Chương 26: 13.Breathing Blood in Heavy Gravity 13-1

The moment Mira shoved that high-frequency thermal fusion rifle into my hands, I understood one thing. This wasn't a gun. This was the Federal military-industrial complex filing a malicious inquiry into the maximum load-bearing capacity of the human shoulder joint. I wrapped both arms around the weapon to steady it. My forearms dropped instantly; even my wrists nearly lost their will to live.

Something inside the rifle's chassis was humming—a high-frequency vibration module running low and mean, transmitting fine tremors through my palms like a small animal locked in an iron box, ready to bite the second it got out.

"Posture." Mira stood slightly ahead and to my side, cigar clamped between her teeth, eyes cold as a court verdict.

"You're not hugging a blanket. Stock to shoulder, elbows down, weight forward."

"This thing weighs about as much as my future."

"Then use your present to carry it." Great. This woman wasn't like Karl. Karl was the type who'd slam you into a wall and then explain what you did wrong. Mira could accomplish the same result with one sentence: not only is your stance wrong, your entire approach to being alive looks suspicious. She walked to the control console and swiped across the light-screen a few times. The lights at the far end of the range cut out instantly. A second later, both wind tunnels activated at once. BOOM— The wind didn't blow in.

It hit. The pressure nearly knocked me back half a step. My boots scraped hard against the floor before I found my balance. Red lights flicked on along the track projectors in the distance. From the ceiling above came a deep magnetic charging hum, like some very expensive, very homicidal musical instrument tuning up. Mira spoke without turning around.

"Mode One. Low-density shrapnel storm. 120 km/h. Let's see if you can even manage staying alive while pulling a trigger." I jammed the stock into my shoulder socket and held on through gritted teeth.

"Are all your classes this charming?"

"No," she said.

"Today's the new-cadet discount rate." The first metallic glint flashed in the wind field ahead. Not a static target. Not a standard clay disc. A jagged-edged black fragment, no bigger than a fingernail, hurled into the turbulence, its path wandering like it was drunk.

"Fire." Mira said only one word. I pulled the trigger. BOOM. Not a bang. A boom. The muzzle flared, and the entire thermal fusion rifle went off on my shoulder like a small localized explosion. The recoil slammed from my shoulder straight into my collarbone. My vision jolted, the barrel kicked up, and the first shot went clean over the fragment, smashing into the blast shield behind and bursting into a blinding spray of sparks. Missed. But my shoulder nearly got written off.

"... Fuck!"

"I saw," Mira said flatly.

"The gun has more opinions than you do." The second fragment came in faster. I was still wrestling the barrel back down when it cut diagonally across from the right-side turbulence, just one flash of reflected light. I chased it on instinct, barely got the barrel on that glint, and heard Mira snap beside me:"Don't chase it—cut it off. You dating that butterfly or what?" BOOM. Second shot. Also wide. Not by a little, either. By a lot.

I could feel my dignity flying around the storm with those metal fragments, all at high speed. Third, fourth, fifth piece. Five shots. Zero hits. My shoulder was going numb, my wrists aching from the shock. My ears were full of high-frequency thunder and wind-shear. The whole range felt like an industrial shredder specifically designed to test whether recruits could be broken before they learned anything useful. Mira walked over and pushed my barrel down with one hand.

"Stop." I was breathing hard. The inside of my visor was about to fog over.

"This thing isn't built for humans."

"Congratulations, you finally got something right." She stood beside me, her left eye fixed on the wind field ahead, the cybernetic implant in her right eye cycling light in slow pulses.

"It was never built for ordinary people." Her hand came over, fingers cold and steady, tapping the back of my grip hand once.

"You're making two mistakes. First—you're watching the fragments themselves. Second—you're afraid of the recoil."

"I'm not afraid." I shot back immediately. Mira turned to look at me. Her gaze was perfectly flat. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"You are," she said.

"From the second shot on, you've been flinching early." I shut up for half a second.... Right. This woman was also annoying. Annoying in the same way Leon was—the type that doesn't argue with you, just quietly identifies exactly where you're lying to yourself. Mira slid the rifle out of my hands with the clean efficiency of taking a dinner knife off the table, then cradled it one-handed and stepped up to the firing line.

"Watch closely." She barely bothered with a ready stance, just slotted the stock into her shoulder like she and the weapon had always shared the same center of gravity. The console lit up. Another wave of shrapnel storm rolled in. Three pieces. Five. Seven. Turbulence, refraction, glints, drift. Mira fired four shots. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Not one shot chased a fragment. Every one went half a beat ahead, into the space it was about to occupy.

The wind field bloomed with tight white thermal fusion flares, and the fragments crumpled in sequence, as if invisible fingers had pinched them out one by one, breaking into burning specks that fell away. Beautiful in a deeply irritating way. Not performance-beautiful. The kind of beautiful that told you immediately—she normally doesn't use this thing on targets. She uses it on people. She tossed the rifle back into my arms.

"Understand?" Two seconds of silence.

"Got it," I said.

"You're not human." The corner of Mira's mouth moved, barely.

"Good. Now learn." She stepped back beside me—close enough that her shoulder line nearly touched mine—and started round two. This time the fragments came in at 150 km/h. I watched the wind field. Stopped trying to track each individual shard. Started reading the shared direction the turbulence was pulling everything—where the pressure was high, where things would drift; where the backwash would curl, where things would suddenly accelerate. The fragments weren't flying randomly.

I just hadn't learned to read them yet. The first one came. I didn't rush the trigger. Waited for it to cut into the brighter turbulence pocket on the right side, then led by half a beat. BOOM. The fragment detonated. Not a graze. A real, clean hit. Even I froze for a fraction of a second.

"Next," Mira said immediately. Second fragment. I was a beat too fast this time—shot early. The thermal beam passed just ahead of it, and the blast shield behind gained another aesthetically interesting scorch mark.

"Too eager," Mira said.

"That's called passion."

"That's called wasting ammunition." Third fragment. I held back. Let it move into the left-side turbulence pocket, then fired. BOOM. Hit. Fourth: miss. Fifth: hit. Sixth: close. Seventh: hit. A rhythm was coming in. Not gradually. It snapped into place in one strange moment. The wind, the fragments, the noise, the rifle's vibration, the pain in my shoulder, the pressure of my finger on the trigger—it all lined up into a single thread in my head.

The feeling was like those moments in the First Special Operations Unit during tactical analysis, when the world would suddenly come into sharp focus. Except this time it wasn't the medication. It was the understanding Karl had beaten into me, and Mira's corrections—precise enough to be genuinely maddening. She was right. Not chasing. Intercepting. Not running after the fragment. Going where it was going and waiting. When I shattered three fragments in a row, even I started getting suspicious.... No way.

Am I actually hitting these? A young girl who should've been in some normal school worrying about how to wash her uniform was now standing in a high-gravity special ops camp's simulated storm zone, holding a thermal fusion rifle that felt like a curse, firing at metal fragments traveling over 150 km/h, and actually connecting. The Federation really had a gift for wasting youth. Then Mira bumped the speed up again. 180 km/h. I saw the number jump in the corner of the light-screen and instantly wanted to swear.

"Wait, did you just secretly—""Not secretly," she said, perfectly calm.

"I adjusted it openly right in front of you." Sure. Even the way this woman escalated difficulty had impeccable manners. The storm went feral. The glints got shorter, the paths more erratic. Smaller interference shreds mixed into the flow, like someone had thrown a handful of razor blades in front of your face and still expected you to pick out which ones would actually kill you. First shot: clean miss. Second: wide.

Third was worse—I'd had it lined up, but the recoil walked the barrel up and the thermal beam passed politely between two fragments, like it was introducing itself to death rather than committing to it. Mira's hand came down on my rear shoulder—one sharp, flat slap. Not hard. But exact.

"Drive your shoulder forward!" she snapped.

"You're not comforting the gun. You're controlling it!" I gritted my teeth and ground my shoulder deeper into the stock. Fourth shot. BOOM. Hit. Fifth. Sixth. I was dropping some, but I was also genuinely catching some—not every shot, nowhere near legendary marksmanship, but not being dragged around by the weapon anymore either. And then a fragment came in from the upper right—thinner and faster than anything before it—and I moved before I thought. My body got there first. Muzzle up. Forward push. Trigger.

BOOM— The fragment exploded into burning red spray less than two meters from my visor. The whole field lit up for a moment. I stopped. Heart racing. Shoulder screaming. Fingers numb. But in that moment I knew—clearly, without doubt—that wasn't luck. I'd actually caught it. Mira went quiet beside me for about a second. For her, one second was already a long time. Then she reached over and pressed my barrel down.

"Enough." I was still breathing hard, still staring at the wind field as it slowly spun down.

"That's it for today?"

"Yes," she said.

"Keep going and tomorrow your trigger finger will move like a Parkinson's patient doing nail art."... Wow. This woman's mouth had real venom. I didn't have the energy to argue, because my right shoulder was genuinely close to filing for separation. The moment I lowered the rifle, my whole arm turned to lead, like I'd just spent the afternoon moving a small landing craft by hand. Mira glanced at me once.

"Not good today."

"Thanks so much."

"But faster than I expected." I looked up at her. That sentence, coming from her, was somehow more troublesome than Karl's "that's more like it." Because Mira wasn't Karl. She wasn't the type who hit first and taught second. She was more like a scope—once she said you were worth something, it meant she'd actually seen something.... Annoying. There was nothing worse than being accidentally acknowledged by someone who actually knew what they were looking at.

It gave you a small, entirely inappropriate feeling of satisfaction. After the session ended, when I racked the thermal fusion rifle, my right knuckles were still trembling faintly. Not fear. Vibration. That thing's recoil was sincere—every shot had apparently taken the opportunity to restructure my shoulder joint's sense of self. The range had mostly cleared out. Only the wind system was still spinning down, the overhead rails occasionally letting out low metallic groans as they retracted.

Mira stood by the observation window, crushing her cigar out in an alloy ashtray. The last ember blinked out like some irritable star finally clocking off for the night. I rolled my shoulder and immediately regretted it.

"If this is what you call an introductory session," I said to her back, "does your full curriculum involve me shooting at meteorites?" Mira didn't turn around.

"Depends on your progress."

"Do all you instructors share the same handbook of terrible stock lines?" This time she did turn, leaning against the control panel as she looked at me. When she wasn't almost-smiling, she was cold. Really cold. Like a blade in its sheath—except you knew it didn't particularly mind coming out bloody.

"You did three things right just now," she said.

"Huh. You're not here to finish me off?"

"First—you stopped chasing targets." She continued as if I hadn't spoken.

"Second—you started reading the wind instead of just watching the fragments. Third—" She paused, her eyes landing precisely on my shoulder.

"You finally pushed the stock back instead of waiting for it to hit you first." I looked down at my shoulder. That spot was definitely red enough to have a future. By tonight, there'd probably be a bruise impressive enough to use as a training diagram.

"I've always been very cooperative with weapons education," I said.

"The weapon's teaching methods were just a bit aggressive in the early rounds." Mira made a quiet sound—low, brief. Not quite mockery, but not quite not.

"You have a bad habit," she said.

"I know. I'm too charming."

"Before you do something right, you wrap yourself in noise first." I was quiet for half a second. She wasn't just reading data. She was reading people. I hated that type most. I crossed my arms and deliberately dialed my tone back to its default insufferable setting.

"You have a bad habit too." Mira's brow shifted, barely.

"Go on."

"You're actually a decent teacher. But you deliver every line like you're handing down a death sentence." She looked at me. One second of silence. Then she smiled. Not much. Just once. Like a hairline crack opening in ice.

"Because most cadets," she said, "get soft the moment you say something kind." She took one step forward, stopping in front of me. Not close, but not far—exactly the distance that told you she wasn't throwing these words away carelessly.

"You're different." I raised an eyebrow.