REBORN INTO A COMBAT ACADEMY

Chapter 5

"Vance!"

Marcus dropped to his knees beside him, hands hovering uselessly over his friend's chest.

He's out? Just like that?

Vance's eyes had rolled back, his breathing shallow and wrong. Marcus's gaze snapped toward Diego, who had already sat back down, textbook open in front of him, reading like nothing in the room concerned him at all.

From the timing, it has to be him.

But that didn't track. This was Diego Campbell. Rank 1. The kid used every upper-rank as a warm-up round because he couldn't even manage clean footwork against a jab. There was no version of this where he'd dropped a Rank 4 without anyone in the room seeing it happen.

Before Marcus could get another word out, the door opened and Coach Voss walked in for the morning session, her eyes already sweeping the room out of habit before she'd even fully stepped through it. She took in Marcus on the floor and Vance beside him in the space of a single stride.

"Marcus. What happened? Why is he down?"

"He just — he went down all of a sudden, Coach."

"All of a sudden." She said it the way people repeat things they don't believe, and crossed the room to kneel beside Vance, two fingers at his throat, her other hand pressing carefully into his midsection.

Her expression changed.

It was subtle enough that most of the room wouldn't have caught it — a slight tightening around the eyes as her fingers found the exact point below his ribs where the muscle had locked hard, almost rigid, in a way an ordinary fall never left behind.

 She'd spent enough years reading bodies after impact to know the difference between damage from carelessness and damage from precision. This wasn't the first kind.

A ghost strike.

That was the only term that fit — a hit thrown and withdrawn so cleanly it barely left a mark on the surface, all the force driven straight into the nerve beneath it instead.

 She didn't know a single coach on staff who could throw something that clean without a windup, let alone a student.

She stood slowly and looked around the room. Her gaze reached Diego last. He hadn't looked up once.

"Tell me what you saw." Her eyes moved across the room, and every student they landed on found somewhere else to look. After a moment, Trent stepped forward, hands loose in his pockets, doing his best impression of someone with nothing to hide.

"Vance and Campbell were talking. Then he just went down."

Those two... Talking.

Voss had coached at Ironclad long enough to know exactly what "talking" meant coming from Trent Wexler about Diego Campbell. She held his gaze a beat longer than was comfortable, and Trent's confidence thinned by a fraction before he looked away.

"He'll be out for a while," she said, straightening. "Nothing life-threatening. I need to get him to the infirmary and take a proper look."

"What made him drop?" Marcus asked.

"I'll know more once I've examined him." There wasn't any point explaining nerve trauma to a room of sixteen-year-olds who wouldn't understand the mechanics of it anyway. She made her decision and said, "I'm canceling this morning's session."

A ripple of unease went through the room.

"Who's covering?" someone called from the back.

"Coach Barrett came in early today. He's opening this block."

The groan that followed was quieter than the first murmur, but heavier. 

Voss was demanding and cold when she needed to be, but her sessions were worth showing up for — clean instruction, honest feedback, the kind of coaching that actually moved a student's rank. 

Barrett was a different proposition. He'd held his title for years on the strength of connections rather than results, and he carried a long-standing grudge against every coach who'd earned their reputation the way he hadn't — Voss chief among them, though Coach Graham ran a close second in his mind.

 If Voss asked him to cover for her, he'd say yes immediately, if only because it let him feel, for one session, like he'd taken something from her.

Voss lifted Vance and carried him out without another word. The door clicked shut behind her, and the room let out a breath it hadn't realized it was holding.

Trent didn't move toward the exit. Instead, he crossed to Diego's desk and stood over him.

"What did you do?"

Diego turned a page.

"…"

Trent's jaw worked once. "No," he said, more to himself than to Diego. "There's no way you did anything I wouldn't have seen." He laughed once, short and dry, the sound of a man talking himself back into certainty. "Don't skip this afternoon."

He turned to Marcus without waiting for a response. "We're skipping Barrett's block."

"He'll mark us absent," Marcus said, glancing at the door.

"He won't do anything." Trent's grin came back easily, the grin of someone who had never once faced a consequence his family's name couldn't dissolve. "You know that."

They left together. At the door, Trent looked back once at Diego, still reading, still giving nothing away.

'Keep that face,'Trent thought, heat climbing behind his eyes.

 'I was going to break your arm. Now I think I'll

take something else too. Let's see what's left of that calm once I'm done with you.’