Chapter 53: Dark Paths.

"Holy fuck."

"What’s happening?"

Malik had already been moving toward me before I could signal him to stay quiet and still. His foot caught a rake lying in the hay. The rake stumbled sideways and hit a shovel with a loud, ringing metallic clang that had absolutely no business existing in a barn we were supposed to be hiding in.

They heard that. Obviously they heard that.

I put my eye back to the gap in the wall. The crew outside had stopped moving. Riven was signalling something to Cael — a quiet, deliberate gesture that meant they had a plan already forming. And Zael was just staring directly at the barn, the kind of stare that didn’t need to confirm anything because it had already arrived at its answer.

There goes our cover.

"It’s Ren Mora." Zael crossed a wicked smile onto his face. "He’s with a friend."

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I turned to Malik. "We have to get out of here. Now."

"Now? We could just hold our position and protect ourselves instead of running—"

"You don’t understand." I kept my voice below the level that would carry through the walls. "That guy’s ability is Dominion. I don’t know how it’s active right now when abilities are supposed to be dampened, but the way he looked at this barn just now wasn’t a guess. We need to leave before he uses it to trap us in—"

The banging came.

Three hard hits on the barn door. The wooden lock held, which was more than I’d expected from something that old, but it wasn’t going to hold long. Two minutes, maybe three if we were lucky. Which meant the only thing that structure was buying us was time to think, and I was burning through it faster than I was using it.

If we ran out the door, we were handing ourselves to them as free points. If we stayed, we were rabbits in a coop and they knew it.

And that was the other thing sitting in the back of my head— why were they attacking other students directly? The rules hadn’t said anything about that before the trial started. Ymir had talked about drones, tag damage, disqualification. He hadn’t said anything about the Order being allowed to just go around shooting people.

Is there something we weren’t told?

"There’s something here."

Malik had been working his way through the hay while I’d been running through the problem, and he’d found something underneath it — a wooden square panel set into the floor. Underfloor. Manual. And it had no business being in a barn that was supposed to be part of a ruined examination zone.

He looked at me. I nodded.

He pulled it open. A staircase dropped away into darkness, longer than it had any right to be, disappearing into a depth the barn didn’t look deep enough to contain.

"What the heck is down there?"

"Storage, maybe. Somewhere they kept the animal waste." Malik studied it. "We should get in."

"If there’s actual dung in there I won’t survive the smell."

"Would you rather they fire a laser through your chest?" He said it with equal parts realism and sarcasm, which was actually a fair proportion. "Besides, this whole place is a designed zone. There’s probably nothing genuinely biological down there."

He was right. My qualification was on the line and I wasn’t going to lose it because I needed to stay presentable. And fighting back wasn’t a real option; three of them against two of us, with Zael’s ability potentially already in play. We had no winning chance. Not even the slightest.

I went in.

The staircase opened into something that was not a storage room. It was a cave, a burrowed tunnel, wide enough to move through without crouching, stretching out into a darkness that swallowed the far end completely. At the base, the path split. Left, and right. Two directions into the same unknown.

"A tunnel?"

"Has to be." Malik stood beside me. Then, after a beat: "Do you think the drones patrol down here?"

The sound of the barn door crashing in reached us from above.

"We’ll find out."

I started moving.

Not because I actually wanted to discover that answer. Encountering drones while cornered in a tunnel after already being chased was a very specific type of cornered that I had no appetite for.

I just needed distance between us and whoever was coming down those stairs, and the right path was the only path that had given me anything to go on.

We moved fast. After several minutes of running blind in the same direction, the ceiling stayed low and the dark stayed dark and neither of us had any idea how far we’d come or how far there was left.

"Gosh." Malik bent forward, hands on his knees. "Exhaustion hits different when you have no idea where you’re going."

"We should stay put for a while." I put my back against the dirt wall, breathing. "At least until a thousand students get disqualified."

"I don’t think that’s going to happen."

The voice came from further ahead. From a shadow at the visible end of the path. Afigure, slight and still, arms wrapped around herself in a scarf.

I moved toward her as the details came together.

"Elise?" I confirmed the blue tag pinned to her before I said anything else. "How did you find this place?"

"I searched." She said simply. "Most people have been taking cover in the destroyed buildings. But I think there’s a reason those buildings are destroyed in the first place."

Malik was still catching his breath. "Wait— why don’t you think the disqualifications are going to hit a thousand?"

"Because the camp is going to run out of drones before it gets there." She said. "Only twenty students have been disqualified so far. And over 150 drones destroyed."

I wanted to ask how she knew those numbers. But I decided to shelve that question for later, because Elise clearly had a relationship with information that operated on its own timeline.

"Twenty out of a thousand." I put a finger to my chin. "Who’s taking out the drones?"

"A girl named Freya Ross."

***

[External POV]

"You damn cowards!"

Freya looked back at the boulder behind her, where a crowd of students had packed themselves like tinned fish into her cover. And like the last eighteen times she’d looked, she produced a menacing, prideful smile at them.

"Why enter a trial if you’re going to chicken out the moment it starts?" The depth in her voice had a specific aggression to it. "Idiots."

Around her, the wreckage of destroyed drones covered the ground in every direction. Hundreds of them, spread across the ruined streets like scattered scrap, still crackling with electricity — the hivemind signal carrying the news of what had happened here back to the rest of the wave.

It always worked.

A few hundred metres ahead, the next wave was already approaching. Moving low and fast through the air, the entire group angled toward her with the specific focus of drones that had been given a target and had decided to prioritise it.

Freya pulled back the charging handle on her gun, counted her rounds. Five left. She looked at the incoming cluster and ran the estimate.

Eleven drones.

She pulled the equation in her head without particularly caring about the answer. Five rounds took five drones. The remaining six she’d handle differently.

She took the first shot immediately. The laser hit the drone’s interface dead centre and detonated it before it cleared the distance between them, scattering fragments in a ring.

She was already moving before the smoke had finished spreading. The next wave of return fire came in hot, she wove through it with movements that had a different quality to them, the kind of speed that came from years of building something specific rather than just being fast. She found a fraction of a second and put the second bullet through the middle of another drone.

Nine left.

One of them had adapted. It stopped short-firing and charged a longer sustained beam, the kind designed to track movement rather than anticipate it.

Freya leapt, going higher and faster than the beam had budgeted for. She found her footing in the air with the practised ease of someone for whom the air was simply another floor, brought the scope to her eye, and fired.

It didn’t miss.

Six left. No more rounds.

She switched the gun to its butt stock, raised it above her head as she came down, and brought it into the nearest drone with a single downward swing and a yell that had full momentum behind it. The drone went sideways and hit the ground in pieces.

The students behind her cover watched in the specific silence of people who had something to say but couldn’t find the moment to say it. Then the murmuring started;

"She’s incredible."

"How is she knocking drones out with the back of a gun?"

"How does nobody know who she is?"

Freya heard all of it. The last one especially. And the answer to that was simple — she’d chosen not to be known.

While Zael had made his run at the god of highschool title, she’d watched from the side without saying a word. When Aria had taken it from him instead, she’d watched that too. Quiet. Patient. Unbothered.

Because highschool titles were never the point.

Freya’s plan had always pointed past all of this — toward a captain position in the BHD, a rank that made god of highschool look like a school council election by comparison. She’d been building toward that for years. Letting the others take the noise while she took the preparation.

This — the trials, the camp, this exact moment — was what she’d been preparing for.

And as far as she could calculate, only two people were actually standing in the way of where she needed to finish.

Her cousin, Zael.

And that bitch, Aria.

They were the only ones here who came close to matching her. Everything else was manageable. Those two needed to be gone as early as possible, and she was going to make sure of it.