UC 0077 — Granada Military Academy, GED Program
The training grounds of Granada's GED division thrummed with mechanical resonance and human tension. Cadets in various Mobile Suit mockups pushed through their rotations under the watchful eyes of instructors and internal surveillance drones. The year-long program, sponsored directly under Rear Admiral Dozle Zabi's discretionary command, was nearing its midpoint, and every test now held weight.
Inside the armored shell of her Zaku mock unit, Tanya von Zehrtfeldt meticulously adjusted internal calibration. Data poured across her display—reactor response rates, heat dispersion algorithms, thruster output variance. Numbers offered stability. Strategy offered survival. And Tanya trusted no battlefield without control.
Her concentration fractured only when Gunnar Vaerst's bellow cracked across the sim-hangar.
"A soldier doesn't hide behind data!"
His voice thundered through the field, rippling through cadets and instructors. Observers paused, even Matsunaga himself, seated in the upper gallery, turned slightly, his expression unreadable.
Tanya didn't flinch. Her emerald eyes flicked toward Gunnar's towering form. "And corpses don't file complaints," she replied icily, voice precise and unshaken.
A silent charge built in the air. They were rivals not by declaration, but by divergence: Tanya's surgical control against Gunnar's raw force.
"You think numbers will save you when real bullets fly?" Gunnar pressed, jaw clenched.
"You think screaming and charging will make you a leader?" Tanya retorted. "A commander doesn't win by shouting louder. He wins by seeing the whole board."
Tension coiled. Other cadets subtly shifted for a better view. Matsunaga scribbled something on his datasheet.
---
Their rivalry persisted through every stage of the GED training arc. The first phase, endurance testing, saw Tanya's Zaku performing smoothly across simulated high-friction environments while Gunnar's pushed itself—and him—to the edge, trading finesse for raw stamina.
In the second phase, zero-gravity combat in mock colony terrain, Gunnar used aggressive drills to provoke Tanya. He baited her team, broke formation boundaries, even simulated friendly fire stress.
She responded by pulling her squad into a misdirection ploy. Her Zaku ghosted between collapsing debris columns, using terrain as a buffer. Her HUD lit with Yuri Drax's silent intel feed, Mila providing suppressive coverage.
"You can't keep dancing forever, Tanya!" Gunnar roared across comms.
"The enemy won't wait for you to yell your way through them," she countered.
---
The final phase—live-ammo field testing—forced the rivalry into dangerous territory. Amid real detonations and collapsing scaffolds, Tanya directed her unit with ruthless clarity. Tactical withdrawals. Positional flanking. Environmental exploitation. Gunnar, however, charged through chaos, taking out dummies—but missing key coordination windows.
Their near-collision on the test range, amidst a storm of smoke and screeching metal, brought Matsunaga's voice down like a hammer:
"You're learning," he growled from the loudspeaker. "That's worse. Now I expect more."
---
On another front of GED training, Lelouch von Zehrtfeldt faced his own opponent—Erich Brandt, a noble-blooded cadet who wore his pedigree like armor.
"You're a fraud," Erich muttered one day before a simulated tactical exam. "You hide behind data and parlor tricks. Let's see you survive real strategy."
Lelouch merely tilted his head. "Very well."
Inside the simulator, Erich launched overwhelming salvos, full assault patterns. Lelouch gave ground—on purpose. Then, just when Erich committed fully, Lelouch sprang his trap: a sacrificial Zaku screen concealing a second wave of ambush units.
The simulation ended with Erich's forces annihilated.
"If you can't control the battlefield," Lelouch said coolly, "control what they think the battlefield is."
Erich stared at the screen, fists trembling—not with defeat, but realization. The real war would not be won with just force or honor, but with perception and adaptation.
---
As the GED program dragged into its harsher final months, the cadets evolved. Rivalries deepened but so did respect. Tanya and Gunnar's clashes sharpened both their styles—hers cold and precise, his fearless and wild. Lelouch's calm dissection of every scenario drew admiration from some and resentment from others, especially Erich.
In private, the twins found rare moments of silence in their shared barracks. Tanya, peeling off her gloves after a simulation, asked:
"You think we'll make it through this?"
Lelouch's voice was quiet. "We must. If we want to change what's coming."
Outside, Matsunaga reviewed their profiles, forwarding select logs to both Dozle and Kycilia Zabi.
"They're not just surviving," he murmured. "They're evolving."
He tapped the files: Tanya, Lelouch, Gunnar, Erich. Steel forged in fire.
And war was coming to test them all.
Countdown to Ruin
UC 0076 – Granada Tactical Cadet Hall
The halls of the Granada Tactical Cadet Hall buzzed with a tension more palpable than usual. The air, heavy with recycled oxygen and unspoken fears, carried whispers that curled into every corner like smoke. Young soldiers, barely more than children, bustled with a mixture of ambition and dread, caught between drills and rumors they were never meant to hear.
Among them was Lelouch, a gifted cadet with a mind sharper than any blade. While others focused on routines, he had taken to the shadows—listening where others dismissed, watching where others dared not. Today, the corridors murmured with unease, fed by rumors that clung like static to the walls.
"Weren't you listening?" whispered a mechanic to a colleague by the storage bay, their voices low. "They say the test data from Side 7 got leaked. High Command's furious. Someone's going to disappear for this."
Lelouch, feigning disinterest by adjusting the strap of his helmet, clenched his fists just out of sight. Side 7—the name alone carried a weight he couldn't shake. It had been whispered before: experimental Mobile Suits, quiet failures buried in classified files, and a silence too heavy to be natural. But this was the first time the rumor spoke of leaks.
Elsewhere, Tanya stood by her locker, her motions crisp as always—but Lelouch noted the subtle stiffness in her shoulders. She wasn't easily rattled, but lately her focus had grown colder, quieter. "Did you hear about the test team deaths?" she asked a fellow cadet, voice barely audible. "MS Igloo-style reactor failures. They're calling it a containment issue… but something's wrong. The data doesn't match."
The cadet beside her shifted uneasily but didn't respond. The implication hung in the air: accidents didn't usually leave no survivors.
As drills ended for the day, Lelouch retreated to the dim-lit confines of the tactical study wing. At his desk, he opened a pad containing fragments of an intercepted internal memo.
Operation British...
His breath caught. He'd heard the term once—years ago, buried in the context of desperation and unthinkable strategy. A colony drop? Could Zeon really be planning something that catastrophic?
A door hissed open behind him. Tanya entered, her steps quiet, yet measured with purpose. She paused when she saw what he was reading.
"If Zeon's even running drop calculations," she said softly, "this isn't posturing anymore. This is annihilation. Side 2, or even Earth—gone in minutes. You don't run those simulations unless someone's ready to do it."
Lelouch slowly stood, facing his sister. "You've seen it too?"
She nodded. "And the failures at Side 7? They were cover for something. Maybe a rush to prepare countermeasures. Or a false flag. But people are scared."
Lelouch's jaw tightened. "Then we can't just be spectators. We can't just graduate, salute, and follow orders."
Tanya's eyes narrowed, not in defiance, but in mutual understanding. "No. We need to understand everything. What's real, what's being hidden. Otherwise we'll be no better than the pawns already marked for sacrifice."
He hesitated, then added, "If we stay quiet, and they go through with it… then our silence becomes complicity."
Tanya's gaze flickered, her usual steel wavering for a heartbeat. "We'll survive it. And we'll remember. When the war begins, we'll be the ones who saw it coming. We'll be ready."
Outside, cadets laughed in the yard, unaware of the quiet war already unfolding between silence and truth. Inside that dim hallway, Lelouch and Tanya stood still—not as children in uniform, but as soldiers beginning to understand the shape of the storm.
The whispers of leaked plans, the reactor failures, the rumors of Operation British—they were not just shadows of politics. They were warnings. And the countdown had begun.
They would not be erased by history.