Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - The Skyboard Blitz

Wind at sixty miles an hour whipped

Wind at sixty miles an hour whipped

Kae’s dark bangs straight across her forehead, threatening to rip her oversized glasses right off her nose.She crouched low on her slate-iron skyboard, her calloused fingers digging into the crude leather foot-straps.

Eighty feet above the mud, where the giant ironwood trunks branched out into a thick, tangled canopy of ferns and hanging moss, the skyboard’s repulsor plate hummed with a low, deep vibration that buzzed right through the soles of her boots.Please don’t snap,

Kae prayed silently, squinting through the rushing green leaves as a branch the width of a shuttle hull flew past her shoulder.

I glued the repulsor housing with river clay and low-grade cobalt solder.

It’s totally structurally sound.

Probably.Ten yards to her left,

Vance was laughing—a loud, unhinged sound that was entirely lost to the rush of the wind.

The red-haired duelist swung her skyboard through a tight, sixty-degree bank around an ancient trunk, her purple-tinted sabers already unslung and resting across her knees.”Mercer!” Cassia yelled over her shoulder. “Three hundred yards out!

Low ridge near the creekbed!”Kaelen was trailing ten feet behind

Kae, his tactical slate strapped flat against his left forearm while his right hand held a long-range kinetic carbine. “I see ’em,” he called back, his voice crisp over the squad’s short-range comms loop. “Block 3’s primary assault unit.

They’re standing over our

Swamp-Stalker kill, getting ready to tag the point beacon.”Below the canopy, in a muddy clearing near a bubbling sulfur spring, eight cadets in pristine grey fatigue jackets were gathered around the massive, steaming carcass of an

S-rank beast

Squad 7 had spent twenty minutes hunting down.The rival squad leader—a tall, heavy-jawed

Vanguard named

Harrison from

Block 3—was standing on the beast’s chest plate, holding a yellow point-tagging wand in one hand while his squad mates stood in a lazy perimeter circle, their standard-issue rifles held at relaxed low-carry.”Easiest fifteen hundred points on the map,” Harrison chuckled, pressing the wand toward the beast’s crest. “Mercer’s squad must have run off when they heard the skitterers in the trees.

Idiots left the kill totally wide open.””Hey,

Harrison,” one of his perimeter scouts called out, frowning as he looked up toward the thick fern canopy overhead. “You hear a motor?””A motor?

Sector 7?” Harrison snorted, not looking up. “Don’t be stupid.

Air support is banned for freshmen.

It’s just wind in the'”BOOM.The canopy didn’t just open; it exploded downward in a shower of shredded leaves, broken branches, and wet moss.Harrison didn’t even have time to raise his rifle.Rhys

Sterling dropped straight out of the sky like a ten-ton anvil.

His slate-iron skyboard slammed into the mud five feet from

Harrison with a shockwave that sent three rival scouts tumbling sideways into the sulfur pool.

Harrison could recover his balance,

Rhys’s gravimetric broadsword swung in a wide, purple-tinted arc.The heavy flat of the blade—mass-shifted to two hundred pounds of kinetic density at the point of impact—struck

Harrison’s shoulder.CLANG-THUD.Harrison’s stasis band didn’t even flicker yellow; it instantly snapped to a blinding, solid red.

The kinetic shockwave hit his torso so hard the emergency bubble deployed in mid-air, encasing the rival leader in a thick, gel-like protective sphere before he bounced twenty feet across the gravel and rolled into a fern bush.”Ambush!” a rival scout screamed, frantically trying to unholster his rifle. “They’re on the ground!

Kill ’em!” He was wrong.

They weren’t on the ground.Cassia hit the glade a fraction of a second later, her skyboard skimming two inches above the mud as she drifted sideways around the sulfur spring.

Her purple sabers flared.SWOOSH-SWOOSH.Two rival

Vanguards felt a cold, feather-light brush across their forearms.

They didn’t even feel the steel cut—until the neuro-paralytic toxin in the alloy hit their bloodstream.

Their legs folded instantly.

Both cadets crumpled into the mud like sacks of wet flour, their emergency bands flashing yellow as their vitals plummeted.From a high, thick branch sixty feet up,

Kae hovered on her board, her knees bent, her kinetic burst rifle resting against her shoulder.Through her optical sights, she spotted the rival squad’s two rear marksmen who were finally raising their rifles toward

Cassia.Tweak the magnetic pinch,

Kae thought, her face completely expressionless behind her smudged glasses.She squeezed the trigger.THUMP-CRACK.The condensed burst of three fused slugs didn’t hit the scouts’ bodies.

Kae aimed straight for the receiver plates of their standard-issue rifles.

The impact shattered both weapons into flying scraps of plastic and aluminum, knocking both marksmen flat on their backs.Before the remaining three rival cadets could figure out whether to fight or run,

Silas dropped out of the canopy on their own skyboards, landing like twin meteors with a warhammer and mass-shifted gauntlets.Total elapsed time from the canopy break: twelve seconds.The glade fell completely silent, save for the bubbling sulfur spring and the soft, steady hum of five skyboards hovering six inches above the churned mud.Six rival cadets lay paralyzed or stasis-wrapped in the dirt.

The remaining two were sitting against a granite rock, their hands raised high in the air, their faces pale as chalk as they looked up at

Squad 7.”How…” the rival scout sitting in the mud stammered, staring at

Cassia, who was casually hovering in mid-air on a piece of dark slate-iron while wiping her sabers with a leaf. “How are you… flying?

Freshmen don’t have aerial clearance!” Cassia didn’t answer him.

She just offered a wide, terrifying grin, her purple sabers reflecting the dim sunlight.Kaelen drifted down from the trees on his own board, tapping the point wand against the

S-rank beast’s crest.PING.— POINT BEACON SYNCHRONIZED —BEAST TERMINATED:

S-RANK SWAMP-STALKERPOINTS AWARDED: +1,500 MERIT POINTSRIVAL SQUAD AMBUSH BONUS: +600 MERIT POINTSSQUAD 07 TOTAL: 4,550 MERIT POINTSCURRENT REGIONAL RANKING: 01Kaelen looked down at his slate, then at the stunned rival cadets sitting in the mud, and finally up at

Kae, who was hovering near a lower tree limb, trying very hard to hide behind her sweater collar.”Tag the rest of their point beacons,” Kaelen ordered, his voice crisp and completely devoid of mercy. “Mount up,

We’ve got forty minutes before

Command broadcasts the regional leaderboard.”