She'd clocked it yesterday on the walk over, but standing in it now, in full uniform, shoulder to shoulder with sixty other wolves lined up in formation across the packed dirt, it felt different. The space pressed back. Old ground. The kind that had absorbed enough blood and sweat over enough years that it had its own smell now, something mineral and layered underneath the cold morning air.

Every trainee stood straight. No talking. Sixty sets of eyes forward, sixty wolves reading the same room the same way – that particular stillness of predators who've been told to wait.

Nova stood in line and kept her face flat and her breathing even and told her wolf, again, to stay down.

The man who walked out to the centre of the ground wasn't large. Average height, lean, somewhere in his forties, with close-cropped grey at his temples and the unhurried walk of someone who'd never once needed to prove anything by arriving quickly. He stopped in the middle of the dirt, looked down the lines once, and didn't raise his voice.

Didn't need to.

"Commander Drax," Rhen said quietly from two spots down the line. First words anyone had said since the assembly formed. "Head of combat training. Twelve years. Don't let the size fool you."

Nova had already decided not to.

Drax clasped his hands behind his back.

"The lunar pool is running ahead of schedule," he said. Flat. Informational. "Your wolves know it. Your bodies know it. Some of you have been feeling it since you got here and trying to pretend you haven't." He looked down the line without pausing on anyone specifically. "We're not doing warm-up drills. We're not doing positional work. We're going straight to combat trials."

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

"One-on-one duels. You pick your opponent. Three consecutive wins, you advance up the rank board. Three consecutive losses." He paused. "Pack your bags; you are not Alpha material."

That landed. Nova felt it move through the line like a current, sixty wolves all running the same calculation at once. Who they'd pick. Who'd pick them? What three losses meant for everything they'd come here to build.

She'd already done the math before he finished the sentence.

Drax stepped back. She stepped up to the battleground and faced the other wolves.

"Who's going first?"

Silence for two seconds.

Then Bren stepped forward from three spots down the line, rolling his neck, and looked sideways at Nova with that same grin from the meal hall. Reconstructed. Back to full power.

"What's wrong, little guy?" Low enough that it didn't carry to Drax. "Need some more dairy before you're ready to go?"

Nova stepped forward.

"I'll go," she said. Loud. Clear. To Drax, not to Bren.

Drax looked at her. Looked at Bren. Looked back at her.

"Are you sure of your opponent?" he said.

She looked at Bren and shook her head.

He spread his hands. That grin is going wider. Sure. Come on then.

*************************************************************************

Bren was big, and he was fast, and under different circumstances, against someone who hadn't spent twenty-two years being trained by a woman who fought like her life required it, he would've been a serious problem.

He came in heavy, the way big wolves do when they're confident, using his weight as the opening move, and Nova slipped left and let him carry himself forward and put her elbow into the back of his shoulder as he went past, and he went down hard and fast, and the dirt came up to meet his face with a sound that made the watching trainees go completely silent.

He was back up in three seconds. She'd give him that.

He came again, smarter this time, lower, going for her legs, and she read it two steps out, stepped over the grab, got his arm at the wrong angle on the way up, and walked him into the ground a second time.

He stayed down for a moment.

Then he got up again.

She almost felt bad.

The third one she finished in under ten seconds. Clean takedown, no damage, nothing personal. She stepped back, let him up and turned to Drax.

Bren stood behind her, breathing through his nose, jaw tight, not saying a single word. Whatever he'd planned to say, he'd left it in the dirt with him.

"Next," Drax said.

A wolf stepped out from the middle of the line. Broader than Bren, quieter, with the flat eyes of someone who didn't telegraph anything. He looked at Nova once, and his skin started shifting at the edges, the tell of a wolf already reaching for the change, planning to come at her mid-shift.

She moved before the shift finished.

Got inside his reach while his hands were still changing shape, while his balance was split between two forms and belonged to neither, and took him down in the space between wolf and man where nobody is quite either.

He hit the ground, fully human again. Looked up at her and blinked.

Around the training ground, something had shifted in the watching trainees. She could feel it, the quality of the silence changing. She didn't seem entertaining anymore based on her size; now they were all paying attention to her differently.

"He's two down," someone said behind her. "One more win and he advances."

"Who's he going to pick?" Another voice. "He's stronger than he looks."

Nova turned to face the ground.

She felt Caden before she found him. He was standing at the far edge of the watching line, arms crossed, not quite in formation, not quite out of it. His eyes were already on her. Had been on her for a while, she thought. That expression she still hadn't fully translated.

She looked at him for one second.

Then she turned to Drax.

"For the final round," she said, loud enough to carry across the whole ground, "I challenge Caden Voss."

The training ground went so quiet she could hear the wind moving across the dirt.

Somewhere behind her, Rhen made a sound that was not quite a word.

Drax looked at her for a long moment.

Then he looked at Caden.

Chapter 7 One More

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