Hour sixty.
The rain came.
Not ordinary rain—Reach’s storms felt as though the heavens were pouring out an entire ocean.
The rain hammered horizontally against the tree trunks, knocking pine needles to the ground in broad sheets and turning the earth into a swamp.
Visibility dropped to less than twenty meters, and all sound was swallowed by the roar of the downpour.
This was bad for Linda.
Her advantage lay in long-range precision marksmanship, but under these conditions, paintballs would drift heavily, and water droplets on her scope blurred everything.
John knew this.
Ethan knew it too.
Tak moved first.
He was in his element in the heavy storm—poor visibility only elevated his stealth capabilities.
He darted through the canopy, deliberately exposing his position to lure Linda into firing.
Linda did fire twice, but the paintballs drifted half a meter off in the rain, bursting into two splashes of orange paint against a trunk.
Tak swung from tree to tree, vanishing into the curtain of rain.
Linda gritted her teeth and descended from the branches.
In weather like this, height was no longer an advantage—she needed to find a more stable firing position.
She closed in on John, and the two met at the base of a giant pine.
Rain poured off them like water from soaked towels.
“He’s keeping me tied down.” Linda wiped the water from her face.
“Tak’s job is to keep me from shooting.”
John nodded.
“Then you handle Tak. I’ll find Ethan.”
Linda glanced at him and didn’t object.
The two split up in the downpour, like two diverging rivers.
Linda began counter-tracking Tak.
She stopped attempting long-range sniper shots, closing the distance to within fifty meters—at that range in the rain, paintball trajectory drift was negligible.
Tak quickly noticed Linda’s tactical shift, but his own situation grew dangerous: once Linda locked onto him at close range, his agility advantage diminished significantly.
The two engaged in a silent chase through the heavy rain, like two fish locked in combat in the deep sea.
John walked toward the river alone.
He didn’t know why—perhaps intuition, or perhaps all the information accumulated over the past two days forming a pattern in his subconscious.
He felt Ethan would be at the river.
The river was the area’s lifeline, and during a storm, the bank was both the most dangerous and the most hidden place—nobody would approach a swollen riverbank in this weather.
He was right.
In the storm, less than thirty meters separated them, but the raging, swollen river surged between them like an impassable barrier.
Lightning tore through the sky, white light momentarily illuminating the entire valley—John saw Ethan’s eyes.
There was no hostility in those eyes.
Only a pure, almost excited focus.
The two locked eyes across the river.
Rain ran down their faces, washing away fatigue and grime.
The water churned at their feet, but neither moved an inch, standing like two iron stakes driven into the ground.
“Your tactics are clever,” John said.
The roar of the rain almost drowned out his voice, but Ethan heard him.
“Your counterattack was more decisive,” Ethan replied.
His voice was similarly fragmented by the storm, but every word remained clear.
Silence.
The rain kept falling.
The river surged between them, broken branches floating on its murky surface.
John subtly adjusted his barrel’s angle.
Ethan noticed, but his expression didn’t change.
Both knew what would happen next—no maneuvering, no tricks, just the simplest question: who was faster.
They fired at the exact same moment.
Two paintballs cut nearly parallel paths through the heavy rain.
John’s paintball hit Ethan’s left shoulder, orange paint bursting against his gray fatigue uniform.
Ethan’s paintball hit John’s right chest—the same orange, the same dull thud.
Both took a step back simultaneously.
John looked down at the orange mark on his chest; Ethan looked down at the one on his shoulder.
The rain kept falling, as if nothing had happened.
Then—a sharp whistle pierced through the storm.
Chief Petty Officer Mendez’s whistle.
A tie.
John looked up.
Ethan raised his head at the same moment.
They looked at each other across the river—their faces covered in rain and grime, the orange paint on their chests slowly being washed away by the downpour. Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
Then, without knowing who started it, both smiled at the same time.
Not a laugh, not a mock, but a light, quiet smile almost drowned out by the rain—like two chess players looking at each other after a match, sharing a tacit understanding.
Linda and Tak heard the whistle too.
Linda stood up from behind a bush, and Tak dropped down from the canopy.
The two glanced at each other across the distance, then headed toward their respective teammates.
No words were spoken, but Linda gave a slight nod—a sign of recognition for her opponent.
The rain stopped.
Reach’s twin moons emerged from a gap in the clouds, casting silver moonlight over the rain-washed forest.
The air was razor-sharp and fresh.
Chief Petty Officer Mendez stood at the rally point, holding a notebook filled with writing.
Over the seventy-two-hour engagement, he had observed everything with eagle eyes—not through screens, but by trekking through the woods himself, recording every decision, every firefight, every candidate’s performance.
He praised no one.
Nor did he criticize anyone.
He simply wrote in his notebook, the pen tip rustling against the paper like a tireless insect.
He wrote: *John-117: Decisive in decision-making; fast and accurate in judging when to abandon a position.
Linda-058: Outstanding long-range precision marksmanship, but close-quarters adaptability needs improvement.
Ethan-007: Sophisticated tactical design, accurate anticipation of enemy psychology.
Tak-047: Ranked first among all candidates in reconnaissance and concealment.*
He paused, then added another line: *After two engagements, stable competitive relationships have begun to form among the candidates.
The rivalry between John and Ethan is particularly prominent.
This competition*—he pondered his phrasing—*is beneficial.*
Chief Petty Officer Mendez closed his notebook and looked at the children gathering in the distance.
John and Ethan walked at the head of their respective teams.
Occasionally, their eyes met across the gap between the columns—only for a fraction of a second, but what lay within that moment was more complex than any words.
They understood each other better than anyone.
Because only a rival could truly understand you.
This was their second engagement, but it would not be their last.
Over the long years of training on Reach, they would square off many more times—sometimes John would win, sometimes Ethan would win, and sometimes, like today, neither would.
But every engagement drove a deeper stake between them, until their fates became intertwined like the roots of two giant trees, impossible to separate.
Later, when the war arrived and the Spartans were deployed to the most brutal battlefields in human history, John would often remember these training days.
He would recall Ethan’s eyes by the river, the two paintballs flying parallel through the storm, and the draw where nobody won.
He would never admit it, but he knew: those engagements taught him more than any instructor ever could.