They woke to a light that eased in rather than slapped, the ship’s slow imitation of dawn. For the first

  time in days Bash noticed it without flinching. His muscles ached in the polite way of someone who’d

  asked a lot of them and been paid back with more capacity; the soreness that had gnawed at him the

  first week was gone. He rolled his shoulders, felt more like a man returning to himself than a machine

  rebooting.

  Rixor was already up, making a ridiculous show of stretching every limb in the room. “I could get used

  to this,” he said, voice rough from sleep. “Not that I want to, mind. Just noting it.”

  Nyra checked her wrist calibrators and gave him a cutting look. “Don’t make it a habit.”

  Taren was quiet and efficient, the way she always was in the morning. She moved like a person who

  measured everything twice and cut the excess.

  S-C moved through his head like a companion, softer now. Neural indicators suggest recovery trending

  positive, your motor patterns are consolidating, and autonomic markers show improved regulation. She

  couldn’t read your muscles directly, only infer their state from those signals, but the model’s projection

  was encouraging. Her tone felt almost pleased; he could feel the warmth in it.

  “Feels different,” he murmured.

  You’re adapting, she said. Your baseline is changing. Expect more shift as neural pathways consolidate

  movement patterns.

  They went down together. The Coordination Facility had that clean, anticipatory smell of booting

  systems and warm plastic. One hundred stations hummed with blue light; today they were split into two

  cohorts, micro and gross, each starting on the opposite half of the floor and swapping after every

  rotation. Today’s assignment was the ten-rotation suite, the full set they’d been repeating for weeks:

  fine, precise sequences on one side, broad, forceful drills on the other. No surprises. The bright thing

  about sameness, Bash thought, was that sometimes it let you notice the margins, how one micro adjustment made a sequence easier, how a breath timed right swallowed two failures in a row.

  They moved as a group, and the difference was visible: steadier hands, fewer resets, more small green

  ticks across their monitors. They pushed through the rotations with a kind of lean, hungry eagerness;

  after the last sequence, a hush broke into scattered laughter and small clapped encouragements. When

  the facility tallied the group average it came up, 63 percent.

  A murmur ran through them like a current. Sixty-three was a number with teeth: not the eighty Jouk

  wanted, but a result that proved a direction. Rixor threw an arm around Bash’s shoulders for a moment,

  a half-grin that meant only, We did something. Bash felt the warmth and tried not to let relief loosen

  him.

  “You’d think we’d be higher,” Nyra said, more to herself than anyone. “But it’s a step. We’ll take it.”

  They moved to the cafeteria buoyed. Food tasted the same, practical, not memorable, but the mood was

  light. Conversations braided through practical things: posture, how to breathe when the holo went dark,

  what tweak helped the ring catch green. Small, useful talk. For the first time in cycles they let

  themselves laugh loudly at nothing and mean it.

  That broke when the Reincarnates came in.

  They arrived like a storm. All Twenty of them, unshaded and loud and doing what the Reincarnates did

  best: making the space theirs. Where since the battle they had mainly kept to themselves, and quiet, but

  today they were open with it. Abilities flickered in small displays, a shimmer of flame that curled but

  went nowhere, a light gust that bent a napkin into a tiny flag, and every demonstration had the edge of

  performance. They had their abilities fully back; the confidence that came with it rode their shoulders

  like armor.

  And their eyes found Bash.

  “Who gets to draw him in the first round?” one of them called, loud enough for half the room to hear.

  “I’ll take him, quick win, then back to harvesting essence... more essence, more strength.”

  A ripple of confident laughter followed. Another smirked, “Relax , Jouk and Virk draw the brackets.

  No rigging, just luck. Either way, we keep stacking fragments. Top ten’s ours.”

  Taren’s jaw tightened. Rixor bristled; his fingers tightened on the tray. Nyra’s gaze snapped to the

  Reincarnates and held them like a blade. Bash felt a low, unpleasant hum in his gut, more anger than

  fear, sharpened and hot. He watched the Reincarnates parade their new-claimed edge, the way they

  exaggerated movements to show that their abilities were back.

  He didn’t answer. Provocation was a game and he’d learned not to let himself be baited. Let them

  shout. Let them be loud. Let them count their expected top-ten seats. The bracket had a day, and the

  bracket had teeth.

  They left the cafeteria to a silence that felt forced. The hallway smelled like metal and warm bodies.

  The quartet moved without the chatter that had filled the morning: everyone thinking, resetting,

  carrying their own private tension.

  That evening, under their low lights, Bash and S-C had a strategic conversation.

  S-C’s statement was quick and blunt. “I’ll collect probe data while you’re on team runs. I can’t build

  canceling patterns yet, I need the real probe traffic first. Repeated returns will show me the sweep

  rhythm and where the Nexus reads from. From that I can try to mask or confuse scans on a solo run.”

  “Solo runs easier, then,” Bash said.

  “Easier, and restricted,” she answered. “Team returns are correlated. The Nexus cross-checks multiple

  feeds; fabricated histories get flagged fast. If you go alone once you’re cleared, I can do more. For now

  I watch and learn.”

  He pushed. “How do you actually modify what the Nexus sees? Make fake memories?”

  “If the probes are consistent and I know the read paths,” S-C said, “I can fabricate temporary cache

  snapshots, packaged, plausible memory histories that look real to a mirror read. In short: fake but

  believable memories for cursory audits. They’re not permanent erasures. They’re decoys that the Nexus

  will accept long enough for us to move a thing or hand it off.” She left the risk clear. “Four clean runs

  should get me to about ninety percent confidence. More samples raise that. But it’s trial first, mask

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  second.”

  Bash let that sink in. “So we get to the portals, you collect data, and then what, you do the hiding?”

  “We test,” she said. “I won’t try a live concealment until my confidence is high. And it only works best

  on solo returns. Group runs break the model.”

  He changed tack. “When the Reincarnates brag about ‘more essence, more strength’, is it just

  unlocking abilities?”

  S-C answered simply. “No. Think of essence as a core reservoir. Each ability you absorb and stabilize

  increases your core capacity. More abilities means bigger core means more total essence you can hold.

  That essence is fluid: any ability can draw from the same pool. If you empty it, you wait for regen.

  Spartors with a single ability have small cores; those who accumulate multiple abilities can store and

  spend more essence across their toolkit. In practice: more abilities give you more energy and flexibility,

  not a locked charge for each power.”

  He nodded. The plan was dangerous and slow and, if she was right, salvageable.

  He lay back on his bunk when she went quiet and let the words settle. He didn’t expect miracles. He

  expected minutes, and minutes were sometimes enough.

  Morning came with the same protocol, wake, gear, move. Jouk was already on the platform when they

  arrived, arms folded. He didn’t waste time.

  “From this point,” Jouk said, “we expedite. Ten rotations showed progress, but not enough. From now

  on: six rotations per cycle, targeted instruction after each set, and individual training assignments

  outside group hours. You will make every hour count. Thirty-six days remain before the Cycle

  Competition.”

  The words landed with a different sting than before. It wasn’t that Jouk had suddenly shortened their

  window, it was the realization that nearly half of the cycle had already evaporated. Twenty-four days

  had passed since the cycle began; a full cycle usually ran about ninety days, split roughly into forty-five

  for training and forty-five for portal runs and harvesting. In their heads that arithmetic snapped into

  focus: training time was finite, and what they’d taken for steady progress was also time spent. Faces

  around him went blank with the same tight, surprised fear he felt somewhere low in his ribs, not

  outrage, not defeat, but the sudden, thin panic of a clock that had been running without them noticing.

  “No more long days,” Rixor muttered, dry. “Just shorter nights.”

  “Focus,” Jouk snapped. “Quality over wasted motion. Six rotations. Rotate. Then the lesson.” He

  gestured, and the holo grid reconfigured.

  The six-rotation push itself wasn’t new, they’d cycled through that shorter, sharper day every third

  rotation, but the realization that the clock hadn’t stopped made a difference. The drills felt the same:

  hard, tight work with little room to breathe between stations, emphasis on explosive recovery, precision

  under fatigue, and the quick reset of hands and eyes. Bash felt it in the familiar way, tension in his

  muscles, a clean ache, the satisfaction of controlled failure, but the group moved with an edge now,

  smaller ticks, faster resets, fewer wasted breaths. S-C fed him concise corrections in the breaks, and the

  green ticks came easier than before; focus had sharpened into something like intent.

  When the sequence ended Jouk shifted them into instruction. Today’s focus was practical fighting, not

  the abstract “coordination” but the art of moving against another living, thinking body.

  “Your System Core knows the histories, the templates, the maneuvers,” Jouk said. “That’s not what

  keeps you alive. Theory and practice are different. You can recite an opponent’s likely motion and still

  be caught because your breath is wrong or your footing is a millimeter off. You need to make the

  physical memory of reaction match the mental recognition of threat.”

  He demonstrated simple things first: stance and base, how to lower your center without losing drive;

  how to close distance without telegraphing; how a feint looks different from a real strike and how to

  use those differences to create openings. He had a spare sparring rig that sufficed for demonstration, a

  slab of composite that shifted weight and offered resistance. He showed how to redirect a strike’s

  energy by angling with the hips, not by locking the arm; how to follow through into a grapple rather

  than rebounding and exposing a flank.

  “Hands,” he said, “are not just weapons. They are anchors, distractors, and stabilizers. Use them to pull

  focus, not just to deliver force.” He paced them through partner drills that emphasized small windows:

  parry and slide, step off and counter, catch the limb and move into a takedown. The training was basic,

  brutal, and immediate, and the difference between the reading and the doing showed on everyone’s face

  as a new problem to solve rather than an abstract puzzle.

  “From tonight on,” Jouk announced when the exercise finished and their breath had slowed, “you will

  use the Nexus VR annex every night for combat simulations. Virtual dummies, variable opponents,

  randomized patterns. The annex supports all one hundred of you simultaneously, nexus circles for

  every Novarch, so you won’t be waiting your turn. Go in pairs, or alone. Train in the VR as if the

  competition depends on it, because it does.”

  The order added two hours to their days. It was a quiet, administrative brutality: no fanfare, no rhetoric,

  only attrition by scheduling. Day twenty-four, Jouk said. The clock was grinding forward and, for the

  first time, the pressure felt like a hand closing around their throats in a way that made planning

  necessary instead of optional.

  They went back to the dorm in a thinner, calmer silence than before. Exhaustion threaded through their

  limbs now not as blunt pain but as the steady hum of a body that had been pushed past its comfort zone

  and accepted it as routine. They ate in small groups, talked about small things, and allowed jokes that

  landed softer than they might have a week ago.

  Bash lay down early. S-C ran through contingency matrices in his head until his lids felt leaden. You

  did well today, she said finally, a whisper that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  He let the words float away and sleep took him, heavy and necessary.