The days bled into each other, the rhythm of each day amalgamating into a continuous throughline. One moment, I was running in the pre-dawn cold; the next, I was lying in the dark, reaching for Ether that refused to cooperate.

  On the bright side, this repetitiveness helped me settle into a consistent routine. The runs I had perfected into an art, setting the pace at forty-two to forty-five minutes, fast enough to get my body warmed up for the day and slow enough to keep the pack within the finish window. The run became less of a race for the group and slowly morphed into a commute, as the kids' fitness steadily improved.

  Some mornings I got to eat, and others I didn’t. Vance’s criteria for punishment were never fully revealed, his cruelty a roulette that heavily relied on his moods. I started to become good at predicting them, able to guess manoeuvre around his lust for punishment.

  The combat drills began to increase in difficulty—not dramatically—but at a noticeable rate. The flailing desperation and foolhardiness of the first day had morphed into something resembling coordination. Hsu stopped trying to rip my arm off in drills, Miller was starting to act a bit more restrained, and the dark-haired boy was starting to hold his own on occasion.

  I still won almost every round I fought in, but the margins of error and victory were shrinking.

  My biggest problem, however, wasn’t the increasing difficulty but the continued ostracisation that I was subject to. Miller had become something of a nexus for the barracks to coalesce around. At the very least, it wasn’t anything more than a growing tension, a gentle simmer beneath the surface, but I was just waiting for the pan to overflow.

  The dark-haired kid's name was Ren. I learned this not because he told me, but because Vance screamed it during a drill when Ren failed to maintain his guard. After the mat incident, Ren began positioning himself near me during rotations.

  Graves continued his education on how to die usefully.

  "A screening line's average active engagement time is four minutes and eighteen seconds," he told us on Day 4. His synthetic eye clicked. "That's the average. The median is closer to two and a half."

  Someone asked about the difference.

  "The average is pulled up by the squads that survive longer," Graves said. "The median tells you what's normal. Two and a half minutes. That's how long most of you will spend in combat before you're either dead, disabled, or the High-Yield Assets to clean the grid."

  Two and a half minutes.

  He showed us the math. Optimal spacing, casualty projections, and acceptable loss ratios. Everything reduced to numbers, quantified.

  Day 4, just after lights out, the first awakening hit.

  A girl three bunks down from me—Priya—sat bolt upright in the darkness and started hyperventilating. The sound was unmistakable: sharp, ragged gasps that cut through the silence of the barracks like a knife.

  Then she started screaming. It was a raw, animalistic sound that made my arm hair stand on end. It didn’t take long for the barracks to break out into chaos—kids stumbling out of bunks, cursing, panicking.

  Vance appeared in the doorway within thirty seconds. He stood in the doorframe, silhouetted by the dual moons, and watched.

  "Cycle it!" His voice cut through the chaos. "Crown to cortex! Push it down! Calm yourself, recruit!"

  Priya's screams became words, fragmented and desperate. "I can't—it's too—I can't—"

  "You can, just breathe. Push. It. Down." His voice had a hint of softness I’d not witnessed from the man before.

  I watched from my bunk as her body convulsed, her hands gripping the mattress so hard that the frame bent. She was doing everything Kael taught us. I could see it—the forced breathing, the focus, the attempt to channel. But the Ether was too much, too fast.

  Shit, I can’t imagine what it’s like for the S-Grade kids.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Then, gradually, the screaming stopped. Her breathing slowed. The tension leaving her body in stages, like a wound unwinding. She collapsed back onto her mattress, drenched in sweat and shaking.

  Vance checked his datapad, made a note, and left without another word.

  Three more awakenings hit over the next couple of days. One morning, while running, a kid named Torres dropped mid-stride and fell on the concrete. Vance had us run around him while a medic was called. He was back in the barracks by the evening, pale but upright.

  The second was during Graves's lecture. A boy named Osei quietly put his head on his desk and went rigid. Graves didn't pause his lesson. He just pointed at two recruits near the door and said, "Get him to medical. The rest of you, eyes front."

  We didn’t see Osei again.

  The third was Miller. It happened during combat drills, Mid-grapple with Briggs. He froze, and his eyes went wide, pupils dilating to pinpoints, and then he dropped like someone had cut his strings. Briggs backed away, hands up, looking terrified.

  Miller's awakening was violent. His body arched off the ground, veins standing out along his neck and temples. He made no sound—jaw clenched so tight I could hear his teeth grinding from across the yard.

  Then it passed as quickly as it started. Miller sat up, breathing hard, and looked at his hands. I could feel it from where I stood—a subtle shift in the air around him, a density that hadn't been there before. His Ether signature was already stronger than mine.

  Of course it was, he was D-Grade.

  He'd started cultivating that same evening. By the next morning, the difference was visible. His movements were slightly faster, his strikes slightly harder. Not dramatically—maybe five per cent. But five per cent in a fight was the difference between landing a hit and catching one.

  The gap was closing.

  I trained harder.

  Without Ether to reinforce my body, every gain came through sweat and repetition. While Miller and the other awakened recruits pushed their new limits, I pushed my old ones. More reps, longer runs, sharper technique. The prep-academy training still gave me an edge in skill, but skill had diminishing returns against someone whose muscles were being actively strengthened by Ether reinforcement.

  On day 5, Miller caught me during a grappling rotation. Landed a clean takedown that I should have sprawled out of. His grip was stronger than it had been two days earlier.

  "Getting slow, Rabbit?"

  The nights were the hardest.

  Every evening, I went through the same ritual. Draw Ether. Lose it. Draw more. Lose it again. The ‘True-Noosphere’ drank steadily, its appetite unchanging. The Perfected Circuit remained a pipe with no destination—everything pouring into a bottomless void.

  But the numbers moved differently this time. Not always free stat points; some assigned themselves automatically.

  Day 3: Connection 0.006%. One stat point. I placed it into Agility.

  Day 4: Connection 0.011%. No stat point. The connection growth was larger, but no reward came with it. Just the number.

  Day 5: Connection 0.017%. One stat point. It placed itself into strength.

  Day 6: Connection 0.024%. My Intelligence went up.

  I stared at that one for a long time. Intelligence. On a day when the most intellectually demanding thing I'd done was memorise a retreat formation diagram. Why?

  The stat points refused to correlate with anything I could track. The only consistent pattern was the connection growth—it climbed faster on harder days, but "harder" seemed to mean something broader than just physical exertion.

  I was getting stronger. Slowly. My stat line read:

  [BODY] Strength: 5 Agility: 5 Vitality: 6

  [ETHER] Capacity: 1 Sensitivity: 1 Control: —LOCKED—

  [MIND] Willpower: 10 Intelligence: 9 Perception: 7

  Tiny increments that might have meant nothing. But when I compared them against my starting block, the growth was real. They weren't the explosive leaps that the awakened recruits were experiencing—Miller had probably gained the equivalent of four or five points to his physical stats in two days of cultivation alone.

  Survive. That's what the quest said.

  I almost laughed when I thought about it now. The quest objective was to survive until the week's end. When I'd first read it, the word had felt ominous. ‘Survive’ implied danger, threat; it implied that the week might kill me.

  It hadn't. Not even close.

  The training was hard, sure, and the food was terrible. But at no point had I genuinely feared for my life. This wasn’t a test to break through my limits, even if my stats were slowly increasing.

  I looked at the quest timer and watched the minutes tick down. Felt the anticipation of kids who were only just beginning to understand what Ether could do, and the anxiety of those who still refused to awaken.

  Eight hours.

  I lay in the dark and watched the timer count down.

  My mouth tasted clean. It had tasted clean since the testing pod.

  I missed the copper.