Kikaru's suit thrusters ignited, flaring red. She shot forward, crossing the twenty meters of packed dirt in seconds, a blur of focused speed.
Caleb planted his boots and tried to raise his forearms. The surplus Standard Issue X-90 armor resisted. A hundred pounds of light metal dragged against his raw muscle.
He was entirely too slow.
Kikaru's boot left the ground as she pivoted, her body twisting into a high upward kick. Her armored shin arced through the air and slammed into the side of his helmet.
The impact shattered his visor. Kinetic force snapped his head sideways and lifted his boots off the ground. He crashed into the dirt, rolled twice, his shoulder plates gouging a deep trench before coming to a stop.
Dirt coated his tongue. His ears rang with a high-pitched whine. The suit's 1.2 percent sync rate froze his cervical joints as a rigid brace. Without that, the kick would have snapped his spine.
He lay in the dirt, staring up at the harsh stadium floodlights. Oxygen scraped against his throat through his pinched regulator.
Kikaru landed gracefully. Her boots barely disturbed the gravel. She deactivated her thrusters. Dust settled around her pristine Mitsurugi Tech Corp. She turned toward the camera drones near the ring's perimeter.
"Evaluation complete," Kikaru announced. Her voice carried clearly and crisply through the stadium's audio feed. "Target incapacitated in a single strike. The written exam algorithm requires a full audit. The applicant possesses zero combat readiness."
She brushed a speck of dust off her shoulder guard, performing for the corporate sponsors watching her stream.
Caleb pushed his hands into the dirt. His head throbbed. Blood dripped from his nose, pooling at his chin guard. He spat red saliva onto the ground.
He forced his knees under him. The surplus suit whirred, the servos struggling to lift its mass. He planted his boots, forcing his spine straight.
"Hey."
Kikaru stopped mid-pose. She snapped her head back, staring at him.
Caleb wiped his bleeding nose with the back of his gauntlet, smearing a dark streak across the battered metal. "You hit like a princess."
Kikaru's eye twitched. The drones zoomed in, lenses whirring to catch the flush in her cheeks.
"Is that the best the elite Mitsurugi bloodline can do?" Caleb asked. He picked up his dropped training baton, resting the wood casually against his shoulder plate. "I've taken harder hits from a dead Honju. Did you buy that prototype just to look pretty for the cameras, or does it actually do something?"
Kikaru spun fully around. The easy smile was gone. Her shoulders squared, chin dropped, weight shifted forward onto her front foot.
"You ignorant scrubber." She swatted a hovering camera drone out of her face, her gauntlet cracking its lens. "Stay down before I break something you need."
Caleb tapped the baton against his palm. "Come break it."
His fingers tightened on the cheap wood. The surplus armor anchored him to the dirt, too heavy to dodge and too slow to counter. One solid hit from her prototype was going to shatter his ribs.
She charged. No thrusters this time. Just augmented speed.
She threw a left hook aimed at his ribs. Her hips shifted. Her shoulder dropped. A textbook setup. Caleb lunged to step inside her guard.
His boot struck the dirt a half-second too late. The heavy plating fought his own muscles. The unpowered armor dragged like wet sand.
Kikaru's fist crashed into his ribcage. The armor held, but the concussive force transferred straight into his bones.
He stumbled. She pivoted and drove a knee upward into his stomach. Oxygen evacuated his lungs in a violent rush. He dropped his guard to clutch his midsection. She followed up with a sharp open palm strike to his chest.
He staggered backward. She spun, landing an augmented elbow against his jaw.
Caleb hit the ground hard.
He scrambled backward on his hands and knees, choking on his own spit. He brought the baton up just in time to block her descending heel. The thick wood splintered into pieces under the weight of her boot. His forearms shook under the crushing pressure.
She kicked the broken baton away and delivered a brutal jab to his shoulder.
Caleb rolled, trying to find space. She didn't let up. A heavy boot caught him in the thigh. A gauntlet smashed into his side.
He took hit after hit. His bones rang. His arms stopped obeying him. Every time he tried to get his fists up, the suit dragged him back down.
The drones dipped lower. Their lenses stayed on his face. One of them nearly clipped his shoulder, angling for a better shot.
Every muscle in Caleb's body screamed. He dragged ragged breaths through a pinched regulator. His arms hung like dead lead. Kikaru was just too fast. He couldn't follow her. She kept disappearing on him, his eyes always a second late to catch her white and crimson armor.
Blood pooled in his chin guard, thick and hot on his tongue. He pushed himself up onto one knee. The stadium spun. He lacked the strength to guard his shattered ribs anymore.
The battered camera drone dipped lower. Its lens whirred inches from his face. One viewer.
Kikaru's voice broke through the ringing in his ears.
"Just surrender, you idiot." She held her ground, her armored fist cocked and ready. "You proved your point. You can take a beating. Now stay down."
Caleb spat a mouthful of blood onto the dirt. He wanted to give his encrypted sponsor an entertaining exit. He forced his right arm to lift, bracing his boots for a final haymaker.
Inside his chest, a furnace ignited.
Something behind his sternum throbbed, answering his intent to strike. Searing heat poured down his arm like liquid fire. The crushing exhaustion incinerated under a violent surge of power. His sleeve tightened. The suit seams pulled, straining against his expanding bicep. The synthetic material bit into his skin, accompanied by a mechanical whine piercing his right ear.
Green code bled across his cracked visor, eating the blue.
[RIGHT ARM SYNC RATE: 97%]
Kikaru drove her fist downward.
Caleb's right arm snapped upward.
The hit detonated through his shoulder. His elbow jolted from the raw impact. Air punched out around him in a concussive wave. The ground kicked violently under his knee. In his peripheral vision, the hovering drones spun away into the glaring stadium lights.
The shockwave fractured the concrete beneath the dirt. A concussive blast of displaced air ripped outward in a perfect circle. It violently scattered the hovering camera drones.
Kikaru's boots tore through the gravel. The impact launched her backward, completely airborne. She flew twenty feet across the ring, crashing violently into the steel barricade on the far side of the arena. The metal fencing groaned and buckled outward under her weight.
Caleb's arm went completely numb.
The green text vanished from his visor, replaced by a blinking gray diagnostic.
[SYNC RATE: 0.08%]
His knees hit the ground before he told them to. His right arm dropped and didn't come back up. He tried to flex his fingers. Nothing. The heat that had flooded his chest was gone, scraped out clean, leaving something cold and hollow in its place.
Silence fell over the arena.
Nobody moved. The scattered recruits staring from the outer rings froze. The proctor lowered his data pad.
Across the ring, the dust slowly cleared.
Kikaru pushed off the bent barricade. Her custom armor was scuffed and streaked with dirt.
She stood up. Her right arm trembled uncontrollably, hanging at an awkward, stiff angle.
Caleb watched her through the dark edges closing in on his vision. The medics were already moving at the perimeter, hands on their kits. Nobody had crossed the line yet. Nobody seemed sure.
Kikaru locked her knees. She raised her chin. Her eyes shone. She bit down on her lip hard enough to whiten it. Her arm shook. She lifted her chin anyway.
"There is no way that hurt me," Kikaru yelled. Her voice pitched up, cracking slightly at the edges. She blinked rapidly, fiercely refusing to let a single tear fall down her dirt-streaked cheek. "You're an idiot if you think a cheap shot like that would ever work on me!"
Caleb stared at her from the dirt, entirely too exhausted to formulate a response.
Her right arm remained rigid. A glaring red diagnostic warning flared on the massive public leaderboard above her name.
[KIKARU SHINOMIYA: CRITICAL ARMOR INTEGRITY. RIGHT BICEP-FOREARM.]
She ignored the flashing red text. She took a stubborn step forward, raising her uninjured left hand into an aggressive fighting stance. She sniffled, wiping her nose with her good shoulder. "Get up! We are not done!"
A loud, obnoxious buzzer echoed across the stadium.
A holographic banner dropped from the lighting rig over the center of the ring, flashing in bright yellow letters.
[MATCH TIME LIMIT REACHED.]
The proctor stepped past the barricade, lowering a checkered flag to signal the end of the bout.
"Match concluded," the proctor announced over the PA system, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. "Applicant Shinomiya wins on points and dominant control."
Kikaru stopped. She glared at the proctor, then snapped her gaze back to Caleb, her eyes still shining with unshed tears and sheer frustration. She spun on her heel and marched out of the ring, stomping her boots and clutching her right arm tight to her waist.
The proctor walked over and looked down at Caleb, checking the cracked screen of his data pad.
"Both of you showcased high survival potential," the proctor stated gruffly. "Applicant 4013, report to the medical bay for evaluation. You move on to the next set of testing."
The words didn't register right away.
Caleb stayed where he was, one knee pressed into the dirt, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side. The arena lights felt too bright now. Too hot. The world had narrowed down to a tunnel that ended at his hand.
He tried to move his fingers again.
Nothing.
Not even a twitch.
A cold, heavy feeling settled into his stomach.
Not pain. Pain was sharp. Pain was simple.
This was something else.
This was his body not listening.
Boots crunched over the broken dirt as the medics finally crossed into the ring. They moved quickly, stepping over the fractured ground where the impact had split the surface.
One of them crouched in front of him and tapped the side of his cracked visor.
"Caleb, can you hear me?"
"Yeah," he said. His voice sounded farther away than it should have.
"Good. Don't try to stand yet."
"I wasn't planning on it," he muttered.
Another medic knelt on his right side and carefully took hold of his gauntlet. The moment she lifted his arm even a few inches, a bolt of pain shot from his shoulder up into his neck and down his ribs.
His jaw locked, and a sharp breath forced its way through his teeth.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "There it is."
"There, what is?" Caleb asked.
She didn't answer right away. Her eyes were moving back and forth as she read the diagnostic feed still flickering across the inside of his visor.
"Massive localized sync spike," she said finally. "Then a full drop. Your nervous system basically slammed into a wall."
Caleb frowned. "I don't even know what that means."
"It means," the first medic said, "you're lucky that arm is still attached."
That got his attention.
He looked down at the brace they were starting to wrap around his arm and then back up at her. "You're joking."
She didn't smile.
"Try to move your fingers again," she said.
Caleb tried.
Nothing.
He stared at his hand as it belonged to someone else. The fingers just hung there inside the gauntlet, curled slightly, unmoving.
A tight feeling started building in his chest.
"Okay," he said slowly. "Okay… so what does that mean?"
The medics didn't answer right away. One of them kept tightening the brace around his arm, locking it firmly against his torso so it wouldn't move.
Caleb swallowed. "What does that mean?" he asked again, louder this time. "Is it just dislocated? Nerve thing? What are we talking about here?"
"Best case?" the medic in front of him said. "Severe neural feedback and muscle shutdown. Worst case, you tore something when the sync spiked."
Caleb stared at her. "Worst case, as in… what? Weeks?"
She hesitated.
That hesitation told him everything he needed to know.
A cold wave washed through his stomach.
"No," he said quickly. "No, no, no. I just passed. You heard him. He said Move on. So just fix it. Reset it. Whatever you do."
"We are going to treat it," she said calmly. "But you need to understand—"
"Does this mean I'm done?" Caleb interrupted. The words came out faster than he meant them to. "Does this mean I can't continue testing?"
The medic looked at him for a long second, like she was deciding how honest to be.
"I don't know yet," she said finally. "That decision isn't mine."
Caleb felt like the floor had dropped out from under him.
"I just got here," he said, more to himself than to her. "I haven't even finished the first phase. You can't tell me I'm out because of one hit."
"No one said you're out," the other medic said. "But you don't get to walk off a neural spike like that and pretend nothing happened."
Caleb let out a slow breath through his nose and looked down at his arm again.
Still nothing.
His voice dropped a little. "If I can't use it… I can't fight. If I can't fight, I can't test. If I can't test, I'm out. That's how this works, right?"
Neither medic answered immediately.
Which was answer enough.
He looked away from them and out toward the arena again. Recruits still stood along the outer ring, talking in low voices, all of them looking toward the shattered section of ground where he and Kikaru had collided.
A few of them looked back at him as the medics worked.
He knew that look.
He'd seen it before.
He remembered back when Him and Elara had gone through the past exam and injured his back. The same look of just give up….
The pain in his chest surged as he felt like this was a huge waste of time as the doctors all packed up and began to leave