REBORN INTO A COMBAT ACADEMY

Chapter 6

"Ah, of course."

Coach Barrett was a heavyset man somewhere in his fifties, his hairline having mostly conceded the fight years ago, leaving a shine of sweat across his scalp even in the morning chill. 

A hooked nose, a lower lip that sat in a permanent, faint pout, and a belly his tailored track jacket did nothing to disguise gave him the look of a man perpetually on the verge of a complaint rather than someone trusted to shape fighters.

"I'll be glad to step in," he said.

Voss didn't roll her eyes, though it cost her something not to. "I appreciate you covering," she said, flat and businesslike, already shifting Vance's weight across her shoulders.

Barrett let out a laugh loud enough to carry down the hall. "Don't you worry about a thing," he said. 

"Coach Voss 'herself' came and asked me *

'personally' to bail her out this morning." 

He leaned hard on 'personally, savoring it. Voss hadn't bowed or begged anything — she'd stated a fact and waited for an answer — but correcting him wasn't worth the minute it would cost her. She gave one curt nod and walked away.

Barrett headed for the classroom like a man finally collecting on a debt.

The truth was, he didn't mind covering sessions. He preferred it, if he was honest with himself.

 Ironclad ran on discipline before anything else — students stood when an instructor entered, spoke only when spoken to, and offered a baseline of respect to anyone wearing the patch, whether or not they respected the man underneath it. 

Barrett had fought hard for that patch, calling in old favors and swallowing more pride than he liked to admit, precisely because without it, coaches like Voss and Graham wouldn't have given him the time of day. 

With it, they had no choice but to ask him for a favor now and then, and that alone made every bit of the climb worth it.

When he pushed open the door, the room straightened up on instinct. 

The smarter students already had the right textbook open before he'd said a word — they'd learned the hard way that Barrett treated being unprepared as a personal insult, and graded accordingly.

"Due to unforeseen circumstances," he announced, "I'll be taking this morning's block. Everyone, open to today's chapter."

Pages rustled into place. Barrett's eyes swept the desks the way they always did, counting, cataloguing — and caught.

One student was still working through a small stack of books, checking spines rather than pulling straight from memory.

 Diego glanced sideways at the desk next to his, caught the title lying open there — 'Combat Doctrine and Institutional History' — and drew the matching copy out of his own bag.

Barrett didn't place him at first. Then the streak of grey in his hair did it.

'Campbell. Back in my block?'

He knew the name the way most of the staff did — not for anything Diego had done well, but for the opposite. Rank 1, and he was basic trash.

 Last year, Barrett had made a point of taking the boy apart in front of the whole class, question by question, until Diego walked out with his face burning and never came back to a theory session again. Barrett had assumed that was the end of it.

'So what brought you crawling back today?'

Something about him didn't sit right, though.

 The Diego Barrett remembered had a particular shape to him — shoulders drawn in, eyes fixed on the floor, the practiced smallness of someone who'd learned that taking up less space kept him safer. 

This one didn't have any of that. His spine was straight without effort behind it. His eyes, when they came up, didn't flinch away from Barrett's at all.

Barrett decided it didn't matter.

 Whatever had put that little bit of steel into the boy overnight, it changed nothing about who controlled his grade in this room.

"Campbell," he said, letting the name sit for a moment. "It's been a while since you graced one of my sessions. Something in particular keeps you away?"

Diego set the book down, unhurried. "I couldn't find the right time."

"Couldn't find the time." Barrett's jaw worked once around the words. "Perhaps there was something you felt was more important than my instruction."

The room went quiet in a specific way — most of them had already heard what happened with Vance that morning, and knew something about Diego had shifted.

 But this wasn't Trent. 

This was a coach who could tank a grade with one stroke of a pen, and surely even Campbell knew better than to push back against that.

"I guess so," Diego said.

Someone near the back let out a breath too sharp to be casual. Half the room went still, watching Barrett the way people watch a match burn down close to their fingers.

"…Oh?"

Barrett's smile stayed exac

tly where it had been a second ago. Everything behind it had already changed.