21. The Nth Politiking

Weeks bled into months.

The Gauntlet changed three more times — new obstacles, old ones modified, the course reshaping itself as though it learned from us. My margins shrank as the pack got faster under Osei’s growing influence. Miller still cleared walls faster than the rest of us, but his power over the other greenies was waning.

I kept up my running, evading capture. It lasted around two months before I was finally caught.

Tomás had called out my route, coordinating with Osei and his network. Even Miller had put aside his pride and allowed Osei to take the lead. Every escape covered, every adaptation accounted for. They finally got hold of me at the cargo nets. I put in a good run.

Tomás approached me in the mess hall afterwards and laid it all out — seven route variations logged, sparring defaults I didn’t know I had, exact biomechanics on how I moved. A complete map, drawn over months of meals, conversations and friendship.

He wasn’t sorry, and I didn’t want him to be.

But it had exposed a critical weakness that I knew was being discovered.

So I tore it all down.

The weeks that followed were the worst of training. Not because the Gauntlet got harder or Vance got meaner, they did, but it was scaled appropriately to our growth. The true difficulty lay with me; I made it more difficult on purpose.

I abandoned every instinct I’d built, every counter that worked, every approach that had won me rounds. I walked into the sparring yard each morning with whatever my body produced in the moment. Most of what it produced was garbage.

I lost constantly, clean losses against people I’d beaten effortlessly weeks earlier. My body didn’t know what I wanted from it. Some old patterns kept surfacing — a hook that started from the shoulder and died mid-rotation because I’d killed the hip drive halfway through. A step that launched right then stuttered left as two competing instincts collided in my legs.

There was one particular afternoon where I’d lost four consecutive sparring rounds — the last one to a Barracks 4 transfer I’d beaten three times in the previous month. She landed a textbook Rotation Two counter that I would have read in my sleep a week ago. But, I’d been trying something else — a lateral movement that didn’t follow any pattern, not even a counter-pattern. My body went one way, and my balance went another.

She trounced me and looked almost apologetic as Kael called the point.

“What was that? Are you even trying anymore?” she asked.

I shrugged and carried on.

Kael watched the losing streak without comment. No correction, no concern, no note on his datapad. Every other struggling recruit got pulled aside for adjustment. Instead, I got silence.

Miller’s corner became the barracks’ power elite. Briggs and a core of strong combat deviations who trained like the exhibition had already started. Miller’s close-quarters lethality had evolved through the rotation tiers into something genuinely frightening — his sparring sessions drew spectators the way mine used to, except nobody was rooting for his opponents.

But his faction was leaking. Slowly, almost imperceptibly — a transfer here, a neutral drift there. The ambitious stayed with Miller. The more calculated migrated toward Osei. The difference was subtle but real: Miller’s faction offered proximity to power, while Osei’s offered structure.

Osei’s network grew to fourteen. During team drills, his group operated without commands — movements synchronised, adjustments propagating instantly through his psychic link. They weren’t the strongest fighters individually. Together, they were the most effective unit on the base.

My table held. Tomás, Jin, Park, Ren, Hsu, Sato and Andrew. Sato and Andrew were new additions, D-Grades from the original intake who’d spent months in no-man’s-land before quietly choosing a side.

We weren’t the strongest or the most coordinated. But we kept showing up and leant on each other.

The connection climbed.

[0.2%]

[0.5%]

[1%]

[2%]

[3%]

[4%]

[4.3%]

Two months out from the exhibition.

[4.7%]

One month.

Two months before the exhibition, Vance posted the evaluation schedule. Three weeks of preliminary matches to establish rankings. One week of championship rounds with corporate sponsors in attendance. Firmware assignments within forty-eight hours of the final round.

Sparring sessions went vicious overnight. Cultivation hours doubled — recruits pushing their circuits harder, risking burnout for marginal gains that might catch a sponsor’s eye. People who’d been neutral for months picked sides, calculating which faction offered the best visibility during the matches.

My table sat one evening after a particularly brutal sparring session. Jin’s lip was split. Park’s glasses were cracked and taped at the bridge. My ribs continued their complaints against every surface in the training yard.

“So,” Jin said. “We’re going to get destroyed.”

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“Probably,” Tomás said.

“Definitely,” Park corrected.

“Not definitely,” I said.

Everyone looked at me, and I smiled at them.

“We can’t compete on stats. Miller and Osei’s people outclass us there. We can’t compete on coordination — Osei’s network is too tight. So those aren’t the fights we want.”

“Great,” Jin said. “What fights do we want?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was I didn’t know yet.

“The evaluations are live combat,” Ren said.

Everyone turned. Ren, who’d been sitting at this table for months, contributing very little other than silence. His voice was louder than I expected.