Chương 7

The sixteenth lap was worse than the fifteenth. I had missed the time limit again. That meant no rest, but I finally managed to steady my breathing enough to try Charlotte's technique. It helped, a bit. I couldn't feel my legs anymore, and the only reason I knew they were moving was because I had not collapsed yet. A small miracle. Charlotte ran beside me, skipping a rest period or two to keep pace with me, and her breathing was finally showing strain.

"Two more," she managed to gasp out.

"Weighted runs. Usually stop at. Eighteen for. First. Day."

"Usually?"

"She's. Watching you." I didn't have the energy to ask what that meant. I just ran. In, out, in, in, out. I kept trying my best to remember the exact order of breaths, but my sluggish thoughts refused to cooperate. I made do. The seventeenth lap started without announcement. Not that it mattered for me, since I missed the time limit. Instructor Zoe simply raised her hand and the rest of the students were moving again. Halfway through, my vision started tunneling.

The edges of the cargo bay went gray, then black, then gray again. The hot poker in my side had been replaced by a power drill, my heart a war drum in my chest, pounding out a screaming rhythm. s top, Stop, STOP. I didn't stop. I had to maneuver around some of the students that had already collapsed. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed another runner next to me on my other side. The heavyset student who had failed the first lap was also refusing to go down. How could I give up when even he didn't?

I kept pushing. A rubber bullet caught me in the shoulder, spinning me half around. I stumbled and caught myself before just barely managing to keep moving forward. No clue how.

"Final lap," Charlotte called from somewhere to my left.

"You're almost there!" Final. The most beautiful word in the Imperial language I had ever heard. I ran. The finish line was four hundred meters away. It might as well have been four hundred kilometers. After the fact, I couldn't remember how I made it through. All I could remember was seeing Charlotte run alongside me. Her silver hair was plastered to her forehead. She looked exhausted. She looked beautiful. I filed that observation away for later, when I had enough oxygen to appreciate it.

I crossed the line and my legs stopped working. The floor came up fast. I had just enough presence of mind to land on my side rather than my face, but it was a close thing. The rubberized surface was cool against my cheek. That was nice. Everything else was not. I lay there, waiting for my heart to explode or my lungs to collapse or something equally dramatic. Neither happened. I just existed in a state of absolute exhaustion. I tasted blood. In my field of vision, a line of blue text floated up.

[THRESHOLD EXCEEDED: BODY +1] The physical agony was still there but seeing my body stat tick up by one made the whole thing worth it. Pure dopamine surged through me. All of a sudden, the run didn't seem so bad if I could add more stats like this. In my six years at my previous school, I had only increased my body stat by four points. Compared to that, this was light speed. Charlotte's face appeared above me, blocking out the light. I dismissed the notification. Her eyes really are quite beautiful, aren't they.

"You made it," she said.

"I missed two laps."

"You finished." She extended her hand.

"That's what matters." I took her hand and let her pull me upright. The world tilted dangerously before stabilizing. Around us, other students were in various states of recovery. Some looked as destroyed as I felt, laying like starfish out on the beach. Others were already stretching like this had been just another Tuesday. Maybe it had.

"Not too bad," Instructor Zoe announced, her voice cutting through the exhausted silence.

"Seventeen of you completed all laps within the time requirements. Eleven of you missed between one and three laps but continued running. The remaining four have been removed from the floor." I looked around. She was right. The students who had given up were gone from the room.

"We'll take a break for the next ten minutes," Instructor Zoe continued.

"Afterwards, we'll begin our physical conditioning." I'm pretty sure my face was going through some funny contortions at the idea of more running or whatever the instructor decided to throw at us. To my side, Charlotte giggled as she took in my distress.

"We're done with the hard part," she whispered.

"What does that mean?" I whispered back. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"The rest of the day should be pretty simple stuff." True to Charlotte's word, it really was. Instructor Zoe had us do some stretching, some weightlifting, and not much else. The exercises were still hard, but compared to the run, these were a walk in the park, especially since they touched upon muscle groups we didn't use earlier in the day. Then, before I knew it, the day was done.

"Alright everyone." Instructor Zoe gathered everyone together. I recognized a few faces, like the big student that looked like he was about to die, and had puked at least a couple of times during the run. Despite all of that, the dude had stayed on his feet and completed all the exercises. Respect.

"I know today was hard for a lot of you. In the Imperial Service, your body is the most important piece of equipment. We push you to the threshold because the threshold is where the soldiers serving the Emperor live. Would you respect a commander who you could outrun? Who you know didn't suffer as much as you have?"

"But, aren't there plenty of commanders who have not gone through rigorous training?" one student asked.

"Yet they can still become good commanders." I recognized the student. She was the one who told me to keep my knees pointed forward. Instructor Zoe turned her head as she locked eyes on the dissenter.

"You're right. The history books are full of soft men and women who possessed brilliant minds but brittle bones. And do you know what they all have in common? They were lucky." Zoe paused.

"They commanded from the center of a formation that never broke. They never had to face death in its face and realize that their body was not strong enough to carry them toward victory. You are in the Strategos Program. You will not be relying on fickle things like being lucky." I shivered, the memory of the run triggering phantom pain in my whole body. Zoe then turned her gaze toward the big student. He looked like he was holding his soul inside his body by sheer force of will. Uninterrupted running for…

about fifteen laps? How did he even survive?

"Look at Cadet—?"

"B-Belcher, ma'am," the guy wheezed.

"Cadet Belcher is in worse shape than anyone else here. By all rights, his body told him to quit an hour ago. And yet, he is still standing. The man has looked at the threshold, walked through it, and kept going. Would you choose him as your leader or someone who you believe would be a liability in a fight?" I looked at Belcher. He looked miserable, but as Zoe spoke, he managed to pull his shoulders back just an inch. Instructor Zoe snapped her fingers.

"That's all for today. Dismissed." The crowd began to disperse. I stayed where I was, partly because I wasn't sure my legs would cooperate with walking. Oh legs, I had taken you for granted. I am deeply sorry.

"You doing okay?" Charlotte asked as she slid closer.

"Yeah, trying to." I paused as I debated asking her the question on my mind.

"Thanks for the tip back there, it probably saved my ass at the end. You've been through this before? That was literal hell for me."

"Weighted runs? A few times." Charlotte stretched her arms above her head, and I tried not to notice how the movement pulled her uniform tight across her shoulders. They really were way too form fitting in certain places.

"Though Instructor Zoe's version is more intense than what I'm used to. She has a reputation."

"For torture?"

"For results." Charlotte chuckled.

"Torture too, though." Her training uniform was soaked through, turning nearly translucent in patches and clinging to her like a second skin. As she exhaled, leaning forward slightly with her hands on her hips, I couldn't help but notice the heavy, rhythmic heave of her chest. The tight material left absolutely nothing to the imagination, and it was perfect. I want to shake the hand of whoever designed these clothes, if I don't get kicked in the nuts first.

She noticed my gaze lingering a second too long and offered a faint, lopsided smirk. I looked away, blushing and muttering something incomprehensible. At least, she didn't look offended. Thank fuck. Brain, we need an oxygen order asap, please and thank you.

"Well, I'm just glad I survived," I said. Before she could respond, the girl who had talked back to Instructor Zoe joined us. Up close and without the looming threat of another lap, I noticed she had auburn hair and stunning green eyes. Charlotte frowned, "Lysara." Lysara held up her hands in a gesture of peace.

"The Strategos Program doesn't usually accept students without military backgrounds or noble sponsorship. I just wanted to know if he's with the Valens."

"And here I thought I got in on my own merits," I joked. I wasn't too sure myself, to be honest. Lysara turned her attention back to me.

"Sorry, I wasn't implying otherwise. All of us here in the program were recommended by someone. My house chose me this year. Otherwise, I'd be stuck trying to decipher data right now. Us Thornes are known for producing analysts."

"And yet here you are," Charlotte said.

"I could say the same to you. A Valen slumming it in the Strategos Program instead of taking a comfortable post in the Diplomatic Corps. How peculiar…" she grinned.

"Beats pushing around paper." Sensing a lull in the conversation, I pulled myself a bit closer to Charlotte's side. No matter what, she was my first friend at Magna Protos and I would be on her side in this exchange, even though the undertone of the conversation didn't fully yet make sense to me.

"Huh. I see." Lysara looked between Charlotte and me.

"Here I was hoping that you two weren't together yet. Now my options in this program are Belcher and Philip. Actually, maybe just Belcher. Philip's a bit of a problem."

"We're not—" Charlotte started, then stopped as she lost her edge. A faint flush crept up her neck.

"We met on the shuttle. We're in the same tower."

"We're all in the North Tower. And you spent the entire physical conditioning session pacing him," Lysara teased. I let out a chuckle despite the tension. Lysara's eyes flickered to me, and I saw a spark of curiosity, and something else, there.

"So your questions earlier about my placement and everything were about my relationship with Charlotte?" I asked.

"That was a strange way to go about it."

"Our year has twenty-eight girls and three guys, and we don't really interact with the other years, or the normies. Let's just say that an unaligned male is a high-value asset. I was just checking to see if the asset was already under contract. Actually, since you're not pledged to the Valens, would you like to have dinner sometime? The new law's made it fine anyways, not that it stopped anyone before, considering the…" she paused, giggling, " demographics. Sharing is caring and all that.

Hell, considering how skewed the genders are, I would probably make sure to 'align' with someone or a few sooner rather than later, if you know what I mean." she winked. It was now my time to sputter. WhatthefuckisshesayingwhatI-. I slapped down my mental voice, and prepared my most eloquent answer yet.

"Uh… Ask me again after I can feel my legs?" Smooth. Very smooth.

"Sure thing." Lysara laughed.

"Either way, I'm hungry and I hate eating alone. You two headed to the commissary?" Charlotte and I exchanged a glance.

"We were planning to," I said as I stood slowly.

"You're welcome to join us."

"How magnanimous." Lysara fell into step beside us as we started toward the exit.

"Fair warning, I talk a lot when I'm tired. It's a coping mechanism."

"We noticed."

"Most people do. They just don't say it out loud." She smiled and winked, giving me a once over.

"You're definitely… interesting, Jax."