The silence in the workshop turned frigid. Zero stepped forward; the light from the overhead panels reflected off his glasses, masking his eyes behind a white glare. He crossed his arms over his chest with military rigidity. His skepticism wasn't a personal offense, but a logical conclusion based on data.
"It's impossible," Zero declared. His voice sounded like the collision of two metal plates. "AKEMI_SOL is one of the most closely watched prospects in the promotion leagues on the Tokyo servers. She is a purebred Japanese asset, with a technical signature forged through years of discipline in national academies. You, on the other hand..."
He paused. His gaze scanned my European features, reducing me to a mere biological anomaly.
"You are something else. You don't fit the ethnic profile or the physical records of that player. Valeria, your sensors must be suffering from ether interference in this zone."
Indignation burned in my throat like a tidal wave of fire, but I refused to let it distort my expression. I recalled every lesson in etiquette and every second of self-control my family had instilled in me in Japan. I clenched my fists and performed a perfect bow—exactly thirty degrees; I kept my back straight and my gaze lowered for an eternal second.
When I stood up, my face was a mask of frigid courtesy.
"Captain," I began. My voice flowed with a serenity that contrasted with the chaos of my nerves. "My blood may be from another continent, but my upbringing, my soul, and my training belong to Japanese soil. Do not mistake my heritage for my professional identity. If you doubt my skills because my face doesn't match your statistical prejudices, the miscalculation is yours, not Valeria's."
Zero clenched his jaw. Accustomed to dealing with the titans of the major leagues, he saw me as nothing more than a prospect—a rising star whose value had yet to be proven on the world stage.
Valeria let out a velvety laugh that shattered the tension like fine crystal. She stepped away from the table and walked toward Zero with seductive elegance, stopping just inches from him. She adjusted his jacket lapel with a slow, almost intimate gesture; her cyan eyes flashed with a sharp seriousness.
"Oh, Zero..." she sighed, tilting her head. "You understand algorithms, animation frames, and damage vectors, but you understand nothing about women."
She gave him a smile heavy with bitter irony.
"If you analyze the world only through your pragmatic eyes, you'll end up exactly as you started: alone. You'll sit on your granite throne, surrounded by levels and flawless statistics, but with no one to watch your back when logic fails. She is AKEMI. Accept it before her steel proves it to you in a way you can't ignore."
He didn't answer. The workshop plunged back into an electric silence. He watched me, this time with a hint of existential doubt. The revelation of my identity had turned this training into something personal—and dangerous.
Zero remained silent for a second stretched thin by the pressure. He didn't lower his guard, but the defensive glare on his glasses dimmed. He adjusted the bridge of his frames with a ritualistic motion and exhaled a sigh; it wasn't a surrender, but a recalibration of his own internal logic.
"I was only seeking to confirm that my allies are who they say they are," Zero declared. He didn't look at me; his attention returned to the tactical map flickering on his visor. "In this world, trust is the most valuable currency... and the hardest to audit. Consider this skepticism as quality control, not a grievance."
It was his way of apologizing. An apology wrapped in pragmatism—the acknowledgment of an error without admitting weakness. Valeria winked at me from the shadows of her workbench, clearly satisfied to have cracked the captain's armor.
We left the workshop and headed toward the Alpha Testing Sector, a facility in the lower levels where machines simulated infected attack patterns. The air there was denser, heavy with a scent of ozone that served as a reminder of how brief peace truly was: a mere interlude between executions.
I walked behind Zero, with Ha-jin-kun's constant presence at my side. The silence was no longer an insurmountable wall, but an uneasy truce following the storm of revelations.
"I didn't plan for him to find out like that," Ha-jin-kun murmured, his voice breaking the stillness to reach only my ears. "I know my silence upset you, but on the promotion servers, a name like yours attracts the kind of attention you can't always control."
I paused for a moment before the simulation room. I glanced at him sideways, my chin held high and my eyes fixed forward.
"The method doesn't matter, Ha-jin-kun," I replied with cutting serenity. "What matters is that the cards are finally on the table. You knew who I was, yet you allowed him to dissect me like a talentless rookie."
Ha-jin-kun clenched his jaw, shifting his gaze toward his Apex rifle, gleaming after Valeria's maintenance.
"I didn't underestimate you," he countered with surprising honesty. "I just wanted your steel to speak for you before your name did. In this game, reputation is a burden; skill is the only thing that keeps you breathing."
I nodded briefly—a pragmatic gesture that accepted his logic without forgiving his silence.
"Understood. But the next time you decide to protect me with silence, remember that I am AKEMI_SOL," I stated, a spark of my former professional confidence igniting in my eyes. "I don't need anyone to soften my entrance onto the stage. I only need you to stay out of my way while I clear the path."
He didn't reply. He knew my words were a statement of fact, not a threat. We crossed the threshold of the training sector just as the warning lights began to rotate. The time for talk was over; the system demanded results, and Zero was already waiting for us in the center of the arena, his tactical cloak fluttering in the wind of the industrial air conditioning.
An escort of commanders led us through armored doors toward Sector Zero—a deep containment zone that soldiers mentioned only in whispers. The air there was heavy, thick with a purification filter that failed to mask the acrid stench of decaying flesh and ozone. Zero marched at the front with a calmness that stood in stark contrast to the tension of the surrounding officers.
At the end of the hall, a final hydraulic lock slid open to an observation gallery. Below, in a pit reinforced with ballistic glass, were the creatures.
They were humanoid figures, advancing with a slow and menacing deliberation. They were devoid of skin or clothing—a grotesque mass of raw muscle and exposed bone, like an anatomical map of pain rendered in deep crimson under the neon lights. Their dark hair drifted around faces that had long since abandoned sanity. A single orange eye projected a feverish, hateful glow, while the lower half of their faces was one eternal wound: massive jaws of jagged teeth yawning from ear to ear.
Scavengers. The first horror after waking into this nightmare.
The ground beneath my boots felt unsteady. For a second, Voss's base vanished; I was back in that first-day room, pursued by that nightmare anatomy, haunted by the loss of the girl I swore to protect. My hands remembered the primal tremor of absolute weakness. I didn't fear the coming fight; I feared the memory of that original vulnerability twisting in my chest.
Beside me, Ha-jin-kun tightened the strap of his Apex; the leather creaked under his grip. His eyes, fixed on the pit, lacked the hunter's glint; instead, they held the shadow of one who has watched too many die.
Even Zero, the unshakable strategist, remained in absolute silence. His mineral features tensed like never before. Behind his glasses, his analytical gaze clouded for an instant with the memory of his own "first time"—the transition from a king on international servers to wounded prey in Aetheria's mud.
"They were our baptism," Zero murmured. For the first time, his voice sounded human, heavy with somber determination. "They were the reminder that here, we are just meat."
I sought his gaze and found the same spark of resolution in Ha-jin-kun's eyes and Zero's stern profile. The humiliation of the beginning and the terror of the Scavengers mutated from weakness into fuel. We were three survivors with the weight of the fallen on our backs; in that shared silence before the pit, we sealed a wordless pact: we would never be the prey again.
This time, we would be the ones writing the anatomical map of pain—using their blood as our ink.