Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - Victory Confirmed
Pressurized air hissed from the drop-sh29 Victory
Pressurized air hissed from the drop-shuttle’s landing struts, venting a cloud of dry, warm ozone across the polished permacrete floor of
Bay 4.After three days in the suffocating dampness of
Sector 7, the smell of sterile air-refiltration, heated turbine oil, and floor wax felt almost alien.
Kae stepped off the hydraulic ramp, her boots leaving four wet, red-clay smudges on the gleaming deck.
She flinched at the sudden glare of high-bay
LED floodlights overhead, her eyes watering behind her smudged, crooked glasses.Around them, two dozen other drop-shuttles were settling onto their landing pads, dumping out hundreds of exhausted, mud-caked freshmen.
Some cadets were limping; others sat right down on the hangar deck, staring blankly at their muddy knees.
The sharp smell of burnt insulation and singed armor plates hung heavy in the air.Kaelen
Mercer walked beside her, his tactical slate tucked under his arm.
His face was gray with fatigue, but his jaw remained set, his posture straight.
Behind them trudged
Torin, looking like a crew of frontline trench veterans who had survived a mortar barrage.At the center of the vast hangar, raised on a steel command dais beneath the towering regional holo-displays, stood
Stone.Kincaid had his scars illuminated by the sharp overhead lights, chewing on his usual splintered toothpick while holding a master telemetry slate.
Stone looked like a chunk of dark granite dressed in a pristine, high-collared command uniform, his arms folded tightly across his massive chest.”Fall in!” Kincaid’s voice echoed off the steel girders, cutting clean through the low, weary murmur of six hundred teenagers. “Square up by squad numbers!
Straighten those collars!”Feet shuffled across the deck.
Squad 7 took their place near the front of the central formation, their muddy boots and battered canvas packs standing out sharply against the clean hangar floor.Kae pulled her baggy fleece sweater down over her knuckles, trying her best to hide behind
Rhys’s massive, six-foot frame.
She could feel dozens of eyes boring into her back—cadets from
Block 2, remnant
Vanguards they’d disarmed in the ravine, even upperclassmen mechanics watching from the second-floor gantry catwalks.
It made her stomach tie itself into tight, freezing knots.Just give us the score so
I can go to my room,
Kae prayed silently, staring intently at the seam between two floor tiles.
I want a shower.
I want a blanket.
I don’t want anyone to speak to me for forty-eight hours.Instructor
Stone took a heavy step toward the edge of the dais, his glare sweeping across the sea of muddy faces.”Seventy-two hours ago,” Stone growled, his voice deep and gravelly as a cement mixer, “six hundred of you dropped into
Two hundred and forty-six triggered their emergency stasis bands and were pulled out on casualty hooks.
One hundred and twelve failed to reach minimum point thresholds.
You survived the
Crucible, but survival is the bare baseline in the
Commonwealth
Institute.” He nodded toward
Kincaid.Kincaid tapped his slate once.High above the hangar floor, the massive three-dimensional holographic board flickered, clearing its regional sub-feeds to project the final, official scores in giant, five-foot blue digits:===================================================ASTRAEA MILITARY INSTITUTE – INTAKE EXAMSECTOR 7 CRUCIBLE CHAMPIONS===================================================RANK 01:
SQUAD 07 (TACTICIAN:
K.)TOTAL MERIT POINTS: 9,800CASUALTY PENALTY: 0%RANK 02:
SQUAD 04 (TACTICIAN:
E.) TOTAL MERIT POINTS: 3,400RANK 03:
SQUAD 12 (TACTICIAN:
C.)TOTAL MERIT POINTS: 2,900RANK 04:
SQUAD 09 (TACTICIAN:
B.)TOTAL MERIT POINTS: 2,800RANK 05:
SQUAD 01 (TACTICIAN:
G.)TOTAL MERIT POINTS: 2,550===================================================A collective, sharp gasp rippled through the six hundred cadets assembled in the bay.Nine thousand, eight hundred points.Nearly triple the score of the second-place unit.
Zero casualty penalties.
A total blowout that hadn’t been recorded in the
Institute’s wilderness trials for twelve years.”Look at that board,” Cassia whispered under her breath, a crooked, fierce smile breaking through the dirt on her face as her fingers twitched near her purple saber hilts. “Look at
Drake sitting down at fifth.”Farther back in the crowd,
Drake stood with his wrists wrapped in sterile white pressure bandages, his dark face tight, pale, and venomous as he stared up at the blue numbers.
Cross clutched her scorched forearm, her lips pressed into a thin, white line.”Per
Directive 8,” Kincaid announced, his voice rolling across the hangar, “Squad 7 is officially confirmed as the overall
Each member of
Squad 7 receives a baseline reward of one thousand
Merits credited directly to their
Institute accounts, along with three unallocated
Credits toward their primary degree tracks.” One thousand merits.Jax let out a low, breathless whistle. “One thousand merits…
I can buy two whole cases of
S-rank spice extracts and a titanium butcher block.”Kae’s heart gave a sudden, hard thud against her ribs.
One thousand
Combined with the personal credit transfers
Rhys owed her for their custom weapons, she had enough capital to register a private digital storefront on the internal campus network.
She could buy raw cobalt, synthetic fluorspar, and high-purity argon gas without asking her parents for a single credit.”Squad 7,” Kincaid growled, his dark eyes locking briefly onto
Kae where she stood half-hidden behind
Rhys. “Report to
Bay 4 processing for final gear logging.
The rest of you—dismissed to residential quarters for medical clearance.” The formation broke.
Cadets began streaming toward the transit elevators, buzzing with loud, exhausted chatter, but
Kincaid stepped down off the dais and walked straight toward
Stone trailing half a pace behind him. “Mercer,” Kincaid grunted, stopping three feet from
Kaelen. “Good command loop.
You kept your perimeter clean.” “Thank you, sir,” Kaelen said, giving a crisp military salute.Kincaid’s eyes shifted sideways, landing squarely on
He looked at her baggy, clay-stained sweater, her frayed cuffs, and her thick black frames.”And you,
Lind,” Kincaid said, his scarred mouth twitching into a faint, dry smirk. “I looked at the thermal scans from your furnace.
Next time you decide to melt
S-iron with wild weeds in a riverbed, try not to vent your exhaust into the drone camera.
You blinded two of my telemetry analysts.”Kae pulled her sweater collar up to her eyes, her face burning. “Sorry, sir,” she mumbled to her muddy boots. “The intake valve was sticking.”Instructor
Stone grunted, a short, heavy sound of gruff approval. “Good steel, kid.
Don’t let the noble guilds buy your patents.”With a final, sharp nod, both instructors turned and walked toward the faculty lifts, leaving
Squad 7 standing alone near the primary gantry.