As the group prepared for that afternoon's training, Ryo silently walked away. He climbed to the highest point of the base — an abandoned watchtower, where the wind was strongest and the sky seemed closest.
He sat on the edge of the metal structure, his eyes fixed on the horizon. There, with his black hair messed up by the wind and the sparks dancing on his fingers, memories came back like lightning flashing through his mind.
---
Ever since he was little, Ryo had always been… too fast. Quick to speak, to move, to react. His thoughts ran like a whirlwind and his feet barely touched the ground. He was the kind of kid who disappeared from one place and appeared in another without anyone understanding how.
At the age of 10, during an electrical storm, he almost died when he was struck by lightning. But that wasn't what destroyed him. What marked him came later.
He didn't die. Quite the opposite. He survived — with his eyes changed and a new energy pulsing inside him. From that day on, he felt everything more intensely. The wind whispered. Electricity vibrated through his skin. His soul seemed... too light to be attached to the ground.
HelionTech didn't take long to find him. They described him as an "atmospheric anomaly in human form." They tried to contain him, study him, shape him. But Ryo was like the wind: impossible to capture.
He fled flying — not in the literal sense, but with such absurd speed and lightness that he seemed to glide. Since then, he survived as best he could, hiding on the rooftops of cities, in the winds between the mountains, in the thunder that no one knew where it came from.
But he never stopped asking himself why him.
Why had the sky chosen him?
---
Back at the tower, Ryo spread his arms. A light current of air swirled around him. In seconds, the breeze turned into a gust. His blue eyes shone with electric intensity.
— "I am the lightning that cannot be seen coming…"
And then, in an instant, he disappeared from the tower. The air exploded in a small thunder, and he reappeared meters below, right in the middle of the group, smiling as if nothing had happened.
—Are we going to train or just stare into the distance? — he teased.
Kael raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms. — We are going to train. And I want to see you synchronize that speed with Selene today.
— It will be easy — Ryo replied, sparks rising between his fingers. — The sky has danced with the moon before.
The group laughed, but something there was changing. Every memory, every past, every pain was becoming strength.
And the team… was finally beginning to unite as one.