The alarm tore Ren out of sleep for the second time in under twelve hours, and this time it came with none of the confused grogginess from the day before, just a sharp, immediate lurch of adrenaline that had him sitting upright before his eyes had even properly opened. ’What is it now,’ he thought, dragging himself off the bunk and fumbling for the nearest clean uniform, ’Almost forgot that there’s another alarm. Of course this outpost doesn’t believe in letting a person sleep past six consecutive hours without some kind of interruption. What is it this time, another monster, another sister, another terrifying stranger who wants to sniff my neck in a hallway?’
The corridors were already full by the time he stepped out, Sentinels moving in the same brisk, practiced current he’d seen the day before, though this time the energy felt different, less urgent, more ceremonial, and Ren fell in with the flow toward the main hall without any real choice in the matter, half-awake and running purely on the momentum of everyone around him.
The hall looked different in the morning light filtering down through the high windows, less like the tense arena it had been during the rank assessment and more like something closer to a formal assembly, rows of Sentinels standing at attention in neat formation while officers moved along a raised dais at the front, several names already being called out one after another, each one met with a round of applause as the named Sentinel stepped forward to receive some kind of commendation, a small medal pinned to the collar, a data pad handed over with what Ren assumed were updated assignment details.
"Recognition ceremony," the Sentinel next to him murmured, apparently noticing Ren’s confusion without needing to be asked. "Command holds these periodically, rewarding units for successful border actions against monster incursions. Half the outpost’s been fighting skirmishes out past the ridge for the last two months. This is the first lull long enough to actually hand out the credit for it."
Ren nodded like that explained everything, though privately he was still trying to work out how a place that had spent the entire previous day treating him like an unclassifiable problem was now expecting him to stand quietly through an awards ceremony like nothing unusual had happened at all. ’Right,’ he thought, watching another name get called, another round of applause ripple through the formation. ’Business as usual. Meanwhile I’m standing here half-convinced someone’s father is going to storm through that door any minute now demanding an explanation for my entire existence.’
He hadn’t spotted Yegard yet, though he assumed the man was somewhere at the front given the general shape of yesterday’s pattern, seated or standing exactly where his authority demanded he be seen. Ren didn’t bother looking too hard for him. He told himself that was a deliberate choice and not an admission of anything, and mostly believed it.
The ceremony wound down eventually, the last commendation handed out to scattered applause, and Ren had just started to relax slightly, thinking maybe he’d actually escape this particular gathering without becoming the center of attention again, when the officer at the front cleared his throat and pulled up a new display on the hall’s main screen, and Ren’s stomach dropped the second he saw his own name listed at the top of it.
"Following yesterday’s assessment," the officer announced, voice carrying easily across the now-quiet hall, "Command has authorized immediate training assignments for several Sentinels whose results required further classification. Given the unusual nature of certain outcomes, these assignments begin effective immediately, rather than following the standard onboarding timeline."
Ren felt several hundred heads turn toward him at once, the same way they had yesterday, and he kept his face carefully blank while his brain scrambled to catch up with what he was apparently about to be volunteered into.
"Miller, Rafayal," the officer continued, reading off the display. "Assigned to direct evaluation and control training under senior instructor supervision, given the unclassified nature of his current output. Training begins today. Immediate reporting required to the west training wing following dismissal."
’Today,’ Ren thought, dread pooling low in his stomach as murmurs rippled through the crowd around him, several people glancing his way with expressions ranging from curiosity to open suspicion. ’Immediately. Super. Fantastic. No time to prepare, no time to process any of the last twenty-four hours, just straight into figuring out how to control an ability that broke a piece of military hardware the one time I actually managed to use it on command.’
The assembly dismissed shortly after, the crowd breaking apart into smaller clusters heading in different directions, and Ren found himself swept along toward the west wing before he’d even fully processed the instruction, a junior officer materializing at his elbow to guide him there with brisk efficiency that left no room for objection or delay.
The training wing was quieter than the rest of the outpost, long reinforced corridors leading toward a series of enclosed chambers built specifically, Ren assumed, for exactly the kind of unpredictable, potentially destructive practice his ability apparently required. The officer led him to the largest of the chambers, a wide circular room with padded walls and a raised observation platform along one side, and gestured for him to step inside before turning on her heel and leaving without further explanation.
Ren stood there for a moment, alone in the center of the empty chamber, feeling distinctly like he’d been dropped into some kind of containment cell dressed up as a training facility. ’This is fine,’ he told himself, glancing around at the reinforced walls with a growing sense of unease. ’Totally fine. Nothing about the walls being padded feels remotely alarming. Very standard training room. Very normal.’
He hadn’t been standing there long before the door on the far side of the chamber slid open, and a figure stepped through that made every ounce of Ren’s forced calm evaporate instantly.
"You," Ren said, staring at Reven as he walked in like he owned the place, that same unhurried, unbothered confidence radiating off him exactly the way it had the day before.
"Me," Reven confirmed, mouth curving into that same slow, private smirk, coming to a stop a few feet away with his hands tucked into his pockets. "Senior instructor, unclassified rank division. I did mention I wasn’t going to let this go."
Ren felt his entire stomach drop somewhere around his boots. "You’re supposed to be teaching me control," he said slowly, working through the implications in real time, "which means for however long this assignment lasts, I’m stuck alone in a padded room with you, specifically, multiple times a week, possibly every single day."
"That does appear to be the arrangement, yes," Reven said, entirely too pleased with himself about it.
"There is no version of this that Command approved on purpose," Ren said, mostly to himself, mostly in horror. "Someone up the chain looked at yesterday’s hallway incident, at the fact that you already tried to pin me to two separate walls within an hour of meeting me, and decided the correct response was to lock the two of us in a room together indefinitely."
"Command doesn’t know about the hallway," Reven said, tilting his head slightly, something sharper flickering behind the amusement now. "And I’d suggest keeping it that way, unless you’d like today’s arrangement to get significantly more complicated than it already is."
Ren opened his mouth to argue, found absolutely nothing useful to say, and closed it again, dropping his head back with a groan directed squarely at the ceiling. ’Excellent,’ he thought, feeling the full, exhausting weight of the last day settle over him all at once. ’Why him of all people. Of course he’s the one person in this entire outpost who’s decided I belong to him is also the one person Command has now assigned to spend hours alone with me, unsupervised, teaching me how to use an ability I already have zero control over. This isn’t training. This is a trap wearing a training schedule as a disguise.’
"We should begin," Reven said, apparently unbothered by Ren’s obvious internal spiral, already moving toward the center of the chamber with the easy confidence of someone who’d done this exact routine a hundred times before. "Summon it. Show me what we’re actually working with before I decide how bad this is going to be."
"It didn’t work the first time I tried yesterday," Ren said, following him reluctantly toward the center of the room. "It only came when I stopped thinking about the audience and focused on the memory of actually needing it."
"Then don’t think about the audience," Reven said, stepping back to give him space, expression settling into something more focused now, more genuinely instructional despite everything else simmering underneath it. "Think about me instead."
Ren blinked at him. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me," Reven said, and the smirk was back, sharp and deliberate. "Focus on the fact that I’m standing here, close enough to reach you in under a second if this goes wrong, and see what that does to whatever’s sitting underneath your skin waiting to come out. Adrenaline works. Threat works. Let’s find out what I qualify as."
’I think,’ Ren thought, staring at him with a mounting sense of doom settling firmly into place, ’that this training program is going to be significantly more dangerous to my continued sanity than any monster on that moon ever was.’ But he lifted his arm anyway, because Reven was right there, watching him with that unnerving stillness, and whatever instinct lived underneath Rafayal’s skin apparently didn’t need much more encouragement than that to start stirring awake.