The laboratory deep beneath the Winter Palace was silent save for the low hum of the ambient energy field, a sound only Mikhail could truly perceive. Before him stood Captain Dmitri Orlov, his face as impassive as ever, his posture one of perfect military discipline. He had been summoned, and he had come.
"Dmitri," Mikhail began, his voice quiet but resonating with the new power he had embraced. "I have told you that a new kind of war is coming. A war of mythology. To fight it, we cannot rely on steel and gunpowder alone. We must become something more."
He looked at his most loyal guardian, the man who had stood by him since the first threats emerged in Pskov. "I am not offering you a promotion or a title. I am offering to reshape your very existence. To take the duty and loyalty that define you and make them absolute. I can make you the perfect shield of this Empire, able to see threats before they form, and to strike with a speed and certainty no mortal can match. It will not be without risk. It will change you forever."
Orlov did not hesitate. His loyalty had been forged over years of witnessing Mikhail achieve the impossible. To him, this was simply the next logical step. "My life is sworn to protect the Regency and the Empire, Your Highness. If there is a better way to do so, I will accept it."
Mikhail nodded. There would be no complex machinery this time. The Resonance Chamber had been a tool for discovery. This was an act of pure creation.
He placed a hand on Orlov's shoulder, and as he focused his will, the world dissolved into pure information. He perceived Orlov's being as a form of intricate code, a lifetime of experience and dedication written into the fabric of reality. With the precision of a master programmer, he began to edit that code. He isolated the variables for loyalty and duty, amplifying them to the level of physical law. He accessed the subroutines for combat awareness and perception, rewriting them with a new, impossible efficiency, weaving threads of the background energy field throughout the man's being to power the new system. He was not just giving the man power; he was upgrading his very operating system.
For Orlov, the experience was a cataclysm. His consciousness exploded outward. He felt the city of St. Petersburg not as streets and buildings, but as a vast, shimmering web of human lives. He could feel the collective fear and hope of the populace as a low-frequency hum. He could sense the jagged, discordant static of a conspiracy being whispered in a dark room miles away. The five senses he had known his entire life dissolved, replaced by a million new ones. The pain of this expansion was excruciating, a fire that threatened to consume his sanity. But through it all, he felt Mikhail's will—a calm, immensely powerful, and structuring force—holding him together, giving him purpose, defining his new reality. He was being reforged.
When Mikhail released his will, the laboratory seemed to rush back into focus, the hum of the energy field fading to a whisper in his mind. He stumbled, a sudden, sharp ache blooming behind his temples. The act of creation had left a void, a deep, cellular exhaustion that no amount of sleep could fix. He looked at Orlov, who remained motionless. To a casual observer, nothing had changed. But to Mikhail's heightened perception, Orlov was no longer just a point in space. He was a gravitational center, his presence bending the faint lines of energy in the room around him. The man had become a constant.
He opened his eyes, and they were the same calm gray, but now they saw everything.
At that exact moment, a secure telegraph in the corner of the lab began to clatter. It was a coded message from Tishchenko, their double agent. Mikhail tore it from the machine. It was an urgent warning: a small, remnant cell of Katorov's network, acting without orders, was about to make a desperate attempt on the life of Matvei Gromov, the union leader, as he left his headquarters across the city. They saw Gromov as a traitor to the workers and a puppet of the new regime.
Before Mikhail could even give an order, Orlov's head snapped toward the north. "Three men," Orlov said, his voice a flat, resonant whisper. "On a rooftop across from the union hall. Two with rifles, one with a bomb. They intend to act in the next two minutes."
Mikhail stared at him. Orlov had not read the message. He had simply… perceived the threat.
With a nod to Mikhail that was both a request for and a statement of permission, Orlov moved. He did not run. He simply blurred at the edges and vanished.
The chapter concluded in a dingy alleyway across the city. Three would-be assassins were making their final preparations on a rooftop when a silent shadow fell over them. Before they could react, they were neutralized with a speed and efficiency that was not human. One moment they were there, the next they were unconscious, their weapons disabled, their plot ended before it ever truly began.
Back in the laboratory, Orlov reappeared as silently as he had left, a faint shimmer of displaced air the only sign of his passage. "The threat to Mr. Gromov is neutralized, Your Highness," he reported.
Mikhail looked at the first of his Bogatyrs. He had done it. He had created a perfect guardian, a living shield for his empire. He now had the blueprint. But he also understood the immense power he had just unleashed, and the terrible responsibility that came with it.
He looked at the schematics for the Genesis Forge, the machine that would build his new world. One Bogatyr was a guardian. A pantheon of twenty would be a force to rewrite reality itself. His work had just begun.