Jack pressed his chest flat against the cold basalt ledge.
The dark silhouette at the fissure mouth was moving with careful, measured steps, its rifle held low, scanning the narrow gap.
He held his breath.
Under his sleeve, the device in his forearm pulsed once—a cold, quiet squeeze that settled low in his bone, reacting to the proximity of the threat with a patient, unreadable rhythm.
The scout stepped forward.
A boot scraped stone.
Jack saw the silhouette’s chest-plate clear the rock lip.
He fired.
The static-kinetic pulse cracked loud in the tight stone chamber, a sharp yellow flash that painted the dark walls for a split second before the scout’s harness buzzed violently.
The recruit’s limbs locked as the nerve-shock hit, and he slumped sideways, his training rifle clattering onto the stone floor.
Jack was already moving, sliding forward on his knees, grabbing the disabled recruit by the nylon shoulder harness.
The weight was heavy and limp, the body still locked in the low-voltage spasm of the simulation’s safety protocol.
Jack dragged it deeper into the chamber, past Vance’s boots, past Kayla’s crouched form, and dropped it against the back wall.
The scout was down.
The harness elimination hummed with a high-pitched, steady click, indicating the recruit was officially out of the exercise.
Jack did not waste a second.
He knelt over the prone form, his fingers moving with rapid, practiced scavenger efficiency.
He unclipped the scout’s collar-mic and stripped the short-transmit receiver block from the shoulder harness.
Vance, leaning heavily against the basalt wall with his injured arm cradled against his chest, watched in silence.
Jack tossed him the receiver block.
“Hold this steady,” Jack whispered.
Vance gripped the device with his working hand, his knuckles white under the dirt.
Jack used a thin wire tool from his pocket to force the receiver’s circuit-grip, overriding the standard channel lock.
He needed to tap into the local squad meshes.
He adjusted the frequency dial, hunting through the static.
The receiver hissed, then crackled to life.
He didn’t just find Ryker’s squad mesh; he caught a secondary, broken signal from their own shattered lines.
Panicked breathing filtered through the static.
“We’re pinned… east ridge runoff… ammo’s dry…”
Jack recognized the voices.
Chen and Davies.
They were the only other survivors of their original squad, cornered somewhere in the lower drainage.
Jack thumbed the transmit tab.
His voice was cold, flat, and entirely devoid of hesitation.
“Chen. Davies. This is Jack. Miller is out. I’m taking the channel.”
A brief pause.
“Jack?” Chen’s voice crackled, laced with disbelief.
“You’re a dreg—”
“You’re dead in three minutes if you don’t do exactly what I say,” Jack cut him off.
“Listen to me.”
He released the button, cleared a small patch of basalt dust and loose gravel on the floor, and picked up a sharp fragment of stone.
With quick, heavy strokes, he scored lines into the dirt.
Kayla crouched close, her eyes locked on his hand.
“We are here,” Jack said, tapping a deep groove in the dust.
“Ryker is holding the mouth of the main passage. He has the high ground and clean lines of sight on the entire canyon floor. If we try to cross horizontally, we’re target practice. But look at the drainage contours.” He pointed to a series of shallow depressions surrounding the basin. This chapter was copied from novelping . com without permission.
“Sulfur vents. The geothermal lines run shallow through this section of the ridge. The crust over them is thin, brittle calcium carbonate.”
Kayla squinted at the drawing.
“So what? We can’t walk through boiling steam, Jack. It’ll scald us, or worse.”
“We don’t walk through it. We use it to blind Ryker’s shooters,” Jack said.
“We’re going to overload our training rifle batteries. If we bypass the safety limiters, we can turn them into localized thermal cells. We drop them down the vent necks. The thermal blowout will shatter the calcium crust and flood the basin with sulfur-steam.”
He pressed the transmit button again.
“Chen. Davies. You have two reserve battery cells left between you. Pop the safety housings. Bridge the primary nodes to force a runaway discharge, then drop them into the vents on the eastern ridge flank. Do it now.”
Over the line, there was a moment of stunned silence, followed by Davies’ muttered, “Understood.”
“Let’s move,” Jack said, rising to his feet.
They slipped out of the fissure, keeping low beneath the shadow of the massive basalt pillars.
The gray, ash-laden twilight of the canyon offered little cover, but they moved with quiet urgency.
Vance struggled, his breath coming in ragged gasps, but Kayla kept her shoulder under his good side, dragging him through the rocky defiles.
They regrouped with Chen and Davies in a shallow drainage trench near the eastern flank.
Chen was wide-eyed, his face streaked with sweat and dark dust.
Davies was clutching his rifle like a life preserver.
Jack took their battery packs.
With his multi-tool, he popped the safety housing of the training cells, twisting the copper contacts until they hummed with an angry, high-pitched whine.
The metal casings began to warm rapidly, vibrating in his palms.
“Davies, Chen. Take these two. Left lateral vent. Drop them, then get behind the spur,” Jack ordered.
“Kayla, take the right.”
They ran to their positions, dropping the vibrating, overheated batteries down the narrow sulfur-spewing fissures.
A second later, a sharp, metallic pop echoed through the basin, followed by a deeper, rumbling crack.
The overloaded cells blew.
The thermal surge shattered the brittle calcium crusts, and with a violent hiss, blinding white-and-yellow sulfur steam erupted from the earth.
The thick, choking fog rolled across the canyon floor, instantly swallowing the pillars, the ridges, and the sky.
“Move!” Jack hissed.
The steam was dense, smelling heavily of rotten eggs and hot iron.
Visual range dropped to less than two feet.
But Jack did not need to see.
He had mapped the canyon’s contours in his head, every ledge and drop-off etched into his memory.
As they moved, his forearm device pulsed again—not with a voice, but with a rhythmic, cold twitch in his radial nerve that guided his steps, warning him of solid stone and hidden drop-offs just before his boots found them.
He navigated the blinding white void with uncanny, quiet precision.
Suddenly, the stolen receiver in his ear crackled.
Ryker’s voice came through, cool, arrogant, and chillingly measured.
“They used the vents. Scavenger tricks. Don’t chase them into the fog. Focus fire on the eastern runoff flank. That’s the only line with a natural handhold. Sweep the drainage spur. They have to come up there.”
Jack froze.
Ryker hadn’t panicked.
He had anticipated the flank.
A second later, Ryker’s squad opened fire.
Bright yellow kinetic bolts streaked through the white fog, snapping blindly but with terrifyingly accurate positioning.
A sharp cry cut through the hiss of the steam.
“Kayla!” Vance shouted.
The wind shifted, a sudden canyon draft thinning the fog for a brief, terrible moment.
Kayla was pinned against a sheer basalt pillar, her rifle empty, surrounded by three of Ryker’s recruits.
Ryker himself stepped into view, his gray uniform immaculate despite the ash, his rifle held casually at his hip.
Ryker looked directly toward the dark shadows where Jack was hiding.
He spoke into his throat-mic, knowing Jack was monitoring the mesh.
“Scavenger. I know you’re listening on the mesh. You have three seconds to step out, or your little tail-end recruit gets eliminated. Then the wounded one.”
Kayla was kneeling, her lip split, ash mixing with her saliva.
She looked toward the darkness, her eyes fierce.
She spat a red-tinged glob of saliva onto the toe of Ryker’s boot.
“Don’t you dare, Jack!” she screamed over the open frequency.
“He’s baiting you! Get to the objective! Leave me!”
Jack’s mind raced.
His survival code, drilled into him by years of scavenging the brutal scrap-wastes of the lower levels, flared in his thoughts:
Always know the exits.
Never die for someone else’s mistake.
Never get trapped for pride.
Leaving her was the only logical choice.
If he surrendered, they all lost.
If he tried to fight his way through, he would be eliminated before he could reach her.
The code was clear.
The code told him to abandon her and win the simulation.
But looking at her defiance, looking at Vance struggling to hold his rifle with a dead arm, the code felt like a hollow, rotting weight.
It was the survival strategy of a rat, not a leader.
No.
Not this time.
If he could not go through them, and he could not abandon her, there was only one path left.
Jack looked up.
Directly above Ryker’s position was a sheer, rotten basalt face—a vertical chimney of cracked, crumbling rock.
It offered no reliable handholds, and a single misstep meant a crippling fall.
It was considered entirely out-of-bounds by common sense.
A deathtrap.
He slung his rifle and grabbed the stone.
He began to climb.
He jammed his fingers into the sharp, freezing crevices, pulling himself up as his boots scraped desperately for purchase on the loose, crumbly basalt.
Ten feet.
Twenty feet.
The wind howled up here, whipping the sulfur steam around his face.
Below, Ryker was counting down.
Jack’s fingers slipped on a crumbling shelf.
A shower of gravel rained down into the fog.
Suddenly, the device in his forearm did not pulse cold.
It flared with an intense, burning, white-hot heat that surged up his arm and straight into his chest.
His nervous system screamed.
His grip failed.
He slipped.