about ten feet. His hands were pressed flat against the massive iron ram head. His uniform had disintegrated from the force, leaving him bare-chested, his impossible musculature rigid, veins standing out like steel cables.
He wasn't straining. He was grinning.
He dug his fingers into the solid iron head of the ram, forging his own handholds through sheer grip strength.
"My turn," he grunted.
With a roar that drowned out the battlefield, Philischus lifted.
The front wheels of the fifty-ton machine left the ground. The rebel crew inside screamed as their world tilted. Kaelen kept lifting, his back forming a perfect, terrifying arch of power. He didn't just stop the machine; he upended it, flipping the entire siege engine onto its back like a helpless turtle. The crash shook the foundations of Highrock fortress.
The battlefield went dead silent. Thousands of men, from lowly squires to lofty Warriors in their floating chariots, stopped fighting to stare at the lone, half-naked man standing amidst the wreckage.
High above the battlefield, watching from a hovering platform, stood General Valerius, one of the Empire's five 'Warlords'—a man known as a walking calamity, capable of sinking cities with earth magic.
Valerius descended slowly, his shadow falling over Philischus. The Warlord's presence usually made veteran soldiers vomit with fear. Philischus just wiped grease from his forehead and looked up, mild interest in his eyes.
"Soldier," Warlord Valerius boomed, his voice amplified by magic. "What unit is this? Who commands you?"
Philischus looked around, as if just realizing where he was. He shrugged, a movement that rippled across his massive shoulders.
"Dunno. The captain died in the first volley."
The Warlord landed. He was seven feet tall in armor forged from a fallen star. He towered over everyone, yet Philischus, standing in a furrow of his own making, felt equal in presence.
"You possess strength that mocks the natural order," Valerius said, his eyes narrowing behind his helm. "Are you a divine scion of the rebel factions? A hidden champion of the usurpers?"
Kaelen cracked his neck. It sounded like a gunshot. He looked past the Warlord, toward the horizon where fresh enemy reinforcements were gathering. The chaos was winding up again. His grin returned, wider than before.
"Nah," Philischus said, already turning toward the oncoming horde. "I'm just glad everyone finally started making some noise. Don't stop on my account."