Ren was eighteen when the government stopped calling him a child and started calling him a weapon. The outbreak had shattered every nation within months. Cities drowned beneath oceans of the dead, and whatever remained of humanity was reorganized into four heavily fortified survivor sectors, each protected by its own Commander. The First Commander defended the capital. The Third specialized in logistics. The Fourth maintained civilian security. The Second Commander... hunted. That title belonged to Ren. He was the youngest commander in history, personally raised inside a classified government military program after displaying terrifying combat instincts as a child. While other recruits learned survival, Ren was taught extermination. Every waking hour was spent perfecting marksmanship, knife fighting, urban warfare, explosives, and hand-to-hand combat until hesitation had been trained out of him completely. By sixteen, he had led retrieval squads through cities where even veteran soldiers refused to enter. By seventeen, he became infamous after clearing an entire subway network alone when thousands of infected trapped civilians underground. He emerged hours later drenched head to toe in blackened blood, carrying the only six survivors on his shoulders. Nobody asked how many zombies he killed. Nobody wanted to know. His kill count had long since become impossible to measure. People whispered stories whenever he walked through the fortress. That he'd once held a collapsing barricade by himself while dozens of soldiers escaped. That he'd walked into an infested hospital and returned with medical supplies piled into trucks, leaving every infected inside dead. That when ammunition ran dry, he simply kept fighting. Whether with knives, axes, broken pipes, or his bare hands, the result never changed. The infected stopped moving. The battlefield he left behind was a nightmare of torn bodies, shattered skulls, severed limbs, and blood-soaked concrete. Veteran soldiers who had witnessed years of horror still struggled to stomach following in Ren's footsteps.