The heavy blast doors ground shut behind Assault Squad Three.
Sector Four's live-fire kill house sealed around them with the patience of a machine indifferent to who walked back out.
Artificial smog poured from overhead vents. Broken asphalt stretched ahead in a crooked street lined with fake storefronts, collapsed concrete, and rebar made to snag boots. The air tasted of ozone, burnt copper, and old hydraulic oil.
Caleb held the surplus combat rifle tight against his chest.
He tried to keep the tactical crouch the quartermaster had demonstrated, but the stance sat wrong in his knees: too clean, too built for academy floors.
He had spent five years walking through blood-slick containment bays with dead tissue sliding under his boots. Warzone posture and butcher posture had different knees.
A priority camera drone zipped past his helmet, lens whirring.
Jaxson stood near a concrete barrier three yards ahead, already performing for his own feed. The fourth-cycle veteran wore armor painted with neon sponsor marks and a smile that had practiced angles.
"Watch this run, chat," Jaxson called, voice pitched for broadcast. "Fifty thousand engagement points today. Gift subs open. Highlight clips coming."
Two other veterans flanked him and treated the center lane like somebody else's problem.
"Rookie," Jaxson said over local comms. "Push forward. Draw initial aggro. Keep them in the open so my drone catches the execution."
Caleb scanned the artificial street: no cover near the middle, two roofline gaps, and three drain culverts large enough for crawler frames.
Jaxson wanted bait. The military called it point, and the other veterans let the order stand.
That told Caleb more than the words did. Assault Squad Three had a rhythm already: Jaxson performed, the others protected his angles, and the newest body absorbed whatever hit first. Maybe it worked in ordinary drills. Maybe it had worked long enough to make them lazy.
Lazy got people killed in places with teeth.
Caleb walked out anyway.
Heat gathered inside the armor. Ninety degrees, maybe more. Sweat crawled down his spine and soaked the undershirt under the plates. The hunger behind his sternum flared, turning each breath into a bill his body could not pay.
The first target lunged from a collapsed storefront.
Mechanical Yoju. Training chassis. Steel mandibles. Weight tuned to bruise instead of dismember, assuming the safety limiters stayed honest.
It came low and fast.
Jaxson ignited his suit thrusters and vaulted off the barrier.
"Clean angle," he shouted.
His plasma round streaked over Caleb's shoulder and hit the thickest section of the Yoju's armored plate. Sparks scattered. The target kept coming.
Caleb dropped the rifle.
It hit the asphalt with a clatter.
His hand went to the standard combat knife on his belt.
His attention caught the old butcher points: a seam under the jaw, a loose left knee joint.
The Yoju leaped.
Caleb stepped inside the bite and let the suit's pathetic one-point-two percent kinetic boost do the only useful thing it could: add a fraction of snap at the exact second his boot planted.
The knife drove into the knee gap.
The joint cracked.
The target slammed sideways and skidded across the street. Caleb ripped the blade through wiring until the optic light died.
Jaxson landed in the gravel.
"Hey!" His voice broke broadcast mode for one raw beat. "You ruined the combo multiplier. Stay out of my shot."
Caleb wiped black lubricant off his glove. "Shoot softer parts."
"I know how to shoot."
"Your target disagreed."
The blue military HUD inside Caleb's visor flickered.
Wind lines and engagement metrics dissolved under corrupted static. Purple code flooded the glass and locked out the military overlay.
[???] They use you as a prop.
Caleb's jaw tightened.
[???] They underprice what you are.
The yellow safety strobes along the fake buildings turned red.
A siren screamed.
The whine of the training targets shifted pitch, rising from drill-speed to something uglier.
"What happened to the limiters?" one veteran shouted.
Jaxson slapped his helmet. His drone dipped, lost lift, and crashed into a second-story window frame.
"My feed is dead," he said. "Reset the network. Somebody tell the proctors to reset it."
[???] I locked the facility doors. I shut down their little cameras.
The rubble at the end of the street exploded.
Six crawlers poured through the dust.
Their optics burned purple.
That part mattered. The hacker had changed the difficulty and branded the target logic so Caleb would know this was personal.
The proctor channel spat static when one of the veterans tried to call out. The observation room gave back only dead air: no kill switch, no instructor voice, no reset order.
The drill had become a closed room with weapons in it, and Caleb could feel the squad understand it one beat too late.
The crawlers swarmed.
Jaxson fired first and fired badly. Plasma hammered chest plates, blew glowing scars into armor, and failed to matter.
One crawler hit him center mass.
Jaxson crashed into a rusted transport shell hard enough to dent the door. The machine raised a serrated limb.
He threw both hands over his face and forgot the rifle hanging from its sling.
Caleb sprinted.
The kinetic boost gave him a sliver of extra momentum. He slid across broken asphalt and kicked both boots into the crawler's undercarriage. The target lifted just enough for Jaxson to scramble sideways.
"Stop shooting plates," Caleb barked. "Joints. Optics. Jaw seams. Anything built to move has a place it hates being touched."
"They're too fast," the third veteran shouted, backing toward the sealed doors.
"Then stop giving them straight lines."
The veteran blinked at him.
Caleb pointed with the knife.
"Broken storefront. Make them climb. They slow when they climb."
Fear almost made the man argue.
Training won by a thread. He scrambled left, dove through the broken display frame, and forced one crawler to turn its body sideways to follow.
That bought Caleb two seconds, which counted as generosity in a bad fight.
A crawler flanked right.
Caleb pivoted off his back foot. His elbow hit the foreleg at the hinge. Steel buckled. The knife punched down through the exposed optic sensor, pinning the machine to the road until its legs stopped scratching.
[???] Beautiful.
Two more dropped from the roof rigging.
Caleb crossed the street in three long strides, grabbed the rear strut of the nearest crawler, and yanked it off line before it could rake a veteran's helmet open. The motion tore heat through his ribs. He ignored it and drove the blade up beneath the jaw.
Sparks sprayed across his boots.
The second roof crawler came for his blind side.
Caleb dropped his center of gravity. Its momentum carried over his shoulder. He carved through the soft underbelly as it passed, then shoved away before its limbs could hook his spine.
It crashed into brick and collapsed in a tangle of metal limbs.
The street cleared around him.
Caleb stood in the artificial ash with the chipped knife raised. His chest heaved. The hunger had hollowed his arms until the weapon weighed more than it should.
The far containment doors opened.
Something stepped out of the dark.
The floor sensors should have rejected the load.
Caleb knew that before anyone said it. The brute's first footstep punched cracks through the painted asphalt and made the drain covers rattle. A normal training rig only carried that much mass when someone deliberately overrode the facility limits.
It stood twelve feet tall, layered in overlapping steel plates, with a hydraulic mace welded to its right arm. Training paint marked it as simulated Danger Class Five.
Jaxson made a thin sound.
"In a Tier-Four drill? No. We cannot fight that."
[???] I uploaded this one for you. Beg, and I will shut it down.
Caleb kept his mouth shut and studied the target.
Shoulder rotation slow, knee plating too thick, mace arm overbalanced. The useful weakness sat low on the spine: an exhaust vent glowing hot every time the hydraulic pump cycled.
He stepped into the street.
[???] Stubborn man.
The brute charged hard enough to shake the ground. Its mace swung in a horizontal arc meant to clear bodies.
Caleb dove under it. The weapon smashed through a concrete pillar behind him and filled the lane with dust and shrapnel. A chunk clipped his shoulder plate and spun him hard.
He rolled through the ash.
The heat in his chest boiled.
His muscles were running on fumes. The thing under his sternum burned through the last stored calories and left his legs trembling.
The brute pivoted. The mace rose overhead. Caleb ran at it. Bad idea. Only idea.
The mace came down. Caleb planted his left boot on the embedded head at the instant it cratered the asphalt. The impact nearly snapped his ankle. The suit boost caught one fraction of the rebound and gave him height.
He grabbed the cabling around the machine's neck and swung toward its back.
Midair, his vision blackened.
Human muscle failed.
The suit stuttered against dead weight. His grip slipped. Gears below him spun open like a metal throat.
Heat surged from his sternum in a last, violent pulse.
His vision cleared just enough to catch the glowing vent sliding past.
Caleb fell backward and drove the chipped knife into the slot.
Body weight did the rest.
The blade punched through heated casing and bit deep. He ripped down as he fell, severing cables until the hilt burned his palm through the glove.
The brute screamed metal.
White light vented from its spine. It staggered twice and collapsed face-first into the street.
Caleb hit the asphalt on his back. He could not lift his arms. The red strobes died. Yellow safety lights flickered on.
Jaxson and the veterans stood frozen near the doors, staring at the smoking Class-Five wreckage and then at the Rank F rookie lying in the ash.
Purple text formed one final time across Caleb's visor.
[???] You almost died to prove a point.
A pause.
[???] I know what is knitting your ribs together, Caleb. I know what is hiding under that suit.
The message vanished.
The military HUD rebooted clean.
She knew.