Vaok'Ace

Vaok'Ace is an Assault-Class Engineered of pure lineage, tracing directly to the original Assault-Class with no divergence and no hybrid dilution. He is the youngest brother of Vaok’Aurena and Auevo. He stands eight feet four inches tall and weighs 861 pounds, though to look at him one would assume he is only slightly thicker than the largest Assault-Class adults. His proportions are refined. He resembles the imperial statues that line the old avenues of Karesh, carved from stone to represent the ideal of what the Engineered body was meant to become, except that Ace moves. The density of his frame is internal: his muscles, bones, and connective tissue are compressed to a degree no other living Assault-Class has achieved. That compression came from no gene. He built it.

His Father

Most Assault-Class individuals never feel the need to push their bodies beyond their natural enhanced state. They are already the strongest beings on the planet, and the gap between themselves and everything else is wide enough that training feels unnecessary. Ace's father disagreed. On routine trips through the Karesh countryside he would pass fuel depots without stopping and then announce, with the same mild surprise every time, that the rover had run out of fuel. "Oh. Seems we're out of fuel, grab the cords, and the harness if you're feeling weak today." On other trips he would drive at reckless speed over the open plains until the thermal cell burned out. "Well. There goes the thermal cell. You want to push it or pull it today?" He never helped. He stood on the rover and watched his son pull it for miles, refusing assistance from anyone they passed on the road, until the citizens of the Karesh countryside came to recognize the sight and simply waved as the boy hauled the dead machine home with a grown Assault-Class man riding on top of it. "We have to get home, right? Can't just leave a Rover out here, boy."

The boy noticed that his legs and back were growing beyond even the adults around him, adults who could trace their own bloodlines to the original Assault-Class without interruption. He began testing his limits deliberately, carrying heavy airship thermal cells at full sprint until his body failed, recovering, and doing it again. Over the years he learned to cord-pull a hanging Joxi light cargo airship, flat-press a Haavu armored rover, and lift one side of a Zhikhan rail engine for ten seconds at a time. He looked for the limits of his physiology where no other Assault-Class had thought to look and pushed past them, and he developed a capacity found nowhere else on the planet: he can grip and lift several tonnes overhead without cardiovascular strain.

Send-Off

Before he left the Geba continent for his first contract, his family gathered to see him off. This is customary for pure-lineage Assault-Class families, because young Engineered males enter the cycle of repeated contracts and some die in combat extremes and never return. His father arranged one final test. He left their rover, very old by this point, in neutral on a steep decline leading toward a river. It rolled to speed. Ace ran it down, grabbed one of the rear tow rings, and stopped it dead. He planted his heels so deep into the earth that his feet disappeared, and pulled the rover back up the slope one step at a time, a slow 300 meters, while his family watched.

His mother smiled. His sisters showed no reaction, because they had grown up watching him do impossible things and it had stopped surprising them. His father and uncles cried, quietly and openly, because they understood what the contracting cycle does to young Engineered men and they had just watched the strongest thing their family had ever produced prove that he was ready to leave them. Then they rushed him, all of them together, and threw him into the river. One uncle shouted over the splash: "Good job! Don't die out there. You're not always going to be the baddest!"

Becoming Ace

Through his contracts Ace met fighters and combat practitioners from across the planet and adapted their methods to his already immense physicality. While deployed he kept training with the heaviest objects available to him, anything with a cord or a harness or a bar to grip or wheels to resist. His reputation grew on what he did, and he said little about it.

His greatest contract placed him on a team of natural-borns in a corridor saturated with syndicate Assault-Class and Tactician-Class fighters, and he understood immediately that he was their only realistic chance of surviving it.

It was a Haavu contract, one of several they had running at the same time, which is why the detail was thin. Mid-tier natural-borns off the Solarn board, heavily outnumbered, held in the corridor between Jerhit syndicate fighters and Joxi forces, with the Zhikhan Manufacturing Collective at their rear to cut off a separate Haavu operation. The few Engineered on the ticket were already spread through the corridor, and none of them were at this position.

He told the team to take both flanks, give him point, and stay in cover no matter what they saw. One natural-born ignored this entirely. The man, who Ace assumed was Severan from the way he carried himself, fought that corridor alongside Ace building to building, window to window. While Ace moved on direct approach from cover to cover, the man worked the interior routes, and the two of them fell into a coordination neither had planned. Where the man threw smoke, Ace was already opening up with array fire into the gap. Where airship fire threatened to pin the man's position, Ace took the short opening to bring the airships down. Between the two of them and the suppressive fire the natural-born heavy specialists laid down from the flanks, Ace killed fourteen syndicate Assault-Class individuals and four Tacticians, forced a Scout-Class operative to break concealment and flee, and brought down two airships. The opening they created let the rest of the team finish the remaining fighters in the cleared ground. After that contract they stopped calling him Acrenel. He became The Big Ace, or simply Ace.

What he carried away from that corridor came near the end of the engagement, when the natural-born was driven into a building and forced into a corner. The far half of the structure had collapsed under rock and debris, cutting off his exit. Ace began positioning the squad to lay down covering fire so he could push in and pull the man out, but through the shattered window he saw something that stopped him. The man was fighting multiple opponents with his bare hands, and he was killing them. Ace had seen Saodeh practitioners, who would never apply their discipline to take a life, and this man moved with none of their fluidity. He knew the combat philosophy of the Bare Hand, favored by high-tier operatives and covert mercenaries: efficient improvised close-quarters fighting for when a weapon is lost, short desperate exchanges with whatever is nearby to buy time for a reload or a single lethal opportunity. The man was doing something else. His style was direct and devastating, drawing on principles from every fighting tradition Ace had ever observed, combined into something he had never seen performed by a single person.

He kicked one man straight in the chest and put him into the man behind him. When the next one closed, he dropped his weight through a strike to the neck and that man went down. He shoved a third into a fourth and hit them while they were still in each other's way. Their firearms were already on the floor. He had already taken them. That was why the man coming at his back had a knife.

A round cut across his face and another man ran at him. He took the rusher by the vest and went over backward with him, both of them off their feet for the length of the throw. As his back arched and his legs came up, he kicked the knifeman behind him off his line. They hit the floor. He kept his hold, drove the first man's head down, and the neck gave.

He came up on the knifeman, locked the armed wrist, and turned that armor between himself and the shooter across the room. The fire meant for him went through the body he was holding. When the burst broke he threw the perforated man at the shooter, stepped in on the left, put an open palm under the chin, took the weapon with his right hand, and fired it at the doorway.

He hit some of them. One went down. Two more kept coming; the rounds had gone into armor and stopped. Before they cleared the doorway he kicked the door into the first man and staggered him. The weapon ran empty. He kept slamming the door on that man, buying time to find anything else.

A thermal charge came into the room. He let the armored man through, took hold of him, and jumped with his own body tucked short behind that armor as the charge went off. The man's back was incinerated. Both of them were thrown. His back hit the wall. He stood up as more rounds came into the room.

That was all Ace saw. He knows the man survived. Moments later the man was out of the building and already running into the next one, back on the operation for the stolen anchors.

Afterward Ace asked him where he had learned to move like that, and for the first time he heard the name spoken aloud. "The River Pass. The Berinu mountains. Boagria." He asked where it was. The man would not tell him. Ace's temperament, the same force and directness that made him effective in corridors, made it impossible for the man to trust him with the answer. Ace could not humble himself enough to receive it, and the man could see that clearly. Ace thought about it for years afterward. He made his fortune and returned home, and the name Boagria stayed with him through every quiet moment until he went and found the place himself.

Boagria

It took him twelve years to find it on his own.

Boagria sits in the mountain passes of Peak Boagria in the Berinu highlands, an edge grey zone with no relay of its own, hidden from anyone who does not know where to look. It was first explored and settled by Ngorrhali explorers who wanted their own place outside of Karesh, and over time it grew into something its founders never anticipated. Members of the community went out into the world seeking greater challenges and brought back pupils from every continent, to learn from them as much as to teach them. Among those who found their way to Boagria were veterans of the Emperor's Wrath, Saodeh practitioners from Yuvaar, Frost Sentinel lineages from Ngorrhal, and Engineered individuals from across the governed world. Anyone on the planet seeking true mastery of the body and close combat eventually hears of this place, and most spend years searching before they find it.

What He Found There

When Ace arrived he saw no one who looked dangerous by the standards he understood. He challenged a massive Assault-Class man who was clearly among the senior practitioners and was refused. He was pointed instead toward an elderly Yuvaari natural-born, perhaps six feet eight and 370 pounds, whose lean body showed every year it had been used.

The old man locked onto Ace's neck and arm before the giant had finished deciding how to approach him, stepped deep into his stance, dropped his weight beneath the center of gravity Ace had spent a lifetime relying on, and threw him. He did it with placement and with timing so precise that Ace's own forward motion became the force that launched him. Ace hit the ground on his back hard enough to feel it in his teeth, and the old man was already standing over him, a short dropping kick into his chest holding him flat long enough to reset the exchange. When Ace scrambled to rise, the old man was no longer where he had been. A sharp strike came from a low angle Ace had not expected, placed precisely enough that he shifted to absorb it, caught his own trailing leg, and went down again. His own weight had been turned against him for the second time in less than a minute. He swung and hit nothing. The old man had already moved and reset.

By the time Ace pivoted to face him, the old man was positioned to end it again. The tonnes Ace could press and the corridors he had walked through carrying the survival of everyone behind him counted for nothing against a natural-born elder who weighed less than Ace's leg and understood the body more deeply than strength alone could reach.

Ace challenged others over the weeks and months that followed and found that the people of Boagria worked on an entirely different level from anyone in the contracting world. One man who looked large and slow fought with timing and placement so unpredictable that nothing Ace had learned in corridors prepared him for it. Others were blindingly fast and never stayed within reach after their strikes landed, moving through angles Ace could not cut off no matter how quickly he responded. Every practitioner used the body differently, and every one of them understood leverage, distance, and positioning as a language Ace had never been taught: how a shoulder could redirect a charge, how a heel planted at the right moment could cancel the momentum of something ten times its weight. It was a science built on generations of accumulated knowledge, taught in a place the rest of the planet barely knew existed.

The Assault-Class man who had refused Ace's challenge never found Ace worthy enough to face him. Over the years that man became the example of what Ace was working toward: someone shaped by Boagria until he was capable enough to leave and find his own pupils elsewhere. That is the hierarchy at Boagria. Defeating the person above you counts for nothing. You rise by becoming capable enough to teach the person below you, and then you are sent out to find them.

Vow

Ace stayed for two decades. He learned forms of combat that treated the body as the only instrument that mattered, and in the process grew more powerful than he had been when he arrived. The training refined what was already there and removed what was unnecessary. The density that lets his 861 pounds pass for a frame only slightly thicker than any other large Assault-Class is the result of decades of physical discipline, compressing a body that was already exceptional into what the statues in Karesh were carved to represent and never expected to see walking.

He took a limiting vow, as discipline: no ranged weapons. He reentered the contracting world using only his hands and the melee weapons Boagria had taught him, walking into corridors where everyone around him carried firearms, arrays, and cannons. He took contracts to find someone worth bringing back, and the varens they paid meant nothing to him.

He found many who were humble but unworthy in body. He found many who were worthy in body but refused to accept that there was more beyond what they already were. He overestimated several as pupils and killed them in the process of discovering they were not ready. He was still unworthy to face several of Boagria's practitioners, and that burned in him alongside every failed search. Eventually he turned his attention away from the contracting world entirely.

Thazahd

The Church of the Infinite Maw houses the most feared and dangerous criminals on the planet within its detention complexes, or so the rumors said. Ace walked to the gates of Thazahd unarmed and in the open, entered peacefully, and then, in full view of the population, smashed several rovers, destroyed a shop, and resisted every attempt to subdue him until it was clear to everyone watching that he was not a normal man. Then he surrendered. He offered no explanation for what he had done because none was needed. The display ensured he would be placed exactly where the most dangerous people were kept, the only place left on the planet where he believed he might find someone worthy of taking back to Boagria.

He has not been seen since.