Rhaevia forced herself to stand up from the scorched ground the second the suffocating pressure vanished into thin air.
Her slender frame was still trembling violently, her nerves completely frayed by the sudden surge of power. Whatever ancient, dormant force had just awakened inside her soul had disappeared as quickly as it had erupted, leaving behind only a faint, flickering warmth deep within her mind.
Before she could process the strange sensation, a sharp, repetitive chime shattered the silence.
BEEP!
BEEP!
BEEP!
Her wrist-mounted emergency communicator suddenly flared to life, its broken HoloScreen flickering erratically with static.
"Rhaevia! Can you hear me?" a cadet’s panicked, frantic voice cried out through the damaged channel. "We’re trapped in a ravine! Please, someone, help us!"
Rhaevia’s flat expression instantly hardened.
"How many?" she asked, her voice cutting cleanly through his hysteria.
"Six of us!" the boy sobbed back over the static.
A second voice shrieked wildly in the background, drowned out by loud, metallic scraping sounds against stone. "They’re coming through the rocks! The Zergs are completely surrounding us!"
Rhaevia turned her head toward the distant, rhythmic clicking sounds echoing across the valley. Six stranded students were trapped inside a narrow depression, completely unable to fight their way out against a swarming horde.
Their coordinates were not far from her current location, but the main emergency command channel was already broadcasting automated evacuation directives directly to every cadet’s comm-link.
[ALL SURVIVING CADETS: IMMEDIATELY RETREAT TO THE DESIGNATED EXTRACTION ZONE.]
[DO NOT ENGAGE SURROUNDING ZERG FORCES. RETREAT IMMEDIATELY.]
Rhaevia glanced toward the distant, glowing blue extraction beacon marking the safe zone. Then, she turned her eyes toward the dark, shadowed ravine where the shrieks were growing louder.
Six human lives were about to be slaughtered. Without a single hesitation, she turned on her heel and began walking toward the source of the screams. One of the rescued students following her stared in absolute, utter disbelief as she changed direction.
"Wait! Where on earth are you going?" he yelled after her.
"Back into the valley," Rhaevia replied without slowing her pace.
"Are you out of your mind? The military explicitly ordered us to retreat to the extraction point!" the boy shouted, pointing frantically at his glowing wrist display.
Rhaevia checked the energy cell of her discarded plasma rifle, locking it into place with a click.
"Then retreat," she stated flatly.
She stepped off the main path and instantly disappeared into the dark, jagged rocky terrain. The boy could only stare after her retreating figure in stunned, breathless silence, convinced that the E-rank girl had completely lost her sanity.
Moving with silent agility, Rhaevia reached the target coordinates within five minutes. Below her position, six freshmen were backed into a tight, rocky depression, cowering behind broken personal shields as dozens of razor-clawed Zergs closed in on them.
The trapped students lacked the firepower to cut through the line, and with her weak physical frame, Rhaevia knew a direct attack was equally impossible. Since brute force was out of the question, she would rely entirely on battlefield engineering.
Her dark eyes rapidly scanned the surrounding geometry of the canyon. She noted loose obsidian boulders, a steep incline, dry vegetation, a narrow choke point, and a massive, structurally unstable cliff face towering directly above the swarm.
An effective tactical plan formed in her mind in less than three seconds.
Rhaevia quietly circled the upper perimeter of the canyon like a shadow. She swiftly planted several emergency plasma charges beneath the loose rock formations, then dragged a heavy, broken length of metallic shuttle cable directly across the narrow passage below.
Finally, she positioned herself at the absolute edge of the highest ridge, overlooking the entire horde. She raised her energy rifle, lined up the thermal sight with the cracked cliff overhang, and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
The high-yield plasma shot struck the cliff’s primary fault line, showering the canyon in blinding sparks.
The entire Zerg swarm instantly froze, turning their glowing crimson eyes upward toward her solitary figure on the ridge.
"Come," Rhaevia murmured, her voice carrying across the quiet canyon.
With deafening shrieks, the monstrous horde redirected their aggression and rushed up the narrow incline toward her. Rhaevia turned and sprinted along the cliff edge, timing her movements to the millisecond.
At the last possible second, she gracefully leaped over the concealed metallic cable she had stretched across the dirt.
The lead Zerg, moving at terrifying speed, caught its heavy lower limbs directly on the taut wire.
CRACK!
The massive beast tripped violently, its heavily armored body crashing hard into the creatures directly behind it. The tightly packed swarm stumbled into a chaotic, thrashing heap in the narrow passage.
Rhaevia immediately turned on her heel and fired a second plasma shot directly into the planted explosive charges.
BOOM!
The detonation shattered the weakened cliff face above. A massive, thundering wall of tons of solid rock collapsed downward into the ravine, burying the trapped swarm beneath a mountain of stone and completely severing them from the cadets.
"NOW! RUN!" Rhaevia bellowed over the roar of falling debris.
The six trapped students scrambled out from the depression like terrified animals. Rhaevia reached down, grabbed the most severely injured boy by his collar, and yanked him forcefully toward the escape route.
"Keep moving!" she commanded sharply.
Nobody dared to question her orders or look back. They sprinted alongside her through the dust clouds as the collapsed stone wall completely sealed the choke point behind them, trapping the remaining beasts in the canyon.
Ten minutes later, the small squad finally reached the safe perimeter of the elevated extraction zone.
One of the rescued cadets collapsed onto the dirt, chest heaving as he stared up at Rhaevia in utter awe.
"You... you actually came back into the dead zone just for us," he breathed heavily.
Rhaevia adjusted the rifle strap over her shoulder and glanced toward the distant military beacon.
"You called for help over the open channel," she replied simply.
Before the cadet could respond, her wrist communicator chimed with a high-pitched digital tone.
[ACADEMY FRONTIER TRIAL: SURVIVAL CONTRIBUTION RECORDED.]
[EMERGENCY RESCUE DETECTED: 6 CADETS SECURED.]
[TACTICAL SURVIVAL POINTS AWARDED.]
Rhaevia paused, tapping the interface. A transparent holographic ranking screen projected into the air before her eyes, displaying the live leaderboards of the entire freshman class.
Her name, which had been sitting at the absolute bottom of the list, began climbing at a staggering speed.
[RHAEVIA RYTHUNDEIR - RANK 7.]
The surrounding cadets leaned in, gasping aloud as they read the glowing blue letters floating in the air.
"Is that real?" a girl stammered, rubbing her eyes. "She’s already in the top ten of the entire academy?"
Before anyone could process the shift, the system recalibrated itself, pulsing with another update.
[RHAEVIA RYTHUNDEIR - RANK 5.]
A fraction of a second later, the numbers shifted again.
[RHAEVIA RYTHUNDEIR - RANK 3.]
Rhaevia frowned slightly, her eyes narrowing as she watched the numbers jump.
"That calculation is far too fast," she muttered softly.
Far away from the barren planet, deep inside the high-tech command center of the Imperial Gifted Academy, several senior instructors were staring at the main holographic leaderboard in absolute shock.
"Who on earth is manually calculating her survival points?" a chief instructor demanded, slamming his hand onto the desk.
"We don’t know, sir!" the system operator shouted back, his fingers flying across the glowing console. "The point distribution system isn’t responding to our manual overrides!"
Suddenly, the primary screen flickered erratically.
[RHAEVIA RYTHUNDEIR - RANK 1.]
Dead silence descended upon the entire command center as the E-rank trash sat at the absolute apex of the imperial rankings.
And then, without warning, her profile flashed red.
[SURVIVAL POINTS: 0.]
The six rescue points she had legitimately earned completely vanished from the system, plunging her score back to zero.
Back on Planet V-17, Rhaevia watched her name plummet off the leaderboard entirely, her expression darkening into absolute ice. Someone sitting in a comfortable military office high above had just manually wiped her official records.