Weeks bled into months.
The Gauntlet changed three more times — new obstacles, old ones modified, the course reshaping itself as though it learned from us. My margins shrank as the pack got faster under Osei's growing influence. Miller still cleared walls faster than the rest of us, but his power over the other greenies was waning.
I kept up my running, evading capture. It lasted around two months before I was finally caught.
Tomás had called out my route, coordinating with Osei and his network. Even Miller had put aside his pride and allowed Osei to take the lead. Every escape covered, every adaptation accounted for. They finally got hold of me at the cargo nets. I put in a good run.
Tomás approached me in the mess hall afterwards and laid it all out — seven route variations logged, sparring defaults I didn't know I had, exact biomechanics on how I moved. A complete map, drawn over months of meals, conversations and friendship.
He wasn't sorry, and I didn't want him to be.
But it had exposed a critical weakness that I knew was being discovered.
So I tore it all down.
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The weeks that followed were the worst of training. Not because the Gauntlet got harder or Vance got meaner, they did, but it was scaled appropriately to our growth. The true difficulty lay with me; I made it more difficult on purpose.
I abandoned every instinct I'd built, every counter that worked, every approach that had won me rounds. I walked into the sparring yard each morning with whatever my body produced in the moment. Most of what it produced was garbage.
I lost constantly, clean losses against people I'd beaten effortlessly weeks earlier. My body didn't know what I wanted from it. Some old patterns kept surfacing — a hook that started from the shoulder and died mid-rotation because I'd killed the hip drive halfway through. A step that launched right then stuttered left as two competing instincts collided in my legs.
There was one particular afternoon where I'd lost four consecutive sparring rounds — the last one to a Barracks 4 transfer I'd beaten three times in the previous month. She landed a textbook Rotation Two counter that I would have read in my sleep a week ago. But, I'd been trying something else — a lateral movement that didn't follow any pattern, not even a counter-pattern. My body went one way, and my balance went another.
She trounced me and looked almost apologetic as Kael called the point.
"What was that? Are you even trying anymore?" she asked.
I shrugged and carried on.
Kael watched the losing streak without comment. No correction, no concern, no note on his datapad. Every other struggling recruit got pulled aside for adjustment. Instead, I got silence.
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Miller's corner became the barracks' power elite. Briggs and a core of strong combat deviations who trained like the exhibition had already started. Miller's close-quarters lethality had evolved through the rotation tiers into something genuinely frightening — his sparring sessions drew spectators the way mine used to, except nobody was rooting for his opponents.
But his faction was leaking. Slowly, almost imperceptibly — a transfer here, a neutral drift there. The ambitious stayed with Miller. The more calculated migrated toward Osei. The difference was subtle but real: Miller's faction offered proximity to power, while Osei's offered structure.
Osei's network grew to fourteen. During team drills, his group operated without commands — movements synchronised, adjustments propagating instantly through his psychic link. They weren't the strongest fighters individually. Together, they were the most effective unit on the base.
My table held. Tomás, Jin, Park, Ren, Hsu, Sato and Andrew. Sato and Andrew were new additions, D-Grades from the original intake who'd spent months in no-man's-land before quietly choosing a side.
We weren't the strongest or the most coordinated. But we kept showing up and leant on each other.
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The connection climbed.
[0.2%]
[0.5%]
[1%]
[2%]
[3%]
[4%]
[4.3%]
Two months out from the exhibition.
[4.7%]
One month.
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Two months before the exhibition, Vance posted the evaluation schedule. Three weeks of preliminary matches to establish rankings. One week of championship rounds with corporate sponsors in attendance. Firmware assignments within forty-eight hours of the final round.
Sparring sessions went vicious overnight. Cultivation hours doubled — recruits pushing their circuits harder, risking burnout for marginal gains that might catch a sponsor's eye. People who'd been neutral for months picked sides, calculating which faction offered the best visibility during the matches.
My table sat one evening after a particularly brutal sparring session. Jin's lip was split. Park's glasses were cracked and taped at the bridge. My ribs continued their complaints against every surface in the training yard.
"So," Jin said. "We're going to get destroyed."
"Probably," Tomás said.
"Definitely," Park corrected.
"Not definitely," I said.
Everyone looked at me, and I smiled at them.
"We can't compete on stats. Miller and Osei's people outclass us there. We can't compete on coordination — Osei's network is too tight. So those aren't the fights we want."
"Great," Jin said. "What fights do we want?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was I didn't know yet.
"The evaluations are live combat," Ren said.
Everyone turned. Ren, who'd been sitting at this table for months, contributing very little other than silence. His voice was louder than I expected.
"Live combat has... terrain." A pause. "The rotation system assumes flat ground. Open space." Another pause, longer. He was looking at his tray, not at us. "If the evaluation matches use obstacles. Elevation. Cover." He stopped. Started again. "Everyone training for ring combat is training for the wrong thing."
He went back to eating. The faintest colour had risen in his cheeks.
The table was quiet for three full seconds.
"We run an obstacle course every morning, same as everyone else," Jin said slowly.
"So what if we start sparring with obstacles too?" I added
"That's not a half-bad idea," Tomás said, the grin arriving in real time as the implication hit. "If we know the terrain. Uneven ground, blind corners, elevation changes. That's a great advantage, one we've been cultivating since week two."
"While everyone else is training in flat rings," Park added, glasses catching the light.
"If, and only if", Jin paused. "The evaluation matches use complex terrain. What if they don't? What if it's flat rings, standard rules, and we've just bet everything on a guess?"
Ren looked up from his tray. Met her eyes directly. It might have been the first time I'd seen him hold eye contact with anyone.
"The evaluation simulates deployment conditions," he said. "Deployment conditions aren't flat."
"And how do you know that for certain?" Jin asked.
"I don't, but at least if it isn't, we have something for once training finishes," Ren stated, his voice going quiet.
I looked at Ren. He had turned his eyes back to his tray and was methodically working through his paste. He'd said what needed saying, and the cost was visible in his posture — shoulders tight, head down.
"Ren," I said.
He looked back up.
"That's the best idea anyone at this table has given in weeks."
He held my gaze for a beat, his shoulders loosened, and I thought I could see the hint of a smile teasing his lips.
"The Gauntlet," Jin said. "Vance's lovely torture device. We're gonna use and abuse it."
"We've got one month," I said.
"One month," she agreed.
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We trained with purpose instead of desperation. The Gauntlet became a classroom — Ren walked us through the course before the morning runs, his quiet voice pointing out sightlines and dead zones we'd been sprinting past for months without seeing. Things that had been obstacles became positions. Walls became cover. The drainage pit became a chokepoint. The cargo nets became an elevated platform with three escape routes, depending on the direction of the threat.
Jin started sparring exclusively on broken ground — gravel, slopes, the muddy stretch behind the supply buildings. She'd drag a partner out there and fight in conditions that made rotation footwork useless. Her burst acceleration deviation, which had always been terrifying on flat ground, became devastating in terrain where opponents couldn't plant their feet. One afternoon, she closed the distance across loose gravel and tagged Sato before he'd finished adjusting his stance. He sat down in the mud and laughed.
Park mapped the evaluation arenas from descriptions traded with older recruits and offhand comments from instructors. He sketched layouts in the dirt during breaks — terrain features, cover positions, likely engagement zones. By the end of the second week, he had three possible arena configurations, each with a tactical framework. He presented them at the table one evening, using bits of paste as terrain markers, and the table leaned in as if it were a battle briefing. Because it was.
Tomás modelled everyone. Every faction, every fighter, every deviation in the barracks fed into his predictive framework; it became our very own tactical playbook. It was our perfect answer and strategy to the heaviest hitters in the barracks.
Hsu sparred with me daily. She'd abandoned rotation-based openings months ago — our earliest sparring sessions had taught her the prescribed patterns were readable, and she'd been building her own approach ever since. Fighting her was the closest thing I had to fighting another formless opponent, and we sharpened each other in ways the training yard couldn't replicate.
One evening after a particularly long session, she sat beside me on the concrete, both of us breathing hard, and said, "You're getting better at this."
"At what?"
"At not having a style." She paused. "That's harder than having one."
It was the most she'd ever said about what we were building. I didn't push for more.
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A month before the exhibition, Kael ran a team exercise — squad-on-squad, three rounds, mixed terrain. The first time the evaluation format had been simulated in training. We were allowed to choose our squads, with six kids per squad. Naturally, those in factions grouped together, the most dangerous echoing the triumvirate that had formed. Miller, Osei and the outcasts.
Miller's squad drew Osei's. The barracks gathered to watch. It was the matchup everyone had been anticipating — raw power against coordinated intelligence. Miller's group hit hard, Osei's group moved as one, and the result was a grinding, technical fight that lasted all three rounds with Miller's elite pushing through on raw stats alone.
Then our squad drew a group of unaffiliated recruits — the leftovers of the leftover pool, people without factions who'd been cobbled together for the exercise.
The terrain was a section of the Gauntlet — walls, cover, elevation changes, restricted sightlines. Our opponents entered it like a sparring ring, spreading out, looking for open ground to execute rotations.
We entered it like we'd been living there. Because we had.
Ren called positions before anyone had thrown a strike. Jin pressed her back against a concrete wall, boots grinding gravel, and waited. The opposing team advanced through the centre of the course, their footwork clean and useless on the uneven ground.
Jin burst through a gap between the wall and the drainage pit. The gravel shifted under her acceleration — a sound the flat-ring fighters had never trained against, the half-second of uncertain footing that their rotation stances couldn't compensate for. She tagged two opponents before either had registered the angle she'd come from.
Tomás fed patterns from behind cover — quick, clipped, his voice echoing off concrete. "Left fighter commits high. Right drops guard on the transition." He directed from the cargo nets above, pointing and shouting.
The drainage pit stank. The walls were rough enough to scrape skin through fatigues. The gravel rolled underfoot and punished anyone who planted their weight the way the rotations taught. It was ugly, loud, chaotic — and every inch of it was ours.
We won all three rounds. Not close.
Nobody in the barracks cared. We'd beaten unaffiliated recruits — the lowest tier of competition. The win didn't register on anyone's radar except ours.
As the yard cleared and the squads dispersed, I caught Kael at the edge of the course. He was looking at the terrain we'd fought in — the walls we'd used as cover, the drainage pit we'd turned into a chokepoint, the cargo nets Tomás had directed from.
He made a note on his datapad.
The first note he'd made about me in months.