The deadly training at the Council’s Collector Academy took children who felt too much and turned them into weapons who felt nothing. Emma Thorne was five when they stole her capacity for normal love. She was eighteen when she graduated as humanity’s most efficient heartbreaker.
Of the 847 candidates who entered the Council’s Collector Academy, only 23 survived the psychological conditioning. Of those 23, only 7 could perform a clean extraction without neural feedback. Of those 7, only 3 could handle high-volume processing without permanent brain damage. Of those 3, only Emma Thorne could drain a lifetime of love in under thirty seconds without losing her sanity.
The Academy’s deadly training had produced killers, torturers, and psychological warfare specialists for two decades. Emma Thorne was the first student who genuinely terrified her instructors.
The Selection That Killed Dreams
Children arrived at the Academy after genetic screening identified them as emotionally “gifted.” Most were between ages four and seven, young enough for psychological modification but old enough to understand that they were being separated from their families forever.
The first month eliminated 67% of candidates.
Instructors subjected children to concentrated exposure to every possible human emotion. Love was amplified until it became physical pain. Fear was sustained for hours until it broke their ability to feel safe. Joy was twisted into mania that left children screaming with forced laughter until their voices gave out.
Children who couldn’t tolerate the emotional overload died from cardiac arrest, neural shock, or complete psychological breakdown. Their bodies were returned to families with explanations of “training accidents” or “genetic incompatibilities.” Parents never learned their children had been tortured to death to test their suitability as weapons.
The survivors learned the Academy’s first lesson: emotions are dangerous forces that must be controlled or eliminated.
Phase Two exposed surviving candidates to others’ emotional extremes without any preparation or protection. Children experienced secondhand murder, rape, genocide, and torture through neural links that forced them to feel what victims had felt. The exposure was designed to overwhelm their natural empathy and teach them to view others’ suffering as data rather than human experience.
Most children couldn’t handle feeling others’ deaths. They either went insane from the psychological trauma or developed multiple personality disorders to compartmentalize the horror. Of the 280 children who entered Phase Two, only 89 retained enough psychological stability to continue.
Emma Thorne processed every atrocity with clinical detachment. Her instructors noted that she seemed to absorb others’ suffering without being damaged by it—a trait that would make her invaluable as a Collector.
The Conditioning That Stole Souls
Phase Three began the systematic destruction of students’ capacity for normal emotional attachment. Instructors used a combination of neural modification, psychological torture, and chemical conditioning to eliminate empathy while preserving emotional sensitivity.
The deadly training process required candidates to perform practice extractions on other Academy students. Children were paired up and forced to drain emotions from each other repeatedly until they could steal feelings without experiencing guilt, remorse, or connection.
Emma’s first practice partner was Marcus Chen, a seven-year-old boy whose parents had volunteered him for “advanced emotional education.” Emma drained his capacity for joy seventeen times in one session, leaving him unable to feel happiness for three months. Marcus cried the entire time. Emma felt nothing.
Her instructors praised her natural talent for emotional theft.
Advanced conditioning involved practice extractions on Academy staff members. Students who hesitated or showed compassion were subjected to “correction”—neural modification that surgically removed their capacity for empathy. The corrections had a 73% survival rate.
Students who successfully stole emotions from their instructors received positive reinforcement: better food, private rooms, access to entertainment. They learned that causing emotional damage to others resulted in personal rewards.
Emma completed her conditioning faster than any previous candidate. She could extract love from a parent, joy from a child, or hope from a dying person without experiencing any emotional feedback. Her psychological profile showed complete suppression of empathy alongside perfect preservation of emotional detection ability.
The Academy had created a monster who could feel everything but care about nothing.
The Graduation That Broke Records
Emma’s final examination required her to perform a mass extraction at a civilian hospital. Her target was the children’s cancer ward—forty-seven terminally ill patients and their families experiencing the full spectrum of human emotion.
Standard protocol called for a team of three senior Collectors working in shifts to process that much emotional energy safely. Emma completed the assignment alone in four hours.
She extracted hope from dying children until they stopped fighting their diseases. She drained love from parents until they couldn’t remember why they should care about their suffering babies. She removed joy from siblings until they felt nothing but emptiness when looking at their sick brothers and sisters.
The hospital staff watched families transform from loving, desperate, hopeful communities into hollow shells who visited dying children out of obligation rather than affection. Parents who had been reading bedtime stories to bald toddlers suddenly couldn’t understand why they’d wasted time on such activities.
Emma’s extraction was so thorough that the hospital’s grief counselors couldn’t help the families because there was no grief left to process. The parents felt nothing. The children died alone, surrounded by people who had once loved them but could no longer remember how.
Medical staff required therapy to cope with witnessing such complete emotional devastation. Several nurses requested immediate transfers. The head pediatrician took early retirement after watching parents ignore their dying children.
Emma filed her report and asked for her next assignment.
The Monster They Couldn’t Control
Emma’s Academy performance metrics exceeded anything in the institution’s records. Her extraction speed was 340% faster than the previous record holder. Her processing capacity was 720% above average. Her psychological stability remained perfect regardless of how much emotional trauma she absorbed.
But her instructors noticed disturbing patterns in her advanced training.
Emma’s emotional sensitivity continued increasing long after it should have plateaued. Her extraction range grew wider each month. Her ability to manipulate emotions became more sophisticated than their protocols had taught her.
During one training exercise, Emma extracted anger from an instructor and then implanted that anger in a different instructor across the building. She had somehow learned to transfer emotions between people rather than simply draining them. The Academy’s training hadn’t included that capability.
Her final psychological evaluation contained a warning that Academy leadership classified immediately: Emma Thorne’s abilities were developing beyond their understanding or control. She could potentially become more powerful than the system designed to contain her.
The report recommended close monitoring and possible termination if her capabilities continued expanding.
Emma graduated with highest honors and was immediately assigned to field duty under the direct supervision of Handler Marcus Chen—the same boy whose joy she had stolen during conditioning. The Academy thought pairing her with someone who had experienced her abilities firsthand would ensure optimal control.
They didn’t realize Marcus had never forgiven her for what she’d done to him as children.
The Academy’s deadliest graduate is about to turn their training against them. The hunter becomes the hunted.
Pre-order “The Emotion Collector: Awakening” on Richardfrench.net, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and wherever books are sold to discover what happens when the perfect weapon remembers how to feel.
