The medic annex looked wrong without the screaming.

  No smoke this time. No fake blood on the deck. The corridor projectors were dark. Classroom 2-03 had been stripped back to its bones: chairs, desks, holo tank off. The only thing out of place was Corin, standing at the front with her hands in her pockets instead of a kit bag.

  Kaden hesitated in the doorway.

  “Inside, Mercer,” Corin said. “Seats, not gloves. Nobody’s dying today.”

  The “today” did a lot of work.

  He took his usual spot. Song slid into the seat beside him. The rest of the medic track filled in around them, quieter than they’d been on the first day. The morning and Aurora’s lecture had burned some of the chatter out of them.

  The door slid shut with a soft hiss. The annex node dimmed the lights one shade.

  “Good,” Corin said. “Everyone’s here and no one’s bleeding. That makes this my favorite block this week.”

  A couple cadets managed weak smiles.

  “You’ve spent the last few days playing catch-up,” she went on. “We threw you into breaching sims, gave you loaner skills, watched you make choices while mannequins screamed at you. Khatri just gave you the System version. Stats, traits, AP, class tracks. What you haven’t had yet is anyone sitting you down and saying, ‘This is what a combat medic actually does in a fight.’”

  She glanced at the dark holo tank, then left it off.

  “So,” Corin said. “Let’s fix that. Because if the only picture in your head is ‘guy with a kit who appears at the right time with the right tool,’ you are going to get yourself and other people killed.”

  She leaned back against the front table, arms crossing.

  “First correction,” she said. “You are not doctors. You are not surgeons. You’re not going to be in nice clean bays with full scans and a team and eight minutes to make a decision. You are damage control under fire. You are there to stop people from dying long enough to get them somewhere else. That’s it. You don’t cure. You buy time.”

  She swept the room with her eyes.

  “Second correction,” she said. “You are not rear-line support. If you think being a combat medic means you get to stay behind cover and wait for the wounded to come to you, transfer tracks now. You go where the breach team goes. Sometimes you go through the door first because your Shock Leader knows the first thirty seconds decide whether anyone is even savable. Your weapon does not stay on safe just because you have a red cross on your shoulder. You shoot, you move, you treat. In that order, unless there’s a very good reason not to.”

  Song shifted next to Kaden. He kept his eyes forward.

  “Third correction,” Corin said. “You’re not there for everyone. You’re there for your squad. Your platoon, if you’re lucky. You might help someone outside that circle sometimes. Aurora will even reward you for heroics if they pay off. But your job is to keep your people moving, shooting, breaching. If you die in a hallway because you stayed behind with someone you couldn’t save, that’s one less medic for everyone else.”

  She let that sit.

  “Questions?” she asked.

  No one raised a hand. Not yet.

  “Good,” she said. “You’re capable of listening before you argue. I like that.”

  She pushed off the table and started pacing slowly.

  “You had Khatri this afternoon,” she said. “She told you stats are levers. That you feel them. PHY lets you drag more weight. RES keeps your hands steady when everyone else is shaking. COG lets you track more things at once. All true. You will ride those numbers hard. Aurora will push them as you level. But I want you to understand something.”

  She stopped near the edge of the front row.

  “Your stats don’t make the decisions,” Corin said. “You do. And some decisions will hurt no matter how much RES Aurora pumps into you.”

  Kaden felt his jaw tighten. Corin’s eyes flicked his way for half a second, then moved on.

  “You want theory?” she said. “Fine. We’ll start with a story and pull the theory out of it.”

  The room got quieter. Even the vents seemed to hush.

  “Ship called the HIS Rampart,” Corin said. “Heavy cruiser. This was… fifteen years ago. I was where you are now, give or take a few scars. Tier one, Level… four, five. Combat medic on a boarding team, not leading it. Our Shock Leader’s name was Rhee. Mean bastard. Good at her job.”

  She looked at the far wall, like she was seeing a different room.

  “We were riding shotgun for a convoy running supplies along one of the mid-range corridors into Andromeda,” she said. “Opposition raiders hit the line. Standard pattern: they jump in close, try to crack an escort or two, snag whatever they can, jump out before heavier tonnage arrives.”

  She lifted a hand. The holo tank came on with a low hum, painting the air with a simple schematic: blue convoy line, red Opp contacts.

  “Rampart takes a hit,” she said. “Not a kill-shot, but ugly. We return fire, force the raider to break off. One of their escorts doesn’t make it out in time. Damaged, bleeding atmosphere, drifting along the corridor edge.”

  The red dot flickered, then went dimmer.

  “Command decides we’re boarding,” Corin said. “You’ve heard the doctrine: don’t let Opp tech fall into their recovery teams, don’t waste an opportunity to learn. So Rampart throws a line, gets a hard dock, sends our team in with two others. My job: keep Rhee’s people alive as long as possible while we grab whatever data we can and trash their drives.”

  The schematic zoomed into a corridor cross-section. Blue icons moved into a red hull.

  “First ten minutes are textbook,” she said. “Opp resistance is light. They didn’t expect to be boarded. We push, clear, leapfrog. I patch a couple of grazes, seal a suit breach, keep everyone walking. Stats are doing their thing. PHY lets me haul people. RES keeps me from throwing up in my helmet when I see my first actual Opp up close.”

  Her mouth quirked, not quite a smile.

  “And then,” she said, “things stop being textbook.”

  The schematic updated. Red triangles appeared behind the blue team icons.

  “Oversight,” she said. “We missed a cross-corridor. Their reinforcements come in from behind us, cut off our path back to the dock. Another team gets pinned two compartments over. Comms are full of shouting. Aurora’s doing its best to keep up, but we’re far from Rampart’s main node, so our HUDs are basically implant-only. No nice little red outlines telling us where cover is. Just guns and guesses.”

  She inclined her head slightly.

  “This is where your theory lives,” Corin said. “In the moment between ‘we’re fine’ and ‘we’re not.’”

  She marked three blue icons on the holo.

  “I’ve got eight marines with me,” she said. “Rhee, squad lead. Koss, our heavy. Tollen, tech. Rest are riflemen. We’re in a corridor that looks a lot like the one you practiced in yesterday, except when Opp rounds hit bulkheads on their ships they throw shards, not neat little impact marks.”

  The holo lit with a scatter of orange around the blue line.

  “We get hit from both ends,” she said. “Koss takes a round in the chest plate that drops his HP to twenty in one hit. Suit integrity’s compromised. He goes down. Two riflemen catch shrapnel. One in the thigh, one in the neck. Blood everywhere. Rhee calls a fallback to the nearest junction, three doors back, where we can hold better.”

  She looked at the cadets.

  “Who do I treat?” she asked. “If you were me, who do you go to first?”

  The room was silent for a beat. Then a hand went up. Corin nodded.

  “Cadet,” she said.

  “Neck wound first,” the cadet said. “Then Koss. Leg can probably move. Others can drag him back.”

  Corin nodded once.

  “Reasonable,” she said. “That’s what Aurora’s triage overlay would tell you too, assuming it’s working and you have a skill for it. Airway, breathing, circulation. Neck wound, chest trauma, extremities. Save the ones you can save fast enough to matter.”

  She let the holo hang for a second, then shifted it.

  “I went to Koss first,” she said.

  That landed like a dropped mag.

  “Why?” she asked. “Because Koss was the only one who could carry the shield that was going to keep the rest of us alive through that fallback. His PHY was high enough to haul that much composite and still move. His RES was high enough that I knew if I got him back on his feet, he wouldn’t freeze. Neck wound was bad, but I judged I had a sixty, seventy percent chance of shoving a patch on it and getting that rifleman walking even if I was thirty seconds later. If Koss died, our odds as a squad dropped hard.”

  She tapped the tank. Koss’s icon glowed.

  “So I hit Koss,” she said. “Foam patch on the seal, stabilizer dose, kick his HP from twenty back into the fifties. Enough to move. I yell at the leg wound to put pressure on their own damn thigh and hop. I tell the neck wound to keep their hand clamped where it is and not die.”

  Her mouth went flat.

  “We start the fallback,” she said. “Koss is swearing in my ear the whole time. Neck wound’s leaving a trail on the deck. Rhee’s covering our retreat with one rifle and one Opp carbine she picked up off the floor. We make it to the junction. I drag the neck wound behind cover and take a look.”

  She flicked a glyph. The neck icon turned red.

  “Too late,” she said. “Arterial nick blew wider when they moved. Pressure wasn’t enough. By the time I got eyes on it, they were already dropping. I hit them with everything in the kit. Doesn’t matter. They die with my hand in their throat and Koss breathing hard beside us, shield up.”

  The room stayed very still.

  “Textbook,” Corin said quietly. “Aurora logs say ‘correct prioritization.’ Squad survival probability increased. Combat medic: successful use of limited resources. I got TRAUMA RESPONSE ticks and progression in my class. On paper, I did my job.”

  She looked at them, one by one.

  “Here’s what the logs don’t tell you,” she said. “That rifleman’s name was Harrow. They were twenty. They’d been on Rampart for three months. They liked old twentieth-century music and terrible jokes. Koss blamed himself for putting his shield out of position and getting hit in the first place. Rhee spent the next week sending me data on every possible way we could have played that corridor to not lose anyone. Command gave us a commendation because we finished the objective and brought back usable data.”

  She snorted softly.

  “Aurora doesn’t care about any of that,” she said. “It doesn’t care what Harrow’s favorite song was. It cares that my choice meant seven marines made it back instead of six. It marked my behavior as effective and started nudging my trait profile around that.”

  She let the holo fade. The tank went dark.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “This is what being a combat medic is,” Corin said. “It is not magic glue. It is not dramatic saves under perfect lighting. It is looking at three people on the floor and picking the one who gets to live. Sometimes that choice makes sense on a spreadsheet and still feels like a knife you stuck in someone yourself.”

  Silence pressed in.

  “So,” she said eventually, “let’s talk about theory.”

  She moved back to the front table, braced her hands on it.

  “Field medics operate on three pillars,” Corin said. “Write this down if it makes you feel better. It won’t save you, but it might give you something to cling to when you freeze.”

  Several cadets, including Song, actually pulled up notes.

  “Pillar one: mobility,” Corin said. “You have to be able to move. Drag, carry, crawl. Your PHY numbers matter here. Your AGI, so you don’t trip over bodies or your own feet. If you can’t get to the casualty without dying, they’re already gone. If you can’t get them out of the kill zone, all you did was give them a prettier place to die.”

  “Pillar two: triage,” she went on. “That’s the part Kaden got a crash course in.” Her eyes flicked to him, then away. “You assess, you prioritize, you decide where your hands go first. You will be wrong sometimes. Get used to that. The goal isn’t to be perfect. It’s to be less wrong than you would be without training.”

  “Pillar three: communication,” she said. “You’re not operating in a vacuum. Your Shock Leader needs to know who’s walking, who’s limping, who’s not getting back up. You call HP when it matters. You shout when someone’s about to bleed out behind cover. You tell your heavy when you can’t get to the downed tech so they have to change the breach plan. If you try to carry everything yourself, you will fail.”

  She straightened.

  “That’s the job,” Corin said. “Move. Decide. Talk. The tools, the foam, the bandages, the loaner skills, those are just extensions of those three things.”

  A hand went up, cautiously. She nodded.

  “Ma’am,” a cadet in the second row said. “Did you… ever pick wrong? Like, pick someone, and later Aurora said you should’ve gone the other way?”

  Corin’s expression didn’t change much. Something in her eyes did.

  “Yes,” she said simply. “More than once. Sometimes the System disagreed with me but it turned out fine. Sometimes it agreed with me and it still felt wrong. Sometimes it caught something I missed and gave me a low-yield penalty. Traits stagnated. No skill progression. Aurora’s way of saying ‘do better.’”

  She paused.

  “Here’s the part Khatri didn’t tell you,” Corin said. “Aurora is not infallible. It has more data than you do, but it’s still working off probabilities. In the Rampart corridor, it liked my choice because more people lived. In another boarding I was on, years later, I followed its weighting exactly, and we still lost the ship. It logged me as optimal while we were being spaced.”

  “Then what’s the point?” someone muttered.

  “The point,” Corin said, “is that you use every tool you have. Your stats. Your traits. Your skills. Your brain. You listen to Aurora, but you don’t worship it. You listen to your Shock Leader, but you don’t let them turn you into a pack mule with a med patch. You listen to yourself, but you don’t let guilt make your decisions.”

  She looked around.

  “You’re going to hear a lot of heroic stories,” she said. “About dreadnaughts like HIS Bulwark at Second Carina, cruisers that held a corridor three minutes longer than they should have, stations that didn’t fall because some squad you’ll never meet kept a hatch closed. What those stories leave out is the medic at the edge of every frame trying to keep enough people on their feet to make the heroics possible.”

  Her gaze ticked over Kaden again, met his eyes for a heartbeat.

  “If you do your job right,” she said, “most of the time no one will notice. The fight will go the way it’s supposed to go. The people who make it home will assume they were just tough enough. You’ll know better. Aurora will know better. That has to be enough.”

  She clapped her hands once, sharply, breaking the tension.

  “All right,” Corin said. “Practical bit. Turn to the person next to you. You’re going to tell them your stat line. All five numbers. Then you’re going to tell them what that means for the three pillars. What you’re good at. What you’re bad at. What you need to compensate for. No false modesty. No bragging.”

  There was a ripple of discomfort. She didn’t care.

  “Mercer,” she said. “You’re in the front of the splash pool. Start.”

  Kaden felt his ears go hot. Song turned to look at him like he’d just been given front-row tickets to something.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kaden said.

  He exhaled, then pulled his status up where he could see it.

  “PHY six,” he said. “AGI four. COG seven. RES six. AP five.”

  Song whistled under his breath.

  “Pillars?” Corin prompted.

  Kaden forced himself to think instead of freeze.

  “Mobility,” he said. “I can drag someone bigger than me if I have to, but I’m not going to be graceful about it. AGI four means I’ll be slower in cluttered corridors. I’ll need more help with carries if we’re under fire.”

  “Good,” Corin said. “Triage?”

  “COG seven, RES six,” Kaden said. “I… process fast enough to keep track of multiple casualties, I think. RES means I don’t shut down as fast when things go to hell. So triage is probably my strongest pillar.”

  “Communication?” she asked.

  He almost said “I’ll tell them,” but swallowed it.

  “Still working on that, ma’am,” Kaden said. “I can get tunnel vision. Stats don’t fix that.”

  A few cadets snorted quietly. Corin’s mouth twitched.

  “Honest,” she said. “I’ll take it. Song, your numbers.”

  Song tapped his temple, then rattled them off.

  “PHY five, AGI six, COG six, RES five, AP five,” he said.

  “Mobility?” Corin asked.

  “I’m not carrying Koss, ma’am,” Song said. “But I won’t trip over my own boots doing it. I can run a casualty drag cleaner than Mercer, probably.”

  “Triage?”

  “Average,” Song said. “I won’t freeze, but I won’t be the one thinking three steps ahead either.”

  “Communication?”

  “I like talking,” Song said. “Maybe too much.”

  A ripple of actual laughter ran through the room. It broke some of the tension.

  “Exactly the exercise,” Corin said. “Know where you sit. Know how your numbers feel. You don’t get to change your starting stats, but you sure as hell get to choose how you play them.”

  She clapped her hands again.

  “Pair up,” she said. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. Then we’ll run some hypothetical corridors on the tank. No screaming, no foam, just decisions. And you’re going to talk through them out loud, because if you can’t explain why you’re picking someone, you probably haven’t thought it through.”

  Chairs scraped. Conversation rose, awkward at first, then more natural. Kaden and Song turned to face each other properly, then swapped with the cadets behind them when Corin told them to rotate.

  By the time the fifteen minutes were up, Kaden had heard half a dozen stat lines. PHY nines who already dreamed of carrying heavies. RES fours who went quiet when they admitted it. COG fives who laughed at themselves and said they’d just follow whoever sounded confident.

  Corin killed the chatter with a raised hand.

  “Good,” she said. “You’re all slightly more self-aware than you were an hour ago. That might save a life. Might not. But it won’t hurt.”

  She tapped the holo tank back on. A corridor schematic appeared, four blue dots, three red.

  “For the rest of the block,” she said, “we’re running scenarios on this. No bleeding. No dramatic sound cues. Just dots and numbers. You tell me who you treat, why, and what you think Aurora will think of it. Then I’ll tell you how close you are to the way the System logs it. Maybe I’ll even tell you what I did the last time I saw something like it for real.”

  She gave them a thin smile.

  “Congratulations,” Corin said. “You’ve officially had your first ‘theory’ class. Try to remember it when someone’s screaming in your ear.”

  Kaden sat up a little straighter as the first scenario loaded. Dots, numbers, distances. For once, he was almost grateful for the abstraction.

  It was easier to practice being wrong when the only thing on the floor was light.

  They got out of the annex later than scheduled. The corridor outside was already cycling to evening light, the strips along the ceiling dimming toward a softer blue.

  Song peeled off toward the sim wing with a groan about homework. Kaden headed toward the barracks, shoulders heavy, mind still chewing on Harrow bleeding out on a foreign deck fifteen years ago, when he’d been a four-year-old nowhere near an Academy corridor.

  Navarro intercepted him halfway down the passage, bouncing off the wall to fall into step with him.

  “There you are,” she said. “You owe me.”

  “For what?” Kaden asked.

  “My continuing education,” Navarro said. “History. Policy. Aurora. Medic horror stories. I’ve got Interstellar History & Hegemony Policy tomorrow, and I’d rather not look like an idiot when some commander starts asking questions. I want my bullet points.”

  They ducked into the barracks. A few cadets were already sprawled on bunks or hunched over slates. The noise level was low enough to talk without yelling.

  Navarro dropped onto the foot of his bunk and nudged his boot with hers.

  “All right, Mercer,” she said. “Hit me. What’s the big picture?”

  He sat on the edge of the mattress, armor half unsealed, and thought about how to boil it down.

  “Advent,” Kaden said. “Aurora scans humanity, slaps stats and skills on us, we use them to start new wars instead of not being idiots. Opposition shows up a few years later, moving along the same corridors Aurora just opened. Avian-adjacent, plate-faced, military, not stupid. Almost honorable, if you squint at the right data.”

  Navarro snorted.

  “Bird-knights,” she said. “Love that for us.”

  “Tech parity,” Kaden went on. “We’re about as dangerous as they are. Hegemony forms because the alternative is extinction. Castes, tiers, conscription at sixteen. Andromeda is the main front. Stalemate. Best thing the Navy can say is we’re not losing.”

  Navarro leaned back on her hands, eyes on the ceiling.

  “Cheery,” she said. “What about ships? I heard someone say Bulwark in the mess.”

  “HIS Bulwark’s the poster child,” Kaden said. “Dreadnaught. Twenty-five years on the line, zero core breaches. Nine confirmed capital kills, bunch of escorts, more propaganda footage than anyone wants to sit through. Rhein used her as the example. But there are a lot of other hulls. Most of us will end up on something anonymous.”

  “Yeah, figures,” Navarro said. “Some poor destroyer that gets to babysit a supply chain and complain about coffee.”

  “Probably,” Kaden said.

  She nudged his boot again.

  “And Aurora?” she asked. “What’d Khatri say that I should pretend to have known already?”

  Kaden huffed out a breath.

  “Stats are real,” he said. “Five is baseline for a normal human. Above five actually changes what you can do. PHY six can carry more. PHY ten can carry nearly double body weight. RES means you panic slower. AGI means you don’t eat deck as much. COG is how fast you think, not how smart you feel. AP is your skill fuel.”

  Navarro’s eyes narrowed, interested now.

  “So when you say you’re better at triage because of your COG, that’s not just you bragging?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t bragging,” Kaden said.

  “You were a little,” Navarro said, but there was no sting in it. “What about levels?”

  “Academy throttles us at two,” Kaden said. “Real levelling happens in Andromeda. Kills, missions, surviving things we maybe shouldn’t. Every ten levels Aurora offers you something. Class upgrade, trait, skill. Based on what you actually do, not what you say you want.”

  Navarro made a face.

  “So no telling Aurora ‘I’d like to be a sniper’ while you stay in the med bay and fold gauze,” she said.

  “Apparently it doesn’t buy that,” Kaden said.

  She was quiet for a second.

  “All right,” Navarro said. “Your stats. Since you’re so educated now. Where are you sitting?”

  Kaden hesitated, then pulled up his sheet and read them off.

  “PHY six, AGI four, COG seven, RES six, AP five.”

  Navarro whistled.

  “Brain and nerves,” she said. “Makes sense.”

  He looked at her.

  “Yours?” he asked.

  Navarro shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal.

  “PHY seven,” she said. “AGI six. COG five. RES five. AP five.”

  “So you hit harder and run faster,” Kaden said.

  “I hit harder, run faster, and don’t get stuck in doorways like you do,” Navarro said. “But if we’re ever under fire and there’s more than two bleeding bodies, I’m going to look at you and hope your extra COG is worth something.”

  He snorted.

  “Deal,” he said.

  She tilted her head, studying him.

  “You okay?” Navarro asked. “You look… I don’t know. Like you swallowed a live grenade and it hasn’t decided what to do yet.”

  “Just a long day,” Kaden said. “History, Aurora, Corin. A lot of people telling me how little I know about dying.”

  Navarro bumped his shoulder with hers.

  “Good news,” she said. “We’ve got, what, nine weeks until graduation? Plenty of time to cram a bunch more mortality in there.”

  “Comforting,” Kaden said.

  “Always,” Navarro said. She slid off the bunk. “All right. I’m going to go pretend to study while actually losing credits at cards. Try not to stare at your HUD so hard you burn holes in it.”

  She took a step, then looked back.

  “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I’m glad you switched tracks, Mercer. Feels… right.”

  He didn’t know what to do with that, so he settled for a nod.

  Navarro flicked two fingers at him in a lazy salute and wandered off toward the far end of the bay, where the murmur of a card game was already starting.

  Lights-out came late.

  By the time Kaden made it back to his bunk for real, his head was full of corridors. Not the metal and smoke of the sim lab, but the clean lines of the holo tank, blue dots sliding past red, Corin’s voice asking, Who do you pick? Why? Navarro’s laugh sat on top of it all, light and sharp.

  The room settled into darkness by degrees: voices dropping, boots stowed, the soft thunk of someone smacking a bunk frame in the half-light. Emergency strips along the floor painted everyone’s faces in faint ghost-green when they moved.

  Kaden lay on his back and pulled up his sheet one more time.

  LEVEL: 2

  CLASS: COMBAT MEDIC CADET (TRACK)

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 4

  COG: 7

  RES: 6

  AP: 5

  TRAUMA RESPONSE – LVL 1 (36%)

  Thirty-six percent. A sliver of a bar under the trait, barely more than a third full.

  He stared at it longer than he meant to.

  Thirty-six percent that said Aurora had noticed he hadn’t fallen apart. Thirty-six percent that didn’t care that he’d done it over mannequins and one very real corpse.

  He wondered what a hundred percent would feel like. If it would ever feel like anything other than being slightly less of a mess than the person next to him.

  Somewhere across the room, Navarro snored once, sharp and unbothered, then rolled over. Someone else muttered in their sleep. The vents kept hissing.

  Kaden blinked the sheet away.

  Aurora kept the number, hovering in the back of his mind even after the HUD faded. Thirty-six percent, waiting to see what the next corridor would do to it.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine a day when that bar would be full.