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But I saw the change immediately. The standard Tier 1 uniform had a deep V-neck collar. Felix wasn’t wearing the standard issue. Under the jersey he wore a high-tech compression shirt, black fabric rising all the way to his jawline. A mock turtleneck.

I smirked. He was hiding my bite.

He took his seat in the front row staring straight ahead at the stage without acknowledging the other Tier 1s shifting beside him, but I caught the tension riding his shoulders. He knew I was there.

Director Tegula stepped up to the podium. The lights dimmed, dropping the audience into shadow while a spotlight hit the stage.

“Individual brilliance is a myth,” Tegula began, his voice amplified, “The Regime does not require soloists. We require a symphony of violence.”

A hologram flickered to life above him, two players on a digital field, one blue, one red. They were colliding, their movements syncing into a brutal dance that tore through a defensive line.

“The Crucible Protocol,” Tegula announced.

A ripple of unease moved through the room. The Crucible was legendary, a stress test designed to break the weak, and every man in the plush seats had heard a version of it whispered somewhere on the way up.

“For the next two weeks, the Top 50 will not train alone. You will not eat alone. You will not sleep alone.”

Tegula smiled, a mechanical expression closer to a baring of teeth than a greeting.

“We are pairing you. Order and chaos. Ice and fire. We are welding you together to see if you hold, or if you break.”

He tapped the podium. The screen behind him filled with a list of names.

“Your partner is your shadow. If they fail, you fail. If they drop rank, you drop rank. If they are eliminated...” He let the silence hang. “You pack your bags.”

There it was, the real teeth under the theater. I scanned the list, and I didn’t need to look hard. I already knew how this story ended, because Tegula loved his drama.

PAIRING 1: CENTO / REGILLEN.

The murmur in the room turned into a buzz. Heads turned. Eyes darted from Felix in the front row to me in the back, and I understood the show we made, because everyone had seen the tackle yesterday and the hatred on the field.

Felix stood up. “Director.”

“Sit down, Asset Cento,” Tegula said. He didn’t even look up from his notes.

“Director, with respect, our playstyles are incompatible. The algorithm...”

“Your metrics dropped, Asset Cento.” Tegula’s voice turned to ice, cutting him off. “You showed weakness on the field. You let an unranked transfer put you on your back.”

Felix stood there for a second with his mouth opening and closing, stripped of his authority in front of the entire Academy, and then he sank back into his chair, defeated. Watching it happen, I felt the strangest thing, a flicker of something that wasn’t triumph, gone before I could name it.

I chuckled low in my throat anyway, because the room expected it, and so did I.

Roommates.

The facility kept the Duo Dorms in the East Wing, isolated from the gen pop, and nobody bothered pretending the distance was about anything but maximum psychological pressure.

The door read my new clearance and slid open. The room was small on purpose, designed to force interaction: two narrow beds pushed against opposite walls with barely enough floor between them to walk, a single desk, a bathroom walled in glass that offered zero privacy. Whoever drew this floor plan had never shared a room in their life. Or they had, and hated everyone who ever would.

Felix walked in first. He dropped his bag on the left bed and immediately started scanning the room, the vents, the smoke detector, working the perimeter like a man checking a cell for the guard’s sightlines, and I revised something I had assumed about him. That was practice.

“Audio sensors in both corners,” he said, his voice brittle.

“Good to know.”

I walked past him, close enough to catch the smell of him, close enough to feel how still he held himself, and threw my bag on the right bed. I sat down, the mattress springs creaking under my weight. Two beds. One shared three feet of floor. The air in the room was already going thin, burned up by the tension between us.

“Here are the rules,” Felix said. He kept his eyes on the white wall, refusing to engage. “You stay on your side. You don’t touch my gear. We speak only when necessary. We survive the two weeks, we split, and we never speak of this again.”