Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - Broadcast of the Top Ten

Frost had formed overnight along20  Broadcast of the

Frost had formed overnight along the high basalt lip of the ridge, thin and brittle like crushed glass under boot heels.Kae sat wedged between two damp boulders, chewing slowly on a strip of smoked

Ironhorn meat

Jax had handed her twenty minutes ago.

The meat was tough, salty, and smelled faintly of woodsmoke, but it beat the hell out of the chalky synthetic ration bars.

Her fingers were stiff with cold inside her fingerless work gloves, her eyes raw from lack of sleep.Fifty feet below their ledge, the primordial jungle lay buried under a sea of white morning mist that stretched all the way to the jagged teeth of the western mountains.”Coffee’s lukewarm,” Jax announced, stepping over a fallen pine log with a dented tin pot.

He poured a dark, bitter stream into a folded foil cup and passed it to

Kae. “Drink up,

You look like a ghost that got dragged through an oil drum.” “Thanks,” Kae mumbled, burying her nose in the steam.Across the small rocky hollow,

Cassia was standing on a flat stone, idly polishing the curved edge of her left saber with a rag.

The purple-tinted steel caught the pale morning sun, humming with a quiet, lethal vibration.

Torin were adjusting the foot straps on their skyboards, while

Rhys stood near the cliff edge, his massive gravimetric broadsword planted point-down in the gravel like a fence post.Only

Melissa looked miserable.

She was sitting as far from the edge as possible, wrapped in two thermal blankets, furiously applying ointment to a bug bite on her neck. “I don’t understand why we had to sleep on a cliff,” she whined for the fourth time that morning. “The wind blew dirt into my medical kit all night.””Because cliffs only have one avenue of approach,” Kaelen said without looking up from his slate.

He was leaning against a weather-beaten pine, checking the squad’s biometric reserves. “In a jungle, you get surrounded in your sleep.

On a ridge, you see them coming from three miles out.”Before

Melissa could draft a rebuttal, every wristband in the hollow gave a sharp, high-pitched double chirp.BEEP-BEEP.The sound echoed off the stone walls, sudden and insistent.Kae nearly spilled her coffee.

Cassia’s hand dropped instantly to her hilt.

Rhys turned his head toward the valley.”Staging time,” Kaelen muttered, his thumb tapping his wrist unit.Across

Sector 7, the sky didn’t just brighten—it vibrated.

High above the cloud layer, three massive broadcast shuttles hummed through the upper atmosphere, firing high-yield holoflares into the heavens.

Crimson light bled through the morning mist, casting long, eerie shadows across the canopy as a loud, crackling audio feed cut through the

Kincaid’s voice, amplified to a dull, rolling thunder that shook the needles off the pine trees.”Cadets of the

Aegis-IV Intake.

Day 17 has begun.”The voice echoed across the mountains, cold and completely unsympathetic.”Seventy-two hours have elapsed since drop-down.

Two hundred and ten cadets have been evacuated via stasis bubble.

Three hundred and ninety remain operational in

As of zero-eight-hundred hours, the

Protocol is officially active.”Cassia frowned, stepping closer to the ridge. “Bounty protocol?””In accordance with

Directive 14,” Kincaid’s voice roared from the sky, “the live regional leaderboard is now open to all surviving units.

Furthermore, to eliminate passive camping, the exact

GPS coordinates of the

Ten ranked squads will be broadcast continuously across the public network every fifteen minutes.”Melissa gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. “They’re broadcasting our position?!””Hunting teams who successfully trigger a stasis band on a

Ten squad member will claim fifty percent of that squad’s total accumulated point pool,” Kincaid continued, sounding almost amused by the chaos he was unleashing. “Current point standings are now updating on your personal slates.

Good luck, cadets.

Try not to die.” The audio feed snapped off with a sharp static pop.Silence fell over the ridge, thick and suffocating.Kaelen’s fingers moved across his slate with terrifying speed, clearing the red alert headers to open the main sector ranking board.The rest of the squad gathered around him in a tight, silent circle.

Kae shuffled closer, her foil cup held loosely in her hands, peering over

Rhys’s massive shoulder at the blue holoscreen.— SECTOR 7 LEADERSHIP BOARD —[PHASE 2:

BOUNTY PROTOCOL ACTIVE]01.

SQUAD 07 (TACTICIAN:

MERCER)   — 4,950 PTS [GPS BEACON ACTIVE] 02.

SQUAD 01 (TACTICIAN:

DRAKE)     — 3,100 PTS [GPS BEACON ACTIVE] 03.

SQUAD 04 (TACTICIAN:

CROSS)     — 2,850 PTS [GPS BEACON ACTIVE] 04.

SQUAD 12 (TACTICIAN:

VANCE)     — 2,400 PTS [GPS BEACON ACTIVE]05.

SQUAD 09 (TACTICIAN:

STERLING)  — 2,100 PTS [GPS BEACON ACTIVE]Torin stared at the top line, his jaw slowly dropping. “Four thousand… nine hundred and fifty?””We’re almost two thousand points ahead of

Drake,” Silas whispered, looking from the screen to his own kinetic gauntlets. “We’re almost at five thousand.” “We wiped four

Ironhorns and two full squads in twenty-four hours,” Jax chuckled, though the usual humor was missing from his voice. “Of course we’re in first.” Nobody cheered.Kaelen wasn’t looking at the point total.

His eyes were fixed on the tiny, pulsing red crosshair flickering right beside

SQUAD 07 on the screen.He tapped the crosshair, pulling up the tactical sector map.A glowing red pulse was beaming straight up from their exact position on the ridge, visible on every cadet slate within eighty square kilometers.

And surrounding their mountain, scattered throughout the dark jungle valleys below, dozens of tiny blue dots—the remaining three hundred and eighty cadets—were suddenly stopping.Then, one by one, the blue dots began turning toward the ridge.”Four thousand nine hundred points,” Kaelen murmured softly, his gray eyes widening as the tactical reality washed over him. “That means every team in

Sector 7 knows that if they take us down, they claim nearly two thousand five hundred points in a single fight.””That’s enough to leapfrog straight from the bottom of the board into second place,” Cassia realized, her grip tightening on her saber hilts.”We aren’t the hunters anymore,” Kaelen said, shutting off his slate with a sharp snap as he turned to face his team. “We’re the biggest bounty on this planet.

Every single squad in this forest is coming for us.”